The Bad Fire (37 page)

‘Twiddie and Rita,' Haggs said and shrugged. ‘I can't say I'm intimate with them, Perlman. They passed in and out of my world once or twice. It's not as if I'd have them at my house. I wouldn't sit down to dinner with them.'

‘They wouldn't know what fork to use, would they,' Perlman said. ‘They'd think the fish knife was for the butter. Rita would stub out her fags in the left-over mashed potato. Oh, it's a scary picture. When did you last see this awesome pair?'

‘Who remembers?' Haggs said.

‘Try, Roddy. Try for me.'

‘I'm drawing blanks,' Haggs said.

Perlman said, ‘What if I was to knock this table over and this nice Rennie Mackintosh lamp with it? What if I was to spill your drink in your lap? What if I pretended to vomit on these lovely waxy floorboards, I mean, give it the full boke choke right out of my gullet, you know what I mean? Wouldn't that be a humiliation for you, Roddy?'

‘You can dance on the fucking table for all I care.'

‘You wouldn't blink?'

Haggs shook his head. ‘Neither eyelid would move.'

‘And you wouldn't be embarrassed?'

‘You can't pressure me, Perlman. You ought to know better.'

‘You want to test me, Roddy? I'll go down on my knees and make puking sounds. Members will show grave alarm. Disgust will be evident. You're judged by the company you keep in the rarefied atmosphere of an expensive boys' club. It's no bloody skin off my back to be seen rolling on the floor. I don't give a fig, old son. Ready?' Perlman clutched his stomach and made a sound of discomfort. It was barely audible, but the threat was there. ‘After I've rolled on the floor and made rude gurgling noises and farted, I'll throw this ashtray through the mirror behind the bar where all the single malts are lined up like smart wee soldiers. Glasgow Policeman Loses Control At Exclusive Golf Club. Sound good to you, Roddy?'

‘Fuck you, Perlman.'

‘I hear that refrain a lot.'

‘Twiddie and Rita, when did I last see them – that's all you want to know?'

Perlman lit another cigarette. ‘Tell me.'

‘A week ago.'

‘In what circumstances?'

‘Passing on West Nile Street. We exchanged quick chat about the weather. I went my way. They went theirs. I wish I had more, Perlman. I wish I could bring sunshine into your life. But that's it.'

Perlman sucked smoke. Haggs was a good liar. He didn't have a giveaway of any kind. He lied barefaced. Probably because he believed what he was saying. He invented alternative realities and lived inside them. ‘I was hoping for more, Roddy. Truly. Here's the thing. They set fire to a van, a Transit, but they're such rank fucking dildoes they didn't exactly light up the sky with their effort. I have a witness, a fellow that saw Twiddie and Rita run from the scene of their incendiary flop.'

‘Stop right there,' Haggs said. ‘You think this interests me? A pair of morons try to burn a van – come on, Perlman. Tell me a better story.'

‘This one picks up,' Perlman said. ‘In the back of the van is a wallet.'

Haggs had the sense of travelling in a small boat towards rough waters. ‘A wallet?'

‘Aye.'

‘And?'

‘The property of Matty Bones.'

Wallet
, Haggs thought.
Bones
. The two words echoed in his brain like coconut shells struck together.

Oversight. Big time. The ship was drifting towards rocks and the lighthouse wasn't working. Haggs said, ‘So what?'

‘So how did Bones's wallet get in the back of this van, together with bloodstains that are precisely Matty Bones's type?'

I could kill, Haggs thought. ‘I'm not exactly Twiddie's keeper, Perlman. How the hell would I know what he and that deranged crumpet of his get up to? I move in another world altogether.'

Perlman looked round the room and remarked, ‘And very nice it is too.'

‘I wish you luck, Perlman, I really do. But as for a burning van and Bones's wallet, listen, you've come to the wrong place if you're looking for alms.'

‘I had my hand held out and I was expecting you to cross it with the silver of information,' Perlman said. ‘Daft of me. I live in great expectation, Roddy. I always believe that behind every closed door lies the dark truth. And in every burning Transit van is the clue you don't expect. Funny old world.'

‘Funny's right,' Haggs said. Note to self, he thought: stay calm in adversity. Don't let it show.

‘The van was stolen in Renfrew three nights ago, matter of interest. Were you in Renfrew by any chance?'

‘Give me a break, Perlman. Do I look like I'd steal a Transit van?'

‘Maybe you do,' Perlman said, and gazed in the direction of the trees, the lake, light from the sun spreading across still water. A golf ball was flying through space, insignificant against the vast blue of the world. It came down like a shotgunned bird in the dead centre of the lake. Plop.

‘People pay to play golf.' Perlman shook his head. ‘Downright amazing.'

‘Are you done with me?'

‘Aye,' Perlman said. ‘For the time being.'

‘Call me first next time,' Haggs said. ‘If there's a next time.'

‘But you're such a hard man to reach, old son.'

‘If at first you don't succeed.'

‘How does the rest of that go, Roddy?'

Haggs clapped a hand against Perlman's shoulder. ‘You're a smart arse, Lou. But I like you anyway.'

‘The admiration is mutual, Roddy.'

‘I never doubted it,' Haggs said.

‘Remember, Roddy. I've got my eye on you. The good one. I'm this close to nailing you for
something.
'

Perlman walked towards the exit. As he pushed open the glass door and stepped outside, his cellphone rang in his pocket and he felt the closing door slap lightly against his back.

He spoke into the handset. The caller was Sandy Scullion, who said, ‘Central Station, Lou. Now. It's bad.'

47

In his room at the dosshouse in Duke Street, Tommy Gurk stood at the sink and plugged an electric razor into the wall-socket and, concentrating on his reflection in the mirror, ran the razor across his skull. His dreadlocks dropped like newborn minks into the sink. He thought of the young geezer at the railway station.
I want to have a word, you don't mind
. I was out of the Zone, Gurk thought. I wasn't in a place of peace. I wasn't in the garden. Where was calm? More locks fell into the sink.

Take your hand off me, chief.

A word, won't take a minute. You have some ID?

Never carry any. Don't need it. Free country, ennit? You a copper?

Could I take a wee peek inside the briefcase?

What's in this briefcase is private, mate. For mine eyes only.

I'd like to just check that, sir
.

You're not listening to me, are you, copper?

Zzzzzz. Tommy Gurk switched off the razor and leaned forward over the sink until his face touched the mirror. He put his hands into the pile of dreadlocks that lay nestled in old brown porcelain. Strip the identity down. Change. You can't go around this city looking the way you did. You can't do what you've come to do unless you alter your appearance. He pulled his lower eyelids down. Underneath, the pink tissue was pale and looked unhealthy.

He stepped back from the mirror. There. Bald now. Shaved to the skin. He gathered the thick lanks of cut hair and put them in a wastebasket, then ran water into the sink until all trace of stray hair was gone. The room smelled of old cigarettes and piss and disinfectant and the stale flesh of all those men and women who'd come and gone. A dosshouse. In the lobby downstairs he'd paid his money at the desk and the clerk in the cage hadn't even looked at him and the people who sat in beaten-up leather chairs paid him scant attention, they just shuffled newspapers or played draughts or snoozed and twitched in their wino dreams. He'd felt invisible. That was what he wanted.

He remembered, saw it clearly, how the gun came out of the briefcase.

Wait a minute, think, put away that weapon, sir
.

All the faces in the crowd at the railway station had receded like people suddenly diminishing in size, the sky pressing down, the planet wobbling on its course through space, all topsy-turvy.

Just give it to me
.

You want it, you got it, china.

The explosion jarred his hand but he didn't have time to feel the kick because he'd stuffed the gun back in the briefcase and then he'd run, he'd fled down side streets, this way and that, lost, not caring, needing to be beyond reach and recognition, then he'd found an underground station in Buchanan Street and gone down the escalator to the platform and boarded a train that carried him into the sweet anonymity of a black tunnel, and he'd come up into brassy sunlight in another part of the city and bought the razor in a second-hand shop and boarded a double-decker bus and after he disembarked he walked a few blocks until he found this dump, this great drab Victorian building where rooms were cheap and the clientele cheaper.

Catch your breath. Find the place. Enter the Zone.

He ran a hand over his hairless head. He felt bumps in his skull, and tiny crevices his dreadlocks had hidden. He couldn't find the calm. He was a long way off and his compass fucked. He was tuned to static. He thought, I'll phone Kaminsky, I'll tell him what happened, unforeseen circumstances – but Kaminsky never wanted to know about failure. The word wasn't in his vocabulary.

Down in the street an ambulance raced and screamed, an auditory explosion, how could you reach out for tranquillity in such a place? He had a flash of Tibet, the placid shadows of the monastery, monks in saffron robes, the gong that echoed in the arched passageway, wind-chimes, unflavoured cooked rice in his mouth. He'd go back to that if he could. Like a fucking shot.

He emptied the briefcase on the bed. The gun. The toothbrush and tube of tea-tree toothpaste he always carried in the event he couldn't get back to wherever home base might be. Healthy gums, very important. A disposable razor. A small phial of Total Shaving Solution. A bar of hemp soap in its original box. That was all.

The ambulance faded but now there were police cars and sirens and all hell. The city was a cauldron of jarring noises. He had to get the whole job done successfully and go back to Largs and collect his gear from the hotel – if that was possible, if the place was safe – and then head south, maybe by bus, he'd decide later. He walked to the window and pulled the net curtain back a little way and his fingers penetrated the dry moth-eaten material. He looked into the street and thought how a simple business deal –
let's shake hands on it, Mr Mallon, or can I call you Jackie?
– could go so easily to ruin.

He tossed his few belongings back into the briefcase and left the room. Punter's name on the paper, what was it, why was he panicked into forgetting simple things?

Too much chaos, too much swirl. Rise above it.

Begins with an ‘H'. Higgs?

No, Haggs. Spot on. Got it.

48

Eddie Mallon sat in the back of a taxi with his head tilted back and the window down and warm air blowing at his face. Even with his eyes open he kept seeing McWhinnie, poor dead Charlie blown away – and for what? Some questions hung in the air like toxic gases. You couldn't analyse them any more than you could disperse them.
What did McWhinnie die for?

The driver said, ‘They say it was a policeman.'

‘Huh?'

‘A policeman,' the driver said and glanced back to look at Eddie. ‘The fella that was shot. You hear about it?'

‘I heard,' Eddie said.

The driver's plump neck spilled over his shirt collar. His jaw was nicked from shaving cuts. ‘The way this city's going,' he said, and he shook his head because he had no vocabulary for the horrors he saw.

‘The whole world,' Eddie said.

‘Aye, the whole world, right enough. I don't remember the last time a policeman was shot in Glasgow. It's bloody terrible, so it is. I blame Hollywood pictures and the general decline in Christian values. We used to look up to policemen when I was a wee boy. They told you what was right and what was wrong and gave you a good kick up the arse if you needed it. Nowadays that sort of thing would land them in court.'

Eddie wasn't listening. He was conscious of the number of police cars on the city streets. An officer was dead. Consequently, visible police presence everywhere. A communal sense of shock, grief, a dismal black mood dominant inside Force HQ. Subdued officers whispering together, sharing a single visceral truth:
one of our own has been murdered
.

Charlie McWhinnie should never have been involved, Eddie thought. If Caskie hadn't used him as his personal hound-dog and private gofer, McWhinnie would never have become entangled in the life and movements of Eddie Mallon, and maybe the disillusion spreading like bindweed through Charlie would have withered. But Caskie had forced Charlie into tasks he felt either demeaning or futile, and so he'd fallen asunder, baffled by the point of his life and the direction of his career.

Eddie stared at the passing buildings. To his right the turrets and spires of the Art Gallery, an extravaganza in red stone. The building seemed to float on air. He felt numb, then angry. His mood swung this way, that way. He shut his eyes tight, experienced the sway and vibration of the cab.

‘Broomhill Drive you wanted?' the driver asked.

‘Right,' Eddie said. He looked at Caskie's business card crumpled in his hand. ‘Sixty-five.'

‘Sixty-five. Here we are.'

Eddie stepped out, paid. He stared at the grey house, the stained-glass panes in the upstairs windows, the carved stonework above the front door. Grapevines and wheat sheaves, a rustic effect. What good does it do to come here? What can I possibly get out of this? A blind man and his fawn labrador guide dog went past and Eddie thought, That's what I need, something to lead me, show me the way. The man's white stick tapped on the pavement.