The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Eddie didn’t like Haggs’s laugh. He tapped his fingertips on his knees.

  Haggs said, ‘I won’t delay you, wherever you’re going. I have something for you. A wee present.’ He reached behind, retrieved a white paper bag from the back seat and opened it. He removed a varnished pine box about eighteen inches long and six wide, with brass hinges. It was highly polished and Eddie saw his reflection in it. Haggs set the paper bag, which bore the name Emporio Armani, on his lap, and then laid the box on top of it.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ Haggs said. ‘A man dies, and you realize maybe you should’ve been closer to him when he was alive, and a wee bit kinder. You following me?’

  ‘You’re talking about Jackie,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Right. I could’ve tried harder. We might’ve done business together if we’d been less stubborn. Allies. Know what I’m saying?’

  Eddie looked at the box. ‘Now you regret missed chances.’

  ‘Aye. I was up late last night thinking about them and …’ Haggs’s voice faded away. ‘Take this last deal he was into. We could’ve done something together …’

  ‘What deal is that?’

  ‘He never mentioned the specifics, Eddie. And I’ve been less than honest with you, I admit.’

  ‘Really,’ Eddie said.

  ‘You heard we argued. I told you I’d forgotten the reason.’

  ‘And that was a lie?’

  Haggs looked contrite. I’m expected to buy the expression, Eddie thought.

  Haggs said, ‘This is the way it was. Jackie needed some extra cash to finance his deal. He asked me to participate. He didn’t say what the biz was. I was supposed to trust him. I said, you’re asking a hell of a lot, Jackie. He said, Haggs, you’re too fucking cautious. And if I ever decided to put my faith in him I could come back with the green. Then I thought, what the fuck, I’ll take a chance, a bit of a flyer, I’m not short of a few quid after all – but it was just too bloody late, and Jackie was …’ Haggs shut his eyes a moment and looked sadly pious.

  ‘He invited you into a deal,’ Eddie said. ‘Only you didn’t know what it was.’

  Haggs, eyes still shut, spoke softly. ‘Aye.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me this yesterday.’

  ‘I felt fucking awkward about it, Eddie. I didn’t want you thinking I’d turned your dad away like that. Let him down.’

  No way, Eddie thought, although he enjoyed Haggs’s act, the flicker of shut eyelids, the dry solemn tone of contrition in the voice, the mea culpa of it all. He watched Haggs’s eyes open and how they swivelled towards him without the man’s face having to turn.

  Haggs said, ‘Maybe the deal still has legs. Maybe it’s alive and kicking and just waiting to be financed. I’m thinking of Senga, Eddie. She might be hurting for money.’

  ‘Ask her,’ Eddie said. ‘Maybe she’ll be able to tell you something.’

  ‘I have a sneaky feeling Senga doesn’t like me,’ Haggs said. ‘Some past misunderstanding. I have every regard for her, Eddie. Believe me. But I think my best approach … well, it’s through you.’

  ‘You want me to ask Senga? You want me to tell her that Roddy Haggs would like to partner her in a business deal? Maybe even become her benefactor?’

  Haggs smiled. ‘You’ve picked me up wrong, Eddie. I’m not thinking along that road. I’m wondering if …’ He hesitated, eyeballed the street as if he suspected that the scraggle of shrubbery might conceal an enemy.

  ‘Wondering if I know anything?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘If Jackie confided in me?’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’

  Eddie smiled, tilted his head back. From the corner of his eye he was aware of the glossy box in Haggs’s lap. His gift. ‘I hate to disappoint you, Roddy. Jackie phoned me a few times when I was in New York, but he never talked business.’

  ‘Not once, eh?’

  ‘Not once,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Ah well.’ Haggs sighed and opened the box and took out the Kentucky Flintlock pistol and weighed it in the palm of his hand. ‘I brought you this, Eddie. You seemed to admire it yesterday. I want you to have it.’

  ‘I can’t accept that,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Take it, for Christ’s sake. I’ll be annoyed if you refuse.’

  ‘I can’t take it, Roddy. It’s too expensive.’

  ‘Money, money’s pish, there’s always loadsa money,’ Haggs said. He lifted the pistol and levelled it and, closing one eye, stared along the barrel at Eddie.

  He held this position and the light in his eye was pure concentration, as if Eddie were a target. ‘You could blow somebody’s head clean off from this range,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ Eddie remarked.

  ‘You really could.’

  ‘I’m convinced.’ Eddie gazed into Haggs’s face and the fierce brightness in his eyes and for one bad moment he wondered if the man had gone insane and planned to kill him. American Cop Slain in Glasgow Suburb. A random murder, inexplicable and irrational. He imagined Jackie looking down the barrel of a gun. Jackie’s terror. Jackie’s life came to this in the end, a hole, a bleak aperture.

  ‘One shot,’ Haggs said.

  ‘That’s all it would take for sure,’ Eddie said.

  He felt sweat form on his body and his T-shirt stick to his skin. Haggs wasn’t going to shoot, this was some form of threat, a demonstration of what he could do if he took it into his mind. This was Haggs flexing muscle, pumping his own kind of iron. The gun was a Nautilus machine, an exercise bicycle. I can shoot you the fuck into oblivion if I want, Eddie baby.

  Haggs said, ‘Now if I had a beef against somebody. Boom.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Do I have a beef against you, Eddie?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to have a beef against Jackie’s son.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to give you a reason,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Sometimes I wish duelling was still legal. Pistols at dawn. Name your seconds. One man facing another. Equality of chance. You’d tell me if you remembered Jackie mentioning anything.’

  ‘Yeah, for sure.’

  ‘I’m fucking serious, Eddie. I’d like to give Senga a helping hand. After all, she’s a widow, give or take a legal document. So don’t just put the matter out of your mind. Understand me?’

  Haggs moved the gun an inch closer to Eddie. It was one of those moments when your life is a gyroscope turning on a wire. Eddie felt a drop of sweat slide down his nose and trickle to his upper lip.

  ‘You have my word,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Your word, terrific. Wonderful.’ And Haggs laughed, lowered the weapon. ‘Note to self: Eddie Mallon doesn’t like looking down the wrong end of a gun. Even when it’s unloaded,’ and he laughed again, delighted with Eddie’s visible unease. ‘Oh, Christ, I enjoy a wee bit of mischief. The secret lies in looking serious.’

  ‘You looked pretty serious all right,’ Eddie said. He felt strangely out of balance, as if sunstruck. He was thirsty.

  Haggs boxed the weapon, shut the box and stuck it back in the Armani bag, then passed it to Eddie. ‘She’s all yours, Eddie. Look after her. Grease her from time to time.’

  Eddie took the bag. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Just don’t forget where you got the gun,’ Haggs said.

  ‘Count on it.’

  Eddie pushed the passenger door open.

  ‘Need a lift anywhere?’ Haggs asked.

  ‘No, really, I’m fine.’ Eddie got out of the car.

  Haggs laughed again and said, ‘Hi-ho Silver,’ and the big Jaguar screamed away, tyres burning, engine roaring. Motionless under the high hot cinder sun, Eddie clasped the Armani bag to his chest and thought, Yeah, Haggs looked pretty serious all right, goddam serious, like a man with more than a passing acquaintance with deadly violence.

  40

  Sometimes when Detective-Sergeant Lou Perlman listened to experts, forensic know-alls with their un
iversity ties and big brains, his attention wandered. After all, what did he really need to know about the temperature at which paper burned, or the amount of oxygen required to conduct flame through a narrow enclosed space? Cubic this and cubic that. It was all just so much slosh, like milky tea spilled into a saucer.

  ‘Is there a point you’re getting to, Sid?’ he asked, sounding raspy and sullen. ‘No hurry anyway. I’ve got all bloody day to waste.’

  Sidney Linklater, a graduate of Edinburgh University, thirty-three years of age and a Force Support Officer – a civilian – blinked at Lou Perlman in surprise. It always astonished him that others could fail to be fascinated by his world of fibres and threads, of flames and melting points, of decomposition and putrefaction. He likened the non-scientific mind to an asteroid turning pointlessly in space.

  ‘All right, I’ll hurry along, Lou, if you’re finding this a bit of a bore,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Sid. Some of us are cut out to be scientific. Others of us are just men with big feet and big bunions and wee brains. Like me. The dogged sort. We pound pavements. We’re happy just chugging along. Clip clop. Fucking Clydesdales in human clothes.’

  ‘I find false modesty indigestible,’ Linklater said.

  ‘So is all your fucking data, Sid. No offence intended.’

  Linklater said, ‘Sometimes I feel like a missionary preaching to savages.’

  ‘I am a savage, Sid. Keep that in mind when you talk to me. Simple words. Short sentences. See Dick pish. See Spot shit. Remember, I was brought up in the Gorbals. Correction. I was dragged up. We’d only just got electricity installed the day before the demolition people moved in. I’m a child of the gaslight generation. We didn’t have PCs and websites. Ours wasn’t the Information Age. We knew fuck all.’

  ‘And I was delivered by a stork.’

  ‘Oy vey,’ Perlman said. ‘Those hankie deliveries can be tricky.’

  Linklater shrugged and looked round his workroom. Assorted objects, seemingly unconnected to one another, sat on shelves. Two pairs of Wellington boots. A charred shotgun. A couple of hunting knives with shiny blades. Bottles of various chemicals. A bicycle bent out of shape. Spades, trowels, a big fishing net. A microscope, also a load of computer gear that Perlman, who was quite proud of being misaligned with the electronic age, couldn’t identify – maybe they were scanners, or photograph enhancers, or some kind of UV equipment, who cared?

  Not Lou Perlman.

  Linklater, whose hobby was making charcoal rubbings from ancient tombstones, pushed his glasses up his long nose and gazed down at his work-table. He wore see-through plastic gloves. In his right hand he held a pair of tweezers. ‘Let’s go the number one route just for you, Lou. No frills. No fancy cocktails.’

  ‘My boy,’ Perlman said.

  There was debris on the table, and Linklater poked at it. One plastic ashtray, a couple of misshapen cigarette filters. A small pile of wet ash and scraps of scorched paper. A square wallet of black leather lay to one side in a small dark puddle. There was a smell of petrol.

  ‘These would-be arsonists splash a little petrol inside the van,’ Linklater said. ‘Strike a match, drop it in, buzz off. They leave the window on the passenger side open – a slit, no more than that. They overlook a basic principle of the firemaker’s skill. Flame needs oxygen. This fire goes, but it isn’t the spectacle it’s supposed to be. Some of the spilled petrol burns, sure, but this isn’t a movie, Lou. The tank isn’t going to blow up. We get some flame, enough to destroy the fabric on the seats. More dramatic black smoke than flame. The fire suffers oxygen deprivation, so it’s too slow for the light display the arsonists must’ve wanted. Anyway, there’s bugger all in the back of the van to burn, no rags, no papers, nothing, just this wallet … then along comes the fire brigade, hoses blasting. The wallet was just beginning to ignite. There was blood on the floor of the van which the firemen, despite their zeal, didn’t manage to hose entirely away. It’s AB neg. No fingerprints on the steering wheel. Some in the interior. There’s mud on the tires. Fresh.’

  Linklater touched the wallet with a latexed fingertip. ‘I emptied it carefully,’ he said. ‘I set the contents over here,’ and he tweezered to the side a sheet of opaque plastic, under which lay banknotes that had been browned along the edges, scarred first by fire then doused with water. Linklater gently shoved the wilting money aside and concentrated on a sheet of lined paper.

  ‘This appears to be a page out of a cheap notebook, Lou. The writing’s felt-tip and the water’s made it run. It seems to be some arrangement of numbers. An accounting, maybe. Somebody adding and subtracting.’

  ‘Ah-hah. What else have you got?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly stuffed with goodies,’ Linklater said. ‘But there’s this.’ He edged a piece of folded pink and green paper towards Perlman, who bent forward and looked at it through his one good eye. The other eye, lid still swollen from the insect bite, smarted beneath the patch.

  ‘A driving licence,’ Perlman said.

  He bent until his face was only six inches from the table. There was no photograph in the licence, but the name of the owner was legible. Perlman heard birdsong in his head. He straightened up and smiled, and in a very bad voice cranked out an 80s song lyric. ‘The tide is high, I’m moving on.’

  ‘What in God’s name is that appalling noise?’ Linklater asked, feigning great terror.

  41

  Eddie Mallon met Christopher Caskie in a café a couple of blocks from Force HQ. It was a fashionably relaxed place with ferns and high arches and pretty waitresses, unlike the mutton-pie and strong-tea brigade of grim aproned matrons Eddie remembered from Glasgow restaurants years ago. The girls who served you were good-looking, moussed hair, modishly pale complexions. Eddie ordered a bottle of mineral water, espresso and a chocolate croissant. Caskie, with a prim little nod of his head, asked for tea.

  ‘Nice room,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I come here now and again,’ Caskie remarked. ‘Is that a bruise on the side of your neck?’

  ‘I had an upset,’ Eddie said. ‘I lost my footing.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. I hope it’s not too serious.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Did he know? Had McWhinnie told him? Eddie seriously doubted McWhinnie would make a report of their encounter.

  ‘Been shopping?’ Caskie nodded at the bag.

  Eddie set it on the floor and said, ‘Just something for Claire.’

  ‘Nice thought,’ Caskie said. ‘You phoned, so am I forced to assume you have more tricky questions for me? See if I can guess. It’s about Tommy G.’

  The waitress, a lovely trim girl in short black skirt, had a good-natured face. She set coffee, croissant, Strathmore water and tea on the table. ‘If you need anything else, let me know,’ and she was gone discreetly. Eddie swallowed the mineral water instantly, then tasted his coffee and bit into his croissant.

  Caskie said, ‘I ran the name, Eddie. The computer has no record of Tommy G.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I am too.’

  ‘You’d expect –’

  ‘I always try to avoid expectations,’ Caskie said. He tasted his tea and made a face. ‘I don’t remember asking for herbal …’

  Tommy G: a blind alley. Eddie swallowed the last of his croissant. ‘Did you run it as Tommy G or Tommy GEE?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Are there other sources you can try?’

  ‘They take time.’

  I don’t have time, Eddie thought. A funeral, then home. The end. Back to Queens. Back to a dead junkie in an abandoned house. ‘You heard about Billy McQueen?’

  Caskie said, ‘On the radio.’

  ‘You knew the guy?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Barely.’

  ‘Friend of Jackie, they tell me.’

  ‘I believe there was a vague fiscal relationship over the years,’ Caskie said.

  ‘Why would anyone murder him?’

  ‘Has it b
een confirmed that he was murdered?’

  ‘Come on. You think he had some freaky thing about scaling unfinished buildings in the dead of night? Like a dangerous hobby that just got out of hand and he slipped? Maybe he dressed in some Spiderman get-up and went out across the scaffolding to look for handy dangling places.’

  ‘A touch theatrical,’ Caskie said. ‘I can’t begin to guess, Eddie. If I knew the man better, maybe I could proffer an opinion.’

  Caskie had a small half-smile on his face: Detective-Inspector Enigma. This man might have been involved in the death of my father, Eddie thought. He gripped the edge of the table and felt his hands tighten, and he saw the inside of his head change colour – as if emotions were tints – and the pattern of his thoughts went this way and that, and he suddenly wanted to reach out and grab Caskie by his striped necktie and drag his head down to the table and pound it and pound it. Then he let the feeling go, and he tried to relax, and he pushed his chair back from the table a few inches. Complicity in a brutal murder. What if you’re wrong, Eddie? What if you’ve miscalculated? But your heart, sometimes reliable in the past, and occasionally impetuous too, says you’re right. Believe in it now.

  He leaned towards Caskie and said, ‘Tell me about safe houses.’

  ‘What houses?’

  ‘Safe. Places where cops put witnesses for security reasons.’

  ‘I’ve never had any use for such places personally, Eddie. I assume they exist. I may be wrong.’

  ‘But you don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in the subject?’

  ‘It popped into my head, Chris.’

  ‘Without reason?’

  ‘All kinds of things pop into my head without reason.’

  ‘You ought to control that tendency.’

  ‘I try, Chris, I try. Here’s another one. For example: Do you think it’s possible for a cop – a senior officer, say – to run a kind of private fiefdom inside a force? Like his own little kingdom, I mean, where he could do what he liked, he could make his own personal use of manpower, use police property – like safe houses – any way he wanted, he could decide what was right and what was wrong without involving his fellow officers. This guy would be unaccountable. Up to a point.’