The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Fluorescent lights, cream walls, a ceiling of deep red. Jackie Mallon’s coffin sat on a plinth behind which were brass doors. The coffin would slide through those doors and down into the furnace, into that fiery kiln where wood and flesh and bone imploded in hot ash.

  He sat beside Joyce. He was aware of Chris Caskie, dark-suited, sitting in the row behind. He felt an odd little flutter of pity for the man. Joe Wilkie sat alongside Senga: conspirators. There were others Eddie had never seen before, neighbours probably, some of Jackie’s old friends. At the back, close to the door, was Lou Perlman. He raised a hand in Eddie’s direction, a small gesture. Here we all are, Eddie thought, waiting for fire to begin its consummation.

  Waiting for Jackie to burn.

  A minister, dog-collared and pallid, stepped in front of the plinth. We come to mourn our friend Jackie Mallon, he said, and his voice was high-pitched and nasal, and Eddie, in a moment of irreverence, imagined him calling bingo numbers.

  We come to remember him, and his kindnesses, and the goodness of his heart. We come to extend our condolences to his family members. He was a man much loved by his friends and held in high esteem within his community. He was a man who loved life.

  Eddie glanced at Caskie. But Caskie, with a distant depressed expression, was looking up at the ceiling, as if he wanted no connection of eyes.

  We come today to pray for his soul.

  Yes, Eddie thought. Pray hard. If you can find the man’s soul. Jackie had lost it long ago in the streets of this city. Caskie’s shagging my daughter and he doesn’t know I know. It’s a bit of a laugh, intit? Have another glass of cider, Senga, eh?

  Was it only late in life you felt some shame, Jackie?

  But it was way too late by then.

  Eddie lowered his head, stared at the floor. Don’t talk about the weapons. Say nothing, keep them secret. But that went against his grain. Such neglect would come back years later to haunt him, and he’d open a newspaper and read about a fresh atrocity in Ulster, or see a bomb-wrecked house smoulder in a TV film, and what would he feel then? I could have helped. I could have helped just a little. If I don’t lift a finger, how will I live with myself? How will I teach my kid anything about truth? Okay, so I take extra security precautions, vigilance at all times, I live as if there’s menace in everything, and if it comes right down to it we pick up and move and start all over: it was a lot to ask, a lot to expect. But what else could he demand of himself?

  We come to pray that God takes Jackie into the heavenly masses.

  Eddie held his sister’s hand. She uttered a sob, raised a hand to cover her eyes. Caskie leaned forward and touched her shoulder to comfort her, and Senga, turning a little, observed these small movements from behind the mystery of her veil. Joe Wilkie blew his nose. Somebody else, situated at the back of the chapel, began to cry. Eddie expected he’d feel something, despite himself, maybe a reflex of grief, a spasm of sorrow, but no, he was beyond it now.

  He remembered his hand in his father’s and Jackie Mallon saying, I was never a criminal, son. Remember that. If anybody says anything against me at school, learn to ignore it. I was the victim of spiteful men. That’s the truth.

  You never knew what truth was, Dad.

  Eddie realized music was playing through a sound system and that people around him were getting to their feet and singing ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’.

  I was never a criminal, son.

  Eddie thought: You were worse than that.

  Curtains closed in front of the coffin. Senga uttered a tiny cry and Joyce wept against Eddie’s shoulder, and then he led her up the aisle and out of the chapel into the sun. He looked at the crematorium dome and the waves of heat rising from it, aware that Joyce had wandered away from him and was talking to Caskie, and that Senga, a cigarette in her hand, was surrounded by neighbours and acquaintances who wanted to offer a word of comfort, a hug, a kiss.

  Perlman said, ‘I like these things brief. Get to the point. I never believed in long-drawn-out funerals. I’ve been to some where I wished I’d brought a packed lunch and a bloody sleeping bag. Believe me.’

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Everything I do has a concealed purpose, Eddie. I’m a cunning old bastard. I’ve been around the block more times than I can count. Never forget that. I’ve got my eye, and I mean that in the singular, on a certain person here.’

  ‘Would he be a colleague of yours?’

  Perlman said, ‘Aye. A few wee problems have cropped up that I need to probe a little further.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘They concern poor Charlie McWhinnie and his relationship with Caskie.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It appears Charlie kept a small if somewhat cryptic personal notebook tucked away in his desk under paper clips and rubber bands,’ Perlman said. ‘A few entries are intriguing. Something about a safe house in Govan, and Matty Bones – which seem to verify your own suggestions. Also, it seems there were certain irregular orders he took from Caskie beyond the call of duty. Of course, it might just be Charlie’s imagination working overtime. He was unhappy with his lot, after all, and unhappy men are sometimes driven to flights of utter fancy.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Eddie said.

  ‘But not in this case,’ Perlman said.

  ‘Right.’ Eddie looked in the direction of Caskie, who returned the look and smiled a little nervously. Lou Perlman lifted one hand, a lazy gesture of greeting at his colleague. Then Caskie stared away in the direction of men pruning roses.

  Eddie watched his sister. Be strong, Joyce. And when things go wrong for you here, when the ground opens up and the plunge is a deep one, you know where I’ll be, and you know I’ll help. Then he gazed at Senga, tall and seemingly devastated by her grief, red hair tucked under her wide-brimmed black hat, holding court with friends and neighbours. She had a handkerchief in one hand and she stuck it under her veil to wipe her tears away. Eddie couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t tell if she was looking at him.

  He said, ‘I don’t see young Ray Wilkie anywhere.’

  ‘Aye, right enough, he’s missing,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I seem to remember I heard him say he had some overtime to do at the warehouse.’

  ‘On the day of the funeral? Seems strange.’ Perlman lit a cigarette and sucked smoke deep. ‘There’s an odd wee note in your voice, Eddie. Are you trying to tell me something?’

  Eddie hesitated. But he knew where he was going and what he had to say. There wasn’t a choice. There never had been. ‘They had a load of quite fascinating crap inside that big Mercedes van, Lou. Maybe Ray’s planning to dump it.’

  ‘What crap?’

  ‘Old tables and chairs, busted lamps, other stuff.’

  ‘You sneaked a peek, did you?’

  ‘I’m a nosy bastard.’

  ‘And you think this van’s worth me bothering about?’

  Eddie said, ‘Yeah. But you didn’t hear it from me, Lou.’

  ‘An anonymous tip.’ Perlman sighed. ‘We get a lot of them in this business.’

  ‘Some good,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Others pure shite.’

  ‘But you check them all anyway.’

  ‘That’s what we do,’ Perlman said.

  ‘No sign of Gurk?’

  ‘Not yet. Ah, I daresay we’ll find him soon enough.’

  Eddie looked in the direction of the green dome and he thought, You’re burning, Jackie, you’re ashes now, and just for a moment he imagined his father hovering above this place, taking form in shifting patterns of light, a malign genie.

  Burn, old man, float away, leave us. A father lost for all time.

  But he’d always been lost. You only dreamed he might be found, Eddie.

  There was a sudden breathless silence as if for a tiny fraction of time Jackie had taken all the sound of the world with him as he turned to flame, then Eddie heard people chattering on all sides of him, and someone crying, and the crinkle of plastic
wrapped round a bunch of lilies held in somebody’s arms, and Lou Perlman, activated by an anonymous tip, punching numbers into his cellphone.

  Eddie felt sun hot on his face and heard the motorway buzzing like a machine fuelled to run for ever and he imagined the city spread out under a haze of heat, and light rise in shimmering films from the Clyde, and he thought: Welcome to Glasgow, and goodbye.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Glasgow Novels

  1

  Lou Perlman stood on the dark riverbank and gazed up at the body dangling from a girder under Central Station Bridge.

  This was the second hanging he’d seen in his life.

  The first – long ago, almost fifty years – had been a milk delivery-man called Kerr who’d hung himself from an oak in a scrubby little park at the edge of the old Gorbals. Perlman hadn’t thought about Kerr in ages, but now he remembered the dead man had worn a white work uniform with the logo Southern Cooperative Dairy.

  Dresses for work, hangs himself instead. Little Lou, about six and chubby, had watched cops cut Kerr down and place him on the grass. Obviously a suicide, one of the cops had said.

  Lou had never heard that word. He’d looked it up in his father’s big dictionary. ‘The act of killing oneself intentionally.’ It had seemed strange to him that anyone would take his own life. Years later, as the recipient of several hard-won diplomas from the academy of rough streets, it no longer astonished him. Depression, melancholy, debt, terminal weariness – there were a thousand reasons or more for slashing your wrists in a bathtub or swallowing fifty Temazepam or tying a noose round your neck.

  The air beneath the bridge smelled dank. A goods train rumbled overhead. Perlman watched the wagons as they passed out of view. He stamped his feet for warmth. The tip of his nose was an ice-cube. He could sense snow in the air, an early December downfall. He searched the pockets of his coat for his gloves, but could find only one. Christ knows where the other was. He was always losing gloves. Socks too. Anything that comes in pairs I lose one, he thought. Why couldn’t they sell gloves and socks in threes?

  He glanced at his watch: 1:15 a.m. He lit a cigarette and watched two cops climb an extension ladder. Another uniform was already up in the girders fiddling with the knotted rope. An ambulance appeared. A couple of medics came out carrying a stretcher, which they set at the foot of the ladder. Perlman scanned the casual observers who stood here and there, the night people, the homeless, the curious who just happened to stumble upon this unexpected cameo of the city.

  Suicide. That’s from the Latin, of course, Colin had said. Perlman remembered how his brother had remarked, in a smart-arse offhand manner, that the word was derived from sui, oneself, and cidium, a killing. Clever Colin, four years older than Lou and even in those days the proud owner of a Very Big Brain, top of his class in everything.

  Poor Colin, all things considered. Two days ago he’d been a Polaroid of good health. Strong, fit, lean. A weight-lifter, cyclist, non-smoker, a man who abstained from all toxic ingestion except the occasional glass of good wine. Very good wine.

  Things change, zoom, zap, God never gives warnings.

  The cops were lowering the body now. Carefully, in slow stages, they brought the dead man down. Perlman looked at the corpse’s herringbone overcoat; expensive wool, no shmatte. The fellow’s scarf was grey silk and his slip-on shoes gleamed in the headlights of the ambulance. One trouser leg had ridden up, showing a short black sock and a stretch of white skin. He wore a plain gold wedding ring. He’d come here, rope presumably in coat pocket and, stalked by God knows what horrors, he’d either climbed up into the girders from the stone support plinth on the riverbank, or he’d descended from the railway line above.

  Then he’d made the necessary killing attachments and jumped.

  Perlman stepped towards the stretcher, looked down at the dead man. What had driven him to finish his life hanging from the underside of a railway bridge that straddled the River Clyde in the middle of Glasgow? Eyes open, lips parted, head tilted limply to one side, the guy had black and silver Brylcreemed hair parted in a razor-sharp line to one side. He might have been dressed for a night out, a serious date. He was sixty, Perlman guessed. Maybe more.

  Perlman bent over, and his bones creaked, and he thought how, especially on these biting wintry nights, you could hear the Reaper’s advance signals in the realignment of joints. He studied the rope, one end of which lay across the dead man’s chest; the other was bound hard round the throat and gathered at the back of the neck in a big thick slipknot that looked like a cancerous growth, a lethal melanoma. The end that had been fixed to the girder was stained dark and oily from the city’s emissions, from railway residues and lubricants and leakages.

  ‘I had to cut that top knot, Sergeant. With my knife.’

  Perlman looked up at the young policeman who’d spoken. How like kids they seemed to him these days, callow boys, some of them barely at the age of shaving. This one was called Murdoch. He had an open pink face that shone from the cold and earnest eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t work it loose with my hands,’ Murdoch said. ‘I tried.’

  Perlman shrugged. ‘No big deal, son. We couldn’t leave the poor sod hanging up there until we’d located somebody with nimble wee fingers, could we? Might’ve taken all night.’ He wondered why the young cop sounded so apologetic: eager to please, he assumed. Young and keen, didn’t want to wreck what might have been a vital item of evidence, in this case a knot in a length of rope recently tethered to a girder.

  Perlman sometimes had an unsettling effect on young cops. God knows, he always tried to be friendly and understanding, even compassionate, but maybe they were intimidated by the longevity of his career, or his legend as a cop who knew just about every ned in the city. Or they were perturbed, as ambitious young men and women might be, by his refusal to accept promotion beyond the rank of Detective-Sergeant. This was so tough for these kids to understand? It was simple: he didn’t want to get caught up in the internal politics of the Force, which grew more complex the higher you rose. He’d seen too many useful cops taken off the streets and shackled to their desks, clamped in the chains of administration. He thought: if I don’t want to get my arse kicked upstairs, it’s because this is my job and this is my city, and I don’t want to change a bloody thing, not even a situation like this, kneeling on the bank of a black river in the freezing night air in the cold cold heart of Glasgow.

  He rummaged in the pockets of the coat. Empty. He fingered the wedding ring, checked it for an inscription, found none. He felt the softness of the dead man’s palm. He undid the buttons of the coat, slid his fingers inside. He had an uneasy sensation, a stark sense of trespass. Going through a dead man’s clothing in front of twenty or so night-crawlers – he knew he ought to have waited until the poor bastard was inside the ambulance before starting this rudimentary exploration, but he’d always been impetuous. A weakness in his psychological structure, too late to fix.

  He called to Murdoch. ‘Son, get these bloody gawkers out of here. Scatter the whole crew of them. And don’t be polite either. Use the authority of the uniform, and lean if you need to.’ He gestured to the small crowd. Murdoch and his fellow uniforms began to make the appropriate loud noises, Come on, move along, nothing for you to see here, shove off the lotta you. The pedestrians began to shuffle away. They’d regroup further down the street, of course: death was magnetic.

  Perlman took off his glasses, wiped them on the cuff of his coat, then returned to his examination of the suicide’s jacket. The label read: Tailored in Italy for Mandelson’s of Glasgow. Mandelson’s was an expensive menswear shop in Buchanan Street: it wasn’t where Lou Perlman bought his clothes. He slipped a hand into the inside pocket. Two spare buttons wrapped in clear plastic, nothing else. No wallet, no keys, nothing. It was the same with the side and breast pockets. All empty. Perlman frisked the trouser pockets: nothing – no loose change, hankie, crumpled slip of paper, match-book. A dead man, a well-dressed, well-
nourished Caucasian, with no identification and only one personal possession, an anonymous gold ring.

  Chilled, Perlman cupped his hands and blew into them. He stood upright. His joints felt like fused metal. He gazed at the man’s face and for a moment had a fleeting sense of familiarity. From where? He turned and squinted across the narrow river where the old Renfrew ferryboat lay at anchor: a relic of a dead Glasgow, it had once carried passengers downriver. Now it had been adapted as a floating venue for theatrical and musical events. Perlman had attended a concert there some time ago, a swing revival band from Rotterdam.

  He looked down at the suicide again. No ID. No farewell letter.

  Maybe that was the way he’d planned it. Just a nobody at the end of a rope with nothing to say. Sad. Perlman nodded at the two orderlies from the ambulance.

  ‘You can take him,’ he said.

  They lifted the dead man into the ambulance. Perlman caught himself staring at the corpse’s shoes, and he thought of the man’s soft hand again, and he had one of those moments when you realize, with a quickened skip of pulse, that appearances are only surface. Stir the pond and the silt shifts and sometimes something unexpected emerges from the murk.

  2

  The young man walked through the park with his hands in the pockets of his big heavy coat. He listened to a breeze rattle the skeletal branches of trees. He saw a half moon in the sky. Glass from broken lamps and hypodermic syringes littered the ground. He passed a bench, glanced at a man who lay there in a tattered sleeping bag that oozed pieces of insulation. The man’s head was covered in a hood, and he snored. A drunk, a beggar.

  Beyond the sleeper, the young man saw the statue and a pale light hanging above it. You’ll find a figure carved in stone. That’s the place where you wait. He tried to read the inscription on the base, but couldn’t make out the letters because too many vandals had come this way with spraypaint. Who was this fellow who’d been honoured by a statue? A political hero? a great poet? He couldn’t have been so very important if he’d been placed in this tiny swathe of park so far from the city centre.