The Bad Fire

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

  “Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

  “Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

  “While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

  “Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

  “Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

  “A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

  “Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

  “A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

  “A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

  The Bad Fire

  A Glasgow Novel

  Campbell Armstrong

  The people who bring Glasgow to life for me:

  Annie Spiers, Erl and Ann Wilkie, Kevin and Susan

  McCarra, Nigel Clark, Brenda Harris. Thanks.

  1

  On a hot Monday night in early summer Jackie Mallon went on a leisurely pub crawl. Dressed in a black suit and black shirt and a slim silver tie with a wide ostentatious knot, he allowed himself only one drink, Cutty Sark and water, in each bar he visited. A dandy at sixty-eight, thin hair held back with gel and dyed the colour of crow, his dentures vanilla-ice-cream white, he wore ruby cuff-links and his cuffs hung exactly half an inch from each sleeve. His movement was economical, his manner careful; he might have been walking barefoot on a surface of shaved glass.

  He surveyed the customers in each pub, winking at the gilded girls who pierced their lips and eyebrows with safety pins and hooks, girls who knew nothing of his reputation as a ladies’ man in the old days, a knight of nooky. He nodded at friends and acquaintances who waved and called out his name cordially and wanted to ply him with drinks or just be seen sharing a joke with him because of his rep, because it did no harm to say you knew Jackie Mallon, you even drank with him.

  He was also conscious of the young turks who drifted in from the outlying housing schemes and were looking to make their mark. These neds sometimes caught his gaze directly, and he felt a hostile challenge in the way they stared at him. Who the fuck does this old tosser think he is? High time he was put out to grass.

  Jackie thought: Snottery wee boys. Couldn’t lick my black suede shoes. I’ll be retired soon enough, lads. One last deal and I’m off into the big red yonder.

  He rode from pub to pub in the back seat of his pale blue Mazda, chauffeured by Matty Bones, a former jockey with a pallbearer’s face and a Smith & Wesson 4006 in the glove compartment. Bones drove him to the New Monaco Bar, where he bought everyone a drink. Next, they went to the Three Cheers and then the Clutha Vaults in Stockwell Street.

  This was Jackie Mallon’s terrain. This was where he’d been born and brought up, and where he felt secure. He had this part of Glasgow in his back pocket. He knew the tenements, the people, their feuds and marriages and divorces, their kids. His cocoon was an area bounded by the Duke Street abattoir, the Necropolis and the Gallowgate – a parish of tenements and tombstones and elaborate crosses that made eerie patterns on the Necropolis skyline. His territory encompassed Glasgow Cathedral and the spine of the Tolbooth tower where centuries before the heads of executed criminals were impaled on spikes for public enlightenment.

  Jackie Mallon, who’d left school at the age of eleven, remembered Luftwaffe bombs falling on the shipyards, demobilized sailors and soldiers flooding the streets at the war’s end, horny and high-spirited, government-issue orange juice that looked like neon chemical goo, old Granny Mallon’s rabbit stews on Tuesday nights at the flat in Bathgate Street – but the city’s true antiquity was a shuttered house to him.

  He sat in the back seat of his car and surveyed the streets with proprietary affection. My town.

  ‘Where to now, chief?’ Bones asked.

  Jackie Mallon wondered if he wanted another drink. He considered going back to his terraced house a few blocks north of Duke Street. He pictured Senga painting her nails flamingo or scarlet, and drinking Crossbow in front of the TV. He heard her big merry laugh and saw her fleshy underarms tremble. If she’d drunk enough cider she might be listening to a CD of Eagles songs and looking melancholic, and she’d say: O do you still fancy me, Jackie? Say you do. I’m in the mood to feel wanted.

  Eagles, he thought. ‘Crying Eyes.’ Electric cowboy shite. He was very fond of Senga, but her taste in music gave him the willies. He liked Sinatra. Elvis. ‘All Shook Up’ was an anthem to him.

  He peered from the window. Bones was driving down Bell Street, close to the old Fruitmarket, now a venue for musical events. A lot of the old city had been stripped down and tarted up. Jackie Mallon preferred things the way they’d been before the developers came hurrying in with their big blueprints and their wrecking balls and their frantic greed.

  It’s changing, he thought, and I’m changing too. I don’t look at crumpet the way I used to. And they don’t look at me. The ashes in the grate grow cold.

  For the first time in a long time, Jackie Mallon felt a touch of nervousness. He wasn’t sure why. The last bit of business was going fine. The pieces fitted nicely, thank you. He’d go into the sunset with a small fortune. So. Was it the idea of retirement that upset him? What to do with his time? How to fill the days? Or was it because this job was a Big Score and he wasn’t sure if he still had the goolies for that kind of action any more?

  ‘Blackfriars next?’ Bones asked.

  ‘I don’t know if I feel like another drink, Matty.’

  ‘You usually finish off your night at Blackfriars …’

  Jackie Mallon was quiet a moment before he said, ‘Right, right, I’ll have one last wee drink. You’ve twisted my arm.’

  ‘Easy arm to twist, eh,’ Matty Bones said, and smiled, showing a mouth filled with the stumps of old teeth. He parked, opened the back door for Jackie Mallon.

  Mallon clapped the little man on the shoulder with affection.

  ‘Righty-o. I’ll drive down there and wait for you,’ and Bones gestured towards an area of wasteland about a hundred yards away.

  ‘You’ll not join me for one?’ Mallon asked.

  Matty Bones rubbed his stomach. ‘Ulcer’s playing up.’

  ‘Milk of magnesia,’ Jackie Mallon said.

  ‘That stuff doesn’t work for me,’ Matty Bones said.

  Jackie Mallon paused outside Blackfriars pub. He looked up. Starlings and swallows flew in the darkening blue sky over the city. Soon streetlamps would come on.

  Blackfriars was dark and comfortable. He ordered a Cutty, added water from a jug, looked the place over – students arguing about an Italian film, and a couple of familiar faces from a local TV news show trying to look conspicuously incognito. He tossed back his drink, stood at the bar for a few minutes, eyed a flame-haired barmaid, then he went outside and walked towards the patch of wasteland where he could see the Mazda parked among other cars. The driver’s door was open. A figure sat behind the wheel. Bones.

  Cigarette smoke drifted out of the car towards a nearby streetlamp where thousands of moths created a frantic blizzard. Jackie opened the rear doo
r. He got in and looked at the back of Bones’s head.

  ‘I thought you’d quit smoking, Matty. Had a relapse, eh?’

  The man turned his thin face. He wasn’t Matty Bones.

  ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Jackie Mallon said. ‘Where’s Bones?’

  The man had a smile that was a sneer, upper lip drawn way over the top teeth. The look was camel-like. He tossed his cigarette away. ‘He had to leave.’

  Jackie Mallon said, ‘Bones wouldn’t leave.’

  The man had a thin moustache. His breath smelled of alcohol. He was twenty-five, maybe, and had a small silver stud in his right nostril, which was inflamed by a yellow cushion of pus. He wore a transparent plastic raincoat buttoned to the neck. Jackie Mallon knew him, and considered him scum.

  ‘Are you ready to talk, Mallon?’

  Mallon sighed. ‘Take this back to your boss. I’ve got nothing to tell. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. And I’ll keep saying it.’

  ‘Oh my. That’s going to depress him.’

  ‘My heart aches.’

  ‘Is that your last word, Mallon?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘The boss hates bad news.’

  ‘Tough shite.’

  The man’s gloved hand rose to where Jackie Mallon had an unimpeded view of a gun, the barrel of which was pointed at his face. The gun was Bones’s Smith & Wesson. This troubled Jackie, because Bones wouldn’t let anybody – especially this scruff – touch his weapon.

  Which meant.

  Jackie Mallon didn’t like to think what it meant. He didn’t like to think what a plastic raincoat on a hot dry night meant either, although he knew.

  I took my eye off the fucking ball. Complacency, the curse of old age. He stared directly into the gun, then the man’s face. The man had a look in his eye Jackie Mallon had seen before, fear pretending to be bravado, terror masquerading as cool.

  ‘That’s a very dangerous weapon, sonny,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Think. Think carefully.’

  ‘Haggs doesn’t pay me to think,’ the young man said.

  Mallon looked at the gun again. I’m an endangered species, he thought. Cold skin, hot night. He shivered. Mibbe I’m coming down with something. He heard moths buzz with the intensity of locusts under the streetlight and he had a sense of his life dwindling until he was no more than a fly-sized speck that might fit inside the barrel of the Smith & Wesson.

  ‘Tell Haggs to go fuck himself,’ he said.

  2

  The telephone rang and Eddie Mallon opened one eye: the bedside digital clock read 3:22 a.m. He was tempted to let the answering machine pick up and go back to sleep and see if he could reboard the train of his dream, which had been taking him on a pleasant ride through smooth green countryside that looked exactly like the land where the Jolly Green Giant lived, a place where peas were quick-frozen for freshness at the moment of picking. But he knew the locomotive would have gone from the station by now, and so he reached reluctantly for the handset and hauled himself into the real world.

  The room was humid even with the window open; the dark was dead and heavy, the rasp of crickets somnolent and slow. He said his name into the mouthpiece, his voice thick.

  ‘Eddie?’ The woman sounded distant and nervous.

  Mallon recognized his sister’s voice at once. ‘Weird time of day to be calling, Joyce. It’s almost half past three here.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘You got it,’ he said. What was wrong with her? ‘That makes it – what? About eight thirty a.m. where you are.’

  ‘I’m not wearing a watch,’ Joyce said.

  Eddie’s wife Claire woke and reached for the bedside lamp. The sudden pale light made Eddie blink.

  ‘Who’s calling?’ Claire asked.

  Eddie covered the mouthpiece. ‘Joyce,’ he said.

  She looked surprised. ‘Is she calling from Scotland?’

  ‘I guess,’ Eddie said. He spoke into the handset. ‘Are you in Glasgow, Joyce?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joyce said.

  ‘Something’s wrong. I hear it in your voice. Talk to me.’

  ‘I need you to come home, Eddie.’

  ‘I am home. Queens is where I live, Joyce. Remember? Give me one good reason I should drop everything and come over there.’

  ‘Because I bloody need you,’ she said. ‘Sometimes a sister needs her big brother.’

  Joyce had never said such a thing before. She didn’t even sound like herself, her voice was small and hurt, and she wasn’t in the habit of calling him at this or any other time of day to ask him to go back to Glasgow.

  A moment’s silence on the line. He wondered if this call travelled through a cable on the dark Atlantic seabed, where no light had ever penetrated. He felt a touch of sorrow, thinking of the ocean’s black width and the tourniquet of family and how tightly it was knotted even if you thought it had worked loose over the years.

  He heard Joyce take a deep breath. ‘It’s Jackie, Eddie. Oh Christ, why is it so damn hard to say? He’s dead. Jackie’s dead.’

  Something he couldn’t identify turned over inside Eddie Mallon and dropped like a stone falling from a great height. A heartbeat skipped, an irregularity, a valve malfunctioning. He had a feeling of a screw being drilled through his chest. ‘Dead? How? How did it happen?’

  ‘He didn’t die in bed, Eddie. There was no gentle into that good night shite.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, Joyce.’

  Joyce told him in a single spare ugly sentence.

  He was surprised by the heft of loss. There was a weight inside him, an iron pendulum creaking back and forth. His eyes smarted. He had difficulty swallowing. He felt himself splinter. He walked with the phone to the window and pressed his forehead to the warm pane and looked down into the darkened back yard. He listened to the heavy silence of the house. A beam of light extended from the bedroom window into the yard, illuminating a narrow patch of grass. He looked beyond the light to a place where blackness concealed beech trees and he had the other-worldly sensation that the ghost of his father was out there beneath the thick limbs and silent leaves. I’m leaving, Eddie. I wanted to say my last goodbye.

  ‘What is it?’ Claire asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  Joyce asked, ‘Eddie? You still there? Hello hello?’

  Eddie Mallon felt as if he’d floated from this room, transported back to a Glasgow street in the early 1960s, a little boy on a kerb with his small hand in his father’s big palm, and tramcars clattering past on their iron tracks and sometimes in the rain an overhead wire sparking and the air smelling scorched.

  Never cross until the way is clear, Eddie. Look left, look right, look left, make sure nothing’s coming. Don’t you forget that, Eddie.

  Okay, Dad. Left, right, left again.

  Good boy.

  You’re dead and I don’t understand why, Dad. I loved you, yes, I did, no matter what.

  He felt tiny and scared a moment, no longer an adult in an adult world.

  Claire asked, ‘Who’s dead, Eddie? Who is it?’

  Mallon didn’t hear his wife. His head was racing. Questions crowded his mind. Professional habit. What kind of weapon had been used? Had he been alone at the time of his murder? Had a motive been established? He imagined the old man’s pain, or maybe there was no pain, maybe it was all over in a fraction of time too tiny to calculate. ‘Have you phoned mother?’

  ‘That’s your side of the world,’ Joyce said.

  Eddie pushed the thought of his mother from his mind; he’d return to it soon enough.

  Joyce said, ‘The funeral’s Friday. The pathologist says he’s finished with the body … I can’t deal with this alone, Eddie.’

  Claire was out of bed now, standing at Eddie’s shoulder. ‘It’s Jackie, isn’t it? It’s Jackie who’s dead …’

  Eddie Mallon touched the side of his wife’s face gently and nodded his head.

  She said, ‘Oh God, I’m so
rry, Eddie,’ and he held her against his shoulder, grateful for her comfort even as he was miles away in that place where he could still sense his hand wrapped in his father’s spectral grasp. The past could ambush you. Like the way he smelled his dad at that moment, so real, so close – tobacco clinging to a woollen overcoat, damp socks drying in front of a coal fire, a whiff of Cutty Sark, these things bushwhacked you.

  ‘I’m sorry, really I am,’ Claire said. She had a genuine heart. In her world all setbacks were opportunities in disguise; deaths weren’t doors that slammed shut. They were openings into other spaces, worlds we knew nothing about.

  He spoke quietly into the handset. ‘I’ll call you back in a couple of hours, Joyce.’

  ‘I’m feeling fragile, Eddie.’

  ‘I’ll arrange something. I promise you.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting right here by the phone,’ Joyce said.

  Eddie Mallon put the handset down.

  ‘Sit beside me,’ Claire said.

  Eddie sat on the edge of the bed. Claire held his hand. He stroked her skin, which was damp. Eddie gazed at his wife’s face. Once thin and delicate, a delightful skeletal construct, it had been made puffy by the mischief of time, the lines around the mouth deepening. But he still saw the beauty of a young woman in her. She was still the girl he’d fallen in love with more than twenty years ago. He wondered how much he’d changed from her perspective. His black hair, dense and curled, was streaked with grey, and he carried about fifteen pounds more than when they’d married, and some mornings he woke feeling the mass of forty-five years pressing down on him, and it was an effort to face another day.

  The really good mornings, when you leapt out of bed, when you felt like a god who could overcome any crud the day threw in your face – a flat tyre, a cup of bad coffee, even a sniper in a tower with a scoped rifle and a bad attitude – were diminishing yearly. I love you, Claire, he thought. We’re just not the people we used to be, those bright smiling kids in the old wedding photographs on the dressing table.