Read Online The Bad Fire by Campbell Armstrong - Free Book Online

know where to find you. Sandy will walk you out.’
    Eddie moved to the door. ‘I hope you find the killer.’
    â€˜I’m confident,’ Tay said. ‘I’m always confident …’
    Perlman rubbed his hands briskly. ‘Nice to meet you, Eddie. Sorry about your father. Really I am.’
    â€˜Thanks.’ Eddie nodded at Perlman, then picked up his bag and walked with Scullion back the way they’d come.
    Scullion said, ‘Tay’s an excellent policeman, Mr Mallon.’
    â€˜I’m sure.’
    â€˜Dealing with the public isn’t his forte. He’s brusque at times.’ Scullion paused, smiled at Eddie in a forlorn way. ‘I just wish you had a better reason for visiting our fair city, Mr Mallon.’
    â€˜So do I,’ Eddie said.
    â€˜Anyhow,’ Scullion said, spreading his hands in a gesture intended to suggest that the city might be surprisingly bounteous just the same, ‘welcome to Glasgow.’

10
    Joyce was waiting for him in the Arrivals lounge.
    She’d changed her appearance since he’d seen her last. She’d shed the black clothes and the aura of existentialist gloom in favour of faded old blue jeans, an oversized T-shirt with a camouflage pattern, tan sneakers with yellow-and-brown striped laces. She still wore shades, but the lenses were royal blue and tiny, not big and black. Her hair had been cropped short and dyed blonde. The style gave her oval face an undernourished quality. She threw herself at him energetically, clutching him hard.
    â€˜Eddie Eddie, oh Eddie.’
    He held her tightly. He had a sense of love, like oxygen flowing to his head; it surprised him how easy it was to love her, because he often imagined absence and distance would eventually erode his feelings, and hers too, but that hadn’t come about. And now all at once he was goddam tearful. It was what happened as you got older, he’d noticed. You sniffled more readily at things, choked up at reunions and soft-hearted movie sequences and farewells. One day you’d be a sentimental old fart in an armchair crying into a Kleenex during It’s A Wonderful Life .
    â€˜I’m just so damned glad you came. Hold me and don’t let go, Eddie.’
    She felt thin, fragile. He wondered how her life had been lived in the five years since he’d seen her. They were neither of them letter writers. They spoke a couple of times a year by phone, and that was it. In New York he thought about her, missed her – but then, like everyone else, he got immersed in the currents of his own life and the promises he made to himself about calling Joyce more often were pushed to a backburner where they simmered. And that was sad, because the years were rolling inexorably away.
    Then he was thinking of how far he’d drifted from Jackie Mallon too, and he wanted to say something to Joyce about him, but he was groping for words. Jackie floated before him, the thick eyebrows and the upright walk that was almost military at times, the cheeky dazzle of the smile and the habit the old man had of cupping a cigarette as he smoked, as if he were afraid of a wind blowing it away. It might have been a mannerism born in the drab post-war years, when cigarettes were precious.
    I didn’t have enough time with him, Eddie thought, I invented him from memories. And he was suddenly consumed by anger. Somebody had killed the old man, and that fucker, whoever he was, would goddam have to pay in the end –
    He caught himself in mid-rage, breathed a couple of times deeply, sought calm. Don’t go off the deep end. The police are looking for the killer. They’ll find him.
    Joyce said, ‘I’m all cried out. Talk to me about the living, Eddie. Talk to me about Claire. Tell me about my gorgeous wee nephew.’
    He spoke about Claire. He brought her up to date on Mark and the girls who chased him. She linked her arm in his and they walked across the terminal,