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

off for chump-change in filling stations. He touched his sister’s hand and wondered why anyone had asked her , the stricken daughter, to ID the corpse. They might have been tactful and asked one of Jackie’s friends, somebody hardened by the streets. But no. In their insensitivity or haste they’d turned to the daughter.
    Is this your dad? Is this mess you see before you Jackie Mallon?
    â€˜Did the cops tell you anything?’ he asked. ‘Do you know if they have any ideas about who killed him, or why?’
    â€˜I just remember they asked me to look at the body. There were so many people drifting in and out, suits, uniforms, I was hysterical in a kind of slow-motion way. I remember a guy drove me home after I’d been to the morgue. He was nice. He asked me if I wanted to go for a drink with him any time I felt the need to talk.’
    â€˜He’s a master of timing, this character,’ Eddie said. ‘What did you tell him?’
    â€˜I said call me in a month or two. But secretly I was flattered because he was drop-dead in a kind of little-boy-lost way. Any other time I would have said yes without thinking.’
    â€˜The last time you said yes without thinking you ended up marrying the guy,’ Eddie said.
    â€˜Just as I’d forgotten all about Harry Haskell, you go and remind me. I wish you could do something about that American accent.’
    â€˜Am I supposed to sound like a guy who’s been selling newspapers outside –’ and he fumbled for a location’– St Enoch Station all his life?’
    â€˜Sorry to tell you this, Eddie, but there’s no such station any more. Shut down long ago …’
    A streetlight illuminated her face a second. She lit another cigarette. She looked, he thought, very young. A person too young to have her kind of history – a family hewn apart, a marriage that had been disastrous from the beginning, a murdered father.
    â€˜You wanna hear my American?’ she asked.
    Eddie Mallon said, ‘I have a choice?’
    â€˜Hey, it’s your loss, buddy.’
    â€˜That’s bad, Joyce.’
    â€˜Bad as in good?’
    â€˜As in terrible.’
    They’d slipped into banter, he thought. Steer clear of the real subject. Digress. He looked at his watch but the damn thing had stopped. ‘I need to call Claire. She worries when I have to fly.’
    â€˜Phone from my place,’ Joyce said. ‘I just remembered the man’s name.’
    â€˜What man?’
    â€˜The one that drove me home from the morgue. McWhinnie. Charles, I think. Detective-Sergeant. Posh Glasgow accent. He said yes instead of aye and didn’t drop his gs at the end of -ing words. Classy, eh?’
    â€˜Very,’ he said.
    The car left the motorway and headed into the east end of the city, where Eddie had been born and raised; suddenly streets were darker, tenements overbearing and the occasional streetlamp was missing, presumed vandalized. Stores were shuttered, bars closed. The only place open was a fish and chip shop. Eddie saw a fat man behind the counter toss a chip in the air and, like a trained sea-lion, catch it in his mouth on the way down.
    Joyce turned the car into Onslow Drive and parked outside the house that had been the Mallon family home in another lifetime.
    Eddie said, ‘I thought we were going to your flat. Why are we stopping here?’
    â€˜I want to see how Senga’s bearing up,’ Joyce said, and stepped out of the car.
    Eddie didn’t move.
    He gazed at the garden, which was a tangle, a jungle of shrub. He stared at the windows, half-expecting to see a curtain drawn back and his mother’s face appear there, or the shadow of his father pass in front of a pane. He imagined Flora calling, You finished your homework, Eddie ? Or the sound of Joyce practising scales she could never master on the old upright piano in the living room. Doh ray me fah clunk , the lid slammed down in