28

The calamitous drumming in Caskie’s head just wouldn’t quit. Hot and flushed, he kept going over the same thing – his denial of ever having heard of Haggs. Reason, give me one good reason, he thought: I panicked. I slipped. I gave in to a kind of idiot seizure of guilt. Moron. It was downright stupid, a magician dropping his cards during a sleight of hand, and Mallon – certainly no dummy – had picked up on it. Caskie was convinced of that.

What would it have cost me to say I knew Haggs by name? Nothing. He’d answered without thinking. Haggs? Never heard of him. Nothing to do with me. Not part of my world. He’d rushed into the denial too quickly.

The burden you’ve been carrying. You’re on overload.

He watched Joyce, who stood at the window and looked down into the street. She smoked a cigarette. ‘Where the hell did Eddie go? He just disappeared. He didn’t say he was leaving. It’s been more than an hour, hasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’ Caskie had lost track of time.

From the hallway came the sound of a man drilling screws into sheets of plywood. Caskie had telephoned him and he’d come at once to put the plywood in the place where the glass had been, a temporary solution, security for Joyce. She’d wondered how Caskie could find somebody so quickly. One phone call and voilà. The carpenter appeared within ten minutes. Probably an old favour. Caskie had hundreds of strings he could pull in this city. He’d already arranged for a patrol car to remain in the vicinity in the event that Tommy G returned. She had the feeling a single car wouldn’t worry a man like Thomas G.

‘It’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m not dressed yet,’ she said.

‘School holidays,’ Caskie said.

She looked at Caskie. He had a strange lifeless tone in his voice. ‘I’d better put some clothes on,’ she said.

She stepped into her bedroom, closed the door. She pulled on a T-shirt with the logo McCools, the name of a bar she sometimes visited when she was in a jazz mood. Then blue jeans tight at her hips. She stood in front of the long mirror of the wardrobe, thinking she looked undernourished. She remembered how the intruder had dragged her to the floor, the way his hand had parted her robe. She’d have bad dreams about him. He’d crash her head uninvited.

She sat in a green velvet chair, an item salvaged from Jackie’s yard. She saw her image again, this time in the oval mirror of the Victorian dressing table that had once belonged to Granny Mallon, funny how bits and pieces of furniture and small items of jewellery are handed down through generations like genetic material passed from one person to another, and she thought of how often Granny Mallon must have gazed at herself in this very mirror, a young wife, barely more than a girl, brushing her hair stroke after stroke.

She touched her lip where Tommy G had struck her. It didn’t hurt now. She’d pressed ice cubes to it for a while, and they’d helped. She heard a knock on the door. Caskie appeared. She looked at his reflection in the mirror.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’ll be fine. Just give me a minute to myself, Chris.’

‘Checking,’ he said. ‘You want aspirin or anything else?’

‘No. But thanks for asking.’ She smiled at him in the mirror. He closed the door, retreated. She couldn’t read his expression. Concern, certainly. Always. She wasn’t sure what else. Something troubled him. Probably Tommy G. She heard the buzz of the carpenter’s drill and a big delivery truck pass in the street and how it made the glass vibrate in the window frames. Flora popped into her mind and she thought, I want my mother, I want to lay my head in her lap, all the things lost to us in the crap of the years, all mother-daughter moments ripped away from us. Thank you for that, Jackie. Thank you. I loved you anyway.

Caskie fingered the spines of books. A Scots Quair. Growing Up in the Gorbals. The USA Trilogy. Motes of dust drifted in sunlight. He walked the room restlessly. He brought his face close to one of the busts Joyce kept on shelves. This one, smooth-eyed, blind, a Roman copy, seemed to be peering into a world outside the range of everyday senses.

‘Counsel me, Senator,’ he whispered to the bust. ‘Look at the bloody awful state of things. Where do I go from here?’

‘Are you talking to a statue?’ Joyce asked.

Caskie turned quickly. He hadn’t heard her enter, and he was a little embarrassed. ‘I was conferring,’ he said.

‘Talk to statues often?’

‘All the time,’ Caskie said. ‘They don’t judge, you see.’

‘You’re afraid of judgement?’ Joyce asked.

‘Now and then.’

There was a noise in the hallway, and Eddie Mallon came into the room.

He looked weary, Joyce thought. His eyes were lightless. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she asked.

‘Choosing a coffin,’ he said.

‘Oh shit, damn damn, I was supposed to help Senga do that and it went out of my mind. I feel awful.’

‘Under the circumstances,’ Caskie said, ‘you’re allowed a little amnesia.’

Eddie flopped on the sofa and stretched his legs.

Joyce said, ‘You’ve been gone a long time.’

‘When you’re buying a coffin you don’t simply leap into the first one you see,’ he said.

‘Comical,’ Joyce said.

‘I need some light relief,’ Eddie said.

‘Don’t we just? I think I’ll walk round to Senga’s. See how she’s doing.’

Caskie looked at his watch. ‘It’s time I was going too.’

Eddie glanced at Chris Caskie, whose face was lightly tanned. It made his small beard seem whiter.

‘Did you process Tommy G through your computer, Chris?’

‘It’s in,’ Caskie said. ‘Nothing’s come back to me yet. We’ll get something, I’m sure.’

‘I’m sure,’ Eddie agreed.

Joyce ruffled his hair. ‘Back soon.’

Caskie said, ‘See you later, Eddie.’

I know how to empty a room, Eddie thought. He heard the front door close. He thought of phoning Claire, but before he could lift the phone the motion of the day caught up with him – the taxi-rides that had zoomed him from one end of the city to the other – and he shut his eyes and dozed in a shallow way for twenty minutes, dreaming of Glasgow, a black-and-white Glasgow he’d never lived in, steamships on the Clyde, crinolined ladies stepping out of horse-drawn carriages, shoeless kids begging on street corners. The air stank of raw sewage and the dank river. Women in shawls sold fish from wheelbarrows, and men hauled on their shoulders sides of butchered animals.

He woke dry-throated, walked into the kitchen, drank some water at the sink. He felt a deep frustration. He didn’t see how he could stay in Glasgow long enough to penetrate the reasons behind Jackie’s murder, or identify the killer, as if the slaying and the people involved belonged in a Glasgow so secret it was out of his reach – like the monochromatic city he’d seen in his dream. He was due to leave the day after the funeral. What could he achieve in so short a space of time? He couldn’t drag out his visit, he had work at home, the case of the dead junkie girl in the abandoned brownstone, her identity and cause of death, and God knows what else might have happened in the meantime, what files dropped on his desk, what mysteries he was paid to solve –

Caskie and Haggs. Haggs the gun collector and Caskie the cop. What did they have going between them that required such facile fabrications? It was a fair assumption, he thought, that Haggs knew Caskie. He certainly knew of him. Say their paths had crossed. It was possible they’d met in orbit around Jackie. Assumptions, and Eddie wasn’t enamoured of them, but sometimes they were the little building blocks that led to truth. He dipped his head under the cold water tap and let the stream run for a minute. Then he turned off the tap and stepped back from the sink and enjoyed water running over his scalp and down his face and thought: Caskie, lying sonofabitch.

You and Haggs are involved in something –

It was always something, this mystic something, this object that couldn’t be defined. He dried his face and walked back to the living room and opened the phone directory.