60

The place where the school had once stood, that vacant lot of nettle and dock leaf, seemed hostile in the dark. Eddie ran a hand along the railings as he walked. Senga still held his arm.

‘You shouldn’t have looked,’ she said. ‘Very naughty of you, Eddie. Spying like that.’

Eddie thought the night had an emptiness about it, as if the pulses of the city had been stilled. The street was quiet.

‘So, Eddie. What will you do?’

He hadn’t thought. He hadn’t had a chance to think.

Senga took her arm away from him and stopped, turning to face him. ‘Your father did it for me, Eddie. I asked him. I told him what our people needed, and he found it.’

‘Our people?’

Senga said, ‘Our people, my people. It’s in the blood, Eddie. You can’t just squeeze it out of your system. Our people over there need the weapons.’

‘There’s never an end,’ Eddie said. ‘It goes on and on.’

‘What do you imagine – that everybody buys all this disarmament shite? Come, we’ll open our arms dumps and you can take a look and see how cooperative we really are. Fucking hell, Eddie, you can talk peace and coexistence until you’ve got steam coming out your ears, and the politicians can huff and puff about how bloody brilliant they are – oh, aren’t we wonderful, we’ve brought peace – but at the end of the day you’ve got people who’ll never trust each other, because there’s been too much blood for forgiveness, and too much hate. There’s no peace, Eddie. Only PR. Only the image. The shadow on the wall. No substance. Not where it counts,’ and she laid a hand on his arm. ‘We can never trust the other side. Understand that. We may fight among ourselves now and again, we may squabble furiously, but when it comes right down to it, we’re united against the enemy.’

The enemy. Eddie stared into the haunted darkness of the school grounds. He imagined cigarette smoke drifting from the boys’ lavatory and the sound of kids playing football in the field beyond the bicycle shed, that space where annexe buildings, skimpy in their impermanence, had been erected to absorb an overflow of students. He grasped the railings and felt he was looking at the last resting place of innocence.

They strolled a few more yards. This time Senga walked a couple of feet away from him. She isn’t touching me now, he thought. The intimacy has been abandoned.

‘How did it work?’ he asked.

‘Jackie paid half the money upfront to Gurk in Largs, McQueen brokered the deal and got his share, and the cargo was duly collected by Joe Wilkie from a drop on the outskirts of a place called Port Glasgow. The other half of the money was due when Joe returned with the goods. But then that arsehole Haggs stepped into the picture and he brought disaster – so who pays up when Jackie is dead?’

‘Somebody has to,’ Eddie said.

‘But who? I don’t have the three hundred thousand plus, or whatever Jackie owed.’

‘Jackie must have had it,’ Eddie said. ‘He intended to pay, didn’t he?’

‘Jackie always squared his debts, Eddie. I have no doubt he had the cash somewhere. Finding where – that would be the real problem. Where did he stash it? There must be a thousand places, eh?’

She knows where Jackie hid his cash, Eddie thought. She knows.

He said, ‘The cargo leaves Glasgow soon, I’d guess.’

Senga didn’t answer this question. She said, ‘Our people are waiting for it at the other end. They’ll pay well for it. That’s where Jackie made his profit.’

‘But you won’t use that money to settle the debt with the original supplier, will you?’

‘Me? That was all Jackie’s business. I don’t know anything about these weapons or where they came from, do I? Look at me, Eddie, and you see a woman who just liked a few drinks and listening to the Eagles and keeping my man happy. An ordinary soul.’

‘A nice façade,’ Eddie said.

‘And I played it well,’ Senga said.

She’s screwing with Kaminsky and his operation, Eddie thought. A dangerous line to walk. If Gurk couldn’t get the cash or the return of the goods, somebody else would be despatched. And after that, if need be, somebody else. And on. Kaminsky would send his minions and emissaries into Ulster and Glasgow until he found out what had happened to his consignment. It was business, and he couldn’t be perceived as soft.

Senga, locked inside an airtight old dream of Protestant ascendancy in Ulster, didn’t seem to get this. People obsessed with ancient causes were blind to reality and change. Eddie thought of the van and the clapped-out furniture and the cargo that lay hidden in the space beyond the tables and chairs, and he realized that he and Perlman had interrupted work in progress, that Senga and Joe and Ray must have intended to conceal the cargo under tarps, inside boxes, whatever.

I shouldn’t have looked but I did.

He said, ‘Jackie wasn’t a fucking bigot.’

‘Bigot? Where did you dig that one up, Eddie? We’re not talking about bigotry. I believe in what I’m doing. I was born believing in it. That hasn’t changed. That doesn’t make me a bigot.’

‘Okay. What word do you prefer? Patriot? Jackie didn’t support this decrepit cause of yours.’

‘Did he ever tell you that?’

‘When I was a kid, I remember –’ He paused, bringing back to mind that night when Jackie and his cronies had sung Orange songs in the living room, and the air smelled of smoke and spilled beer, and he fell into a silence that was oppressive.

‘Somebody should point out that it’s years since you’ve been a kid, Eddie.’

‘I remember he said there was no difference between people, no matter their religion.’ No, those hadn’t been his words exactly, he’d phrased it some other way, and Eddie, foundering in the shallows of memory, troubled by this whole situation, couldn’t bring back the precise sentences. I’ve lost my way, he thought.

‘He was kidding you, Eddie. He was always a great kidder.’

‘No, you must have changed him, you must have influenced his way of thinking –’

‘He liked to think for himself, Eddie. He knew where his sympathies lay. They weren’t quite so strong as mine, but he knew.’

They’d reached the corner of Onslow Drive. Eddie saw a lamp go on and off in one of the terraced houses. In the brief illumination a middle-aged woman appeared in a window, then vanished, like a figure in the abrupt pop of a flashlight. He thought of Jackie Mallon disappearing in sudden darkness, slipping away, indefinable. Dad, he thought. Just come back for a moment and defend yourself, make your position absolutely clear.

‘I’ll report this to the cops,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t think you’ll go to the police, Eddie.’

‘What’s stopping me?’

‘Let me put it this way, Eddie. We have friends all over the world, Eddie. Sympathizers who see a way of life threatened, and they don’t like it. They feel they’re being forced into peace on terms they don’t want. They see their traditions undermined and the tide’s turning against them, and they’re in no mood for going under. They don’t want to share power with some people whose hands are very very bloody. These friends are serious people.’

He saw it immediately: Claire and Mark. A dark night. A morning at dawn. A new mailman delivering a package. A man pretending there was a fault on the phone line or a gas leak, anything. Claire’s car exploding as she turned the key. Mark struck by a hit-and-run driver while he cycled to school. He imagined empty rooms. Where a wife had been, or a kid, absences. His heart twisted in his chest.

He said, ‘I don’t believe what you’re telling me.’

‘I don’t have to spell it out, Eddie. I like you. I’m fond of you. We’re family, just about. Believe what I’m telling you, that’s all I ask.’

‘I fucking hate being threatened,’ he said.

‘Threatened? I was merely mentioning certain possibilities, love.’

He thought of the Mercedes. Automatic weapons in layers darkly shining at the front of the big van, some covered by tarp, a few visible. He had no idea how many. Hundreds of AK-47s or some similar automatic weapon, it was impossible to estimate the number of guns or the diversity of the consignment – there could have been thousands of rounds of ammunition, packs of plastic explosives, scores of grenades, and handguns. Without going back and checking the contents of the van, how could he know?

He gazed the length of Onslow Drive. Our Orange friends need some hardware, what can you do for us, love? And Jackie smelled the spoor of profit even as he heard the beating wings of the angels of Protestant righteousness. He’d buy the guns and sell them to Ulster connections at a hefty profit. Guns in oilskins, boxed and buried in fields, hidden in the outbuildings of lonely farmhouses, sunken in pits, concealed and ready for use when the time came.

He looked directly at Senga. She’d threatened his family. The full force of that struck him, and he was angry. ‘Christ, you’re such goddam neanderthals,’ he said. ‘You and all the people like you. Your marches and your tribal songs and your fucking banners. All right; Glasgow might be more superficially sophisticated these days and you might be better dressed and wear more fashionable clothes and maybe you visit your hairdresser once a week and get your fucking nails done, but the poison is the same as it always was. You’re living in the past, and it’s barbaric.’

‘Believe me, I wish it was different, Eddie. I wish there was trust and peace and happy wee children from both sides of the divide holding hands and singing, believe me. But it’s a barbaric world, and you’re a part of it as well, so don’t criticize me,’ Senga said. ‘Where the hell do you think the other side get their money and arms from? Smack in the heart of where you live your little bit of the American dream, Eddie Mallon. New York. Boston. Chicago. The money rolls in every time somebody sings “Danny Boy” in an Irish pub. Pass the coinbox. Let me make a contribution to the boyos. Well, we have to defend ourselves against all that cash rolling across the Atlantic into Ulster, Eddie, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.’

‘Now give me the speech about how the weapons are for defensive purposes only,’ Eddie said.

‘Of course they are, dear,’ Senga replied. ‘We’re a peaceful people. But we’re not weak.’

‘You’ll only shoot if you’re shot at, right?’

‘Naturally.’

Eddie shook his head: and I was born yesterday. ‘What did you and Jackie see in one another, Senga?’

‘We loved. We loved a lot.’

‘And the Cause,’ Eddie hated the sound of the word. ‘Was that something you had in common, huh?’

‘Oh, we had more in common than that, pet. But love’s a deep mystery. All kinds of people fall for one another and you never know why. Right?’

He looked at her face in lamplight. She was going somewhere with this, and he felt it, and he wanted to kill the conversation, but he waited, fascinated even as he sensed dread.

‘Take …’ She paused. She looked up at the streetlamp, concentrating on the torrent of moths, as if she were trying to count the numbers.

I know what she’s going to say, he thought. I feel it coming.

‘For instance, your sister,’ Senga said. ‘What does she see in Caskie? Makes you wonder.’

‘You knew about that,’ Eddie said.

Senga laughed. ‘Oh, for years.’

Eddie sensed the light from the overhead lamp dwindle to little more than a faraway star. ‘What about Jackie?’ he said.

Don’t tell me, he thought.

‘Jackie knew from the beginning, Eddie. Jackie knew from the minute the stalls sprang open and Joyce was off and running into Caskie’s bed.’

‘She was twelve, for Christ’s sake,’ Eddie said.

‘Mature for her years,’ Senga remarked.

‘I can’t believe Jackie –’

‘Oh, grow up, Eddie. He not only knew, he encouraged it.’

‘I don’t believe,’ Eddie said.

‘No skin off my nose,’ she said. ‘But Jackie wanted his own tame policeman. He thought Caskie might come in handy along the way somehow. So Joyce was deliciously sweet bait. Ripe and fresh, straight off the tree. And Caskie – poor love – he fell so hard it was almost comical. And seeing him try to hide his feelings around Jackie, God, it was farcical.’

Caskie had been handcuffed by Haggs; but Jackie was the one who’d been the original jailer.

Chris Caskie, tame house-broken policeman.

‘You might say Jackie pimped his own daughter,’ Senga said.

‘Might say? Is there another expression?’

‘I prefer to think of it as a strategic manoeuvre, Eddie. Nightcap?’

Eddie refused. He felt cold. Despite the warmth.

Senga said, ‘Another time then. Goodnight.’

He watched her walk away, tall and loose in her movements, and he thought about going after her to dispute her version of events, then he decided no, why should he, he’d come to the end of the road. Like every other time he’d tried to exculpate his father, it would be energy wasted and another scar across his heart. There was a limit to the search for excuses: nothing about Jackie Mallon merited tolerance. He deserved to have been shot in the back seat of a car parked on a piece of waste ground on a Glasgow street at twilight, with a whiff of scotch on his breath and his face blown off.

He fucking deserved that kind of ending.

His life had been a bankrupt affair.

Eddie turned and moved slowly down the street in the direction of Joyce’s flat. He let himself into the building and climbed the stairs. Bone-weary. Sweating. A man at the end of revelations too heavy to carry. He was dragging his body through time until the moment of departure. He thought about the guns. He thought about Jackie negotiating in Largs with Tommy Gurk. He thought about Caskie and Joyce, and how Jackie had brought them together in the event that he might gain something from that illicit relationship. The cunning and brute insensitivity of it.

Yes, Jackie, fuck you, you deserved your execution.

He unlocked the door of the flat and went inside.

Joyce sat on the sofa with a glass of wine in her hand.

‘It’s late,’ she said.

‘And I’m tired.’ You never knew you were used, did you, Joyce?

She got up from the sofa. ‘I heard about McWhinnie and those other killings … Chris says the police are turning the city upside down. It’s awful to think …’

Everything was receding already, Eddie thought. The tenements, the streets, the names of the living and the dead. Joyce put her arms round him. Yes, dear Joyce, it’s awful to think. He smoothed a strand of hair from her forehead with a gentle gesture. You love Caskie, he thought. You’ve made a settlement with your emotions.

And you never knew Jackie played the role of a dark cupid, a gargoyle. And Caskie didn’t know either.

‘I’m sorry I upset you before,’ she said.

‘I’m over it, Joyce.’

‘Are you?’

He nodded. ‘I hope it all works out for you. I hope it happens the way you want it to happen.’

‘Is that your blessing, Eddie?’

‘Bestowed,’ he said.

‘In a half-hearted way.’

‘You expect more?’

‘I don’t know what I expect,’ she said. ‘I wish you liked him.’

Eddie said, ‘Bad chemistry.’

‘No. More than that. Those accusations you made.’

‘Let them go, Joyce.’ He lay down. The room seemed fuzzy. ‘Early rise in the morning.’

She leaned over him, kissed his forehead, and he wanted to cry suddenly. He felt a sadness as black as night in the city. There was the ache of dead hopes inside him.

‘Big day,’ she said. ‘Hard to believe he’s gone.’

‘Yes.’ They held one another tightly for a long time and Eddie remembered the cab that had taken him and Flora away so many years ago, and all the wreckage since, lies, crimes, love misguided, love abused.