The Bad Fire by Campbell Armstrong Page B

past slowly below.
    â€˜I can’t imagine Flora’s state of mind,’ Joyce said. ‘Your husband tells you he’ll fight for custody of both kids, he’ll drag you through the whole legal system even if it takes years and he’s got the cash to do exactly what he threatens. He issues an ultimatum – choose one kid, or risk losing both.’
    This was the version Eddie had heard so many times from Flora. He looked at his sister. How frail she seemed in the soft light of the lamp; almost like a kid on the cusp of adolescence.
    She said, ‘Jackie always tried to do his best for me after Flora went. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him for what he’d done. Oh, I tried. I really wanted to hate him. I used to get down on my knees and pray I could learn to hate him. God, teach me to hate … Daft. In the end, forgiveness takes less energy.’ She smiled, sipped a little wine. ‘Have you forgiven him?’
    â€˜I like to think so,’ Eddie said. ‘Or maybe I’ve just fudged what happened in the past. Discarded it. I’m not sure.’
    â€˜You know, I used to think Flora chose to take you to America because you were her favourite.’
    â€˜No. She thought I could cope with the upheaval better because I was older. She was obsessed for years with saving money and hiring a hotshot lawyer in the States to fight for custody of you, but time passed, and she could never get the cash together …’
    Fatigued, Eddie moved to the sofa, lay down. He crossed his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling where the lamp created an oval of weak light. Giving up a child, he thought. It would hurt like hell. It would be a pain you could never alleviate. Day after day you’d haul a sense of loss around with you, and people might detect it in your mannerisms, the far-off look that would come into your face. But it wasn’t only Flora who’d given up a child. Jackie Mallon had deprived himself of his son by his own brute act of spite. He’d punished himself as well as Flora.
    That one big mistake, Dad. That heartbreaking cruelty. That’s where the halo is corroded.
    He was beginning to drift now. Couldn’t fight it much longer. After a while he heard Joyce stub her cigarette. He felt her kiss his forehead softly and say, ‘We’ll get through all this.’
    â€˜Sure we will,’ he said. She switched the lamp off. The darkness was comforting. He heard her cross the floor and enter her bedroom. She closed the door quietly.
    He lay, fully clothed, on an unfamiliar sofa he didn’t have the strength to open into a bed.
    He slipped into sleep, dreamed he was dancing, he and Senga waltzing on board a cruise ship. The orchestra played ‘Moonlight in Vermont’. The conductor had Flora’s face. In the dream he looked at the tattoo on Senga’s arm and he knew what it was. It surprised him. He thought: I’m mistaken. He woke briefly, considered the tattoo, then everything floated away from him and he fell into a sleep that was deep and this time dreamless.

14
    At six thirty a.m., Billy McQueen, AKA Billy the Stump or Billy Wan-Fittit, read the morning newspapers in his Merchant City penthouse. The building in which he lived had been a derelict warehouse before razor-brained developers realized that the city centre of Glasgow was a very desirable place to live, if you were of the cellphone, fast-buck, nightclubbing slick-car generation; and so Merchant City had been created out of shabby Victorian warehouses and banks and offices, its new apartments purchased by lawyers and glitzy media types.
    Billy McQueen didn’t come into these categories. He was a middleman, a fixer who brought people together to make deals, and he took a generous percentage of profits for his troubles. He insisted on receiving a portion of his fee upfront as a token of goodwill. Officially he was an accountant, the profession specified on his