The Bad Fire by Campbell Armstrong

‘Note to self: Mr Caskie does not like sailing. Don’t ask him again. It makes him want to vomit.’
    Caskie stared at the shore. He thought: I have one year until retirement. I’ve never looked forward to it before now. One year and then I’m beyond Haggs’s reach. Gone. All this will be a dream hurriedly dissolving: you hope . He couldn’t wait a year. He didn’t have that kind of patience. He sucked sea air into his lungs as if to cleanse them and thought, I need to get Haggs out of my life soon. Today. Tomorrow. The day after. First chance I get. He’d had dreams of killing Haggs. In one, he dropped Haggs from a great height into a vat of acid and Haggs, screaming, was skinned within seconds. In another he’d strangled Haggs with an old bicycle chain. These dreams always left him drained.
    Roddy Haggs unlocked a small cabinet and took out a plastic Tesco bag which had been rolled over and wrapped with very thick rubber bands. He thrust the bag into Caskie’s arms and said, ‘Before I forget. Evidence for the prosecution.’
    Caskie, whose heart thumped, and who felt gluey saliva rise again in his throat, took the bag with great reluctance. What have I done? he wondered. What in God’s name?

9
    Eddie Mallon sat in the sky, hunched forward in his seat while he waited for that moment when the wheels struck the runway and the aircraft with all its great weight roared to an unlikely halt. A time he always found tense and scary. All bets with gravity were off. You could die in an instant of fire.
    When the cloud cover was blown away and he saw the city appear, he forgot his alarm. He found himself looking out at a mazy profusion of orange streetlamps burning in the night, the lights of cars on long ribbons of motorway, and in the west beyond the limits of Glasgow the outline of hills. He couldn’t recollect the city having been so bright before. It didn’t square with his boyhood memory. He recalled a grubby place, more shadow than streetlamp. A soot-cloaked city, darkness at noon, black buildings.
    â€˜Your table, sir.’
    The young woman who wore the sombre blue uniform of the airline chided him for his failure to put his table in the regulation upright position. He did as he was told; only on planes was he so readily obedient. This high off the ground he had no control over anything, no choice but to defer to people cloistered in a cockpit, men and women who understood instrument panels, radar, all the rest of it.
    His nervousness wasn’t entirely founded in this lifelong dumb-ass fear of flying. He was also thinking of what he’d encounter when he landed. He was thinking of his sister and wondering how she’d handle her father’s funeral. He was thinking about the old man’s long-time live-in companion, Senga Craig. What you see is what you get with Senga , Joyce had said. She’s sentimental and she’ll weep at the sight of a dead budgie in a cage, then out of the blue she’ll hit you with a hard opinion or a tough insight you never saw coming. Under that pile of red hair there’s a sharp brain .
    The prospect of finally meeting Senga made him a little uneasy; maybe it was the idea of seeing another woman in a house he’d only ever associated with his mother. Now somebody else slept in Jackie’s bed. Somebody else controlled the household, chose the furniture, all the things Flora had done. Jackie loves her , Joyce had said. And she’s devoted to him. They’re happy .
    He heard the thud of the undercarriage, a noise that always distressed him. The plane was four hundred feet, three, then two hundred, above the runway. And now, his nerves leaping like doomed kittens in a canvas sack on their way to a river, he watched the runway rush up to make contact. It was always easier when Claire flew with him; he had her hand to squeeze.
    Landing. Touchdown. The wheels whined on the runway. Eddie clutched the