The Bad Fire by Campbell Armstrong Page A

handrest until he was certain everything was safe, then he sat back in his seat, relieved, as the craft taxied. Why the fuck was he scared in planes?
    It had always been so, starting with the first flight he ever took, and that was the day he’d fled Glasgow with his mother, and he’d locked himself in the toilet and trembled, just stood there looking at himself in the mirror and shaking , not really knowing where he was flying to or why, except it was the end of the world as he understood it. Easy for a shrink to make something out of that, Eddie. You associate flying with upheaval. With change and the fear of change. You can get off the couch now, Mr Mallon. That’ll be two hundred bucks .
    He unbuckled his seatbelt. He stepped into the aisle, opened the overhead compartment, hauled down the leather bag Claire had packed for him. This was the only luggage he had, which meant he didn’t have to waste time at the baggage carousel.
    He checked the inside pocket of his jacket, made sure his wallet was in place, then moved along the aisle towards the exit. In the terminal he stood in the Immigration line reserved for non-Europeans. He was a naturalized American. Stuck in this slow-motion throng, he wished he had dual citizenship, because people with European Community passports were streaming through other channels unimpeded. He shuffled in stages towards an official in a glass booth, a rotund individual with no neck and Coke-bottle glasses.
    Eddie handed his passport to the official, whose nametag identified him as Arthur Dudgeon. He checked Eddie’s photograph against the real man, then said, ‘Somebody wants to talk to you, Mr Mallon,’ and he nodded in the direction of a man who was standing, hands in the pockets of a pin-striped suit, twenty yards away.
    â€˜Is there a problem?’ Eddie asked.
    Dudgeon said, ‘It’s a formality, I’m sure.’
    You couldn’t argue with passport-control officials. It was a waste of time the world over. These guys dreamed in their sleep of the Ultimate Rubber Stamp, the imprimatur of Total Authority. You possessed that, you had World Domination.
    Eddie took his passport, picked up his bag, then walked towards the man in the suit, who shook Eddie’s hand firmly; he was somewhere in his thirties and had thin ginger hair and a pleasantly bland face.
    â€˜Sorry to inconvenience you, Mr Mallon. I’m Detective-Inspector Scullion, Strathclyde Police. Will you follow me, please? We need just a wee minute of your time. Good flight?’
    Eddie said, ‘We didn’t fall out of the sky or anything drastic.’
    Scullion smiled. ‘Ha. Indeed indeed.’
    Eddie tracked Scullion along a narrow corridor to a room that was little more than a partitioned space with a desk and three chairs and a single metal filing cabinet and a neon strip in the ceiling.
    â€˜Sit down if you like,’ Scullion said.
    Eddie did so.
    Two men entered the room. One, big and square-headed and business-like, had a build and complexion that reminded Eddie of cinderblock. He sat behind the desk. His suit was charcoal, his jacket buttoned tight across his midriff. The other man, who stood slouched, wore an unfashionable brown suit with a two-slash back flap, and thick-framed black glasses. He had a pale pink patch over his left eye and short silver hair cut in the fashion of a marine butchered by a half-blind barber. Hard to tell his age. Middle fifties, but he looked older.
    â€˜I’m Detective-Superintendent Tay,’ the big man said. He shook Eddie’s hand firmly and then gestured to the man with the eyepatch. ‘This is Detective-Sergeant Perlman.’
    Eddie nodded at Perlman who smiled and adjusted his glasses. Eddie wondered about the purpose of the patch under the lens. Perlman had the look of a man whose tailor had expired in the mid-1970s.
    â€˜You’re here for your father’s funeral, I suppose,’ Tay said.
    Eddie