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huh?’
    â€˜There’s a joint round the corner,’ Figaro said. ‘I’ll go.’
    Figaro disappeared. Brown-nose Figaro. Marvel looked at Eddie Mallon.
    â€˜Say, this ain’t your shift, is it, Mallon?’ Marvel said. ‘Come to that, it ain’t my shift either. So why have I dragged my sorry ass downtown at this time of day, you ask? Lemme tell you. Because I ain’t been home, Eddie. I been struggling with paperwork. I been wrestling figures. Budgets. City Hall needs numbers to crunch.’
    â€˜Way over my head,’ Eddie said.
    â€˜Way over mine too.’ The captain lit a small brown-papered cigarette and stared at the corpse. ‘My brain feels like a punchbag. I just stepped out for some air and take a look at this body we got here. What brings you out?’
    â€˜I need to talk with you,’ Eddie said. ‘I want some leave.’
    â€˜You got vacation time coming to you?’
    â€˜This would be leave of absence. Family reasons.’
    â€˜Somebody sick?’
    Mallon saw lights go on in the upper floors of the building. He imagined the dead man, John Boscoe Bentley, falling through space, through darkness: what did you think as you dropped? You knew you were going to hit ground hard, and you’d break, so what went through your mind in those few seconds? Nothing? Everything? Or was it all just one blind deep-red searing panic? And at the end – what? A fraction of acceptance? A microsecond of tranquillity? Maybe you just blacked out, or your heart exploded out of fright halfway down.
    â€˜My father died.’ Eddie turned to look at Marvel.
    â€˜Say. Sorry to hear that. Real sorry. How did it happen? Was he sick?’
    Eddie said, ‘He was shot.’
    â€˜ Shot . Jesus Christ.’
    â€˜I don’t know the circumstances.’
    â€˜Shot. Fuck. Fucking world we live in.’ Marvel sucked on his cigarette and stared into the lit end a second. ‘You got any heavy cases on your desk as of now?’
    Eddie said, ‘There’s the dead girl we found in the empty brownstone …’
    â€˜That junkie kid nobody can ID?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ Eddie said. He pondered the mystery of the missing teenage girl, a runaway from somewhere, and the fact her identity hadn’t yet been established. Somebody must be missing her, waiting up for her, insomniac parents in a small backwater township in a faraway state.
    â€˜Tom Collins can deal with that,’ Marvel said.
    Tom Collins was Eddie’s partner, a dark-jawed second-generation Irishman.
    Eddie said, ‘Apart from the girl, it’s stuff that can wait.’
    â€˜Stuff that can wait, huh? I never heard of stuff like that before,’ Marvel said, and smiled. ‘Must be new on the market. I gotta grab myself some of that good shit. You take the time you need, Eddie. You want any help, you know where to turn.’
    â€˜I appreciate that,’ Eddie said.
    Marvel dismissed the gratitude with a quick motion of his hand and was already moving away, drawn towards the door of the building by the sight of Figaro, who was clutching a cardboard cup of coffee.
    An ambulance appeared, lights whirling. Eddie Mallon watched the paramedics emerge. He saw them surround the body. And he felt weirdly lonely, out of touch with this world of his, as if he’d already left it, and was airborne, flying back to a place he barely remembered.
    Glasgow, a city seen through a rainy mist, a fuzzy sketch in damp charcoal.

7
    In the doorway of his parents’ bedroom Mark Mallon asked, ‘How long will you be gone, Dad?’
    â€˜A couple of days,’ Eddie said. He marvelled at how tall his son had become; magically, he’d stretched from five feet to just under six in the space of a year. He was almost as tall as Eddie himself. Facially, he resembled his mother; he had a delicacy about him that gave him an androgynous look. Girls loved it. They worshipped the