Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (35 page)

‘So?’

‘So cabs, or any kind of motors, don’t tend to blow up just because someone lands on top of them. Unless it’s a movie you’re watching.’

‘What’re you saying, Rigby?’

‘Our boy Gillick,’ I toed his foot, ‘reckons Jimmy’s a dab hand at improvising petrol bombs from the good old days. A wee
magnet
to clamp it to the petrol tank, a mercury-tilt switch, Finn hits hard enough to rattle the lot …’ I shrugged. ‘I’m telling you what Gillick said. Maybe you’ll get more out of him.’

‘But why the fuck would they want to blow the cab?’

The sixty-four thousand dollar question. Actually, the
one-point
-eight million question.

‘Point I’m making,’ I said, ‘it’s Gillick and Jimmy on the hook for what I owe.’ I nodded at the desk. ‘And Jimmy’s ten grand is just sitting there.’

He pursed his lower lip. ‘It’s tidy,’ he said. ‘This providing Gillick backs it up.’

‘Tell him if he doesn’t,’ I said, ‘I’ll be coming for his other eye.’

‘Okay,’ he said. Nodding to himself, slow. He touched the tips of his fingers to the gash above his ear, had a look at the blood. ‘So now, you and me, all we’re left with is personal.’

The evening was closing in, the sky a rotten peach. I told Maria to get her stuff from the Phaeton and went and had a look at Gillick’s Saab in the garage. Unlocked, no keys. A minute later I was easing in beside the Phaeton.

I put her bags on the back seat, debating whether to leave Bear where he was. Maria wouldn’t hear of it. So he got transferred to the Saab too.

I drove up the steep track and into the pines, flicking on the lights against the thickening gloom. The Saab so quiet, even in first gear, that I heard an owl whoo-hoo over the engine’s hum. Up across the razor-back ridge, down into the valley again.

‘How’d he get out?’ I said.

A hardy joker, Toto McConnell. Had squirmed across Jimmy and kicked in the back panel, come scrambling through from the boot, Bear trapped in the well behind the front seats. Maria’d bailed out and made for the trees, squeezing the Beretta’s trigger. Its safety on.

The rest I knew.

The dash lights gave her pallor a ghastly blue sheen. Hands trembling, the adrenaline rush sending her into delayed shock, how close a gun had been to her belly and what was in it.

‘Stop the car,’ she said.

‘We don’t have time to—’

She gagged, put a hand to her mouth. There was no hard shoulder, nowhere to go.

‘Harry!’

I jammed on, skidding. She was pushing out the door even before we’d stopped, and vomited quietly onto the verge.

It was a one-puke deal. She sat back into the seat, eyes closed. Pale as raw vellum now, a diamanté gleam to the sweat prickling her forehead.

With her eyes still closed she found her bag, fumbled inside. Came up with a bottle of water, some tissues.

‘You alright?’

She took a swig, gargled, spat onto the verge.

‘Just get me to the airport,’ she whispered.

It was that horrible time to drive, dusk sifting into night, when the lights of the oncoming cars are harsh, dazzling. My skull a damp sandbag, grit drifting in at the back of my eyes. Trees flooding by on both sides. Tremors in my hands that had
nothing
to do with the swollen knuckle, the adrenaline effort of
carving
‘TOUT’ into a man’s forehead.

I was fritzing, the synapses shorting out even as they fired and flared, trying to process what Gillick had said.

It made no sense.

It made perfect sense.

Exhausted now, long past the brink.

Maria didn’t speak until we hit the roundabout at Carraroe and I turned off, heading back towards Sligo.

‘Where’re we going?’ she said.

‘One last pit stop.’ I heard myself sound hollow, as if on the other end of a long-distance call. ‘Then we’re good.’

‘I’m going to miss that flight, Harry.’

‘If you do I’ll drive you to Dublin.’ I looked across at her. ‘Maybe get on the plane with you.’

‘The fuck you will.’

‘And what if it’s mine?’

‘All the more fucking reason,’ she said, placing her hands on her stomach, ‘to keep it a million miles away from you.’

Maybe she had a point.

I shifted in the seat, pulled the pair of pale blue envelopes from my back pocket. The one with a cheque for seventy-five grand inside, and addressed in Finn’s handwriting to Andrea Toner, 18 O’Neill Crescent, Carton – I tucked that under my thigh. Handed Maria the other.

‘You might want to see that,’ I said.

She was only mildly curious opening the envelope, and had to peer at it closely in the bluey light. Then she realised it was a birth certificate.

‘Gillick had this?’ she said.

‘That’s right. He reckons Finn is Grainne’s father.’

‘So?’

‘You knew this?’

‘Sure. Finn told me. That night he told me about killing his father. He told me everything, Harry.’

I doubted that. The best liars tell only mostly the truth.

‘Kind of sweet of him really,’ she said. An acid bite to her tone. ‘I mean, I was taking him in sickness and in health, right? The least he could do was tell me how sick he could actually be.’

She didn’t know the half of it.

‘And you told Grainne you knew,’ I said. ‘Which is why she went for you with the scissors.’

‘She wanted everyone to pretend Finn was some kind of saint.’ She shrugged. ‘About fucking time she grew up, learned a few things about how the world really works.’

‘Right. Because every girl needs to find out, at some point, how her brother is her father too. Doing her a favour really, weren’t you?’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘And now you’re going to steal her trust fund, use it to destroy the Hamilton name. Maybe drop some incest into the mix to spice things up.’

‘That’s the general idea, yeah.’ She held up the envelope. ‘Mind if I keep this?’

‘It’s all yours.’

O’Neill Crescent lay on the outer fringe of the Cartron estate, a left-hooking curve of semi-ds that petered out just before the pocked tarmac crumbled into a shallow ditch, its muddy stream choked with brown weeds and rusting bike wheels, used
condoms
and shopping trolleys that looked brand new. In the bare field sloping down to the water two emaciated ponies snuffed for grazing among the blackened circles of dead bonfires and the dark hulks of burnt-out cars.

When I U-turned the Saab at the end of the street, reversing into the high weeds, a rabbit-sized rat went scuttling across the road to disappear up the driveway of number 26.

Maria shuddered. ‘This better not take long,’ she said.

‘It won’t.’

Leave a Saab sitting out on O’Neill Crescent and you’re asking for rats a lot bigger than rabbits to come swarming.

For now, there wasn’t a single human face to be seen.

The driveway of number 19 hosted a battered caravan up on breeze-blocks, and even at that it was in better nick than the house. Three of its facing windows were either fractured or boarded up and the front door had been patched at least twice with plywood.

Number 18 was still holding on, or trying to. The window boxes on the first-floor sills were empty, but at least their chipped and flaking paintwork gave the place a splash of yellow and blue. The tiny lawn out front was ragged but recently cut. The front door all of a piece.

There was no bell, so I rat-tat-tatted on the reinforced glass. When I turned around I could see why the planners had once thought O’Neill Crescent worth building. Away to the north, Benbulben was a delicate swash of amber-tinged plums and lavenders as the sun sank for the horizon. To the west the bay gleamed silvery-green, still as mercury where it funnelled up towards the docks.

I rat-a-tat-tatted again, giving it serious knuckles. That won me a shadow lurking back in the hall and a muffled, querulous tone. ‘Who is it?’

‘You don’t know me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘It’s Andrea, right? I’ve a delivery for you.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I’m not a bailiff.’

‘Fuck off away from that door
now
.’

No threat to back it up. Even through the door the deadened tone sounded strained, defeated.

I hunkered down, prodded in the letterbox. ‘It’s from Gillick,’ I tried.

‘I don’t know any Gillick.’

‘He knows you.’

A pause. ‘What’re you delivering?’ she said.

I slipped the envelope out of my pocket, pushed it halfway through the letterbox. ‘This.’

‘So drop it in.’

‘Sorry. I need to hand it over in person.’

‘Fucking bailiff. Fuck off.’

‘Go back inside,’ I said, ‘and look out the window. If I look like a bailiff, then fair enough, I’m gone. But I should warn you, there’s a cheque for seventy-five grand in here.’

The shadow didn’t go away in search of a window. Hard to tell with shadows, but I got the impression its shoulders slumped. Then it seemed to swell, come closer, and I heard the rattle of a chain. She opened the door a crack. One glimpse was enough to convince her that, whatever my business was, it was a long way from being official.

She unhooked the chain, stood back. I pushed the door in and stepped into a tiny hallway. She backed away into the sitting room. I closed the door and followed. The curtains were pulled tight,
leaving
the room dark except for the glare of the muted TV. It felt like stepping into a cave, the TV a coldly flickering fire. An emptiness in that room IKEA would give up Stockholm to be able to mimic, the kind of minimalism only functioning poverty can carry off with any degree of authenticity. She shuffled around the low table and sat on a couch that had much in common with a Swiss Protestant’s pew. The low table was bare but for an overflowing ashtray, a pack of smokes and a tumbler with about half an inch of wine.

The place stank like a grow-house, that sickening smell of stale dope that seeps into the walls. She didn’t look stoned, though. Eyes like new coins, bright and shiny and hard.

‘It’s Harry,’ she said, not looking at me as she fumbled a cigarette from the box. She didn’t offer me one. She knew why I’d come. ‘Isn’t it?’ The tremble in her voice made it all the way down to her fingers. She had to snap the plastic lighter three or four times before she got the cigarette lit. ‘Harry Rigby. Right?’

‘That’s right.’

Her face was pinched, pale but blotched with crude pinks and angry reds, and I didn’t have the kind of time it’d take to work out which was make-up and which tough living. Late twenties and hard with it, time as a kiln forging a mask of her face.

The last time I’d seen her she’d been sitting on a rock staring out to sea, her back hunched against the sight of Finn perched high on the cliff, the retro-mini ’60s wedding dress rucked up and wrinkled in the small of her back.

I put the envelope on the table, pushed it across. She glanced at it once, biting her lower lip, then looked at me, the eyes still hard and shiny and bright. I looked past her, to where a cane stood propped in the corner.

‘Paul around?’ I said.

‘Not right now.’

‘Will he be back later?’

‘You’d need to ask Paul.’

‘Where’ll I find him?’

‘Your guess,’ she exhaled, her voice flat now, ‘is as good as mine.’

From outside came the fat parp-parp of the Saab’s horn. I crossed to the window, twitched back the curtain. Maria spotted the movement and held up her arm, tapping at her wrist. I gave her the thumbs up. ‘It’s Maria,’ I said. Andrea nodded, then wrinkled her nose. I pulled the curtain all the way back. ‘Finn’s fiancée,’ I said.

‘I know who she is.’

‘Come here,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Come over to the window. I want to show you something.’

‘I think you’d better go.’

‘I’m going. Just let me show you this one thing. That way I don’t take the cheque with me when I leave.’

She picked the envelope off the table and folded it in two, rammed it into the front pocket of her jeans. Stubbed the
cigarette
and got up, came around the couch. I pushed back the other curtain.

A pretty view, so long as you looked long and far. Benbulben dissolving into dusk, the bay suffused with the faintest of pinks. On the far shore, down at the deepwater, the PA building stood out stark as a warning finger against the coppery sky. It took a moment or two, but it was there her eyes were drawn.

‘Did you watch?’ I said.

She twitched. ‘What?’

‘Were you watching,’ I said, ‘when he jumped?’

‘Who, Finn?’

‘Paul. Did he give you a time, when it was likely to happen?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘Come on, Andrea. Seventy-five grand? Sounds a lot like a life insurance policy on a cardboard box like this. Unofficial, maybe, but it’s in the ball-park. Am I right?’

She stood rigid now, the eyes shiny and bright, no longer hard.

‘Just nod,’ I said. ‘The cheque’s going nowhere. It’s yours. Christ fucking knows you’ve earned it.’

She turned away from the window, muttering something I didn’t catch, and went to perch on the edge of the couch again. Hunched forward, with the effort of maintaining a defiant stare deranging her features, she wasn’t unlike a gargoyle. She reached for the smokes but her hands were shaking so hard that I had to take away the cigarette and lighter, spark it up. She took a quick hard drag, spat out the smoke.

‘You can fuck away off now,’ she said.

I perched on the other end of the couch, shifting my position as the .38 dug into my coccyx. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I can appreciate—’

‘Oh can you? Really? What is it you can fucking appreciate?’

‘That you’ve lost—’

‘Me?’ she sneered. ‘I’ve lost fuck-all.’

‘Lucky you. I lost my kid today.’

It didn’t penetrate straight away. Then her brows wrinkled and she sat back. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘My boy. He died today.’ I gave her the short version, how we were run off the road, the coma. How it’d all started Thursday night at the PA, when someone jumped and came down on the cab and blew my life into a million pieces. That I needed to know the how and why, for closure.