Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (21 page)

‘You’re welcome to stay if you want,’ she said.

The cop eyed the covering. ‘It wouldn’t be, ah, dangerous or anything?’

‘Not particularly,’ she said over her shoulder as she scuttled for the sanctuary of the glassed-in booth in the far corner. ‘But it’s up to you.’

He weighed it up and came down on the side of his potential progeny, retreating through the double-doors as the
radiographer
came through from a door to the right of the booth. A
sharp-faced
blonde, hair scraped back in a bun, a dun-coloured folder under her arm. She didn’t so much as glance in my direction as she clip-clipped to the booth, put some X-rays up on the light box. Nor did she meet my eyes as she swung the X-ray into place over my head, got it positioned just so. Her own were glazed, and I wondered how long she’d been on shift.

She went back to the booth. Her voice came amplified,
metallic
, as she reminded me not to move. I waited for the hum, then took a quick peek at the double-doors. The cop was crowding the rectangular window, keeping tabs. A loud click-
tung
sounded from beneath the table.

‘Please, Mr Rigby.’ Her voice frayed with irritation. ‘It is vital you don’t move.’

I held up a hand. ‘I need to use the toilet. Sorry.’

‘Just hold still. This won’t take a—’

‘Okay. But I need to go now. When I get nervous …’

‘There’s really nothing to worry about, Mr Rig—’

I sat up, lifting off the covering that was protecting me from whatever it was I really didn’t need to worry about. Slid down off the table, pointing towards the door beside the booth. ‘Is there a bathroom through there?’

‘Yes, but that’s a restricted area. There are facilities available to –
Mr
Rigby.’

But by then I was already through the door, closing it behind me, sliding the snib across. Tall filing cabinets either side of the corridor, darkened cubicles, one at the end with a light showing. The sharp blonde’s, I presumed. Beyond that were a set of
emergency
exit doors.

An alarm went off about two seconds after I kicked them out, by which time I was halfway across a deserted delivery area and aiming for an alleyway in the far corner. Picking up the pace now, from crabby shuffle to crippled jog. The alleyway was softly lit with an orange light and opened up into the harsh sodium glare of the hospital car park. Here, and for once, the universe chipped in on my side. The car park was huge and terraced and neatly landscaped, its levels dug out of a gentle slope, and I let gravity do the work as I zigzagged from one tidy clump of bush to another, lungs burning, the cotton-puff heart long since split in two and thumping in both ears.

At the bottom of the car park I put a rock through a Sierra’s window, jump-started the engine at the second attempt, took off for Connaughton Road. Pulled a right at the lights, drove north towards the plum bruise of Benbulben in the false dawn.

I was in bad shape. Weak and dizzy, wheezing hard, brain fizzing like bath salts in Perrier. And driving can be tricky when you’re only using one blurry eye and the other is hosting what felt like a rerun of Guernica.

Still, it could have been worse. I might have been in a coma with a tangerine-sized lump bleeding into my brain pan.

How long before the Sierra was posted stolen and the cops made the jump that it’d been me who boosted it? A couple of hours, at least, but probably more.

Plenty of time to soak the grieving Saoirse Hamilton for a quick ten grand.

I leaned on the buzzer until I heard a click, then a tinny, angry voice asking who I was and what the fuck I thought I was doing. A metaphysical gambit, bordering on Cartesian, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I told him I was there to see Saoirse Hamilton at her request and if he didn’t open the door quick smart the art gallery hallway would have a new installation comprised of a Ford Sierra wearing a busted front door and a fake elephant-trunk knocker.

Three minutes later I was standing in the great hall again. Simon struggled into a glare while he knuckled sleep from his eyes, half-dressed in a rumpled white T-shirt, grey tracksuit
bottoms
sans piping, pool-deck flip-flops. The bloodshot eyes could have been the result of too little sleep or too much brandy, and probably both. ‘This better be good,’ he muttered sourly.

‘Look at me. Will you take a good fucking
look
at me? Do I look like I’d be here if I didn’t have to be?’

He stifled a yawn. ‘What happened?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I need to see your boss.’

‘She’s asleep right now. And she hasn’t been getting much—’

‘She wants to see me. I’m here.’

The quick lift of his eyebrows might have been surprise,
disbelief
or scorn, but whatever it signalled it meant he was out of the loop. ‘Is this to do with Finn?’

‘If she wants you to know, she’ll tell you later. So let’s go,
chop-chop
.’

He stared. I let my eyes go dead. He took a step back without realising it. ‘Wait here. I’ll ask if she’ll see you.’

‘Tell her if she doesn’t, she won’t be seeing me again.’

‘That’ll break her heart,’ he sniped, but it came from over his shoulder as he flip-flopped away up the staircase. I waited until he’d turned left into the corridor at the top of the stairs, then ducked into the study and found the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me, Dee.’

‘Shit.’

‘How is he?’

‘Fine, yeah. Great. Fantastic, actually.’ The bitterness was a mustard gas wafting down the line. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so peaceful for so long.’

‘You’re still at the hospital?’

‘’Course.’ Then: ‘Why, where are you?’

‘I had to leave. I’ve some arrangements to make.’

‘And they’re more important than Ben?’

‘You wouldn’t let me see him anyway.’

‘Not the point, Harry.’

‘So what is the point?’

‘The point,’ she said, ‘is that you put him in fucking hospital and now you’ve fucked off to make some fucking arrangements.’

‘I didn’t put him in hospital. We were—’

‘Save it for the cops. You were the one driving, on a mobile phone.’

‘Dee – it was you rang me.’

‘You’re saying it’s my fault?’

I could almost taste the menace. ‘I’m trying to tell you we were run off the road.’

A long silence, then, ‘If I find out you’re lying, Harry, I’ll stand up in court and testify myself.’

‘Ask Ben. When he wakes up, ask him. He’ll tell you.’

A choked-back sob. ‘You think he’s going to be alright?’

‘Of course he is. Look, I can’t say too much about these arrangements I’m making, but …’

‘But what?’

I swallowed dry. Saying it made it real. ‘I’m going back inside, Dee. There’s a cop on my case and he’s putting me away.’

‘For what?’

‘Does it matter?’

She sounded distant, half-dreamy. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t
suppose
it does.’

‘I’ll stay in touch. If there’s any change in Ben, let me know.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Be strong, Dee.’

‘Fuck you.’

She hung up. I depressed the connection, rang Herb. In the silence the whole house seemed to lurk at my shoulder, one ear cocked. And maybe that was just the faint echo I was hearing, the kind you get on an open line.

‘Yello.’

‘It’s me.’

‘About fucking time, too. Where are you?’

‘Be cute. I’m on an unsecured line.’

‘Why, where’s your phone?’

I filled him in, ending with Ben’s condition.

‘Fucking hell. Will he be alright?’

In his cautious tone I heard the real question, the same one Dee had been asking, the one that ended with the words ‘brain’ and ‘damage’.

‘We’re hopeful,’ I said. ‘Signs are positive.’

‘Anything I can do from this end?’

‘Not much, Herb. But cheers.’

‘Okay, but if you think of anything … Listen, Harry? What about the—’

‘Not now, Herb. You’re on my list and I’ll get to you as soon as I can. But not now.’

‘Alright. But don’t go lost. Don’t make me send someone out to find you.’

‘Herb, man – I’m your reducer. It’d be me you’d be sending out.’

‘So don’t make me do it. You’re fucked up enough without turning schizophrenic.’

He hung up. I waited a full three minutes before hearing a funny kind of whispering click on the line, and then I hung up too.

I wondered if my new eye-patch would stir up some memories of Big Bob’s piratical mien but Saoirse Hamilton was polite enough not to comment when she received me on the balcony of a
morning
room adjacent to her bedroom. Or maybe, consumed with grief, or not generally disposed to noticing the little people, it just didn’t register. She wore a lilac peignoir, the rustles of sleep in her face and hair giving her the blowsy appearance of a prosperously retired madam.

The drop beyond the low pillared wall fell sheer to the crooked black teeth of an inlet a hundred feet or so below, so I retreated to the wicker armchair angled towards her own, propped my feet on the low wall. It was some view. The sun was crowning gold on the horizon, the air already balmy, and depending on how I tilted my head I could have watched a corona gild Queen Maeve’s grave on Knocknerea, the Atlantic take on a patina of silvery leaf or Saoirse Hamilton’s cleavage blush a rosy hue. Not being a man for nature in the raw, I focused on the coffee she was pouring.

She dropped two lumps into the bowl without asking if I was sweet enough already and handed it across. I stirred and sipped and closed my eyes. It was probably the finest coffee I’d ever tasted.

‘You’re not Greek,’ she said.

I opened my eyes again. ‘I never said I was.’

‘I mean, Mr Rigby, that you come bearing no gifts.’

‘Ah, right. Classical.’

She lit a menthol More, easing back into her seat and settling her bowl of coffee on her midriff, so I had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t her cleavage that was steaming. ‘Why so?’ she said.

‘When I spoke with you yesterday I thought I had what you wanted.’

‘Finn’s suicide note. Let’s not be coy.’

‘Fair enough. It was actually a passport with five grand cash inside.’

She held up her bowl in both hands, so that she could sip from it without taking her eyes off mine. She thought I was lying, was waiting for the tell, some flinch, for me to brush my nose or look away. So I blinked, grazed a forefinger across my nose and glanced out at the sunrise, just to see where it might take us.

‘But if Finn was planning to …’ She heard the words she was about to say. Her wince was practically audible, the Botox
skreek
of tectonic plates grinding. ‘You told me,’ she said in a firm voice, ‘that Finn had plans to travel. To Cyprus.’

‘What I said was, he was moving there. To live. But it’s not just the passport.’

‘Yes?’

‘The cops want to know why it’s a fake.’

‘A fake?’

‘It’s that or he stole Philip Byrne’s passport, stuck his own mugshot inside.’

She flapped some eyelash so hard that a hurricane started to brew in Brazil. ‘But why would Finn need a fake passport?’

‘At a wild guess, I’d say he wanted to travel incognito.’ I
swallowed
off the last of the coffee, put the bowl down on the
hardwood
table. I’d resisted long enough but I hadn’t had a smoke in over eight hours, so I filched a menthol More, sparked it up with her dinky gold Cartier. It didn’t exactly taste like mint-roasted cowpat, but it was close.

‘Mrs Hamilton,’ I said, ‘let’s just accept at this point that when it comes to Finn and why he did what he did, I know nothing. What’s bugging me is that he stashed the passport where
someone
was bound to find it eventually.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

‘That makes two of us. I’m just saying, you should mention that to the cops. They don’t seem to think it’s all that important.’

‘Why should they?’

‘Well,’ I exhaled hard, ‘mainly because they feature me for pushing Finn out the window. So I’d appreciate it if we could crack on with this job you have in mind, because there’s a good chance that I’m under arrest at the moment, technically speaking, and I don’t have a lot of time to play with.’

But I’d lost her at window, the full lips pursing into a cat’s-bum pucker. ‘How
dare
you,’ she began, but by then I was waving the More around to distract her, a Yoda-sized lightsaber.

‘I didn’t push anyone anywhere,’ I said, ‘and I don’t do poetry either. It’s late, I’m knackered, and I’ve more to worry about than whether Finn bit the big one or wafted off into the ether on angels’ downy wings. I’m here because you want me to do a job. So just tell me what it is and how much it pays and we’ll see how it goes from there.’

She bridled, quivered and damn near danced a Cuban
hokey-cokey
. ‘You haven’t the manners you were born with,’ she hissed.

‘True enough, but I’m guessing etiquette isn’t a prerequisite for this work you need done. So what is it you want?’

She simmered a while. I dunked the More in the coffee bowl. The fizz-spit seemed to bring her back. She sat forward and placed her own bowl on the table, flicked some silk and lace into a froth while she gathered her thoughts.

‘One prerequisite,’ she said, sounding starch, ‘would be an ability to actually deliver on your promise. Regardless of what it was you found in Finn’s studio, you singularly failed to bring it to me. As you said you would.’

‘Yeah, well, that had a lot to do with being rammed off the road and being hauled in by the cops. Next time I’ll be what they call forewarned, keep a weather eye out for the
deus
trying on his
machina
shit.’

‘Yes, the Guards. Why do you say you are technically under arrest?’

‘I said I might be, but I don’t know. The boys don’t believe I was rammed. So they’re thinking, a one-car accident, I was
probably
drink-driving, on drugs. Right now they’re waiting for the blood tests to come back.’