Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (26 page)

Her voice was cold, burnished.

‘Was it you?’ she said.

‘Don’t be daft.’

The reflection blurred as she moved forward. Cocking the gun, the click loud as a shot. She touched the muzzle to the top of my spine.

‘Was. It. You.’

‘Maria,’ I said, ‘you’re not thinking—’

‘I’ll be gone before they find you.’ She ground the barrel into my neck, forcing my head forward. ‘Last time. Was it you?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’ She relaxed, allowing the muzzle fall away. I was
twisting
my head to look up at her when she poked it under my
cheekbone
. ‘And if you ever try to tell me what I’m thinking again, I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

‘Duly noted.’

The first time I met Maria I told her that her eyes reminded me of Lauren Bacall’s. Narrow green slits under severely cropped brows. Now, like Lauren’s, they were dead. The nose was still imperious, though, straight as a tent pitched on a downhill slope, its haughty aspect softened by cheeks left rosy by the shower and a tiny apple chin. The mouth was wider than a melon slice and luscious as split peach.

I guess I was hungrier than I’d thought.

‘You couldn’t have rung ahead?’ she said. Hungover, her voice had the metallic whine of a wasp trapped in a pipe. ‘Christ, I nearly shit myself in the shower.’

I put the pair of coffees down on the glass-topped table and liberated a bottle of Courvoisier from the sideboard, slopping a generous dollop into both mugs. She bypassed the coffee and went straight for the bottle, taking a three-swallow slug before coming up for air.

I took a decent wallop from the coffee and then rolled a smoke from the detritus of Finn’s makings on the table while the brandy hectored my corpuscles like a Sarn’t-Major bawling drills. She made a brusque gesture. I tossed across the cigarette. She dug a lighter from the pocket of the kimono-style dressing gown that didn’t contain a .38 Detective Special, lit up and exhaled without taking her eyes from mine.

‘So how’ve you been?’ I said.

‘How would you be?’

‘Drunk.’

‘That’s how I’ve been.’

She sat back into the high-winged armchair, tucking a bare foot under her thigh. The kimono damp where it stuck to her shoulders, dark stains on the pockets from the film of oil on her palms. For a memento, Finn kept the .38 in good working nick.

Maria didn’t look too bad either.

Dried out and spruced up, Maria Malpas was hands down the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in the flesh. Bereft, hungover and raw from the shower, hair like Medusa’s in an Arctic gale, she was still top three, easy.

‘How’d you hear?’ I said.

‘Yesterday morning, at work. I’d only just got in. Mary saw me coming and started flapping around, how brave I was. She’d heard it on the news in the car.’ Her mouth went thin. ‘The fucking bitch couldn’t make one fucking phone call.’

Said bitch, I presumed, being Saoirse Hamilton. She sucked down another couple of inches of brandy. ‘How about you?’ she said.

‘I rang, but I didn’t want to tell you in a message.’

She nodded a vague acknowledgment. ‘I mean, how did you hear about it?’

‘I was there.’

‘There?’

‘When it happened.’

Her mouth was a bouncy castle, the words a helpless tumbling. ‘And did he …? Was he …?’

I told her what I’d been telling everyone else, except this time I included the bit about being at the PA to deliver grass. I
expected
a big hoo-hah about how no one orders in that much smoke and then jumps off nine stories, but all she did was crack a
grimace
that was half-smile, half-snarl. ‘That’d be right,’ she said. ‘That’s Finn.’

‘Was.’

‘Yeah, that was Finn.’ She toasted me with the bottle, had
herself
another swig. Eyes wet and hard as black ice. I felt a guilty twinge at not taking the brandy away, but Maria wasn’t the kind who looked fondly on intervention even when she wasn’t
packing
a gun in her pocket. And I had twenty grand to earn.

‘Y’know what?’ she said. ‘Fuck Finn, fuck his mother, fuck the whole shitty inbred lot of ’em.’

‘Skol,’ I said, raising the coffee mug. ‘So what’re your plans?’

A sloppy shrug. ‘Wait for the funeral, I suppose. Then go home. But I don’t know, even the thought of packing up …’

She was trapped in the moment, unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that she had to move on.

‘I’m guessing the salon’s a non-runner,’ I said.

‘I won’t be going back
there
.’

‘I mean, the one in Cyprus. Finn’s development.’

Her eyes became arrow slits. ‘Fuck are you talking about?’

‘Finn had plans,’ I said. I told her about the apartment
complex
, Finn selling up, the changes to Grainne’s trust fund. ‘It was supposed to be a surprise. A wedding present, like.’

She stared for a moment, then shook her head, and then she laughed, but it cracked halfway through and she wound up on a coughing jag. I crossed over to the armchair and patted her between the shoulders. She cringed away. Chastened, I shuffled back to my pew on the other side of the glass table.

‘Finn move to Cyprus?’ she said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘Finn said a lot of things.’ She was staring again, and I
wondered
if I shouldn’t look at her in the reflection of the
glass-topped
table, lest I be turned to stone. She tapped the cigarette’s filter with the ball of her thumb, so that ash toppled onto the carpet. ‘He’d talked about it, yeah,’ she conceded. ‘But he kept
on
talking about it. A whole
year
he was talking about it. But he was never leaving, Harry. Never. She had him on a leash, and, and …’

She choked something back, then launched the bottle at the red-brick fireplace. It shattered, showering the rug with splinters of glass and a not inconsiderable amount of expensive brandy. I’d have paid good money to see her and Saoirse Hamilton let loose in a china shop. ‘The latest thing,’ she said, ‘was he reckoned we should think about taking a break. Can you believe it? I’m the one waiting a year for the bastard to make up his mind, and then
he
says maybe we should take a break.’

‘He say why?’

‘Why do you think?’ The smile was a raw wound. ‘The bitch was on his case. Dump me or she writes him out.’

‘He actually said that.’

‘In so many words.’

‘What did you say?’

‘What
could
I say?’ She waggled her hands, a crude caricature of a zany clown. ‘“Hey, pick me instead, I’m worth millions.”’

‘You’d have been selling yourself short.’

She closed her eyes. ‘Not now, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘Now’s not the time.’

‘Maria, he’d changed the trust—’

‘Sssssh.’ She put a finger to her lips, the eyes still closed. ‘Not now,’ she said again. She let the cigarette fall away and cradled herself, rocking in a mute keening. I got up and went around the table, retrieved the cigarette, put it in the ashtray. Then I sat down beside her.

‘Let me do this,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. But it might help.’

I put an arm around her shoulders, gave a gentle squeeze. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away either. I increased the pressure, pulling her towards me, and suddenly the tautness in her shoulders snapped. She turned into me, burying her face in my chest, bawling as she gripped a handful of T-shirt in each white-knuckled fist. I rested my chin on the crown of her head and felt each sob shiver my ribs like a jump-start to the heart. Something hard grinding into my side.

‘You put the safety back on that gun, right?’ I said.

She nodded and snuffled, then half-laughed. ‘I fucking
hate
you,’ she told my sternum, the words coming muffled.

‘I know.’ It’s cruel, really, but I can’t help liking women who don’t like me. I think it’s that I respect their intelligence. ‘Listen, Maria – are you listening?’ The head bobbed. ‘I think you’re in shock. You should see a doctor, get some painkillers prescribed, a sedative. I’ll take you if you want.’

She blew a sigh that set my athlete’s foot tingling, then
struggled
upright, smearing the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her palms. She pushed me away and looked around, and it was as if she was seeing the place for the first time.

‘Shit,’ she said.

The phone rang, once, twice, three times, cutting off midway through the fourth ring. Maria didn’t even glance in its direction. ‘Guilt’s a bitch,’ she said. She was staring into space, at some point that lay between where we were and who she used to be.

‘You’ve absolutely no reason to feel guilty,’ I said, trying to remember the speech Dutch had given me. ‘If he really wanted to go, there’s no way you could have stopped—’

‘Not me.’ The words were dry feathers. ‘Finn.’

‘Y’think?’

‘I know.’

‘That’s my theory, yeah. Finn being Finn, his mother bearing down, he couldn’t stick the—’

‘His father, Harry. His father.’

She reached into her pocket, took out the gun. An ugly sight. Maria had fine slim fingers, the manicure perfectly finished, a hand capable of creating the most subtle of artistic strokes. The gun, its sheen of oil notwithstanding, was dull, black, blunt and snubby. A purely functional killing machine.

‘What about his father?’ I said.

‘No one told you?’

‘Finn told me he drowned.’

‘Did he tell you he was there when it happened?’

‘No,’ I said. The lies came easy with Maria too. ‘He forgot to mention that bit.’

She poked at an oily stain on the kimono with the barrel of the .38. ‘Apparently he was giving Finn the one-day-all-this speech. Just the two of them, down at the deepwater. Anyway, his father asked Finn to get out of the car, he was parked pretty tight to the edge of the dock. So Finn got out. Afterwards they said it was just one of those things, he put the car into first rather than reverse. Not used to the new gear-stick.’

I’d done it myself, except never on the edge of a deepwater quay.

‘Finn says the last thing he saw was his father’s face,’ she said, ‘he was hunched up over the steering wheel. Then he was gone. Just like that. Toppled over. Finn freaked out. But what’s he
supposed
to do, jump in after him? Finn wasn’t much more than a kid at this stage, hardly out of his teens. And by the time he got to a phone …’ She made a meaningless gesture with the hand not holding a gun. ‘Afterwards he had to make a statement to the cops, then the insurance company had to have their own
investigation
. It all dragged on for about two years.’

‘That has to be tough.’

‘I honestly don’t know if he ever got over it.’

‘And she blamed Finn.’

She looked up at me, taking a second or so to focus. The brandy bedding in nicely now. ‘Who, Saoirse?’

‘She told me they were estranged. I thought it was an odd word for a mother to use about her son but I guess it makes sense.’

A sardonic twitch pulled at the corner of her mouth. ‘Estranged?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘Saoirse fucking Hamilton doesn’t make many mistakes, Harry. If that’s the word she used, then that’s exactly what she meant.’ She hesitated, then slid me a sly look. ‘Y’know, with Finn being there, the only witness, no one could say for sure it wasn’t suicide.’

‘Guys driving Beamers don’t generally top themselves, Maria.’

‘No one could say it was, either.’

‘What’re you trying to say?’

‘We were down there one night last summer,’ she said, ‘just sitting on the dock, smoking a draw. Finn was supposed to be up in the studio but he’d left a CD playing, he had the car doors open, the radio on. One of those lovely half-moons up over Cartron … Anyway, out of nowhere he said he’d killed his father.’

That one hung in the gritty, festering air. She was drunk, cunning and mean with it, lashing out just like Finn’s mother and sister before her. On balance I preferred Grainne’s raking nails. A primitive approach, sure, but at least it had the virtue of being instinctive, honest.

‘You said it yourself,’ I said. ‘He was young, he saw it happen. That’s a lot to take on your shoulders, and at that age you think everything’s your fault, wars and famines, the whole lot. And if his mother held him responsible …’ She waited me out, smirking now. ‘I’m guessing,’ I said, ‘that he already had the guilties about not jumping in, trying to pull his father out. Give that kind of shit enough time, enough pressure, and it’s bound to – whoa, point that somewhere else.’

She was aiming the .38 at my good eye, about twelve inches from my face.

‘Finn said he killed him, Harry.’ She lowered the .38, laid in on her thigh. ‘Put a gun against his head, pulled the trigger …’

‘And now he’s dead, yeah. Christ, Maria, he was quoting you Bohemian fucking Rhapsody.’

‘I got that, thanks. Saoirse say why she wanted the gun back?’

‘No, she didn’t. But that’s bollocks. The autopsy would’ve—’

‘Autopsy?’

‘Sure. There’s always a coroner’s report when—’

‘There was no
body
, Harry. Officially, they reckoned Bob made it out of the car alright, through the open window, and then got swept away.’

I stared at her, trying to remember exactly what Finn had told me about his father’s drowning. If he’d said anything about their not finding a body. ‘Maria,’ I said, ‘why the fuck would Finn want to shoot his father?’

‘Harry,’ she mimicked my tone, ‘why would Saoirse even think about wanting the gun back?’

‘It was her husband’s. She’s entitled.’

‘Sure, yeah. Except it’s a bit fucked up that the first thing she thinks of when her son commits suicide is the gun that Finn says he used to kill his father.’

There was something in that, and there might even have been something in it for me if I gave a shit about Finn, Saoirse and Big Bob Hamilton. But I had a job to do. Saoirse Hamilton wanted the gun and was prepared to pay to get it. Story, end of.

‘Forget about the gun,’ I said. ‘Forget about Finn and his father. What you need to worry about is that Saoirse blames you for Finn jumping, and was talking crazy earlier on, making all sorts of threats. If you want my—’