Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (36 page)

Which was true, in a way.

‘Christ,’ she whispered.

‘All I’m asking,’ I said, ‘is if Paul said anything before he went.’

Another parp-parp from outside. Andrea jerked, and a
half-inch
of ash toppled onto the carpet. She looked down at it, glanced up at me. Then, slowly, very deliberately, she rubbed the ash into the carpet with a pointed toe.

She was still putting it together for herself, so it came out in pieces, like shards of pottery unearthed at some dig, broken and brittle but sharp enough to slice deep.

Paul diving off a cliff and getting it wrong, just a fraction out when he jumped.

Coming down hard on the unforgiving rock.

‘At the start he thought it was a slipped disc, it was bad down here.’ She half-twisted to indicate her lower back, the left side. ‘Except it kept getting worse. After a while he couldn’t even drum, wasn’t able to walk sometimes. He’d have to sleep down here.’

‘What’d the doctor say?’

She shrugged. ‘He thought it’d sort itself out. In the beginning, like. And the dope, the grass, it seemed to help. When it kept on getting worse he thought maybe it was some kind of early
arthritis
, he could treat it himself. Later on, whenever it got bad enough for him to want to go to the hospital, he was in too much pain to move. In the end I told him I was leaving, packing up, if he didn’t just go and get it seen to.’

‘And?’

‘Spinal stenosis, they called it. He’d cracked his spine in the jump, and there were complications, an infection in the spinal canal that wouldn’t stop spreading. Degenerative, the doctor said.’ She said the word carefully, giving all the syllables it deserved. ‘He said it’d take a major operation, but it’d be risky, Paul could be left, y’know.’

‘Paralysed.’

‘Yeah. And Paul goes, what’s the fucking point, pay a fortune for some operation that leaves him paralysed anyway. That was even if we could get it in time.’ She gestured around at the bare
living
room. ‘I was the only one working, and health insurance …’ She shrugged. ‘So there was a waiting list, all these criteria we had to meet.’ She choked back a giggle. ‘Paul says, “Here’s me fucked on the flat of my back and the bastards want me to jump through fucking hoops.”’

‘And all Finn wanted him to do was fall off a building.’

Another shrug, this one fatalistic. ‘He felt guilty all the time,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know people thought Paul was a flake but no one really knew him. Didn’t know what he was like up here,’ she tapped her forehead. ‘One night he started on about for better or worse, said it was a load of shit, there was no way he was dragging me down with him. This was when we were talking about how we’d need to re-do the house, make it wheelchair-friendly, maybe put in one of those stair-lifts. Just talking, really. I mean, we could hardly afford his painkillers, let alone any fucking
stair-lifts
. And every day there was something new he couldn’t do.’ Reliving it now, her voice raw with smoke and maybe a hint of desperation. ‘I mean, it was bad enough when I was having to wash him in the shower. But wiping his arse?’ A bleak light in her eyes. ‘I’m not …’ she began, and then she looked up at me. ‘It was worse for him than me,’ she said. ‘He’d actually cry, get into this rage …’ A quick hard drag on the cigarette. ‘Then one day, it was actually one of his better days, he was just lying here on the couch, he said Finn had a gun. If he could only get his hands on it. Before it got so bad he wouldn’t be able to, to …’

‘He asked Finn for the gun?’

‘I don’t know. He must’ve said something, though. Finn’d call around during the day when I was out at work, I’d come home and the place’d be stinking with grass, the two of them toking away, having a fucking laugh.’

I tried to picture him there, half-stoned on the couch,
paranoid
, Finn calling around with his baggies of grass and rolling spliff after spliff, pouring his poison into Paul’s ear.

‘Did he tell you it was Finn’s idea?’ I said.

She shook her head, her fringe falling forward to hide her face. A tear dropped from the end of her nose. ‘He left a note.’ She sniffed. ‘I came home from work and he was gone, just the note on the table saying he’d had enough, he was taking care of it. Nothing packed, all his stuff still here. I tried ringing him but he never picked up.’

She looked up at me, the eyes raw. Defiant again. ‘What could I do, ring the cops? Tell them my husband was out there
somewhere
planning to kill himself?’ She cradled herself, rocked back and forth. ‘And then, the next morning, I heard about that fucker Finn, how he was supposed to have jumped off the PA building. The bastard. The dirty fucking
bas
tard.’

Another parp-parp from outside, and another. I stood up. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I have to go.’

I don’t know what she’d thought, that maybe we were going to hang out all night swapping hard luck stories, weeping and
wailing
about lost loves and how unfair was life, how cruel and cold.

‘Yeah,’ she sneered. She snuffled again, wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘Now you’ve got your fucking closure.’

‘Not nearly,’ I said. ‘Not even close. And at least you got a cheque.’

In a way I was pleasantly surprised that Finn had at least
honoured
the debt. This providing, of course, it didn’t bounce when Andrea took it to the bank, Finn writing a cheque to buy himself time.

I stepped out the front door and pulled it behind me as gently as I could. Strolled out to O’Neill Crescent with its burnt-out cars and rusting bike wheels, the starved ponies still snuffing and caravans propped high and dry on their cement blocks.

I flashed back on that night in the Cellars and the boys’ Rollerskate Skinny tribute band, Paul hammering the drums in a lather of sweat. In the corner of my eye a lemon arcing towards the stage and Finn with his eyes closed, chin tilted, singing, ‘I love this compromise, you’ve finally got me, swallowing miracles, the whole way down …’

By now the black finger of the PA was invisible against the night sky.

Somewhere inside I felt a pang for Paul. A glimmer of why he might’ve wanted just one last dive. The air rushing by, the rush of what it means to be totally free, even for a couple of seconds. Those gloriously precious final few.

Like the man himself said, when you’re in, you’re in.

‘Forget Knock,’ Maria said when I got back in the car. Thumbing her Blackberry, the Expedia website up on her browser. ‘We’ll never make it.’

‘Fine by me. Dublin it is.’

Might be for the best. A three-hour drive would give me
plenty
of time to decide if I should tell her Finn was alive and well and very probably grooming another suicide, this in case his latest scam didn’t work out.

My best guess was that Finn’d been playing everyone off. Stringing Maria along with the promise of a new life in Cyprus, offering Gillick some ground-floor action on the new
development
in the sun. Giving Saoirse just a glimmer of hope that he’d see the light, give up Maria and come back to the fold, revitalise Hamilton Holdings and become her warrior and king, her future legend.

All of it predicated on ripping off young Grainne’s legacy, the one-point-eight million held in trust by a man who was both brother and father. Her life strip-mined even before it began.

And maybe Finn might have pulled it all off, too. Squared all those circles. Until a certain Harry Rigby got involved, started slipping between his sheets.

‘Belfast’s a better bet,’ Maria said. ‘There’s a flight tomorrow morning to Larnaca, connects through Birmingham.’

‘Sound,’ I said.

Anything that postponed the moment when I’d finally have to look down at Ben, waxy and lifeless on a morgue slab, was good with me.

We turned out of Carton and up the hill, down onto Hughes Bridge. Hardly any traffic. The bypass clear under the orange glow of the lights. A faint snoring from behind, Bear panned out with his nose on his paws. The crutches a-rattle on the rear seat.

Empty, now. Drained. No rage, no pain. Running on fumes and guilt.

We cut across past the hospital, out by the college. Got onto the Enniskillen road. I knocked the Saab into cruise mode, got comfortable.

It didn’t last.

It never does.

The phone rang.

‘Herb?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Heading for Belfast. What’s up?’

‘She’s gone.’

‘Who, Grainne?’

‘Who fucking else?’

‘Christ. How’d she—’

‘I was helping her with the laptop, some shit she wanted to find. Then she picks up the SIG, says, nice gun.’

‘And?’

‘And she locks me in the fucking utility room.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘Don’t get fucking smart with me, Harry, bringing fucking lunatics around here, shitting all over—’

‘She say where she was going?’

‘What d’you think, we had a nice fucking chat through the utility room door?’

‘When was this?’

‘An hour ago, maybe more.’

‘And she said nothing at all. About where she was going, like.’

‘I told you, she said nothing.’

‘She bring the laptop?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What shit was she trying to find?’

‘We found it. Her birth cert, scanned in.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck is right, Harry. It’s not like we don’t have enough—’

‘We’re sorted with Toto, Herb. That’s done.’

‘Done?’

‘Mostly, yeah.’

‘How come?’

‘Long story. I’ll tell you later. Listen, you’re sure Grainne said nothing about where she was going?’

‘She wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t listen. Just kept singing.’

‘Singing?’

‘Girl’s off the charts, Harry. If you see her coming, you’d better—’

‘Herb? What was she singing?’

‘Something about speed to her side, nobody every told her something something something … I don’t know, she isn’t
exactly
fucking Adele, y’know?’

I hung up.

Our old friends Rollerskate Skinny.
Speed to my side, nobody ever told me that this sort of thing could come alive
…

‘Let me guess,’ Maria said. ‘The little witch promised him a blowjob.’

I didn’t want to hope. But it was worth a try.

‘Give me your phone,’ I said.

‘What’s wrong with that one?’

‘It doesn’t have Grainne’s number in it.’

She rummaged in her bag until she found the phone, scrolled down through her contacts, pressed Grainne’s number. I plucked it from her hand, clamped it to my ear.

She answered on the sixth or seventh ring. Amused, cold. ‘I am led to believe,’ she said, ‘that you are pregnant with an ex-
convict
’s bastard. I do thank you for confirming my long-held
suspicions
.’

‘Mrs Hamilton,’ I said, ‘it’s Harry Rigby.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’d like to speak with Grainne, if I may.’

An iron-sounding chuckle. ‘Grainne is nowhere to be found, Mr Rigby. We’ve tried ringing her, of course, but for some reason she left her phone here this morning when she drove away with you. Naturally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that to the Guards when I file a missing persons report.’

‘You do that. On the off-chance that she does turn up, though, tell her I have the paintings Finn stole. My guy in CAB tells me that the finder’s fee, the reward, should be enough to tide her over for a few months, keep her going until she’s old enough to access the trust fund herself.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘It is. I’ve got the gun, too.’

Silence then, and the faint hiss of static.

‘Perhaps you should come here, Mr Rigby. When Grainne does turn up, you can tell her about her unexpected good fortune in person.’

‘I can do that, sure. Should I bring the gun?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘No trouble at all, Mrs Hamilton. I’ll see you soon.’

I got turned in a laneway, drove back to town. Pulled up at the taxi-rank opposite the Town Hall, double-parked.

‘You’re really going after her,’ Maria said.

A flash of some eyes behind a fringe, the hopeful up-and-under look, pleading.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘She’s insane,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Troubled, some’d say. And with good reason.’ A horn parped from behind. I acknowledged it with a wave as he pulled around me, then knocked on the hazard flashers. ‘You told Grainne you were pregnant, didn’t you?’

‘So what?’

‘Did you tell her Finn was the father?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Mainly because you couldn’t know for sure. Unless you’ve already had a test done.’

‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Harry.’

‘Ideas aren’t really my thing.’

‘Good. Keep it that way. Now let’s—’

‘I need to know.’

She sat there with her hands on the steering-wheel, thumbs tapping the soft leather grip. ‘Archú,’ she said, so softly I barely heard her.

‘What?’

‘You don’t recognise your own name?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Finn.’ She looked up at me then, and there was hate in her eyes, and hurt, and something that might even have been tender. ‘He said it was the night you pulled him back from the edge. Telling him about your brother. How you killed him over a kid who wasn’t even your own.’

Odd. The way I remembered it, Finn had been the one who’d dragged me back from the edge. Telling me about the arsons, the pressures that opened up the fissures deep inside, left him bipolar, suicidal and clinging by his fingertips to that sheer black cliff.

We’d ended up laughing at one another. The way you do when a spark of hope flares. That god-given moment when you realise there’s someone even more fucked-up than you. That there might even be a way back.

Of course, we traced it all back to our mothers. Saoirse for changing Finn’s name from Philip, starting him early down that road of hiding who he really was, the brain-bending strain of pretending to be someone else, always.