Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (6 page)

Money buys money.

NAMA might have been across Hamilton Holdings like some Biblical plague, but there were no eviction notices pinned to the doors of Weir’s Folly. And I was pretty sure too that when I drove on out to The Grange, there’d be no For Sale signs to take the look off the place.

I buzzed on the bell again, still wondering how I’d begin. No matter how I started out it always fell apart when I got to the part where I said his name. Which was when Finn’s voice cut in,
talking
about family and kids, his plans for Cyprus. Then the flesh spitting on hot metal, that oily, rank whiff …

I buzzed a fourth time, but the place was dark and it was
obvious
Maria wasn’t home. I gave it another thirty seconds or so, then dug out my phone and dialled her number. It rang out, went to her answering machine.

‘Hi, this is Maria. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but if you leave your name, number and a short message, I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.’

‘Maria, it’s Harry. Call me back whenever you get this. It’s, ah, it’s important.’

I hung up, wondering if she already knew. If she was in there with all the lights turned off, sitting in the darkness with her hands cradling her belly, staring blindly into the void where her future used to be.

We’d been having a freakish spell, an early Irish summer, the kind that can last two months or two hours but always goes on too long. To date we’d had nearly a week of sunny days and mild nights, and the sunset earlier on had been a ruddy shepherd’s delight. Which meant it’d be a bright, warm and beautiful
morning
when I told Herb his cab was a write-off, this courtesy of Finn, his flaky fuck du jour.

I wondered if Herb’s insurance covered suicides jumping from nine floors up. Not that it mattered, any insurance hike or replacement would come out of my end. The deal we had was, anything that happened on my watch was my call.

And then there was the three baggies of Toto McConnell’s finest weed, all gone up in smoke.

Just one more fucking thing …

I drove north out the Bundoran Road. Still shaky, thumbs drumming on the steering-wheel’s leather. I felt horse-kicked and brutalised, heart pounding, mouth dry. A ripping of some fabric deep inside and I don’t care if you call it the spirit or the soul or the electric charge that keeps the machine running, but it was fritzing up sparks, flashes of lightning glimpsed behind
thunderheads
massed along some dark horizon and only a matter of time before the storm broke and the loneliness came roaring down out of the hills, black hounds howling fit to bust a lung.

The Furies unleashed and Gonz in the vanguard, teeth bared and monstrous in a pitiless snarl.

Finn had been the only one to understand. Said his own dreams were full of kraken and creatures half-shark and
half-squid
, surging up from the dark depths to snatch him from the shore, drag him down. Drowning dreams, or dreams where he sat on the ocean floor trying to drink the Atlantic down, although the dreams when the slimy tentacles transformed into his father’s arm were the worst, the hand grasping for Finn’s, and Finn
reaching
, always reaching, his father’s fingers slipping away beneath the waters and gone.

You didn’t have to be Freud to work it out. Neither of us had needed a therapist to pick through the entrails.

How to live with it, though. Nothing in the textbooks about that. No clues to be deciphered from the clipboards they
consulted
, no hieroglyphics printed in invisible ink between the lines of their endless questionnaires.

I was wallowing, yeah. Anything to keep my mind off what was to come, the standing before a mother, a widow, with the worst words she would ever hear.

And then the long crawl into the deep dark hole and the pulling over of the earth to deaden every sight and every sound that might remind me I was still alive.

The Audi purred along, down the long curve into Rathcormack, out the straight run into Drumcliffe village nestled ’neath bare Benbulben’s head. The pretty little church with its lights all ablaze and somewhere in there W.B. casting his cold eye on death, and life. The Audi’s tyres hissing slick on the sweat of the German tax-paper, who’d paid for every straight yard of road built in this country in the last forty years. McIlhatton ya blurt, we need ya, cry a million shaking men, and what rough beast, his hour come round, slouches towards a mother to break her heart …

Sweating now. The Audi veering across the white line. I sat up in the seat and flipped my smoke out the window, reached for the stereo and pumped the volume. Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, Thom Yorke’s wailing about raining down from a great height. Nice timing, Thom. The kicker being that Finn had the Audi’s stereo tuned to McCool FM, the personalised Spotify pre-records he’d broadcast to the world all night, or that part of the world within a fifteen-mile radius of the PA building at least.

Too much.

I dug out his CD,
Music to Make Babies To
, slipped it into the deck. Hoping for a little distraction. Finn’s compilations were musical crossword puzzles, each song a clue. Except Rollerskate Skinny were first out of the traps, ‘Swingboat Yawning’, and that was way too close to the bone,
heaven to be overcome, what are you going through the only thing I can ask you
, even before they hit the whimsical hook,
Now my future is all behind me
…

I knocked the stereo off and drove on. Shuddering from a bad case of the grace of Gods and but fors. My brain popping sparks as it tried to weld two irreconcilable truths, one Finn over this side, the easy-going guy with the big plans and a sloppy
shit-don’t
-matter grin, the other a flattened lump of burnt flesh and shattered bone. No sense to it, no logic.

Except that was Finn. Always had been. A two-piece jigsaw, no way of making it fit.

Now my future is all behind me
…

Maybe Herb was right. The part-time philanthropist, he called Finn, the rich kid dabbling in poverty for the photo ops and tax-breaks. ‘Pro fucking Bono,’ he’d sneer whenever Finn’s picture appeared in the
Champion
or the
Weekender
. It was
perfect
for Herb that Finn was into skiing, snowboards. ‘Because it’s all fucking downhill.’

Yeah, maybe. It doesn’t get much more downhill than nine stories high and gravity singing its siren song.

The first Hamiltons came over with Cromwell and slaughtered enough Papists to earn themselves a plot in hell. Or Connaught, as the locals called it. The townland is still there, the pretty little village of Manorhamilton in the county of Leitrim, although these days the rack-rents are called austerity measures and we scarf McBurgers rather than scabby black spuds.

The point being, the Hamiltons and their carpet-bagging Anglo-Irish ilk had only been in Ireland for five hundred years.

Around here, that just about qualifies you as a blow-in.

I’d been out to The Grange once before, for a wedding
reception
, but even so it took some finding in the high-ditched labyrinth on the peninsula southwest of the village of Grange itself. A faux-Georgian pile, of course, although to be fair to the Hamiltons, it was only faux because the original Georgian
structure
had been torched back in 1921 during the IRA campaign to ethnically cleanse Ireland of Protestants, and specifically those of the land-owning class. But the Hamiltons were a hardy breed, perennials. The kind to thrive on slash-and-burn. It helped that one of Donald Hamilton’s brothers, one of the minor artists of the Celtic Twilight now long eclipsed by Jack Yeats, had been bounced into the Senate in 1924 as one of the Free State’s token representative Protestants.

The Audi purred up out of the small wood of oak and sycamore into a sunken dell, smooth lawns running from the
forest
fringe to either side of the house and curving up and behind to form a steep-sided bowl. A round loop of gravel had fallen short of lassoing the house and had had to content itself with an oblong fountain instead, a trio of arrow-pinging cherubs perched on its rim, a Mexican stand-off in marble. The obligatory Merc was parked out front, a shiny black Lexus tucked in behind, and one of those ridiculous urban jeeps, a Rav4. Spotlights popped on as I cleared the trees, bathing the house with a bluey glow. Squared-off and stolid, exuding a hunched defiance despite its three storeys. Red ivy put a blush on the functional grey stone but had the perverse effect of emphasising the austere lines and harsh angles. Wide steps narrowed to a front porch under a portico that had been swiped along with the Elgin marbles. The flowerbeds were neater than a double gin.

I hauled up the wide steps. Shivering now, a salty Atlantic breeze gusting around the corner of the house. Apart from the ivy, the door’s fire-engine red was the building’s only splash of colour. A brass door knocker in the shape of an elephant’s head was inviting but a lusty swing on its trunk revealed it as
ornamental
. I pushed the button set into a steel plate to the right of the door. Almost immediately the speaker above the button crackled.

‘Yes?’

‘Harry Rigby. I’m a friend of Finn’s.’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s been an accident.’

An intake of breath suggested he was about to try another affirmative query, but then a bolt slid back. The hallway, when the door had finally swung open far enough to allow me slip inside, looked like it had been designed with fat giraffes in mind. He made to speak but then stood back and let me through. ‘I’m Simon,’ he said, ushering me across the tiled hallway into a study with French windows set into the opposite wall. The other walls were taken up with shelves of leather-bound volumes, although here and there the grotesque exaggerations of modern
portraiture
leered from the gloom.

He gestured towards an armchair of dimpled green leather, waiting until I’d sat down before perching on the edge of its facing twin. On a squat table beside his chair sat a cut-crystal decanter, a green-shaded lamp and an empty balloon glass. A leather-bound book lay open and facedown on the chair’s arm but I couldn’t make out the title. I couldn’t work him out, either. Forty-something, quietly spoken, with a receding hairline and grey at his temples. His eyes, keenly alert, were also grey. Which made him old and smart enough to know better than to be seen in public wearing black trousers with a charcoal satin stripe running down the seam.

‘It’s bad,’ he said. ‘You’d have phoned if it wasn’t bad.’

‘It’s the worst. I’m sorry.’

The eyes seemed to blossom, then narrow. ‘He’s dead?’

I nodded. He swallowed dry. His eyes glazed over. ‘How did it happen?’

Even as I told him he was frowning, shaking his head. ‘Suicide?’ he said when I’d finished. ‘Finn?’

‘That’s why I thought Mrs Hamilton should know. Before the cops get here.’

‘Of course. She’ll appreciate that. Thank you.’ He didn’t seem to be aware that he was shaking his head all the while. ‘You’re sure?’ he said then. I nodded. ‘But why would he …?’

‘No idea. I’m sorry.’

He licked at dry lips. ‘She’s asleep, of course. I should wake her, but …’

He didn’t move.

‘The news won’t be any worse in the morning,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t suppose it will.’ He was humouring me, buying time. Right then he was miles away, or maybe just upstairs telling a woman the worst news she would ever hear. ‘Do you have
children
, Mr Rigby?’

‘A son.’

‘If it was you,’ he said, stalling, ‘would you rather find out straight away?’

‘I would, yeah.’

‘I think I would too.’ He thought it over, then noticed my
fidgeting
fingers and prescribed a brandy for the shock, poured us both a couple of inches. He sluiced his down without waiting for a toast. I wanted that brandy so bad I almost inhaled it having a sniff, but I was a taxi-driver on my way back in to meet with the cops, so I let it run up against my lips and slip away again. Just enough for a taste, to observe the ceremony.

‘I’ll wake her,’ he said. Dutch courage. ‘She should know.’

I stood and fished a card out of the back pocket of my jeans. ‘If you need me for anything, you can get me at that number.’

He glanced at it, distracted, then showed me to the door, thanked me again. He was still standing at the top of the wide steps when I pulled away down the drive, his stance loose, the shoulders slack, and I’d have bet everything I owned he’d have stood there through winter if it meant he didn’t have to climb those stairs and wake the woman who slept so blissfully unaware.

‘What I don’t like about it,’ Tohill said, ‘is you were there when it happened.’

‘When it happened, yeah. Not where it happened.’

‘Don’t be cute.’

‘I was down in the yard. The big decision was made nine storeys up. It was all over by the time he got down as far as me.’

‘Says you.’

‘It’s me you’re asking.’

‘Let’s not try to be too smart, hey?’

‘What’s that, policy here?’

The interview room was tricked out like a little girl’s
bedroom
, pastel pinks and blues. Some new EU directive, no doubt, designed to minimise the invasiveness of the interrogation process for those thugs and scumbags who suffered from a
sensitive
disposition. The lighting subdued, not so much as a
cigarette
burn or graffiti scar on the formica-topped table. The smell of paint was fresh enough to give me a faint headache.

Tohill stalked the room with his hands in his pockets,
fair-haired
, late thirties, his face a scuffed steel-toe boot. He liked me as well as he’d like any other ex-con who’d left the scene of a crime.

We’d chewed that one over. Last I’d heard, suicide wasn’t a crime. Tohill was of the opinion it wasn’t suicide until he said so. Now he leaned on the back of the chair across the table and ducked his head so his pale blue eyes were level with mine. ‘Let’s just go over it one more time.’