SLOOT

by Ian MacPherson

  ‘And? What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘What, you spend every weekend in Scrabster?’ He chuckled again. ‘See where I’m going with this?’

  Oldest, best and most infuriating friend. Bram drove on.

  ‘Gas girls, the aunts,’ he said. ‘Thing is, though. I know something they don’t.’ He chuckled at the thought.

  Hayden sighed inwardly. Another hilarious Bramecdote. Best get it over with. ‘What do you know that they don’t?’ he asked as they approached the Howth Road intersection.

  Bram seemed relieved. ‘Glad you asked me that.’ He whipped his mobile out. ‘I took another shot of Eddie in his coffin.’ Hayden grabbed the mobile from Bram as an acceptable alternative to crashing, and examined the screen. Eddie lay dead in his coffin in the background. Bram, in the foreground, gave the thumbs up.

  ‘Lucky the old dears didn’t see that one,’ chortled Bram.

  Hayden looked closer. ‘What’s that on his forehead?’

  ‘You mean the gash?’ said Bram. ‘It’s a gash. How’s the novel coming along?’

  ‘How did he get that?’

  Bram thought about it. ‘Syphilis?’

  Hayden said nothing. A deep gash on the forehead and no-one had seen fit to mention it? A ladder to the cellar sawn almost fully through and tilted onto its side? Perhaps it wasn’t modern art at all. Perhaps it was –

  ‘Thing is,’ said Bram, ‘I’ve been giving a bit of thought to your book. Can’t write ’em myself, dunno why, but other people’s stuff? It’s all up here,’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘so how’s about you run your ideas past me and we’ll see what I come up with? Might be a help, might not.’

  Hayden sat in silence for some time as the car approached the turnoff to the airport. Bram was halfway around the roundabout when Hayden spoke.

  ‘Turn the car back,’ he said. ‘I think Eddie’s been murdered.’

  ‘Inciting incident,’ said Bram. ‘Excellent. I’ll give it some thought.’

  And he drove straight on.

  8

  It’s always difficult for someone like Bram to separate fact from fiction. Eddie murdered? Too much for him to take in. No point pushing it, so Hayden eventually settled for saying he wanted to spend a bit more time on the home patch. Soak up the atmosphere. Bram worked this through in his mind as they turned back into Kincora Road.

  ‘You’ve decided to set it in Clontarf,’ he said. ‘Good move. Possible title: Clean Streets. You know. As in –’

  ‘I know, Bram,’ said Hayden. ‘I know.’

  Bram had just slowed down for a speed bump when – wow! Professor Emeritus Larry Stern cycled past, his shock of white hair flapping furiously in the bike-induced breeze. I mean, serendipity or what? Professor Emeritus Larry Stern, Dept. of Comedic Studies, CDU. Author of several seminal works on this most complex of subjects. His masterpiece, A Learned Disquisition on the Theory and Practice of Comedy, is never far from my bedside table, or, indeed, my thoughts. His short introduction to the subject, Mirth: A User’s Guide, which posits five levels of comedy, is highly recommended for the uninitiated.

  Now, I don’t want to get lost on a tangent, but I wish I could have followed the professor. As I’ve become familiar with his impressive body of work over the years, I’ve found myself referring to him as one would to a philosopher; as a guide, if you will, through the seemingly endless complexities of this Sturm und Drang we call life. Perhaps he was running a summer course at City of Dublin University. If so, I desperately wanted to join.

  I filed the professor away for future reference as Bram pulled the car to a halt outside Eddie’s.

  Hayden hopped out. The three aunts waved from behind the cotoneaster.

  ‘Howaya, stranger. Coo-ee.’

  ‘Seems like only twenty minutes since you were last here.’

  ‘That’ll be the oul dementia kicking in.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ said Hayden, crossing the road. ‘I was here twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Did you forget someting? Did you?’

  ‘Only that could be early onset.’

  ‘We’d see a doctor quick if we were you, Hayding.’

  ‘Before you forget.’

  Hayden decided to get to the point. ‘The gash on Eddie’s forehead,’ he said. ‘Thoughts?’

  His words had a surprising effect. His aunts seemed to shrivel into the bush like a three-headed tortoise. Hayden waited. They reappeared.

  ‘That’s an ingrown birtmark, Hayding. They grow out when you’re dead.’

  ‘Or syphilis.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Bram, getting out of the car.

  ‘Oh, did you now? Well we were joking, weren’t we girls?

  ‘A bit of respect for the dead if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘But we’d go for ingrown birtmark, Hayding. They only manifest themselves post mortem, don’t they, ladies?’

  ‘That’s Latin, Hayding. But you’ll undoubtably know that from your classical education wit the Christian Brothers in Fairview.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Hayden pointedly, ‘I’ve decided to stick around for a while.’ He was about to say ‘Something about this whole business stinks’, but you never knew what convoluted byroads of the English language the three aunts would go down with that one. ‘I need a bit of a break,’ he said instead.

  ‘From what, Hayding?’

  ‘More to the point, for what?’

  ‘To what exalted purpose, if any, do you deign to grace us wit your estimable presence?’

  ‘In a word.’

  Hayden regretted his response as soon as it popped out. ‘I’m writing a novel, actually.’

  ‘Oh now. Excusez-nous.’

  ‘Will we be in it, Hayding? Will we?’

  ‘Not as such,’ he replied. ‘It’s not that kind of novel.’

  Then, before they could set off babbling again, he thanked Bram, waved to his dearly beloved aunts, strode briskly back across the road and crunched up the drive to Eddie’s. Bram returned to his car and drove gratefully off. The three aunts resumed pruning and said nothing, each lost in her own deep thoughts, and all three lost in each other’s.

  ‘Turn the car back. I think Eddie’s been murdered.’ Hayden might just as easily have said ‘Turn the car back. I need a bit of a break’, because that’s exactly what he needed – and where better than his late uncle’s house in leafy Clontarf?

  Hayden, though, didn’t see it as a break. No, Hayden was a man with a mission. He dumped his bag on the sofa, marched back out the front door and went around the side of the house. An old, black bicycle lay against the wall. Behind it, a rusty ladder. He moved the bike and laid it to rest against the privet. He then hoicked the ladder over his shoulder and made his way, with difficulty, to the front door. Put the ladder down first, then open the door. Makes sense when you think about it, but it’s not what Hayden did. I was reminded of a scene from an old 1912 black-and-white two-reeler, Apoplexy, in which the heavily moustachioed silent screen icon Finlay Jameson fails to get a ladder past the front door and ends up demolishing the doorframe, the building, and, thanks to the house of cards effect, the whole street, ‘with hilarious consequences’.1 Wonderful comedian, Jameson. Even his moustache had funny bones. Not to mention his heavily-insured skipping rope eyebrows. My own particular favourite Furious Finlay short has him pushing a gorilla over a rickety bridge, only to meet a self-propelled piano coming the other way.

  But this is by the by. Hayden eventually manoeuvred the ladder inside the house and lowered it into the cellar. Extended to its double length, it thumped satisfyingly onto the floor below. He switched the light on, stepped gingerly onto the top rung, and started the steep descent at the point where the original ladder had snapped. He stopped. There was no doubt about it. A saw had been applied to the left-hand upright. It ha
d been sawn most of the way through. He ran his fingers along the edge to where it had snapped. His mind racing now, he continued his descent. The floor underfoot was tightly packed earth and, as he became accustomed to the light, he almost tripped on an overturned wooden drink crate. He set it face up.

  He was about to move on when the light reflected off something in one of the empty bottle compartments. He reached down and prised it out. A pair of broken spectacles! Eddie’s. He delicately disentangled the twisted wire of the frame. Bloodstained. As, he now saw, was the edge of the crate. Could this explain the large gash on Eddie’s forehead? Had he been descending the ladder, possibly to replenish his supply of Sweet Ambrosia, then fallen, probably drunk, to the wooden crate beneath? But the ladder was sawn through. Why had no-one seen fit to investigate Eddie’s death? To suspect foul play? He glanced quickly around the cellar. Silence and shadows. Cobwebs and canvases. He climbed back up and out into the daylight.

  This was serious.

  It wasn’t crime fiction.

  It was fact.

  * * *

  1 Prof. Larry Stern, Disquisition, Chapter XIV – Other People’s Misery.

  9

  The sun shone in an azure blue sky. I borrowed that line from an essay I wrote when I was nine. Azure. Blue. Same thing. I didn’t know that then, I do now. We live and learn.

  As Hayden emerged from the darkness of the cellar into the light, I suddenly had the urge to go to Dollymount for a swim, but that’s the trouble with murder; you’ve got to follow the corpse. And this, as far as Hayden was concerned, was beginning to look premeditated. Which begged the question: how do you solve a homicide? In the real world, the short answer is you don’t. You go to the Gardaí. That’s their job. While they’re solving it, you write a crime novel. That’s your job.

  The local Garda station being a fair old walk from Eddie’s, Hayden decided the bike might be a good idea. It was a bit rusty and in need of a good oiling but – interesting this – no need to pump the tyres, even though it clearly hadn’t been used for quite some time, judging by the rust. Not that Hayden noticed, but I did.

  Hayden wheeled it down Eddie’s drive and hopped on. It took him seven minutes to creak noisily from Eddie’s to the station and park the bike on the steps. Surely no-one would think of nicking it there? The simple answer to that question is: yes, they would. The reason they didn’t was because it was a rusty old contraption with a small family of spiders underneath the saddle.

  Hayden loped up the steps, out of the sunlight and over to reception. Some time later, he was ushered into a small room on the first floor. Chairs. Table. Dusty blinds. A bluebottle in search of a window. Behind the table, on a tilted chair with one prodigious boot resting on the table, a toothpick in his mouth, lounged Detective Inspector Lou Brannigan. I could describe him in detail, but I don’t think I need to. The boot on the desk, not to mention the casual poke of the toothpick, says it all. As does the trilby perched on the back of his head. Now, a trilby can be either trendy or naff; it all depends who’s wearing it. When Brannigan looked at himself he saw trendy. Everyone else saw naff.

  He motioned to a seat with the toothpick.

  ‘So,’ he said when Hayden had been seated for several minutes, ‘you breeze in here and tell the lad out front your Uncle Eddie owes his untimely demise at the age of, what – eighty-six? – to the involvement of a third party. Now how do you suppose we missed that?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Hayden. He was lying. He had several ideas, none of them reflecting favourably on the guards.

  Lou Brannigan extracted a small portion of fatty bacon from his molars and wiped the toothpick on his trouser leg. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘Man to man. Let you bring the Garda Síochána, as represented by myself, up to speed on this allegedly heinous crime.’

  ‘Well –’ said Hayden.

  Lou Brannigan raised his toothpick for silence.

  ‘Before you start,’ he said. ‘They tell me you’re a comeejin. You might like to leaven your account with a few bon mots, witty asides and mebbe the odd jokeroony. It’s a fierce hot afternoon and my sleep was interrupted yet again last night’ – he sighed, rearranging his boots with great deliberation – ‘by the increasing levels of criminality on this tragic little isle of ours in times of undoubted flux.’ He leaned further back in his chair and returned the toothpick to his mouth. ‘You have the floor.’

  Hayden, glad to unburden himself, told Lou Brannigan everything. The phone call on stage. The trip back. The funeral. The scar. The twisted metal of the cellar steps and finally, the bloodied crate and broken glasses. I say finally. He couldn’t help but mention that he’d decided to stay for a few days.

  ‘I’m writing a novel, actually,’ he said, the word ‘actually’ out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  ‘Do you tell me so?’ said Brannigan. ‘And what, precisely, is its import? What is it about?’

  ‘Early days,’ said Hayden, ‘but it’s a murder mystery.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Brannigan, ‘and you must be the fierce brainy gent. I’m an avid reader of the murder mystery genre myself. Takes my mind off the job, d’ye see. Holy Joe, now, there’s a book. That’d be my own particular favourite by a Limerick mile.’ He patted his stomach affectionately and sighed. ‘Of course, it’s his ould mammy I feel for. Holy Joe indeed, for he treated her very badly. Very badly indeed.’ He seemed lost, for a moment, elsewhere. Then he returned, genially, to base. He added a second boot to the table. ‘Now re this deceased relative of yours,’ he said, ‘do you think we have the man or, indeed, given the equal opportunities world we inhabit these days, lady-power to investigate every poxy little alleged murder? And anyway, you seem to know more about it than I do. Why not put in a bit of legwork and solve it yourself?’ He placed one boot on top of the other and thought about switching teeth with the pick. ‘Sure amn’t I run off my feet here. We simply don’t have the resources.’ He flicked his toothpick at the waste bin. ‘Answer me this. I believe the aforementioned Uncle Eddie, hereinafter referred to as “the murderee” is, to coin a cliché, not only dead but also buried.’

  ‘Cremated,’ said Hayden.

  Brannigan chortled silently. ‘Cremated, is it? So, let’s get this straight. You want us to exhume the feckin ashes, hoh? Listen, if it was murder itself and it happened here or hereabouts, our very own Frankie Pope is assuredly your man. We’ve been trying to get something on that boyo for yonks. Unsuccessfully thus far, I might add. And I wouldn’t mind, but he’s holed up in solitary splendour not half a mile from this very room. Hiding in plain sight, if you follow my gist.’ He sighed wearily with the weight of his knowledge. ‘Frankie, aka Francis, is only the youngest, slipperiest member of the toughest, meanest, orneriest family in Dublin. The brains behind the outfit. The man who’s never there.’

  Hayden was still confused. ‘Orneriest?’

  ‘That’s what I said, bud. You got a problem with that?’

  ‘No, no. Just – good word.’

  ‘Frankie Pope and his band of half-wit brothers. If the venerable Eddie has indeed been helped on his way to the Big D, that’d be my educated guess.’ Brannigan redistributed his bulk with a loud grunt. ‘Sadly for both of us, however,’ he continued, ‘I can’t sit around here all day indulging in tittle tattle and hearsay. Not to mention any crackpot theory that walks through that door.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. ‘Could I maybe get you to fill out this evaluation sheet at the desk beyond? Level of satisfaction with service provided. Male stroke female stroke other, delete as appropriate. Caucasian stroke person of colour stroke other, ditto. Oh, and with reference to your tome. If you’re looking for a flawed anti-hero with an interesting past…’

  He left the rest of the sentence floating on the stale, dusty air.

  Hayden took the evaluation sheet and turned back at the door. ‘So where exactly does this
Frankie Pope character live?’

  Brannigan extracted a replacement toothpick from a small container and chortled affably. ‘Oh now,’ he said. ‘You want me to do all the work?’

  Hayden asked at reception. Frankie Pope lived in so-called ‘solitary splendour’ in a big, detached, redbrick house on Seafield Road. From the description, Hayden recognised it as the house immediately backing onto Eddie’s, the one he could see from the garden. Handy on one level, but very intimidating if you knew who owned it, because Frankie Pope sounded pretty nasty. He knew the sort, though not in real life. Cold, manipulative psychopaths, with a whole family of lesser psychopaths to do their evil bidding. Hayden experienced a momentary quiver of fear as he cycled up Haddon Road on the return trip, but then his rational mind took over. Why would Frankie Pope go to all the trouble of sawing through Eddie’s cellar steps when he could have him wasted with a drive-by shooting, no questions asked? This was just lazy thinking on Lou Brannigan’s part. He might rearrange his boots on the table or flick another toothpick at the bin – the first one missed, by the way – but that’s as far as his detective skills seemed to go.

  A quick interjection, if I may, for purposes of clarification. The Lou Brannigan as presented up to this point is not typical of the many decent, hard-working men and women who swell the ranks of the Gardaí. I’m covering my back here. A longer, gushing and, some might say, craven appreciation of this fine body can be found in The Annotated Sloot.2 Let’s leave it there for now.

  Hayden, by this stage, had gone inside. He stood gazing meditatively out of the window to the back garden. The sun was angled across the statue which bore, at precisely 18.27, an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Stopford Price. Very impressive, but Hayden was distracted by his preparations for the task ahead. On a shelf he found an old teapot, a handmade cosy in the shape of a bishop’s work hat – in World of Eddie, even a lowly teapot was a work of art – and a caddy half full of finest Assam. Rich. Robust. A muscular breakfast tea known for its malty flavour and, interestingly, in its small-leaf form, a staple of Irish Breakfast Tea. Hayden knew all this. A recent convert to abstinence and, as a direct consequence of same, to the pleasures of the four-minute brew.