SLOOT

by Ian MacPherson

  Maybe Lou Brannigan was right. Maybe, just maybe, there was no foul play. Hayden abandoned the tea, opened the cellar door, put the light on and stared into the depths. The way the twisted ladder had settled, its offkilteredness, was pretty Tate Modernesque. So how was this for a scenario? Eddie had created his Artist Descending into Hades. He wasn’t happy. Rungs that work? Too conventional. He decided to reposition them. Started to sever the ladder with the aid of a saw and a glass of his homemade hooch. The job was almost done. He ran out of his tipple of choice, went to the cellar to get some more, forgot, in his cups, that he was in the middle of re-imagining his artwork, stepped on the top rung, snapped the ladder from its moorings and fell to his untimely death. Yes, that was probably it. Pretty simple when you worked it through. All you had to do was think yourself into the mind of an artist. Eddie’s death was tragic but accidental. Case closed.

  It made total sense, particularly if you wanted an easy life.

  So where now for Hayden? He’d stay on in Clontarf, write in the mornings, enjoy his afternoons and evenings off. This suited him perfectly, and why wouldn’t it? It also suited me perfectly. I could now pursue whatever course on the comedic arts Professor Stern was running, without the inconvenience of keeping an eye on the plot. Double perfect.

  Or was it? If Eddie’s death was really nothing but a tragic accident, why read on? I don’t think I’m giving too much away to suggest that new information comes to light about Eddie – but Hayden doesn’t know this yet, which puts you one step ahead of our reluctant detective.

  Intrigued?

  Trust me. I know what I’m doing.

  Honest.

  I’ve read all the books.

  * * *

  2 ‘Not quite the beach read I was led to expect’ – The Lady

  10

  Hayden sat at Eddie’s writing desk. It felt strange. Almost as if he was channelling something; except he didn’t know what that something was. It made him think about why he was writing the novel in the first place. The need to get off the standup circle of hell? There was that. But there was also something else. He certainly didn’t feel the need to impress his father. His father had never paid him any attention whatever he did, so a novel wasn’t going to make a difference one way or the other. Not that it bothered him particularly. But Eddie’s desk. It felt right, somehow, to be sitting there to start the novel, although he wasn’t quite sure why.

  Whatever about that, there was a mountain of clutter to sort out first, so he made a start. He binned a few unopened bills, an empty envelope for parish dues and a leaflet about recycling. Under the Everest of paper sat Eddie’s answering machine, its red light blinking. One message. He left the remaining papers for now and was about to press play when, well, he didn’t. The message wasn’t going anywhere and besides, he had a novel to write. He’d listen to it later. Good call, Hayden. Time to get stuck in. It sounds, on the face of it, like a pretty no-nonsense approach. Sign of a real pro.

  Theoretically.

  Over the next couple of hours, he sharpened his metaphorical pencils. Moved his desk to get a better view. Moved it back. Typical writerly activity. He was still faced with the same blank page, though, so he tore it out and concentrated his attention on a replacement, also blank. It was a short step from this to staring out the window at the statue’s ever-changing face and reading the blurbs on the backs of other people’s books. He’d made a mistake placing Bram’s charity shop box under the desk, because some time later, and he couldn’t figure out how or when it had happened, his own work had been set aside and he was twenty pages into a crime noir set in 1950’s San Francisco: Two in a Bed, by Gay McQueen. S&M-friendly pulp. Brad finds the S, not to mention the M, quite pleasant, but when Clint shaves off the sleeping Brad’s mustache [sic] in a fit of pique…

  Not a great book, but once you start reading these things you can’t put ’em down. By the time he’d finished, it was early evening. He managed to scrape together the makings of a modest meal; to be precise, a tin of sardines, the remains of a packet of oatcakes and a small bowl of soggy crisps from the wake. As he sat eating, his eye fell on Eddie’s tapes.

  The tapes were neatly arranged, as they had been since Hayden was a child, on a set of mahogany shelves above Eddie’s desk. Each shelf was packed tight with slim cardboard containers. As a child, even as a young man, Eddie had forbidden him to touch them, never mind open the dusty boxes. This, he was told, was work. Just Eddie, an antiquated recorder, and a very occasional guest. But Eddie was gone now, so Hayden put his plate down and, almost gleeful at the wilful transgression, prised one of the boxes out. He opened it and removed its contents. A reel-to-reel tape, named and dated. Hayden put it back and slid another from its box. Same thing. Eddie had amassed an impressive collection. Hayden ran his eye along the neatly hand-printed labels, all arranged chronologically.

  •Eddie At Work XXI

  •Eddie At Play III

  •Monologues

  •Sam

  •More Sam

  And so on. Fascinating stuff. Hayden took the earliest one out. Eddie at Work I. It was dated March ’51.

  The recorder still sat on the old oak table in the corner, complete with a large pair of dark brown, leather-encased headphones. He had no idea how to operate it. Eddie had declared it a no-go area, and you didn’t cross Eddie. In the lid-flap, however, he found a dog-eared user’s manual, so he set about working out how to attach the tape from one spool to the other. It turned out to be quite a meditative process, a bit like, well, meditation, and Hayden’s whole being was suffused with a gentle wellness as he became attuned to the slower rhythms of yesteryear.

  He removed the tape from its sleeve, clicked it onto the recorder, wound it through and attached it to the feeder tape. He inserted the headphones, turned the lever on and settled back into the old mahogany swivel chair worn smooth by decades of Eddie.

  I have no intention of giving a verbatim transcription of what might be called The Eddie Tapes. That would be a book in itself.3 Fascinating stuff, though – an alternative version of Ireland from the mid- to late-twentieth century – and Hayden was riveted from the off. Eddie on Eddie. Eddie on his working methods. Eddie in conversation. A kind of aural logbook charting his creative development. The first tape worked through and started spinning wildly as it reached the end of the spool. Hayden placed it carefully back in the box and returned it to its shelf. He chose another one at random. Eddie at Work IV, June ’53. Eddie in his mid-twenties, and already he’d started experimenting with sound. He was now listening to tapes of himself ‘as a younger man’, commenting playfully on the passage of time by conversing with his earlier self. A mixture of morbid, absurd and hilarious. ‘Two weeks older,’ he intones at one point, ‘two weeks closer to the grave. Ah-h-h, the grave.’ He must have been all of twenty-five at the time.

  Hayden was hooked. But as he chose another tape at random, Eddie in conversation with the downright morose Sam, he began to feel unsettled. What was he doing in this house filled with memories, childhood, and Eddie?

  He yawned and stretched. Time for bed. He’d just put the lights out and was about to settle down on the sofa when he remembered the message on the answering machine. He padded across the room in his underpants and pressed Play. ‘You have one message. Message received Tuesday May 31st.’

  The date was interesting. Just before Eddie died. He waited. A husky female voice: ‘You haven’t settled up yet, Eddie. So call Marina. I really must insist.’ A short pause. The voice dropped a register. ‘Or else, my sweet. Or else.’

  End of message. Who was Marina? What hadn’t Eddie settled up? Hayden pressed save. He was about to head back to the sofa to decode the message – which might or might not have sounded menacing – when his eye was caught by a rogue light outside the window, flickering near the back wall. He peered into the surrounding darkness. The light seemed to be swaying be
tween the fruit trees, moving slowly towards the house. Word would have got out about a single man dying. Empty house. Hayden’s terror was almost tangible.

  Solution? He’d put the living room light back on. Problem solved. The would-be-burglar would think, ‘third party on the premises’ and take his or her swag-bag elsewhere. He reached for the light. The torch beam changed direction. Hayden’s hand hovered over the switch. The intruder wasn’t headed for the house after all. The torch lit up the shed, a hand reached out, the shed door opened. The torch went in.

  Hayden toyed with the idea of a direct confrontation but decided, on balance, against. He’d monitor developments instead, see if he could get a description, possibly capture the intruder on his mobile. Good plan. It took care of the abject terror factor. Now where had he put his phone? Equally important, did it need recharging? Bit late for that now. The shed door opened. A dark shape emerged, torch now off, closed the door and retraced its steps towards the back wall. It was also, he noted, clutching something bigger than itself. Flat. Rectangular. Unmistakably one of Eddie’s paintings. The burglar reached the back wall, placed the painting on top with ease, and clambered over. Seconds later, the painting disappeared from view.

  Hayden’s curiosity trumped his terror. He unlocked the back door quietly. Alert to the slightest noise, he darted up the garden, between the fruit trees, until he reached the back wall. He pulled himself up and peered over. Darkness. Silence. He threw a leg up and hoicked himself onto the wall. Still no sound in the surrounding moonless night. He waited a few moments and was about to give up and go back when a light went on in the redbrick house, illuminating a spacious, high-ceilinged living room. He could now make out a gravel area in front of the window and a long, sloping lawn. Inside the room, a dark-clad figure placed the painting on the mantelpiece and stood back to survey it. Hayden leaned forward and squinted in an effort to do the same, but from this distance could only make out a few blurred shapes. The dark-clad figure remained just that.

  Hayden was about to let himself down on the other side and work his way closer to the window when it hit him. This was Frankie Pope’s garden! He’d have guard dogs. Beefy minders. The usual paraphernalia of the criminal classes. Whatever the painting was, he could keep it. End of subject.

  Except that it linked Frankie Pope to Eddie.

  And that in itself was chilling.

  * * *

  3 It is a book in itself: The Annotated Sloot: Vol XII.

  11

  Hayden was in the middle of not writing. It was mid-morning. Mornings had been allotted to getting on with his novel. He’d been sitting in front of a blank page waiting for inspiration for some time. Nothing. He pushed his chair back and looked longingly at Bram’s book box. If he dipped into one, just one, it might set him off. He knew this wouldn’t work. He’d get sucked into someone else’s plot and that would be that. Morning gone. Besides, he’d arranged to meet Bram at the Nautical Buoy at midday. Only ten minutes to go until he headed off, but if the previous ten minutes were anything to go by they could take hours.

  Just one. Honest. Just the blurb on the back. A quick fix. The drug terminology wasn’t lost on him. He was desperate. Anything, anything to take his mind off not writing. Well, not anything. Not alcohol. He knew where that led. No, just a quick blurb. Where was the harm in that? Good question. Nowhere. Ah, but that’s where the harm lay. He recognised in his reasoning the inner voice of the addict, but who cared? The addict didn’t, and neither did Hayden.

  He was about to succumb to his inner demon and pounce on the box when Eddie’s phone rang. He pounced on that instead, with pathetic gratitude. See? He wasn’t an addict after all. He could take a blurb or leave it. Given a choice, he’d chosen the phone. He didn’t recognise the number, but why would he? And who, again, cared? Hayden didn’t, and the addict, because Hayden wasn’t one, didn’t exist.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, hi. Trace here.’

  A woman’s voice. But Trace? Who was Trace?

  ‘Trace,’ he said. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Trace,’ said Trace. ‘You know. Trace? AA?’ Hayden stood up, stunned. ‘So, when will you be back?’ He started rooting in Eddie’s drawer. Possibly a nervous reaction. A bottle opener. He ignored it. ‘Thing is,’ said Trace, ‘I’m worried about you, over there in Dublin with all that, you know, temptation and suchlike.’

  Hayden spluttered in disbelief. A pair of bicycle clips. He took them out. ‘You’ve no right to worry about me. You’re not my mother.’

  ‘Who left when you were seven years old, Hayden. Who moved to Waikiki with your dad and left you mum-less ever since. Do you maybe want to talk about this?’

  ‘I wasn’t seven,’ snapped Hayden. ‘It was the day before my seventh birthday. And no I bloody don’t.’

  ‘Well it could be the root of your problem, love.’

  Hayden wasn’t having this. ‘Two points: one, I don’t have a problem and two, I’m not your love.’

  ‘Admitting we have a problem is the first –’

  ‘Hold on. You’re right. I do have a problem. Well spotted, love.’

  ‘See? Self-knowledge is the first step. Do you want to share it?’

  ‘Yes. I do. You. You’re the problem.’

  He pulled an old nutcracker from the drawer and fondled it distractedly.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Trace. ‘Blame the messenger, Hayden. It’s an old trick, but trust me, it never works. I should know, because whatever hell you’ve been through, I can assure you I’ve been through it too.’

  ‘Well, thanks for sharing that. How did you get this number? No, wait, don’t tell me. The Higher Power moves in mysterious ways. Well you tell the Higher Power –’

  ‘That’s not nice, Hayden. Edward McGlynn? Dublin? It wasn’t that difficult.’

  He put the nutcracker back and spotted a pair of opera glasses half-buried in the clutter. He pulled them out and held them up to the light.

  ‘Another thing. You seem to know a hell of a lot about my private life.’

  ‘I’ve seen your act.’

  Fair point. Waikiki. Good comedy name. That’s the problem with confessional comedy. Sometimes the truth is funnier. But still.

  ‘My parents are none of your business,’ he said. ‘There’s no temptation. Or – or suchlike. Bye now.’

  ‘But what about the Ten Point Plan?’

  Hayden didn’t hear that bit. His ears were too furious. He slammed the phone down and stood by the desk, fuming, clutching the opera glasses. He looked down at his hands, took a closer look at the opera glasses, and, possible displacement therapy this, the very fact of looking, of engaging ocularly with the glasses, calmed him down. His ears stopped burning. He turned the glasses over and was soon lost in the aesthetic pleasure of their operaglassesness. He’d never seen a pair before. He didn’t know if Eddie liked opera, but in a funny sort of way you didn’t have to. The glasses were a thing of beauty in themselves, and he was about to train them on the garden to see if there were any sopranos lurking in the bushes when he suddenly remembered. Bram. Nautical Buoy. Midday.

  He placed the opera glasses gently on the desk and closed his blank notebook with gratitude. Courtesy of Trace, the final ten minutes of his self-imposed routine had flown by in seeming seconds. Not that he thanked her for it. The woman was certifiable, but she was in London and he was in Dublin, so no harm done. All thoughts of Trace forgotten, he stepped into the light of a lovely June morning. The three aunts observed him from behind the cotoneaster and kept their own counsel.

  The Nautical Buoy, newly refurbished, sat facing Dublin Bay. The interior was bright and welcoming, with a smattering of customers dotting the bar stools and bistro tables. The lunchtime crowd hadn’t quite made it in yet. No sign of Bram. Over in the corner, guitarist Voot O’Rooney improvised a jazzy little number about the dish of the day, Mushroom, Tomayt
o and Sweet Potato Pie. Not that it was on the menu, but that’s jazz for you: rhythm is all.

  Hayden sat at a vacant table. He hadn’t been in for some years and the changes were dramatic. From traditional dark pub, no women, tipped cigarettes a sign of effeminacy, to bright, inclusive, family-friendly bar/bistro. A shaft of sunshine from the skylight illuminated the distinguished-looking man at the counter, fedora in hand, voice projecting as if to the back stalls.

  ‘A large contusion to the left ventricle suggested foul play, but it turned out he was a keen hurler so he died, as it were, in the line of duty. The clue? He was on a GAA pitch at the time. Auchentoshan single malt an’t please you, Declan. I like to start the day alphabetically. And while you’re preparing this estimable libation I’m off for a quick puff, no offence to our gay brethren.’

  ‘Right you are, Mr. Quilty,’ said the barman. ‘None taken, I’m sure.’

  Quilty strode to the door as if all eyes were on him. Hayden’s were. This was the fedora-wearing drunk Bram had referred to as ‘your man’ before Eddie’s funeral. A criminal pathologist, judging by his little speech. Interesting. Could be very useful. The sun, angled from the skylight, seemed to follow him across the floor. After he’d made his exit through the swing doors, it settled back on the glass of single malt Declan placed on the counter in front of Quilty’s stool.

  Before the doors had stopped swinging, Bram came in. The sunlight stayed where it was. He spotted Hayden and sauntered over.

  ‘Pint?’

  Hayden drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Half?’

  Hayden decided to sit this one out.