SLOOT

by Ian MacPherson

  Tear-stained heart? Steady on there. Nobody said this, of course. The moment was too raw. Too emotionally charged.

  Lou Brannigan rooted in his breast pocket and took out his wallet. From the wallet he removed a folded piece of plastic and from the plastic he produced a faded sheet. He opened it out and held it with trembling hands.

  ‘“Dear Son,”’ he read, ‘“I’ve been a sinful woman, so I’m away off to England. When you get this letter in years to come, and I know you will, Son, I want you to find your little sister and look after her.”’ He glanced over at Marina with genuine adoration. ‘“She was born six minutes after you. Love, Mammy.”’ His eyes, which had long since shed any remaining seen-it-all cynicism, welled up. ‘“PS. I call you ‘son’, Son, because I’ll never know you or your sister’s names.”’

  Trace turned away and sobbed into her sleeve. The three aunts looked distraught.

  ‘We’re twins too, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘I’m ninety-six, Dodie is ninety-four, and Dottie here is ninety-two.’

  ‘Florrie. You’re Dottie. The ting is dough, we feel your pain.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Brannigan, wiping away what he saw as an unmanly tear. ‘We stayed together till we were three weeks old. Totally inseparable. Then my little sister was adopted by the Courtneys of Westmeath.’

  Hayden started. ‘The Courtneys?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ continued Brannigan. ‘The stud farm folk. I, on the other hand, was raised by a family in West Cork. The Brannigans. Decent, God-fearing souls, but I always felt somehow different. As if I was missing an arm or something. Cut to the discovery’ – Lou Brannigan almost broke down here. This big, lumbering, wounded orphan who had worked his way to the top of his profession was now almost weeping openly – ‘the discovery of Mammy’s letter. I got straight onto Twins Reunited.’ He drew Marina close. Proudly. Protectively. ‘The result,’ he said, ‘you see before you here tonight. The missing arm turned out to be this... this adorable...’

  The room was awash with empathy. The aunts applauded. Trace, overcome with the tragedy of it all, blew her nose. But Hayden was agitated.

  ‘This is all very well,’ he declaimed loudly, bringing all eyes back to him, ‘but it doesn’t explain’ – he pointed an accusing finger at the telephone – ‘this.’

  ‘No, Hayden,’ said Marina, ‘but perhaps this does.’

  She crossed the room to where a stack of Eddie’s paintings leaned against the wall and motioned to a speedily recovering Brannigan.

  ‘Would you?’

  Brannigan wiped his eyes with a jacket sleeve and beamed at her. He riffled through the stack, removed an unframed painting, and held it aloft with his huge Garda hands. It depicted Mary Magdalene draped seductively across a divan with Christ, one hand on a motel doorknob, the other held up in a gesture of denial: ‘I Must Be About My Father’s Business’, read Marina. ‘Eddie McGlynn. Oil on Canvas.’

  Hayden was floored.

  ‘I was very fond of Eddie,’ said Marina, ‘but he never looked after himself. Sometimes he went days without eating. So I agreed to sit for him on one condition: payment was dinner at my restaurant of choice. I was looking forward to it, so I left a message. It was meant to be playful, Hayden. Mischievous.’ She sighed at the memory. ‘Eddie, you see, was such a wonderful – oh, what’s the term?’

  Hayden tried the bullish approach. ‘Client?’

  ‘Life force,’ said Marina. ‘Sadly, he never got the message.’

  ‘So perhaps,’ said Brannigan, ‘you’d like to reconsider your original verdict. I seem to recall the word ‘pimp’ being bandied about.’

  Marina placed her hand on Brannigan’s arm. A soothing gesture. She turned to Hayden. ‘I’m a Jungian psychoanalyst, Hayden. Specialising in the mother complex.’ She gazed fondly up at Brannigan. ‘You see, Lou –’

  Brannigan gave her a pained look. ‘Please.’

  Marina smiled professionally and said nothing. The confidentiality of the couch.

  Hayden was stunned. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t make sense. Tell you what. Take five. Back in a tick.’

  He went to the front door, swung it open, and marched briskly down the drive. He crossed the road, walked up to Marina’s gate and yanked the rhododendron bush away from the sign.

  Marina : Courtney

  He didn’t bother reading on. Courtesan. Courtney. Bloody rhododendrons. And the colon? Not a colon at all, but a couple of rusty screws fastening the board to a stake. But hold on. His mind was in overdrive. This wasn’t over yet. He strode back to Eddie’s, went in and closed the front door dramatically. He repositioned himself in the centre of the room.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. You’re a psychoanalyst, so what was all that about the oldest profession on the phone? You can hardly deny it.’ The three aunts were about to burst into a fresh fit of giggles, but Hayden wasn’t having it. ‘I think you’ll find, ladies, that the oldest profession is prostitution. First recorded over four thousand years ago, apparently. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.’ You were probably there at the time. He didn’t say the last bit, but he kept it in reserve.

  ‘Not so, Hayding. We mean, work it out for yourself.’

  ‘There’s Adam, crunching into a Granny Smit, when he tinks, hold on, tings are getting a bit predictable around here. I wonder should I visit a whore?’

  ‘Then he tinks, no, I’m a one-woman man.’

  ‘Which is just as well when you tink about it.’

  ‘As our American cousins say, Hayding, do the mat.’

  ‘But that leads him to a further tought.’

  ‘I wonder who the mammy was?’

  ‘He tinks, Janey, the only woman in the whole world is my own lovely wife Eve. Am I after knowing my own mammy?’

  ‘In the biblical sense, Hayding.’

  ‘Put it another way. Am I after propagating the species incestually?’

  ‘He tries to sublimate this tought. No use. His oul sex drive is shot. He takes to the bottle.’

  ‘Only it’s not a bottle in those days, Hayding. Let’s call it a gourd.’

  ‘Well whatever it is, Hayding, it’s a cry for help.’

  ‘He works it trew.’

  ‘Eureka moment.’

  ‘“I’m after sleeping wit my own beloved mammy! Anyone know a good psychoanalyst?”’

  ‘Enter Eve. “Lie back on that grass hillock there, Adam. Now, what seems to be the problem?”’

  ‘And there you have it. Psychoanalysis, the oldest profession.’

  ‘Invented, mark you, by a female lady.’

  ‘One-nil to the early feminist movement.’

  ‘We rest our case.’

  They may have stopped there, but it didn’t matter. Hayden wasn’t listening. He was studying the floorboards, totally deflated. He’d made a complete idiot of himself and he was nowhere nearer locating the killer.

  Not Pascal.

  Not Frankie Pope.

  Not Brannigan and Marina.

  Who next? Trace? Trace was a stalker and patently unstable, but did that make her a killer? She was clearly obsessed with Hayden, her alcohol fixation a possible manifestation of her warped desire to control him – which might just involve the ultimate control: murder. But Eddie? She’d never even met Eddie. Besides, she was probably in London at the time of his death. Bit of a long shot.

  Which left the three aunts, and there was no way they could have done it.

  Or was there?

  Hayden sized them up. Tiny. Well into their nineties. Possibly older. Didn’t women always lie about their age? He replayed in his mind their various meetings over the past few days. The slinking, the scurrying, the scuttling. The furtive glances and shifty eyes. All signs of possible guilt. And then it came back to him. The tiny feet at dawn. The missing tape.
Hardly proof of fratricide; on the other hand it must have been them, mainly because it wasn’t anyone else. Hayden decided to tackle them head on. Apart from anything, it would put him back in control of proceedings – or so he thought. This was one valuable lesson he learned from the whole sorry business: in dealing with his three dearly beloved but inscrutable aunts, it doesn’t pay to think.

  ‘We finally come,’ he said, ‘to my three venerated, not to say sainted, aunts. Step forward, ladies. Now. I first had my suspicions when you started behaving strangely about me staying at Eddie’s. You were desperate to stop me staying overnight. Why?’

  ‘Well, Hayding –’

  ‘The question is rhetorical. I’ll answer it myself in due course. You also seemed perturbed when I claimed to have solved the case, only to brighten visibly when it became apparent that I hadn’t. Why? And then I hear intruders at five o’clock in the morning, rooting surreptitiously, as I now have reason to believe, through Eddie’s tapes. Why? I put it to you that the answer to all three questions is one and the same. You have something to hide. And this brings us back to that bizarre incident at the funeral. You deleted the photo of Eddie. Why? I put it to you that you wanted to maintain the fiction that Eddie died of natural causes. Why?’ He grabbed a lapel with his nut-free hand and paused to let the question resonate. ‘Because, I put it to you one last and final time, you killed him!’

  The three aunts were mightily impressed.

  ‘Oh, very good, Hayding.’

  ‘Hayding McGlynn, King of the Sloots.’

  ‘Il sloot di tooty sloot.’

  ‘And not unreminiscent of the Ancient Greek orator Cicero in his finest hour.’

  Florrie blushed.

  ‘I take it you’re referring to the time we –’

  ‘No, Dottie. I’m not. I’m referring to his finest oratorical hour. Pro Archia Poeta.’

  Florrie bridled.

  ‘No oratoricals when I was around, I can assure you.’

  A momentary pause while they composed themselves. Spat over, they turned their attention back to Hayden.

  ‘But what’s our motivation?’

  ‘Maybe we just didn’t like the cut of Eddie’s jib.’

  ‘What’s a jib?’

  ‘I tink it’s in the Bible. If the cut of thy jib offend thee, pluck it out.’

  ‘That’s thy right eyeball, silly. If thy right –’

  ‘Silence!’ barked Hayden. He felt he was losing control, possibly because he was, and Brannigan was the first to break ranks.

  ‘Get a grip of yourself, man,’ he said, walking to the door. ‘I’ve known these ladies since they were in their late sixties and I’ll tell you one thing. There’s not a blemish on their characters. Good, upstanding, God-fearing spinsters of this parish. Mass every morning. Confession twice daily. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  And with a last look to check that Hayden was, indeed, ashamed of himself, he was gone.

  Marina hesitated before leaving too. She slipped over to Hayden and put a hand on his arm. A subtle erotic charge, intentional or not, passed from hand to arm. ‘Erwin Schrödinger,’ she smiled. ‘Who’d have thought?’ She squeezed him gently. ‘Anything I can do for you in return,’ she continued. ‘Any time.’ She smiled her enigmatic smile. ‘Double session. No need to book.’

  With that she freed his arm, unplugging, if you will, the erotic charge, and she too was gone. Hayden sighed an involuntary, lovelorn sigh and so, in perfect synchronicity, did Trace; the sigh, in her case, concealing a wild, internal, cry of pain. She screwed the top off a bottle of sparkling water, poured it tremblingly, tearfully, down the sink, and followed the others out.

  31

  Hayden stood alone in the sitting room. Well, apart from the three aunts, who looked out the front window and giggled with girlish glee.

  ‘Mass every morning, Hayding? We tink not.’

  ‘And all that guff about blemishes. Sure we’re covered in blemishes, Hayding.’

  ‘We were up for gun running in the tirties.’22

  ‘To be fair, that was before his time, but he’s way off beam on the character front.’

  ‘We mean to say, what sort of training do they give police bobbies these days at all?’

  ‘It’s no wonder the country is –’

  ‘Language, Dottie. He’s at an impressionable age.’

  But Hayden wasn’t listening. Again. He was routed, his humiliation complete.

  ‘Ah, will you look at the little face on him. Poor Hayding.’

  ‘I suppose he’ll want to know what really happened now.’

  ‘Mind you, we don’t know.’

  ‘On account of the dementia.’

  Their little heads bobbed mischievously.

  ‘Or do we?’

  Hayden closed his eyes, shook his head wearily, and finally swallowed the nut. It was the last thing he’d eat for several days.

  Seconds later, Hayden opened his eyes. The three aunts stood in a row facing him, their six tiny eyes trained on his.

  ‘This is pretty heavy duty stuff, Hayding.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to sit down.’

  Hayden bridled. ‘I’ll stand, if it’s all the same with you. I can take it.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Hayding. But can we?’

  ‘We’ve been getting cricks in our necks ever since you started your pontifications.’

  ‘You must be what? At least five tree.’

  ‘Five feet nine and a half,’ said Hayden. The if-you-don’t-mind was implied in his tone. He sat down.

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘You always were a good boy under all that braggadocio.’

  ‘And the holier-than-thou stuff in your twenties when dialectical materialism was de rigueur wit the pseudo-intellectuals. Not to mention – but that can wait for happier times.’

  ‘Here’s the nub of the ting, Hayding. We were up to no good.’

  ‘We can’t remember any of it on account of the dementia, but sometimes we get little flashes.’

  ‘Hold on, girls, I tink I’m getting one now.’

  ‘Me too. Don’t say me tree, Florrie, or I’ll burst you.’

  ‘Dottie, if you don’t mind. We knew you were going trew the tapes, Hayding, so we popped in when we tought you’d be asleep and took the incrimulating one.’

  Hayden was on his feet again. ‘The incrimulating one? You mean –’

  ‘We do mean, Hayding. The one that incrimulates.’

  Dottie – could have been Dodie – took a reel-to-reel tape from her handbag and slotted it back on the tape shelf.

  ‘However, we took the liberty of transferring it to the latest gadgetry.’

  ‘Modering technology, Hayding. Little hobby of ours.’

  They produced a small state of the art doodah. I’m not up on these things myself, but when they switched it on! The sound! Mono recording, Sensurround effect. You know, that thing you get in the cinema when you’d swear the baddie was behind you.

  Hayden sat down again and swallowed hard. Were the three aunts about to confess to murder, that most heinous of crimes? What would he do if they did? Shop them? The other inmates wouldn’t last five minutes if they were banged up with this lot.

  They set the small gadget down on the table and beamed reassuringly at Hayden. He didn’t beam back.

  ‘This is the edited version, Hayding. Location: Eddie McGlynn’s domicile.’

  ‘We cut the toilet breaks.’

  They pressed play. Two voices. Both incredibly drunk. Hayden recognised them immediately.

  EDDIE: Go aisy on the drink there, son. It’s not a competition. Where was I? Ah yes. I followed your career with interest. Hoping. Always hoping.

  HAYDEN: Sorry, but what the fuck do you mean by that?

  EDDIE: Only Quotin’?
Big mistake. Father Brown’s Boys? I know they killed you off, son, but have you ever watched it? And how about that leprechaun suit ad?

  Hayden was stunned. Eddie was dredging up his long-buried past, but Hayden had no recollection whatsoever of this conversation, or when it had taken place. He listened on with dread.

  HAYDEN: But – but that was, like, the start of my career. That was early fucking on.

  It was too. He was the same age as Foetus O’Flaherty is now. On the make. Not thinking of the years of self-torture ahead.

  EDDIE: Excuses, son. Excuses. The point at issue here is, the true artist doesn’t compromise. I didn’t bring you into the world to peddle pap to the masses.

  SOUND OF A CHAIR HITTING THE FLOOR.

  ‘I tink that was you falling over, Hayding.’

  ‘We’ll tell you one ting.’

  ‘You’re better at sitting down now.’

  ‘Deliberately tirsty, Hayding. That’s what you were in those days.’

  ‘But – but I don’t remember any of this.’

  ‘Oh now, Hayding. Last time you were over. Six munts ago.’

  Hayden was incensed. ‘Wait a minute. I wasn’t over six months ago.’

  ‘You most certingly were, Hayding. You possibly don’t remember, being as how you were hitting Eddie’s Sweet Amnesia wit vim and gusto.’

  ‘But back to the incrimulating tape.’

  SOUND OF LIQUID BEING POURED.

  HAYDEN: What do you mean ‘bring me into the world’? You’re a midwife all of a sudden?

  ‘Pause here, Hayding.’

  ‘Pretty pregnant to our way of tinking.’

  ‘No pun intended, but stick around. It gets worse.’

  EDDIE: You’re right, son. I spoke out of turn.

  HAYDEN: Son? Jesus! What’s all this ‘son’ shit? What exactly the fuck are you on?

  ‘Tut tut, Hayding. Tree genteel ladies present.’

  ‘Although to be fair about it, we weren’t present at the time.’

  HAYDEN: What right have you to demolish my – to demolish my career you –

  Hayden listened in pained silence as his past self stuttered to a furious, intoxicated, word-search stop.