‘Indeed you would.’ I strapped on my seat belt to indicate that I was ready to leave. He didn’t take the hint.
‘Get in on the bottom level, know what I’m saying?’
‘Ground level.’
‘Exactly.’ As if it were a proposal I’d made, and not a correction.
The navies and whites of Hilltop trickled down the windscreen. ‘And what shall you do if the owner isn’t selling?’
‘Between you an me,’ he confided, ‘the owner could use a few readies.’
I raised an eyebrow at him, or at the back of his head, rather, since that’s what he had presented me with, the back of his big thatched head, staring out the driver’s seat window as if he wasn’t speaking to me at all, that my information did not come from him. But it did. All my information came from him.
‘Is that so, Dessie?’
‘It is, Tristram. From what I hear.’
‘And where did you hear this, Dessie? From one of your little birds?’
Hickey smirked. ‘No, Tristram. It’s common knowledge.’
‘Common knowledge,’ I repeated in wonderment. The things that came out of his mouth.
It was steadily growing gloomier inside the truck. The windows were steaming up. Hickey kept his face averted for fear of being photographed in conversation with me by the surveillance man with the telescopic lens who appeared on the rooftops of his mind gathering evidence against him whenever he was up to no good, i.e. more often than not, though the point of this particular charade escaped me. No one could see us through the fogged-up glass.
He examined the dials on the dashboard and reset the mile counter, adjusted the minute hand of the clock, calibrating his universe, the man in control, sighing gravely for my benefit as he made a production of weighing up how much to tell me. ‘Speak to your oul fella,’ he finally remarked in a pointed tone.
‘And why would I want to do that?’
‘I’ll make him a good offer. Enough to fix up the castle. An there’ll be something in it for you.’
I returned my attention to the blurred mass of Hilltop. ‘And what business is this of my father?’
Hickey met my eye at last. ‘It’s his house now, isn’t it?’
I looked down to smile a small smile before facing Hickey once more. I inspected him in silence. This was a trick I had learned from Father. I knew how it worked. The secret was to do it slowly. Hickey’s shirt had turned semi-translucent in the rain. The thin cotton fabric did not cling to his skin the way my shirt clung to mine but was instead draped over his matted black whorls of chest hair like a picnic blanket spread over tussocks of grass.
I sighed as Father sighed when an inspection was complete, in order to express my disappointment, for inspections inevitably culminated in disappointment. That was the point of them. ‘Father doesn’t own Hilltop.’
Hickey’s eyes darted wildly around the floor of the truck, as if fragments of his shattered plans might be salvaged there. ‘So who owns it?’ he demanded, and then, before I got a chance to answer: ‘The Viking. I fucken knew it.’
‘The who?’
‘The fucker got there first, didn’t he? That bollocks is buying up Howth. Right.’ He turned the key in the ignition.
‘Watch out for the lawn,’ I warned him as we shot blindly forward. He hit the brakes and switched the heater up to max, directing twin blasts of air at the windscreen. Two clear saucers appeared in the condensation as if snorted from the nostrils of a bull.
‘Fucken place never went up for sale. It wasn’t on the open market. Did you know that? I bet he got it off youse for a song.’
‘Stop!’ I protested as he mounted the lawn, the truck bucking under us like a pony. ‘Jesus Christ’ – he dialled full lock onto the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the floor – ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The truck slewed sideways across the sodden lawn, spraying mud like a slurry spreader.
I tried to wrest the steering wheel from his grip but those muttony arms held it firm. So I groped blindly amongst indicator stems and bonnet-release levers and his knees until I located the keys. A twist and the parched blare of the exhaust cut out. The truck slid to a halt. For a moment it felt epic, as if I’d disabled a bomb.
I sat up. The windows were spattered with mud. Hickey’s skin was mottled by the grubby light. He put out his hand. ‘Give us me keys.’
I rolled down my window. What had been a meadow of butterflies and wildflowers was now a ploughed field. I turned to Hickey. ‘What did you do that for?’
‘Give us me keys,’ he said again.
‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’
‘Correction: I’ve destroyed the Viking’s lawn.’
‘Hilltop doesn’t belong to the Viking.’
‘Your oul lad still owns it then?’
‘No, the house does not belong to my father.’
‘So whose is it?’
I turned my attention to his set of keys and went through them one by one, deliberating over the features of each in turn as if they were suspects on an identity parade. There were thirty or so keys threaded onto a large ring and none of them looked familiar. It was going to take a while to find the right one.
‘I said,’ Hickey said, ‘whose is it?’
I sighed to indicate that he had broken my concentration and I returned to the beginning of the set.
The keys didn’t get any more familiar the second time around. I lowered them and looked up to find the weather quite altered, as if a new theatre set had been wheeled onstage for the next act or, rather, the old backdrop returned. The mackerel clouds had yielded to the clear blue sky of before and the sea was a glittering sheet of brilliance. A wood pigeon started up its warm coo-cooing, at which sound a small trapdoor of recognition sprang open in my chest, injecting a spicy shot into my bloodstream. ‘It’s mine,’ I said when I was good and ready.
‘What is?’
‘Hilltop. My mother left it in her will to me.’ A pain in my soft tissue at the mention of her, and all my tissue is soft, all of it pains. ‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’
‘I’ll get you a new one.’
I handed him the keys. ‘Kindly return my keys and then drive me home. You’re trespassing.’
He didn’t look at the keys but grinned at me. ‘Tristram,’ he declared, ‘I’m about to make you a rich man.’
‘Hilltop is not for sale.’
After a brief hesitation, during which Hickey gauged whether or not to push his luck and for once decided against it, he selected the Toyota key from the ring and inserted it into the ignition.
*
I knew him. I knew him the second I saw him. I recognised him from his moniker. Tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, buff and in rude – no, obnoxious – good health. An invader to this island if ever I saw one. Not an indigenous short-arse like Hickey or a gaunt Anglo-Norman like me, but a Viking right down to his marrow.
We came upon him on Harbour Road. Hickey was driving me back in silence when there he was. You couldn’t miss him. Everything about his bearing announced itself. I am here, his strut proclaimed as he strode up and down the frontage of a new giant green wine bottle of a bar, patrolling his strip while taking a call. A black Range Rover Sport with twenty-inch alloys was parked in his loading bay. He eyed it every time he passed. Or maybe he was eyeing his reflection in it.
His face was tanned and his collar-length hair tossed back in a salty tangle, as if he’d just come ashore after scudding the waves on his speedboat or longboat or yacht. He was rigged out in deck shoes and no socks. Wide-legged trousers in an off-white fabric, like linen only finer, as if fashioned from the fabric of sails. Whatever it took to advertise his nautical status was nailed to his mast.
People were seated at silver bistro tables on the pavement, installed like his personal audience. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ I said.
Hickey did not respond, other than to bristle and bridle in the seat next to me. He slowed the truck down to get a better
look, for there is something almost pleasurable in being riled to that extent.
The Viking clocked Hickey’s approaching truck and nodded a greeting, or not so much a greeting as an acknowledgement: I see you, I know that you are there. Then he returned his attention to the phone. Hickey and his passenger were of little interest to him. ‘What a cock,’ Hickey remarked and I nodded. For once, we agreed on something.
*
‘Here we are now,’ he announced heartily as we pulled up outside the castle. Hickey was a great man for the hollow cheer when trying to end things on a positive note. Here we are now, is it yourself, you’ll be having another, ah ya will! He thought it made him charming, a bit of a character, a lovable rogue, but although he was fooling no one, it was still somehow endearing in its sheer ham-fistedness. His fists of ham and my feet of clay. How did we get so far?
‘Here we are now,’ he repeated, and inserted an expectant pause to prompt me to respond. I knew that I was forgetting something, but it wasn’t my lines.
‘Yes, well,’ I said, fussing over the catch of my seat belt. What was it I’d been meaning to do?
Hickey nodded at the castle. ‘Bet it’s deadly in there.’
That was one word for it. The castle was crawling with the deadly members of my deceased family – the ancestors on whose chairs I sat, in whose bed I slept, at whose table I dined. They say the place has a ghost now and I have every reason to believe them.
‘Tapestries an stuff . . . ?’ he nudged me.
Hickey didn’t strike me as the type who might harbour an interest in tapestries, still less know what one was.
‘I’d say they’re mad yokes,’ he speculated. ‘I never seen a real one . . .’
Mad yokes, yes, like the stolen Waterford chandelier. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have any genuine tapestries left,’ I said carefully. ‘The original hangings are long gone, replaced by replicas. Same with the paintings. Copies, the lot of them. The valuable stuff was sold off years ago. But keep that under your hat.’ This was not in fact the case. Hickey may have treated me like a blow-in, but I treated him like a thief.
‘Have youse a dungeon?’
I laughed as I climbed out. ‘Thanks for the lift, Dessie.’ I swung the door shut and patted the muddy roof. Off you pop now, like a good chap.
He leaned into the passenger seat and rolled down the window. ‘Ah, you’re grand,’ he said, ‘you’re very good but I won’t.’ I blinked at him in incomprehension. ‘I won’t come in for the cup a tea cause I’m up to me teeth, but I appreciate the offer, so I do. You’re a gent. I always said that about you. Always stood up for you, no matter what they accused you of. Mental psychopathic things. Dodgy satanic shit. Ah, not at all, I’d say: you have him all wrong. Bit up his own hole, I grant you that, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. An as for his lovely manners! His dead mammy would of been proud.’
He hauled himself back into the driver’s seat and stepped on the accelerator. The keys. I had forgotten to retrieve the keys. ‘Hey!’ I shouted after him but he didn’t hear me. The setters did. They came belting around the corner in response, pebbles flying in their wake, ears tossed to the wind, for the fact of there being two of them seemed to egg the other on, turning every endeavour into a competition.
Halfway across the courtyard, the pair simultaneously about-turned and scrambled back to the arch at the same frenetic pace, having been summoned to heel by Father. I stood to attention when he appeared, awaiting one of his caustic remarks – Is that the company you keep now, I see you’ve found your level at last – but he simply walked past me as if I were dead to him, pausing briefly to note the skid marks that Hickey had carved in the gravel.
‘What happened to the pony?’
Stop. Poor Prince. The damage.
At the time, I did not envisage that I would remain in the country for more than a day or two, so I did what I believed was best for him under the circumstances, seeking to remove a fraction of pain from the world, to relieve an iota of suffering. I went inside and rang the vet and arranged to have him destroyed the following morning.
Third day of evidence
14 MARCH 2016
‘Mr St Lawrence, when did your directorship of Castle Holdings commence?’
The date is on the paperwork in front of you. Was it the following week perhaps? I am poor with numbers and getting worse with time but the good news is I left a paper trail. About a week after the expedition to Hilltop with Hickey, I pulled open the front door to encounter a blond man in blue overalls on his knees, a hammer in his hand. I had been wondering what the noise was. A toolbox was set out by his side, its tiers fully extended.
I stepped outside to see what he was up to. He was mounting a brass plaque to the door surround. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
The man nodded at the plaque to indicate that he was mounting a brass plaque to the door surround – yes yes, I could see that, I wasn’t blind. Father, by some small mercy, was out. A smart blue minivan was parked in his spot, Transylvanian Tradesmen printed on the side in livery matching the man’s overalls. I gestured at the plaque. ‘Who authorised this?’
The man returned to his work. Tap tap with his hammer, whir whir with his drill as if I weren’t there, an exemplar of the implacability of the Eastern European that confounds the Irish psyche to such a degree. Instead of embarking on long-drawn-out descriptions of the task at hand, followed by a rundown of potential pitfalls to unnerve the customer, concluding with a few horror stories to illustrate that the competition are cowboys and that the cost of labour is not as extortionate as it may at first have seemed, all the while angling for a cup of tea as any self-respecting Irish workman might, this man simply got on with it.
Castle Holdings read the italic lettering on the plaque, which was the name M. Deauville had chosen for the Irish branch of his company. Sorry, Fergus? Yes, apologies, my mistake. You are quite right: Castle Holdings was not a branch but a separate financial entity.
When the workman was gone I inspected the plaque. It was dappled with his fingerprints, fingerprints which I neglected to polish off, instead leaving them to set into the protective lacquer coating the metal, although it wasn’t the Romanian workman’s dirty fingerprints that were smeared all over that operation from the start.
The sound of another vehicle reached my ears. It was not the tinny rattle of Father’s old Polo, nor was it the return of the smart little van. A powerful engine was ascending the avenue. I turned to face the courtyard.
The vehicle seemed on the brink of appearing for a protracted period, but instead of rounding the corner it continued to grow louder. Louder and ever louder while I stood waiting to receive it. Finally, a motorbike appeared through the trees, the reflections of the leaves flickering upon its obsidian flank. The front fairing was bulky and clenched, the shoulders of a charging bull, but the tail was sleek and tapered, the sting of a wasp. The motorcycle made straight for me across the gravel as if this meeting were scheduled. I checked my watch. It was precisely three o’clock.
The biker dismounted, stiff and bowed in his creaking leathers, a warrior in armour, a medieval knight, one who had ridden for days to reach this place. He removed his gauntlet of a glove but not the helmet. The original Sir Tristram might have looked like this, I remember thinking. The original Sir Tristram, the real Sir Tristram, might have stood where this man stood now, regarding me as this man regarded me now, his black destrier panting behind him, ticking as its cylinders cooled. I wanted to see his face.
From the pannier, he produced a small device, the screen of which glowed elixir green. There was a stylus attached and I signed my name. The motorcyclist then offered an envelope and I looked at him, but his glossy black visor returned only my reflection in miniature, a crooked and contorted man. I did not like what I saw there. I accepted the envelope and thanked him.
He nodded by way of acknowledgement before mounting his motorcycle. I retreated inside and leaned against the door, anxious for him to be gone. The sile
nce of the transaction had unnerved me. The silence of this transaction, and of subsequent transactions, because yes, it was the first of many. As you well know. That is why I have been summoned here. Isn’t it?
When the sound of the motorcycle had faded from the avenue, I brought the envelope to the dining table and sat down. A document of great consequence was contained inside – I see you have it in your possession. Exhibit A, or a portion of it. Yes, I can confirm that that is my signature.
That document possessed a distinct magnetic pull. It had its own field of gravity. The fact that it is presently being passed around the room in silence corroborates that it is no ordinary piece of paper. Exhibit A, you will find, is a remittance advice, a salary slip. The staggering figure of €100,000 is printed in the Payable box. And the staggering name in the Payee box is mine.
I stood up from the dining table.
I sat down again.
I stood up.
I sat down again.
I tried to concentrate.
It was very hard.
My eyes shuttled compulsively between those two electric points on the page: Tristram St Lawrence – €100,000.00 – Tristram St Lawrence – €100,000.00, until it felt like incipient epilepsy. At the bottom of the page, divided by a row of perforations, was a tear-off cheque drawn on a bank account in the Cayman Islands. The cheque portion, as you can see, was subsequently detached. By me.
The cheque was made out to Tristram St Lawrence and the amount was the same. Two new points of seismic activity for my eyes – they started their compulsive shuttling again. Then an irregularity leapt out. A key portion of the cheque was blank. The authorised signature was missing. The cheque was invalid.
Then I spotted my name again. Beneath the dotted line where the signature should be: Tristram St Lawrence, Director, Castle Holdings. I was the authorised signatory. I had to sign the dotted line to get the money. I turned the document over in search of further instructions. The reverse was blank.
The Devil I Know Page 5