by Declan Burke
The lies always came easy for Dee. The trouble there was, Dee started out from a point where she simply presumed I was lying.
‘That’s your problem, Harry. You’re always halfway there.’
‘Jesus, Dee, give me a break. I could really do with one around now.’
That bought me an arched eyebrow, but at least she didn’t say that I always needed a break around now, ‘now’ being roughly any time the maintenance payments fell due.
Credit where it’s due, though. Dee had never held out her hand. Not once. Then again, Ben being Gonzo’s boy, genetically speaking, mine was a voluntary offering with no legal obligations enforceable.
She’d managed just fine while I was inside. A consultant’s PA when I went in, she’d moved sideways into the hospital’s IT department, started off uploading data, the drudge work. I don’t know, maybe it was a kind of penance. Gonz had been a psycho and I’d known I’d pull the trigger long before he dived for that gun, but women always blame themselves. Guilt puts you centre-stage in all the best dramas. Anyway, Dee had put in the hours. Plugged into the system and got herself on the inside track, multi-tasking like an octopus in a pool-hall brawl. Now she ran the IT department, and if she occasionally complained of a mild concussion from bumping her head off the glass ceiling, at least she was trapped in the bubble, a recession-proof public servant peering out at the rubble of an economy laid waste.
Which meant Dee didn’t actually need my money. Just as well, because it’d have broken her heart to have to depend on me ever again. The payments I made went straight into a special credit union account she’d opened for Ben’s college education.
‘What time’s the fare?’ she said.
‘He’s flying out at six. Wants picking up at three.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ll still be back.’
‘Back for what?’
‘This is why you need to listen to your messages, Harry. So you can stay in touch with the human race.’
‘Back for what, Dee?’
‘I’m going out tonight. I need you to sit with Ben.’
‘Babysit?’
‘Nope. You’ll find out why at the PTA meeting.’ She glanced over her shoulder, lowered her voice. ‘His grades are on the slide and I mean badly. And he’s a bright boy, it’s not like he’s … y’know.’
‘Dense, yeah. Like his father.’
‘We need to show solidarity on this one, Harry. Ben has to realise that this is a serious issue. He starts secondary school next year, and if he goes in with the wrong attitude, with shit grades, then he’s fucked from the start. They’ll stream him wrong, he’ll be way down the line, doing fucking woodwork with rubber fucking saws.’
‘Alright, yeah.’ I held up a hand. ‘I get it. It’s all my fault.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she hissed, ‘grow up. This isn’t about you.’ She was pale now, cheekbones burning. ‘It’s about you doing the right thing, telling Ben what’s what.’
‘That if he doesn’t shape up, he’ll turn out like his father.’
‘Something along those lines, yeah.’
‘Which one? The psycho killer or the jailbird?’
The full lips thinned. ‘Flip a coin.’
18
There was every chance Tohill was still lurking somewhere around the estate, but if he was he’d be looking for an expectorating desperado peeling rubber in something high-powered and very probably stolen.
I was banking on Dee’s car trundling by under his radar, the perfect nuclear family aboard, its driver so devotedly and patently harmless a husband and father that he could wear his son’s baseball cap and wife’s Gucci shades whilst piloting a pea-green Mini Cooper without spontaneously combusting from shame.
‘You break them, you buy them,’ Dee said when I wrapped on the shades. Ben snickered from the rear. I drove along through a Gucci-tinged world, honing my justification should Tohill pull us over. The problem being, as I saw it, that the homo sapiens is trapped roughly halfway between micros and cosmos, derived from quantum chaos yet peering at the stars, smart enough to appreciate the elegance in every part of the universe that is not human and yet so unevolved we confuse harmony with order; and being human, crave that which is beyond our reach, and wish to tame that which we do not understand, never realising, or at least not admitting to ourselves, that we are the elements out of kilter with all else, an army of intestinal parasites declaring war on their host, eternity, until it hands over the one quality it does not possess: justice.
Hence the loogie in Tohill’s shell-like.
I dropped Dee off at the hospital, crossed town to Ben’s school, the lunchtime traffic heavy but moving. Ben stayed in the back, a Gameboy plink-bleeping in his hands.
‘Good news and bad,’ I said.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘This meeting. I won’t have time to see all your teachers.’
‘Cool.’
‘So we’ll have to focus on the ones giving you bad reports.’
‘Crap.’
‘So who do I need to see?’
‘Dunno. All of them?’
He was exaggerating, sure, but not by much. The school had a system whereby you were handed an A4 sheet as you went into the gym where the teachers sat at desks attending crocodile lines of parents. An hour later, we were back outside staring at the graph of Ben’s progress report, which strongly resembled the Black Run at Klosters. He was good at art, computer studies and religious instruction.
‘Looking on the bright side,’ I said, ‘you’ll make a marvellous cyber-pope. Your grandmother would’ve been so proud.’
He squirmed, shoulders hunched as he scuffed at the Mini’s tyres.
‘Listen, Ben, we need to talk about this. I’m serious, now. We’ll sit down later on when I get back from Knock, but in the meantime,’ I rattled the A4 sheet, ‘I need you to really think about this.’
‘Where am I going now?’
‘To class. Where else?’
‘But there’s no class today.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘It’s parent-teacher day, dad. All the teachers are busy.’
‘So your grades are failing, and the best thing they can think of is to give you the day off?’
He hoisted a shoulder, let it slump. ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I need to work. I’ve a run to Knock to do.’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
His quiet tone was a blade in the heart. ‘It’s not your fault, son. Look, who usually keeps an eye on you when your mother’s out?’
He frowned at the idea of being babysat. ‘Katie,’ he said. ‘But she’ll be at school.’
‘Of course she will. Okay, get in.’
I rang Dee. The conversation was brief and terse. No, she hadn’t known Ben would be free for the afternoon. Yes, Katie was out of the loop. Yes, leaving a twelve-year-old at a loose end for the afternoon was insane. No, the problem was mine, deal with it.
Exeunt Dee, pursued by bears.
‘Right,’ I said, climbing into the Mini Cooper. ‘Looks like it’s you and me.’
Another shoulder slump, the Gameboy plinking away. But I could’ve sworn I caught the glimpse of a grin behind the unruly fringe.
I cut back through town, across the bridge and out along the docks, turned into the PA’s yard. The scorched hull of the cab was still in place, and I wondered who’d be paying for it to be towed away.
‘What’re we doing here?’ Ben said.
‘Seeing a dog about a dog.’
He rolled his eyes, then noticed the burned-out cab, the scorch marks on the wall of the PA, the X of yellow tape fluttering at the door. A uniformed cop shading her eyes as I pulled in beside Finn’s Audi. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is this, like, a crime scene?’
‘You’ll be seeing a crime scene soon enough, son. Your mother’s lining up a firing squad.’
He crossed his eyes this time, went back to the Gameboy. I got out and waved at the cop to acknowledge her presence, taking care to step
across the black rubbery smears. She put away the mobile she’d been texting on and raised a firm hand, palm facing.
‘This area,’ she announced, ‘is off-limits to unauthorized personnel.’
I kept going, wondering if that was the standard spiel or if she was auditioning for CSI. She had the looks for it, quirky and fey, striking grey eyes, a button-cute chin.
‘I appreciate that,’ I said, nodding agreeably. ‘But I’m here to feed the dog. You’ve heard him, right?’ I edged by her, kicked the metal door. My reward was a fusillade of deep-throated barks. She flinched, but she was adamant. No dice.
There followed a quick chat about her orders and my responsibilities to my dead friend Finn and Bear’s voracious appetite. The ISPCC got a mention. Then I told her about how Bear had broken out the last time he’d been let go hungry for two days. ‘Go ahead and ring it in,’ I said, nodding at her crackling radio. ‘Maybe the dog-handler guy will come down and take care of it.’
Budgets being what they are these days, that was about as likely as some doggy Jesus wandering by with a basket of loaves and fishes.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was in there last night, they already know that. So it’s not like I’d be polluting the crime scene or anything. But look,’ I shrugged, ‘I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.’ I kicked the door again. Bear hurled himself at the other side of it, howling up a storm. ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be me who feeds him, just so long as he’s fed.’
‘I don’t have a key,’ she said.
Thirty seconds later I was around the back and hauling myself up onto the rusted fire escape. It didn’t yaw any more than an oak in a storm, but then I’d have been leery of climbing an oak in a storm too. The stench of drying kelp was thick as a shroud.
The emergency exit door had a deadbolt on the inside but I was guessing that Finn hadn’t bothered to lock up before he took his last dive. For once I was right. I slipped my fingers into the gap between the reinforced metal and the frame and gave a hefty tug, and it came away so easy that it nearly toppled me backwards over the waist-high barrier.
Inside was a dead stillness and the whiff of stale smoke and tortured howls echoing up from downstairs. I opened the studio door and called down to him. A pause, and then came a metallic pounding, the clickering of his toenails an ominous tattoo.
He was all business now, no howling.
‘Bear! Good boy. Good boy, Bear!’
The acoustics confused him and he skittered to a halt three landings below. A querulous whine. I advanced down the steps slowly, calling his name, and soon we were reunited in a slobbery blizzard. I pushed him off and led him down to the ground floor, scooped three cans of ground meat into his bowl. He wolfed it down, one quizzical brown eye watching me as I poured fresh water. I knew this because I was keeping a quizzical eye on him. All dogs, when you go back far enough, were wolves once, but the wolfhound, to the best of my knowledge, was the only breed specifically bred to hunt its own ancestor.
Hard to trust any dog that disloyal or stupid, or both.
Once he was finished eating I opened some more cans of meat and dumped them out, left him to it. Back up in the studio, blowing hard now, I took a quick rummage through the drawers beneath the mixing desk, one eye cocked for Finn’s note, the other for his binoculars. Not that I had a lot of hope of finding either. He wouldn’t have written a note and then hidden it away, and I only had Tohill’s word for the infrareds being missing.
The place had already been dusted, and my prints were all over it anyway, so I tossed the kitchen too: cupboards, fridge, freezer, bin. No joy. Back into the studio, a sooty residue thick on my fingers. I was running out of time, and the cop’d be wondering if I hadn’t fed myself to Bear. I crossed to the window, which had been left open, poked my head out to make sure she was still there. She was strolling in a wide circle, texting on her mobile again, once in a while glancing at the PA building. But all seemed calm. Ben hadn’t even begun to spin doughnuts in his mother’s car, being more intrigued by Finn’s Audi, walking around it, admiring its lines. The water beyond was flat and still, petrol-blue opposite the PA, darkening to magenta as it neared the deepwater. Sounds wafted across from Cartron on the faint breeze, the low thrum of traffic, a gull’s screech, children’s laughter from the schoolyard on the point.
I checked the window frame to see if I could spot any scratch marks, any pattern in the peeling paint that might suggest he hadn’t actually jumped. That he’d toppled out, made one last despairing grab. There was nothing, but that didn’t mean a lot. Life isn’t like the movies. Things don’t happen in slow-mo, and the reason accidents happen is that by the time they start happening, it’s already too late. Lean a little too far when you’re nine stories up …
It hit hard. A low blow that convulsed my gut. Nine stories mightn’t sound like much, not until you’re up there looking down. My head spun, and I closed my eyes against the dizzying drop. That and the possibility of glimpsing the ghostly outline of a body in freefall, arms and legs flailing in a tangled whirl as they sought purchase from the pitiless air.
Except I hadn’t seen Finn fall. He’d dived. Streamlined and arrow-straight.
But it wasn’t his jumping, or diving. It didn’t matter a damn how he’d gone. What sickened me was his going, stepping off knowing what he knew was nestled in Maria’s belly and growing.
I eased back in, slow, no sudden moves. Slid down on the couch, a hot sweat prickling my hair.
Sure, you could say, if you really wanted to exonerate him, that Finn jumped not knowing what he’d be missing. That he was to be pitied for that.
Not me.
Finn Hamilton was dead because he was a selfish prick, period.
I sat there staring blindly and tried to put myself in his place, perched out on that ledge, but it wouldn’t come. Not with children’s laughter on the breeze and Ben down below. Not with—
It was tucked away in the corner, partly wedged behind a stack of landscapes. His first ever portrait, maybe. Even from across the room I could tell it was a pretty good likeness. Up close, when I’d tugged it free, and even splashed as it was with red paint, the canvas ragged where it had been slashed with a blade, you could see he’d caught Maria’s wicked smile, the mischief in her eyes.
So you believe he was distraught about her infidelity …
The sweat dried cold so fast I almost heard it tinkle. It wasn’t exactly a suicide note, but it’d confirm Saoirse Hamilton’s suspicions, and her prejudice to boot. Guts bubbling, I took the palette knife and dug in under the frame, sliced the canvas out. There was a moment’s relief when I rolled up the canvas, blotting out the sight of those mischievous eyes, but then the disgust roiled up in a wave, setting my guts a-chunder. I barged through the bathroom door with seconds to spare, puke spattering the toilet seat and the cistern, each successive heave yielding less and less, and there wasn’t a lot down there to begin with, just bile and black coffee. Finally I was empty and retching dry.
I knelt there with my elbows on the rim, too weak to rise, heart pounding.
Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
That most simple and profound of symphonies, soundtrack to the seven billion or so miracles wandering the only lump of rock and water capable of hosting them for about six trillion miles in any direction.
What a waste.
I washed my face, gargled away the taste of bile, then wadded some handfuls of toilet-paper and wiped down the cistern, the spatters on its seat. Flushed the toilet and went back out into the studio, closed the window, hurrying to leave now, the big room suddenly claustrophobic and closing in, its silence so complete I could hear the crackle of static electricity as the carpet fibres crushed beneath my—
No clanking. No Tom Waits growl.
The toilet hadn’t flushed.
I went back into the bathroom, thinking I’d jammed up the toilet with the wadded papers, but no. Which meant something was interfering with the mechanism inside the cistern.
I wa
s betting on a pair of infrared binoculars.
I lost.
The cistern was empty, unless you counted cistern-like stuff such as water and an overflow tube and the filler valve and a red plastic float. Definitely no binoculars.
Slowly, I depressed the handle, flushing again. Everything worked as it should, the red float descending, the flush valve rising.
The water didn’t stir.
I tried again. This time a single bubble rose to the surface.
I rolled up a sleeve, slipped my hand under the mechanism, finger-tipping my way around the base of the cistern. It felt pretty rough, for porcelain. Dimpled and slightly spongy.
Aeroboard, yeah. A false bottom.
Underneath, waterproofed in cling-film, a narrow padded envelope.
The chances of it being what I was looking for were slim. Who writes a suicide note and hides it away under a false bottom in a toilet cistern?
The screak was the fire-escape door opening. I stuck the package into the waist of my pants, leaving my shirt untucked to cover the damp stain, and braced myself for some of Tohill’s TLC.
But when I popped my head out of the bathroom, it was only the cop.
‘What’re you doing up here?’ she said. ‘The dog’s downstairs.’
‘Sure, yeah. But I got caught short, y’know,’ I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, ‘and the bog downstairs doesn’t work.’
‘So you came all the way up here.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
The faint flush at her cheekbones told me no, that she’d been sneaking off into the weeds behind the PA.
‘Out,’ she said.
‘I should flush first,’ I said, and ducked back into the bathroom, fitting the cistern lid back in place under cover of the clanking and growling. Then I hustled out into the studio, patting my stomach to disguise the bulge beneath my shirt. ‘Shouldn’t have had that curry last night,’ I winced. ‘It’ll be a danger to shipping, that.’
Her mouth twisted in disgust, and I slipped by her out onto the fire escape. ‘Listen,’ I said as she pulled the door to behind us, ‘I wouldn’t fancy both our chances on this.’ I gave the guardrail a hefty tug, let her see it wobble. ‘Ladies first, though.’