by Declan Burke
We turned out of the driveway onto the Strandhill Road, headed for town. It felt like my brain was swimming in black ink. Ben a stab in the heart every time I drew breath and suffering a weird kind of horizontal vertigo, the world accelerating away. The sense of loss like a black and poisoned kind of light. It was everywhere, infusing every last thing with a corrosive despair, eating away even as it fed on itself. The heart turned iron, so that all I felt was the gaping, tugging vortex he’d left behind and a hatred of everything alive, of the world itself for being the world without Ben in it.
‘… fucking disappointed when she opens that baby up.’
‘What?’
‘I said, Grainne’ll be …’ She paused, looked across. ‘Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?’
‘No.’
We’d reached the railway station, were stalled in traffic on Lord Edward Street, the lights red. I had no memory of getting there.
Maria sipped from a bottle of water, tapped the cap home again with the heel of her palm. ‘I’m talking about the laptop.’
‘Forget it. We’re not going back.’
‘Who said anything about going back?’
‘I’m getting you out. That’s all you need to know.’
‘I’m owed, Harry.’ The brandy still working its old black magic. A bolshy tilt to her chin. ‘Finn made promises.’
‘Finn said a lot of things.’
‘Maybe he did, but it’s not just about me.’ She placed her hands, very deliberately, on her midriff. ‘Is it?’
‘You don’t even know it’s his,’ I said.
She conceded that by pursing her lips and nodding slowly. ‘Maybe not,’ she said, ‘but see it my way. It’s either Finn’s or it’s some flake who killed his brother, already has a kid of his own. Sorry,’ she needled, ‘had a kid of his own.’
The lights turned green. I eased off the clutch and trundled around onto the bypass, knocked the car out of gear again as we rolled up behind a Ford Focus.
‘Someone’s going to die for Ben,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t have to be you.’
‘Oh yeah? You’d kill your own kid, maybe? Just when you’ve lost another? Oh, wait – he wasn’t actually yours, was he?’ She patted her tummy. ‘At least this time,’ she said, ‘you know there’s a chance it’s yours.’
‘Maria, I know you’re drunk but I swear to God, one more fucking word about Ben and I’ll drive you straight to Saoirse Hamilton myself.’
‘And tell her what?’ she said. ‘That Finn jumped because you got me pregnant?’
I had a sudden urge to vomit. A flash of Gonzo flopped prone in a chair, a hole punched in his chest, the gun in my hand and the thick whiff of cordite. The sickening thrill of it.
‘Don’t tempt me,’ I said.
‘You never wondered?’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Why you.’
‘Not really. You’re a gold-digging bitch who got bored, needed to kick-start Finn. And I was, y’know, there.’
She seemed pleasantly surprised, if a little disappointed I’d stolen her thunder. ‘And here you are again,’ she said.
The lights turned green. This time we managed to make it through two sets before getting caught behind a red again. ‘What’re you saying?’ I said.
‘I’m saying, the Hamiltons will do okay. Me and you, we’re walking away with nothing. But if we were to—’
‘Forget it. You’re going to Knock and you’re getting on that plane.’
‘Right. And then go home and tell them I’m pregnant and we all live happily ever after.’
‘Not my problem.’
‘No?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Except you don’t know the baby isn’t yours.’
‘You want me and you to play happy families?’
‘I’m saying, Harry, that you already lost one kid today. You want to make it a twofer?’
She was good, no doubt about it. The lights went green again. We cleared the roundabout opposite Summerhill, heading south now, the road clear.
‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘I’ll abort. No way I’m going home to Ozanköy carrying some kid I don’t even know who the father is.’
I pulled over onto the hard shoulder, parked up, got the hazard lights flashing. She watched me roll a smoke, spark it up.
‘Forget the laptop,’ I said.
She smirked. ‘You’re the one keeps banging on about the laptop. You seriously think Finn’d be dumb enough to keep anything useful on it? Saoirse could’ve sent some scumbag in any time she wanted, break into his apartment, the studio.’
‘So why’s everyone want the Mac?’
‘Saoirse wouldn’t be exactly up to speed on the latest in computing. So long as she thought everyone else wanted the Mac …’
‘The woman’s looking for a suicide note. Wants to know why her son—’
‘Come on, Harry. You still believe that crap?’
It didn’t matter a fiddler’s fuck what I believed anymore. ‘So if there’s nothing on the laptop …’ I prompted.
‘There’s a flash drive.’
‘Right.’
‘Finn buried it all.’
‘I hope he marked it with an X.’
‘In cyberspace,’ she said.
‘Christ.’
She was talking about Grainne’s trust fund. How Gillick had worked with Big Bob Hamilton on a rewrite of his will, this not long before Big Bob went for a header off the dock. Essentially, the changes put Finn in control of the trust fund once he came of age.
The flash drive had all the codes, the passwords, the details of the electronic transfers Finn had been making over the last couple of years as he bled the fund dry.
‘How much are we talking?’ I said.
‘Well, the downturn has changed everything. It’s not worth anything like—’
‘How much?’
‘One-point-eight million,’ she said.
‘Jesus.’
I wondered how Ben might have turned out, bright kid that he was, had there been a trust fund waiting for him when he came of age. A tidy little nest egg to put him through college, maybe set him up in business designing his own computer games.
The pain of him throbbing now, as if I’d become entirely an abscess, skin stretched taut across a pus-filled void.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘I’m just wondering,’ I said, ‘what happens if you get your hands on this one-point-eight.’
‘We do a split,’ she said.
‘Wrong answer. But what I’m asking is, what’s to stop you taking the money, aborting the baby and taking off for Monte Carlo to find another sap like Finn?’
‘Because I need it for something else.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘To break Saoirse.’
‘Say again?’
‘I’ll be needing most of it,’ she said, ‘to break Saoirse.’
Which was interesting. ‘How’ll you do that?’
‘The first thing,’ she ticked it off on her finger, ‘is a paternity test proving the baby is Finn’s.’
‘Which might be expensive,’ I said. ‘Especially if it’s not.’
‘Meanwhile,’ she went on, ‘I need to hire a PR company, get a campaign organised to let all the investors know where they really stand with Hamilton Holdings. Get enough of them on board to call an EGM, bring in some outside accountants to take a look at the books. At the same time we’re asking some questions of NAMA, making sure the right journos have the inside line on how HaHo is setting up to buy back the choicest bits of its portfolio at rip-off prices, screwing the taxpayer.’ She’d thought it through. Not all the way, maybe, but at least she was facing in the right direction. ‘The newspapers love all that family feud shit, don’t they?’
‘Their readers do, anyway.’ I took a last drag off the smoke, dropped it out the window. ‘You’re serious about this?’
She got herself ha
lf-turned in the passenger seat so she was facing me. ‘You can think what you want about me and Finn,’ she said, ‘all that gold-digging crap, but I never gave a fuck about his money. It was Saoirse who was all about the money. And now Hamilton Holdings is fucked, about all that’s left is Grainne’s trust fund. Which was why Saoirse was pressuring Finn, giving him all this family-first bullshit. Time to circle the wagons, start again. Why do you think he started making transfers out of the fund in the first place?’
‘Knowing Finn, I’d say it was because he reckoned one-point-eight million would buy him a nice slice of the easy life in Cyprus.’
‘Because you’re like all the rest. One time,’ she cracked a grimace, ‘Saoirse told him the money was his crutch. Saoirse, of all fucking people. Telling him he needed to stand up straight, learn to walk on his own.’
‘Maybe she knew him better than you think.’
She nodded at that, slowly. ‘She knew him well enough to know what buttons to press,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care what any inquest says, it was Saoirse who walked him out that window and pushed.’
And then he came down on my cab and blew my life to shit, taking Ben with him as collateral damage.
It had a nice symmetry, alright. Grab Saoirse Hamilton’s blood money and make her choke on it.
‘This flash drive,’ I said. ‘It could be anywhere.’
‘Sure,’ she said. A nasty little grin. ‘Except you knew Finn, his perverse sense of humour. If Saoirse was giving him grief about money being his crutch, where would he be likely to hide the flash?’
35
The PA yard still stank of burnt petrol, warm tar. The crime scene tape hanging limp.
‘Didn’t take them long to move on, did it?’ Maria said.
Budgets and resources being what they are these days, I was more surprised they hadn’t taken the crime scene tape with them when they left. The chalk outline, too.
We gave the scorch mark a wide berth, the jam stain on the tarmac that was still purple at its centre but mostly sun-browned and flaking. It was worth trying the door, on the off-chance the cops had wandered away without locking up, but no joy. So I left Maria out front and went around the side, scaled the rusted fire escape again. Came in through the studio as the phone Herb had given me beeped, a text message to say Maria’s flight was booked, 7.30 PM to Gatwick out of Knock. Which gave us about three hours. I went on down the metal stairs to the ground floor, padding across the silent gallery. Let Maria in, directed her to the window.
‘You keep sketch,’ I said. ‘If anything moves, do that scream thing again.’
Then I crossed to the rear of the gallery, went through to the storage area behind. Opened the metal door and got a half-second warning, the clickering of nails on concrete, realising too late I hadn’t announced my presence. A furry Panzer exploded out of the dark. Jaws open, teeth gleaming in the gloom. I ducked away, rearing back, so the crown of his head hit me full-force in the chest. Heard the jaws snap and then I was down, bowled over. He skittered on the concrete as his paws scrabbled for grip, and then he bunched and sprang again.
Sprawled on my back, winded and weak, it was all I could do to meet his lunge halfway, bounce an elbow off his snout, grab a handful of rough fur beneath his throat. Gobs of spittle spattering my face as he slavered and snarled, forepaws on my chest, the rear scraping in my groin like he was rucking out a scrum. I tried kneeing him off but he had all the weight and momentum, his relentless twisting and snapping wearing me down.
There came a shrill whistle with a neat little trill. His head shot up as if jerked by a chain, ears pricking. A plaintive whine.
‘Bear,’ Maria urged. ‘C’mere, Bear!’
One last gouge in my groin and he was gone, launching himself at Maria like some grotesque teddy bear, all snuffles and short barks, skittish now. I sat up, shaking so hard I could barely tug my shirt free, wipe the drool from my face.
Starving, I guessed, and maddened for the want of water cooped up in that heat. Had the cops fed him before they’d left? Doubtful.
I went into the storage room and opened a couple of well-gnawed cans of dog food, scooped them into a bowl. Brought that outside and put it down on the ground, slid it across the concrete in his general direction. He’d wolfed it all down when I got back from the bathroom with a bowl of water, Maria hunkered alongside tugging his ears, so I opened another couple of cans of food while he inhaled the water, lapping at it so fast he splashed more than he drank.
‘He’s just a big dopey kid really,’ Maria crooned, tears in her eyes as she tickled Bear under the throat. ‘Aren’t you, Bear?’
A big dopey kid, sure. When you weren’t eyeball to eyeball, his jaws crunching, eyes rolling back white in their sockets. All the better, my dear, to inspect the instinct that had taken his lupine ancestors all the way from the tundra to the ground floor of an art gallery a couple of million years later.
A big dopey stone-cold killer.
Except it wasn’t really Bear she was talking to. It was the other big dopey kid, the one with the Brian Jones fringe and shit-don’t-matter grin, the one who’d walked away forever when he’d taken a stroll off nine stories out into the big empty. I was tempted to suggest she’d be better off talking to the jam stain out in the yard, but I let it slide, went through to the storage room again. The place stank of stale piss and shit, although at least Bear’d had the good grace, or sense of self-preservation, to leave all his deposits in one corner. The pile of crutches lay loosely stacked behind his kennel. I picked one up, shook it. Then another. The rattle of their hitting the concrete alerted Maria to the reason we were there, and she slipped in beside me, picked up a crutch.
She swallowed hard, although whether that was from the rancid stench or some repressed emotion was anyone’s guess. ‘We were supposed to be bringing these home to Cyprus,’ she said.
‘I heard, yeah.’ Finn, the part-time philanthropist. ‘Noble as all fuck, he was.’
She shook the crutch, tossed it aside. Bear wandered in, licking his chops. ‘No need to get pissy,’ she said.
‘I just said he was noble as all fuck. What more do you want?’
She shook another crutch, threw it down. Bear had a nuzzle at it, wandered off. ‘Some people used to get sniffy about it, alright,’ she said. A tart edge now to her tone. ‘Mainly because it made them feel bad about not helping out.’
‘Not me.’
She gave a light shrug. ‘I guess some people are more inclined to help.’
‘Spare me the noblesse fucking oblige, alright? The guy had more time and money than was healthy, he was working off his guilt and impressing the pants off you in the process. Nice work if you can get it.’
‘Jealous much?’
‘Keep talking,’ I waved a crutch at her, ‘and you’ll be needing one of—’
A dull clunk. Her eyes widened.
The crutches were telescopic, the kind with holes punched in the lower half so they were adjustable to the user’s height. I pushed the metal knobs in, twisted the bottom half of the crutch free. A silver-grey flash-drive dropped out onto the concrete.
Neither of us reached for it. Instead we stared at the rolled-up canvas protruding from the top half of the crutch.
‘What’s that?’ Maria said.
I slid the canvas free, unfurled it. A landscape scene, some upland moor of rock and heather, a vast sky, a storm brewing.
There were sixty-plus crutches in the pile. We went through them all. Twenty minutes later we were staring at nine canvases in total, all landscapes. Each one signed, none of them by Finn.
The one that caught my eye was a fiery sunset, a vermillion blaze I could’ve sworn I’d seen in the very recent past, hanging opposite a bank of elevators in a hospital lobby. Not that my testimony would’ve been worth shit. Any half-decent lawyer would’ve torn me to shreds, this on the basis that I’d been pie-eyed on pills at the time, and perhaps understandably distracted as I staggered upstairs to visit my son, co
matose in intensive care.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said.
‘Maybe the crippled orphans were supposed to pin them on their walls,’ I said, ‘brighten up the place a little.’
36
Maria pocketed the flash drive, got the leash on Bear. More of a chain, really, with a plaited-leather grip. The canvases went back into the crutches. Originals, I was guessing, their fake twins hanging on walls all over the country. I wondered if they were all Finn’s work, or if he hadn’t brought some of the Spiritus Mundi crew in on the scam.
Either way, they’d come in useful the next time I saw Tohill. Nine originals in oil had to be worth at least the equivalent of ten grand in coke in a trade, especially when the oils could well be that thread Tohill was looking to pull.
We stepped out into the blazing sunshine, blinking against the glare. Bear tensed, growled low in his throat.
He was leaning back against the Phaeton, shades on, face upturned to the sun. Basking, both hands in the pockets of the waist-length leather jacket.
Toto fucking McConnell.
‘So I’m on my way over to Herbie’s to see what the story is about a certain delivery I’m expecting,’ he said, ‘because for some reason Herb isn’t answering his phone, when I get a call from one of the boys, says he’s seen Jimmy’s motor only it’s not Jimmy driving, it’s this guy he thinks he knows from the taxi rank, Harry Rigby, only he’s wearing an eye-patch so he can’t be sure. Now this is interesting, because Harry Rigby should know something about this certain delivery I’m waiting on, so I ring Jimmy to see what the score is, why Rigby has his car. Except Jimmy isn’t answering his phone either. So I tell the guy to stay with the Phaeton, keep me posted. Next thing I hear, Rigby’s down at the docks, the PA building, where the guy he vouched for a couple of nights back took a dive onto one of my cabs. So here I am, wondering what’s what.’
There was no one in the battered Golf he’d parked to one side, but that meant nothing. He could’ve had a couple of guys staked out anywhere, maybe waiting outside the yard.