by Declan Burke
An iron-sounding chuckle. ‘Grainne is nowhere to be found, Mr Rigby. We’ve tried ringing her, of course, but for some reason she left her phone here this morning when she drove away with you. Naturally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that to the Guards when I file a missing persons report.’
‘You do that. On the off-chance that she does turn up, though, tell her I have the paintings Finn stole. My guy in CAB tells me that the finder’s fee, the reward, should be enough to tide her over for a few months, keep her going until she’s old enough to access the trust fund herself.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘It is. I’ve got the gun, too.’
Silence then, and the faint hiss of static.
‘Perhaps you should come here, Mr Rigby. When Grainne does turn up, you can tell her about her unexpected good fortune in person.’
‘I can do that, sure. Should I bring the gun?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘No trouble at all, Mrs Hamilton. I’ll see you soon.’
42
I got turned in a laneway, drove back to town. Pulled up at the taxi-rank opposite the Town Hall, double-parked.
‘You’re really going after her,’ Maria said.
A flash of some eyes behind a fringe, the hopeful up-and-under look, pleading.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘She’s insane,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘Troubled, some’d say. And with good reason.’ A horn parped from behind. I acknowledged it with a wave as he pulled around me, then knocked on the hazard flashers. ‘You told Grainne you were pregnant, didn’t you?’
‘So what?’
‘Did you tell her Finn was the father?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Mainly because you couldn’t know for sure. Unless you’ve already had a test done.’
‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Harry.’
‘Ideas aren’t really my thing.’
‘Good. Keep it that way. Now let’s-’
‘I need to know.’
She sat there with her hands on the steering-wheel, thumbs tapping the soft leather grip. ‘Archu,’ she said, so softly I barely heard her.
‘What?’
‘You don’t recognise your own name?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Finn.’ She looked up at me then, and there was hate in her eyes, and hurt, and something that might even have been tender. ‘He said it was the night you pulled him back from the edge. Telling him about your brother. How you killed him over a kid who wasn’t even your own.’
Odd. The way I remembered it, Finn had been the one who’d dragged me back from the edge. Telling me about the arsons, the pressures that opened up the fissures deep inside, left him bipolar, suicidal and clinging by his fingertips to that sheer black cliff.
We’d ended up laughing at one another. The way you do when a spark of hope flares. That god-given moment when you realise there’s someone even more fucked-up than you. That there might even be a way back.
Of course, we traced it all back to our mothers. Saoirse for changing Finn’s name from Philip, starting him early down that road of hiding who he really was, the brain-bending strain of pretending to be someone else, always.
‘Is it true?’ she said.
‘Nope.’
‘No?’
‘You know what Finn was like,’ I said. ‘He wanted everyone else to be someone else too.’
She nodded. ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Archu, the Hound of Slaughter. Has a nice ring, just trips off the tongue.’
‘I like Harry better.’
‘I’ll bet you do.’
I got out of the Saab and went around to the first cab in line. When I told him he was up for a run to Belfast, he nearly shit. Hopped out, scuttled around the back of the Saab, started transferring Maria’s bags.
I sat back into the Saab. Maria with the sun-shield down, touching up her eyes in the mirror.
‘You haven’t had any tests done,’ I said, ‘have you?’
She found that funny in a sour kind of way. ‘What’re you saying, Harry?’ She cocked an eyebrow. ‘You actually give a shit?’
‘If it’s mine, yeah.’
‘And what if I said it was?’
‘Then I’ll come find you.’
She closed her handbag with a sharp click. ‘The baby’s mine, Harry. Right now that’s all I know for sure.’
‘That’s enough to get started.’
A wry smile. ‘You’ve never met my father.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Maybe I will,’ she said. ‘It seems to be all the rage.’
She got out, went around the Saab to where the cabbie was holding the door open. I watched the taxi pull away from the kerb, roll down to the intersection, pause and cut right. She didn’t look back.
43
In the end it was all pretty civilised, if a little cold and excessively formal. But that’s the way of it with executions.
I turned in at the gates of the Grange and drove on a couple of hundred yards until I hit a narrow stretch, the forest encroaching on both sides. Eased the Saab to a halt and then reversed back in a half-circle, blocking the road. I checked the.38, gave the cylinder a spin, tucked it back into my belt.
‘Okay, Bear. Let’s go.’
He loped along beside me as we advanced towards the clearing, ears pricked, a querulous whine in the back of his throat. Familiar territory, even if the smells and sounds were strange. He sniffed greedily at the night air, head turning and twisting, and I wondered how long it had been since he’d found himself outside, in his ancient environment of sycamore and oak. The trees densely bunched, a black-on-dark chiaroscuro charcoal etching. From somewhere came an owl’s whoo-whoo and Bear’s head jerked up, whipped around. A low growl.
‘Sssshhh, boy.’
Not that it’d have mattered if he’d tap-danced up to the house wailing be-bop on a kazoo. I had no plan other than kill or be killed.
Duty and the protocols demanded the former.
As for the latter, well, that had its fringe benefits too.
I paused on the fringe of the forest, clicked my tongue at Bear. He pawed at the ground as I dug out the phone, dialled Grainne’s number.
‘Mr Rigby?’
‘I’m outside.’
‘Please, Mr Rigby. Do join us.’
Eighty yards away the faux-Georgian monument to survival stood stark and silent, the upper storey’s windows ablaze with light. The front door dark and gaping open, as if the house was about to scream.
Us.
Maybe she meant Grainne, and maybe she meant Simon. But I didn’t think so.
He was there.
I could almost taste him.
There came a piercing whistle that cut off with a little trill. Bear stiffened, nostrils flaring as he sifted the night. Then he tossed that massive head, reared back and howled. Lunged forward across the immaculate lawn, howling still, cleared the ornamental pond in one leap.
I stepped out of the trees, followed on. Just strolled across the lawn, angling wide of the pond and the fountain, cutting back again towards the broad steps leading up to the front door.
An easy target, sure. But there were no marksmen in the Grange that night, no snipers. I figured they’d let me get close, talk up the paintings, try something to distract me and then put me down.
Sweat dripping from my fingertips, pooling in the arches of my feet.
Another balmy night.
I went up the steps one at a time, easing the.38 from my belt. The cross-hatched grip feeling clammy. Half-expecting someone to step out of the hallway’s gloom, maybe a herd of suicidal giraffes stampeded in my direction.
Getting through the door, I reckoned, would be the toughest part. I’d be back-lit going through, a black shape against the moonlit lawn behind, unmissable for anyone lurking behind the potted bamboo.
So I hauled out the Jimmy Dean roll for one last tired tumble, ducking throu
gh the door low, rolling to one side, coming up fast with the.38 extended.
Nothing. Only the door at the end of the corridor slightly ajar, offering a thin slice of yellow light.
I trudged along through the deep carpet, both hands braced on the butt of the.38, a weather eye on the balcony above. A murmur of conversation growing louder from the end of the hall.
Don’t go in there, Rigby.
There’s lunatics in there with guns, Rigby.
Desperate folk, Rigby, and at least two of them want you dead.
And all the while I was moving towards the door, realising, or finally admitting, that I hadn’t trekked all the way out to the Grange to kill or be killed.
I’d come to be wiped out. For all to be void.
And yet when I pushed in the door I found myself stepping back, half-expecting the SIG to start blazing away.
The only sounds the crackle of burning logs, a snuffling from Bear.
I stepped inside.
‘When you said you would bring the gun, Mr Rigby,’ said Saoirse Hamilton from the couch, ‘I didn’t realise you planned on arriving like John Wayne.’ Her tone mock-severe, as if chiding a spectacularly stupid child. ‘Should I raise my hands?’
Grainne crouched in the other corner of the couch, feet drawn up beneath her, arms wrapped around her shins. Chin resting on her knees and staring blankly into space. Eyes dull, blank.
On the far side of the coffee table, angled away from the fire, Finn sprawled in an armchair, one leg hooked over its arm. The lazy grin starting.
‘Harry,’ he said. ‘You’re a hard man to put down, y’know it?’
Tickling Bear’s ear, scratching at the fur on the back of his head. Bear squirming pleasurably, driving his head into Finn’s lap.
Of the SIG there was nary a sign.
I crossed Grainne off the list, figured Saoirse Hamilton would be too slow if she tried to draw, put the.38 on Finn.
There were questions I wanted to ask, things I’d have loved to know. If Finn had been committed for arson, or if he’d put himself away, grooming some crazy paranoid to take the fall for him when the time was right. If he’d gone to Cyprus specifically to find some woman who’d offer a back-door escape when the hammer came down.
If he’d known Ben was in the Audi when he’d side-swiped us off the road.
But I was bone-tired by then, and anyway, none of it mattered.
‘To business, Mr Rigby,’ said Saoirse, sitting forward on the couch. ‘Have you a fee in mind for the paintings and the gun? Or should we open the negotiations now?’
‘If you so much as blink again,’ I told her, the.38 still on Finn, ‘I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
She paled. ‘Mr Rigby, I must-’
‘I’m here,’ I said, ‘to kill him. No fee charged. What anyone does with the gun and the paintings after that is up to them.’
‘But Mr Rigby-’
‘Only fair,’ I told Finn. ‘You’ve had two goes at me now, at the PA and running me off the road. One question, though. Did you know Ben was in the car before you rammed us? Or did you just not give a fuck?’
‘It doesn’t have to be like this, Harry.’
‘But it is like this. Ben’s dead. There’s no other way it can be.’
‘As I understand it,’ Saoirse said, ‘you were the one who stole Finn’s car and took your son along for a joyride. Not,’ she said, ‘that he was actually your son. But the point pertains.’
I twitched the gun so that it was pointing at her face. What she said was true, on all counts. Didn’t mean I wanted to hear it.
‘Say that again,’ I said. ‘Please. Just say those exact same-’
‘Sic ’im, Bear!’
With a snarl Bear sprang out of his sitting position across the coffee table, the massive head turning, jaws wide.
It was no contest. A.38 Special, pointed in the right place, will take down a charging rhino.
Bear’s massive, unmissable head was about two feet from the muzzle of the.38 when it blew apart. The impact arresting his momentum, so that his headless body reared back in mid-air, came crashing down on the low table.
There was a moment’s stunned silence, the air ringing. Then Grainne gulped and began to sob. I stepped across the table, Bear’s body, the pool of blood seeping black into the carpet. Cocked the.38 and aimed at Finn’s face.
‘Harry …’
His face the colour of buttermilk. No shit-don’t-matter grin now, just those wide blue eyes filled with the horror of extinction.
‘Jesus, Harry, I didn’t know the kid was in the fucking car.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Mr Rigby.’ Saoirse, sounding hoarse now, realising there was no fee to be paid, no more buying to be done. ‘Surely we can discuss this like-’
‘No.’ Except I was feeling it now, the sick burn, the anticipation of the jolt in my wrist, seeing Finn’s eyes widen in agony, then dull, go lifeless.
My gorge rising at the prospect.
‘An eye for an eye, Finn. It’s how it is.’
She came up off the couch with a strangled bellow, dragging the SIG free from where she’d tucked it between the cushion and the couch’s arm. The Iron Queen, raging as the pillars collapsed and the chunks of masonry went tumbling all about.
I put one in her upper chest, knocked her sprawling back the way she’d come, then swung backhanded, the.38’s butt catching Finn high on the side of the head as he drove out of the armchair. Not a brutal blow, but enough to deflect him wide, so that he head-butted my hip and sent me staggering backwards. His arms around my thighs now, trying to heave me over the coffee table. I got a good grip on the.38 and drove it down into the nape of his neck, the top of his spine, and after that he didn’t do an awful lot of anything much.
It was only then I realised the ringing in my ears wasn’t a ringing at all, but Grainne, eyes closed, arms still wrapped around her shins, screaming into her knees.
‘Shut that fucking noise now,’ I told her. She didn’t even hear me. I hunkered down beside Finn, put the muzzle of the.38 to the back of his head, told him how it was going to be. Took a handful of shirt-collar and dragged him to his feet, pushed him towards the French windows. ‘Some kind of dispute over money, I’d say,’ I told him. ‘She wouldn’t cut you in, you blew a hole in her, couldn’t live with yourself. You know the drill, right?’
I pulled the doors open, shoved him outside. He stumbled up against the low wall, almost tipped over. I reached and dragged him back, got him steady.
‘Step up,’ I said.
‘Harry …’
‘Step fucking up or I blow a hole in Grainne too.’
Still stunned, blinking heavily, it took him three attempts to stand up on the low wall. Below, maybe forty metres straight down, the surf rolled in to break on the jagged jaws of the rocks.
He straightened, wobbled a little. Then he found himself and tensed into a crouch. A crippled kind of grace.
One last dive. One final delicious falling away from the world and all in it.
‘Harry,’ he whispered.
‘Yeah?’
‘All I ever wanted,’ he whispered but that was as far as he got. The vocal cords tend to give up the ghost pretty quick when a bullet punches through the side of a man’s skull.
He turned end over end twice before bouncing off an outcrop and pinwheeling into the surf.
‘Bell jars away, motherfucker.’
44
I shuffled back in from the balcony hollowed out and ready to drop. Preparing a little speech for Grainne, how she’d be needing her passport and a big wide smile for Maria whenever she tracked her down in Cyprus, this presuming she was interested, given her piss-poor experience to date, in trying the whole family malarkey again.
Too blitzed to realise the screaming had stopped.
She was gone.
Yeah, and I needed to be gone too. One last thing to do.
So I dragged myself down the long hallway, past the g
allery of staring eyes. Out the front door and down the steps.
The Rav4 was gone, but there was still enough cars out front, and plenty enough petrol to be siphoned off. A jerry can in the boot of the Land Cruiser.
I made three trips, splashed the petrol through the hallway, the drawing room, the living room. Smashed some bottles of brandy.
Stinking of petrol and cordite and blood.
Back out to the steps, where I rolled a cigarette and got it sparked, tossed the Zippo in through the open door. Then I went down the steps and across the manicured lawn and took a pew on the rim of the fountain, watched the flames take hold. Panes cracking, glass splintering.
The smoke in one hand, tasting foul. The.38 in the other, and it probably wouldn’t taste any better.
Something blew deep in the bowels of the house, a generator maybe, and a million sparks went rocketing off towards the stars, heading back home, and as they glowed and dissipated and faded away I conceded that it didn’t really matter either way if I ate the gun or sat on that fountain rim for the millions of years it would take the sun to go cold and wink out, because life was nothing but a pointless bloody farce, just this impossibly brief flaring between being nothing and dead matter, everyone who ever lived just a constellation of atoms stuck together for long enough to realise it’s just that bit too aware for its own good, and how it didn’t really matter, not when you lean back and have a good long look up into that endless night, that Ben had only lived twelve years instead of surviving to shamble into a hole in the ground, deranged and broken, leaking sticky stuff from every orifice that counted.
But even if it all meant nothing I still wasn’t entitled to put myself away. Didn’t have the right. I could point the finger at Finn or Saoirse Hamilton or Gillick or anyone else I chose, it didn’t change the fact that it was my fault Ben was dead. And the very least I owed him was to live with that, to suffer that torment.
The Grange was burning so hard now my skin felt singed. The roar of the flames so loud that it took me a second or two to realise the phone was ringing.
Herb.
‘Yeah?’
‘Harry? Where are you?’
‘You don’t want to know.’