Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (11 page)

I ducked out through the east window onto the flat tar roof, where Dutch had unfolded the deckchair, got himself
comfortable
. From there the view was rooftops down as far as the river, then the bay opening up beyond Yeats’ Bridge. Benbulben a
purple
haze ten miles out. Dutch peered up at me, bleary-eyed.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what the fuck happened you?’

‘Finn Hamilton jumped off the PA.’

‘So I hear. Didn’t know he landed on you.’

‘Damn near did.’

I took a hit off the spliff he offered, ignoring the stale whiff of blood caking black under my nails. He nodded along while I filled him in, gloomy but unsurprised. He’d known Finn, had hosted his band once in The Cellars, the usual deal, the boys drinking free for as long as they played. Which didn’t exactly put a hole in Dutch’s pocket. Finn’s boys were a Rollerskate Skinny tribute band, or more accurately a tribute band playing the
Horsedrawn Wishes
album, a loose setup with his mate Paul on drums, a couple of the lads who jammed up in Dude McLynn’s on bass and rhythm, Johnny Burrows picking away, Finn taking the lead and vocals. That night they’d been bottled off after two songs, Dutch lobbing lemons from behind the bar. Spanners trapped in a spin-cycle, he reckoned, until I gave him the CD and he realised that was how they were supposed to sound, the Pistols trying on Beethoven’s Ninth. Dutch didn’t buy it. ‘So he’s put together this tribute band to play what you’re telling me is the greatest album of all time, except the real band went bust because they couldn’t play it live, couldn’t tour. Is that it?’

In a nutshell, pretty much.

That was Finn, though. Watching him up there that night on the non-existent stage, ducking bottles, putting all that effort into playing songs nobody knew or cared about, not giving a shit what the audience liked or thought it wanted – yeah, sure, he was a
dilettante
, self-indulgent. But you’d want to have a dead soul not to applaud the nobility of the gesture, the quixotic purity of it all.

And maybe that was the problem right there. That Finn had surrounded himself with people who’d encouraged his every extravagance, who’d clapped him up onto the stage knowing the whimsy could only end badly, or out onto those cliffs to watch him dive, cheering him all the way out onto that ledge nine storeys up.

‘And you’re feeling guilty enough to try,’ Dutch said when I told him Saoirse Hamilton wanted me to find Finn’s suicide note.

‘His sister says it’s traditional.’

‘Bullshit.’ He yawned and scratched at his skull stubble. ‘Say you were even psychic, you twigged to what he was planning. Okay, you could’ve stopped him. This one time.’

‘Once might have been enough.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up, Harry. There’s an epidemic out there, blokes jumping every day. And you know blokes, the first you’ll hear is the splat.’

‘They’re not fucking lemmings, Dutch. Every one of them has a good fucking reason to go.’

‘Reasons plural. It’s never just one thing.’

‘Sure, yeah. But I’d say if you went through every last one, money’d be an issue somewhere along the line. And whatever else Finn had going on, money wasn’t a problem.’

‘Harry,’ he said quietly, ‘the guy was a diagnosed schizo. I mean, that’s how you met him, right? All fucked up over his father, traumatised, he’s burning down everything that can’t run away.’

‘I told you that in confidence, Dutch.’

He looked pointedly over both shoulders. ‘Who else is here?’

‘Anyway, that was all a long time ago.’

‘So was the Big Bang, and we’re still dealing with that shit too. And the guy was smoking his head off, Harry. Not exactly what the doctor ordered, eh?’

‘You’re saying I enabled him.’

‘Fuck
that
. You didn’t sort him out, he’d have gone somewhere else.’

‘He didn’t, though, did he?’

‘Don’t
do
that, Harry. Seriously, can you hear yourself? You’re like a teenage girl.’ A mincing tone. ‘“Should I have known? Was
I
the reason he jumped?” You’ll be starting a fucking Facebook page for him next.’

‘Yeah, well, something sent him out that window.’

He exhaled a long draw and held out the spliff. ‘And you’re sure,’ he said, serious now, ‘it was something and not someone.’

‘I was the only one around.’

‘Far as you know. How long were you up there?’

‘In the studio? Twenty minutes. Maybe more.’

‘Plenty of time for Gillick, this Jimmy guy, to get around the back. Up the fire escape. Or anyone else, for that matter.’

‘Possible, yeah, except the cops didn’t find any sign of a
struggle
. Jimmy’s a big man but Finn’s tall, he wouldn’t have gone out that window easy. And anyway, why would Gillick want him gone? He’s the family solicitor, he’s horse-trading with Finn for the PA.’

‘Except you’re saying, the mother reckons that couldn’t happen.’

‘That’s what she told me.’

‘Maybe Gillick found a way around it.’

‘That’s what I said. But Gillick’s in tight there, covers all the legal shit for Hamilton Holdings. Always has. I doubt he’d blow a sweet deal like that for a one-off on the PA, a piece of shit no one wants.’

‘So maybe it’s someone else.’

‘Who? Finn’s a good guy, Dutch, he’s in the
Champion
every second week with some charity or other. Runs the artist’s co-op, Christ, he’s out on a limb for—’

‘Sure, yeah. But a good-looking guy like that, plenty of cash to flash, he liked to put it about …’

‘Not since Maria. Not that I heard, anyway.’

‘He’d hardly go broadcasting it on the radio, would he?’

‘No, but he was making plans, getting married. Moving to Cyprus.’

‘Sure,’ Dutch said, ‘one step ahead of the posse, some father waving a shotgun. I mean, this Cyprus move, it’s all a bit sudden, right?’

‘Last night was the first I heard of it, yeah. But who knows how long he was planning it? And anyway, it was nothing he actually said, but …’

‘What?’

‘He mentioned kids, Dutch. How Cyprus was this great place for raising a family.’ I shrugged. ‘I got the feeling, just the way he was saying it, that Maria is pregnant.’

He winced. ‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How is she?’

‘I don’t know. I went around there but she wasn’t home, and I couldn’t raise her on the phone.’

‘Does she even know?’

‘No idea.’

‘Christ.’

‘I should ring her again,’ I said, and suddenly the tiredness was an ache in my bones.

Dutch hauled himself out of the deckchair, laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘A few more hours won’t hurt. Get some sleep, get your head straight.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘And Harry, this suicide note bit.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t get sucked in. Family shit like that, you don’t want to get involved. The mother wants it found, let her find it herself.’

He left. I tumbled into the deckchair, had one last suck on the spliff and waited for what Mailer once called the biles and jamborees of the heart.

Nothing stirred.

Too soon, maybe. Still in shock. Too numb to feel and too exhausted to start building bridges between what had been and what would have to be. And maybe it was just that he wasn’t dead, not tonight. Not until I closed my eyes and rolled across the stones and woke up tomorrow with Finn sealed in yesterday’s tomb.

Just one more fucking thing, man
…

Yeah, I could nearly hear him now, that hollow chuckle, how being dead was just one more fucking thing. It had been our mantra inside, our koan. No matter how bad it got, it was just one more fucking thing, no worse there is none …

The night I met Finn he was walked into the cell, eyes glazed, a screw to each arm. And yeah, he stank like the pit lane at Le Mans. He crawled onto the bottom bunk and lay on his back all night, hardly able to breathe, unblinking and endlessly fascinated with whatever it was he saw in the pattern of rusty springs and bare mattress above his head. Next morning I tried to rouse him and if he hadn’t been warm I’d have said he was dead. I left him to it. A good-looking guy with a shaggy mop of blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Bad enough, but he was limp and vacant, passive and beyond caring. A walking invitation to the kind of man who doesn’t need an invitation, prefers not to be invited.

The days spun out. Finn slouched through them dull and unaware. He moved when they told him to, popped every pill they put on his tongue. A tiny jerk of the head when spoken to, as if called to from the top of a very deep well. His face hardly changed. Asleep or awake, it was a hard-cornered mask. About the only muscles that moved were those hinging his jaws. He chewed with a mechanical indifference, staring into the space between the shoulders across the table. None of which was unusual in Dundrum.

He’d been there six weeks or so when we finally clicked. A group session, shooting the shit with the shrink and lying through our collective teeth, when Finn, at my shoulder, started in with this sing-song murmur. ‘
Trying to get well, no lies here lies
…’

I glanced across and caught an anarchic flicker in the pale blue eyes. The line triggering the next, so that we half-hummed it together, ‘
Swab the temples of the untapped dreamboy, a jagged day in life
…’

He nodded. ‘So how’s that temple swabbing coming on?’

I shrugged. ‘Just trying to get well.’

And just like that, it was on.

Sometimes that’s all you need. One line, the faintest of
connections
. Both of us convinced of Rollerskate Skinny’s greatness.
Pet Sounds
, according to Finn, being the tinkling of nursery rhymes on a xylophone by comparison.

But yeah, it all flowed from that one line. By the end of the week he’d told me about his father drowning, Cap’n Bob going down with the HMS BMW. How the big fat joke was that it’d been his mother, Saoirse, who’d filed the papers and had him locked up. Saoirse, meaning freedom. This after Finn had moved on, moved up, from torching sheds and half-built houses on derelict estates, had been caught gas-handed outside The Grange itself.

I’d told him about Ben, how he’d been born five days overdue, which made him, as close as science could guess, nine months, three weeks, five days and forty-two minutes old when I held him for the first time. Not much bigger than a volleyball, even
swaddled
, a tiny and badly peeled turnip wobbling on the skinny neck. How I’d cradled him in my arms and made no extravagant
promises
: no harm would come, I’d whispered, so long as I had any part to play. How that was promise enough to put a bullet in his father.

I’d told him that Ben wasn’t mine, okay, but that blood
doesn
’t think, doesn’t feel and doesn’t hurt. Blood pumps and blood bleeds and that’s as far as blood goes.

We laid it all out, every card on the table. A weird kind of poker with no bluffs or blinds, where everyone walked away a winner. I even told him my real name, what Harry was short for. I’d never told anyone that, not even Dee, not even when we were good.

He’d done eleven months. The night before he checked out, he popped his three pills and said, ‘Listen, just tell them what they want to hear. They think you’re a looper anyway, always will. What they need to believe is you’ve convinced yourself, not them.’

He’d walked out of Dundrum with a stack of canvases and an idea. Took a couple of months to work up the outline of a
project
, then went to the financial controller of Hamilton Holdings to sound her out with an informal proposal. Three days later he was standing before the board making a proper balls of a PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t matter. The idea was sound, and by then Hamilton Holdings had one foot in NAMA and hurting bad, looking for ways to diversify. And so Finn was appointed to the official position of art consultant with Fine Arte Investments, a division of Hamilton Holdings dedicated, according to the
literature
, to the creation and management of art portfolios for the discerning investor.

It didn’t exactly work out like that. Very few of the clients even wanted to see the art. ‘The fucking price tag, yeah, that they’ll frame.’ Finn’s role was to match a client to a particular work, so that it looked to the casual observer that there was some kind of coherence to the portfolio, and then get busy donating the pieces to any place that’d make space on its walls – hospitals, town halls, municipal buildings, libraries. The idea being that charitable donations could be written off against tax. ‘Leave a painting long enough on someone else’s wall,’ he reckoned, ‘it pays for itself. Then sell the fucker on.’

Telling me all this when he came to visit me in Sligo Mental Hospital, where I’d been transferred for good behaviour after three years in Dundrum. Not exactly a halfway house, but a sign they believed you’d convinced yourself that life didn’t have to be one long sadomasochist piñata party.

In theory, the transfer was supposed to aid my reintegration into society, especially when it came to Ben, giving him access, making it easier for Dee to bring him for visits.

It never happened. My fault. Couldn’t face him.

Dutch dropped in every now and again, kept me posted about Dee and Ben. They seemed to be doing just fine without me.

Finn came by more regularly, maybe once a month, each time with a new Big Idea. The biggest, I guess, being the day he arrived after three months’ radio silence, tanned like good leather and a gleam in his eye. He’d gone to Cyprus to see if he couldn’t see what Oscar Epfs had seen, that famous light, wondering what it might do for his landscapes. He’d even tracked down Deirdre Guthrie, herself a flamenco dancer under the
nom de plume
Candela Flores and scion to the Guthrie family of artists, who as a young girl had been more or less adopted by Epfs, aka Lawrence Durrell, during his stay in Bellapais, that quasi-mythical village eyrie high above the flat plain of the northern coast.

Finn had never said so, not outright, but I’d always presumed the Spiritus Mundi gallery, which was organised according to a loose co-op structure, was both inspired by Deirdre Guthrie’s gallery in Bellapais and some kind of self-flagellating bohemian reaction against his official position as consultant with Hamilton Holdings. Or Ha-Ho Con, as Finn referred to his tie-wearing alter-ego.