Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (15 page)

‘Or maybe,’ she said, doing something pouty as she tried to pop a smoke ring, ‘it’s just too much hassle, you being
permanently
stoned or asleep.’ A twitch in the corner of her mouth, something smiley but sad. ‘I swear, one day you’ll ring me to remind you where Ben lives.’

No pain like an old pain.

‘Hey, Dee? You’re the one forgot which brother she was
supposed
to be sleeping with. So let’s cut the—’

‘Is that all you’ve got?’ She flipped away the cigarette, slid the patio door closed, then advanced down the flagstones with her arms crossed. ‘The only reason I ask is, every time there’s any kind of dispute you bring it up.’

‘You’re the one who brought Ben into it.’

‘Don’t you fucking start on—’ She pulled up short, tilting her head as she peered at me. ‘Oh for Chrissakes,’ she said, ‘do
not
tell me you were fighting again.’

I couldn’t decide which was more disappointing, that it’d taken her that long to notice the gash in my forehead or that she thought I ever stopped fighting.

Ben’s Sligo Rovers shirt was the last item to get pegged up. ‘It was Finn,’ I said.

‘You were scrapping with Finn?’

She hadn’t heard. ‘Not exactly.’ I rolled a fresh smoke while I told her the story, Finn’s swan dive, keeping it brief, already tired of how pathetic it all sounded, how sordid and final.

Death can be heroic or shocking or at the very least inevitable, but generally there’s a vital one remove, the instinctive
disassociation
. Nobody ever thinks they’ll get cancer or be hit by a bus, or get so old their brains will melt into mush.

Suicide is different. It lives under the skin, too close to the bone. There’s no comfort in it, no perverse schadenfreude to be mined. It’s in all our gift.

Her eyes gleamed. The words were salt on ice, her rigid stance softening, the arms uncrossing to open into what might have become a hug before she caught herself, remembering. The hand that had launched itself towards my left shoulder, perhaps to pat it, or maybe to cup my cheek, wound up covering the O of her mouth.

‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Harry, I’m sorry.’

But it was there in her eyes. First Gonzo, now Finn.

I was some kind of jinx.

God help me, but for a split-second I couldn’t help but
wonder
if she’d been sleeping with Finn too.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I need to borrow the car.’

The damp eyes froze. ‘
The
car? You mean
my
car.’

‘That’ll be the one, yeah.’

‘Not a chance in hell.’

I could tell she was gauging how likely it was I’d invented Finn’s suicide just to soften her up.

‘The cab’s off the road,’ I said, ‘and I’ve a regular looking to be brought to Knock. I can’t afford to turn him down.’

‘You’re not even insured on my car. And anyway, I need it to get to work.’

‘You could always ring a cab.’

A snort. ‘You want
me
to ring a taxi so you can bring a fare to Knock?’

Dee confused sarcasm with irony. Not a fatal flaw, but still. ‘I’ll pay you back this evening,’ I said. ‘And don’t sweat me not being insured. Nothing’ll happen.’

‘A nothing like whatever it is has your cab off the road, say.’

‘That was Finn. He landed on the taxi, blew it to shit.’

You’d have thought, her eyes being so expressive, that Dee would have made for easy prey at poker. Except she went the other way, piled on the tells, so I couldn’t work out if she was wishing I’d been the one who landed on the taxi or been in it when Finn hit.

Probably, the laws of physics allowing, both.

‘It’ll only take a couple of hours,’ I said. ‘And I need to get the cab back on the road. If I can pick up a fare in Knock for the trip home, I’m halfway there.’

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.’

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.