Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (24 page)

I couldn’t contradict her there. She had her mother’s genes and they were brewing up nicely, swelling to plateaus in all the appropriate places. But it was in the eyes you saw it best, the eyes that didn’t film with tears despite the tremulous voice. Her
mother
’s eyes, pellucid and skewering.

‘What do you think is going on?’ I said. A shrink’s gambit.

‘I don’t
know
. It’s like …’ She paused. ‘You were at the PA,’ she said. ‘Right? Thursday night.’

‘Yeah, I was.’

‘And you saw it happen.’

‘Correct.’

‘That’s why you came out to the house, to tell my mother.’

‘Sure. I thought it’d be better that way. Rather than—’

‘But you actually saw him jump, right?’

‘I did, yeah.’

‘Did he say anything?’

About her, she meant. For all that she was trying to play the sullen ingénue, she sounded as plaintive as a woman querying the salt content of the ocean in which she was drowning.

‘He said lots of things. If you’re asking if he said anything about you specifically, then no. Same goes for wanting to end it all. He was in pretty good form.’

‘So why did he jump?’

‘I don’t know.’ I’d always wondered what the number umpteen felt like. Maybe I needed to get
I Don’t Know
tattooed to my
forehead
. ‘My best guess is he cracked under the pressure.’

‘Pressure?’

‘Well, your mother doesn’t seem to be very fond of Maria.’

She hooted at that, loud and harsh. ‘You mentioned Maria’s name?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Did she call her a trollop?’

‘Let’s just say there were variations on a theme.’

‘She called her the Whore of Babylon once.’

‘Nice, yeah. Biblical.’

She adjusted her visor as we rolled down into Drumcliffe, the sun streaming in. ‘Problem there is,’ she said, ‘that was always a bonus for Finn. Anything that pissed off Saoirse was good with him.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I
do
say so.’

‘Good for you.’

‘So if it wasn’t the pressure, why did he jump?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest clue.’ I stole another Marlboro Light, got it lit. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said, ‘the cops don’t believe he jumped. They think he was pushed.’

‘Pushed?’

‘Yeah, but don’t get your hopes up. They think it was me pushed him.’

I was glad I’d stolen the smoke before breaking that one. A chill settled between us. ‘Why would they think that?’

‘Because I was there and they can’t think of any reason why he’d want to jump. And before you start thinking like a cop too, I should point out that Finn’d have taken me with him if I’d been sitting in the cab when he landed on it.’

‘I didn’t know he …’ She swallowed hard.

‘Well, he did.’ It was the first time I’d said it out loud, one of those moments when you realise you’ve been thinking
something
a long time and not really known you were thinking it.
I should be dead
.

I felt the crash coming on hard, this on top of damn all sleep and too much coffee, the concussion and the shock, and Ben, Christ, Ben in a coma. I laughed out loud, heard it thin and
shivery
. ‘It’s kind of weird, y’know? Like drowning witches in a pond. If I’d been in the cab, I’d be in the clear but dead. Except I wasn’t, so now I’m in the frame. Jesus,’ I said, ‘I never thought I’d need an alibi for someone’s suicide.’

She flinched, then glared across. ‘You’re a horrible human being.’

‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

‘Why would you even say such a thing?’

‘Because you’re asking all these bullshit questions so you won’t have to face the fact that Finn’s dead and gone and didn’t care enough about anyone to say goodbye before he went.’

I guess that one made us even. It wasn’t exactly a slap in the face, but she recoiled, her colour draining away, and then she flushed. I edged towards the door in case she reached and raked, but when she took a hand from the steering wheel it was to cup her mouth, perhaps to catch the single precious whimper that emerged.

‘Grainne,’ I said. I tried to soften my tone but it came out like a frog gargling gravel. ‘In the long run, it’s better if you deal with it sooner rather than later. Trust me.’

Her eyes were wet, hard and bright. For some reason I thought of Fiver in
Watership Down
. Then she ruined it with a sneer. ‘Oh yeah? Your only brother committed suicide?’

It wasn’t just the eyes. She had her mother’s way with the hired help, too.

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I killed him.’

That bought me a nifty goldfish impression. ‘You …?’

‘Killed him. And watch the fucking road before you kill the rest of us.’

‘But why would you …?’

‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is I buried it when I should have been purging and now it’s too late. So my advice to you is to take yourself off to a dark room and have a good long think about how Finn’s gone. And I mean, forever. You know how you were hoping he’d be the one to link you up the aisle the day you get married? It’ll never happen now.’

‘Jesus,’ she whispered, ‘why are you saying these—’

‘Because it’s
his
fault it’ll never happen. Stop blaming yourself, start blaming him. Otherwise you’ll go daft.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. Maybe, okay, he had his reasons. But whatever they were, they had nothing to do with you. So let it go, cry him into the ground, move on.’

‘You’re a cold fucking bastard.’

‘Yeah, well, someone has to be.’

We were on the long straight into town now, passing Bertie’s Pitch & Putt, which was just as well, because she jammed on and swerved onto the hard shoulder without so much as a glance in the rear-view. I reached over, knocked on the hazard lights. She sat with her shoulders hunched, knuckles white on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead without seeing much of anything at all. Not so much Fiver, now. More Bigwig. Or Woundwort, maybe.

I did a quick tally of the pros and cons of swiping another
couple
of Marlboros, decided against. Reached for the door handle.

‘Don’t get out,’ she said, still staring ahead, the words softly desperate, an old monk’s prayer.

‘Grainne …’

‘He didn’t
do
it. He didn’t jump.’

‘If that’s the way you need to—’

‘Just listen a second,’ she said quietly. ‘Listen, okay?’ And then the rocket fuel sparked in the back of her mind and she punched the steering wheel and suddenly she was screaming at the
windscreen
. ‘All I want is someone to fucking listen to me for
once
!’

I got the message.

In behind the pellucid eyes and layers of kohl and Arctic cool, the grief and the rage, Grainne Hamilton was very badly scared. 

All the Hamilton women wanted me to read their personal
correspondence
. Maybe it was my manly baritone and sensitive poet’s eyes. Or maybe they were congenitally illiterate.

‘There,’ she said, handing across her iPhone.

Finn had set her up with the email address years ago, when she first went off to Kylemore Abbey Boarding School for Girls, so Grainne could bitch without worrying about Saoirse sneaking a peek. The mail I was looking at had the subject header,
To Be or Not
.

‘Shakespeare,’ she said.

‘Sure.’

‘As in,
Will
Shakespeare.’

‘Ah.’ I scrolled down to the body text, said, ‘Listen, we
probably
shouldn’t be parked on the side of the road. Looks odd.’

She drove like she walked, hunched forward ever so slightly around the shoulders, as if hunted, but for so long that it’d become a part of who she was.

A Gra
, the email began, which was a cute touch,
Gra
being short for Grainne and the Irish for ‘my love’.

I scrolled on down, but apart from the attachment, that was it. We were up on Hughes Bridge by then, the traffic building even at that early hour, Grainne edging along in first gear, her slim
fingers
a-tremble where they rested on the gear-stick. I put the phone down on the pile of CDs stacked behind the seats and claimed another Marlboro as my consultancy fee.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’

‘Why would he write that?’

‘I’m guessing he wanted you to know he changed the TF. Like it says.’

She puffed out her cheeks. ‘What I’m asking,’ she said none too patiently, ‘is why he’d
want
to change it. Unless, y’know …’

‘Go on.’

‘Unless he knew something was going to happen. Or thought it might.’

‘Something like what?’

‘
I
don’t know.’

My stomach grumbled. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I could eat?’

‘Eat?’

I told her I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and thought longingly about the tea and toast I’d been promised in the hospital but which hadn’t arrived before I bolted for the emergency exit, making a mental note to write a letter to the
Irish Times
about the disgraceful state of the Irish health service. She gave a harsh kind of sigh but she rummaged around in the
driver
’s door pocket and came up with half a pack of Polo Mints. A thin ring of mint around a big fat nothing. The cosmos, I
presumed
, up to its old tricks. I’d have been better off eating the paper and foil wrapping.

‘This TF,’ I said around three mints tucked into my cheek. ‘That’s a trust fund, right?’

She nodded.

‘And you think Finn was pushed, or was pushed into jumping, because he changed this trust fund, or was trying to. And because you’re the beneficiary, you’re next for the old heave-ho. How am I doing so far?’

She stared straight ahead, chewing on her lower lip. Another nod.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ I said.

‘You don’t know Saoirse.’

‘True enough. Let me put it this way. How much is the trust fund worth?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Probably not north of half a million, though.’

‘Half a
million
?’

‘Look, I don’t know what your mother tells you about her finances, but between you and me, she’s struggling. Finn
reckoned
NAMA has everything, and the only reason she still has The Grange is that someone, probably Gillick, had the wit to sign it over to your mother personally before the hammer came down.’

‘But that can’t be.’

‘Well, it is. Why d’you think Finn was bailing out?’

‘Bailing …’

‘He didn’t tell you?’ She shook her head, her eyes searching mine. ‘Finn was leaving, Grainne. Moving to Cyprus. Setting up his own company, marrying Maria. He had an apartment
complex
development all planned as her wedding present.’ I wasn’t slapping her face anymore, I was stabbing her in the back. ‘I’m guessing he never mentioned that.’

‘No.’

‘Well buckle up, because here’s where it gets complicated. Finn reckoned he was selling the PA building to Gillick to pay for the Cyprus development. Your mother says that’s impossible, because the PA wasn’t in Finn’s name, although my guess is that it’s because NAMA owns it now. Anyway, she says the reason Gillick was with Finn that night, with her blessing, was to
persuade
him to kick Maria to touch.’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’

‘We’ll never know now, will we? Anyway,’ I gestured at the iPhone, ‘I’m guessing Finn was bullshitting Gillick about buying the PA building back from NAMA, at a rock-bottom price, telling him he’d need to kick some seed capital loose from the trust fund to do it. Except Finn had this development in Cyprus lined up.’

A gap opened on our left. She indicated and slipped into it, got off the bridge, drove in along Markievicz Road. ‘He could have told me,’ she said dully.

‘He did. He sent you the email.’

‘About Maria. Moving to Cyprus.’

‘I’m sure he would have, once the time was right. It was
supposed
to be a big surprise for Maria.’

She followed the one-way system until we were on Connaughton Road, the hospital just visible over the crest of the hill. I closed my eyes and pictured Ben prone in his bed and heard a kind of gulping laugh. I looked across at her. ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘I’d have loved to have seen her face.’ Defiant now, despite the tears on her cheeks.

‘It wasn’t pretty.’

She made the right turn down Lake Isle Road, heading for Thomas Street. ‘She
knows
?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But how …?’

‘I told her.’

‘Why the fuck would you tell her?’

‘She asked.’

‘And you betrayed his confidence. Just like that.’

‘It wasn’t that simple.’

‘She
paid
you, Harry. It’s not exactly rocket science.’

‘She hasn’t paid me a penny. And if you want the truth of it, it was Finn’s fault. He lied to me, told me he was selling the PA. Your mother said there was no way he could do that. Things kind of moved on from there.’

‘To where, exactly?’

I took a last drag on the Marlboro, popped it out the window. Got settled in the seat. I sympathised with her, I really did, but I couldn’t muster the strength to play along. It’s all black and white when you’re a teenager, all rights and wrongs, us and them. Takes a lot of excess energy to sustain that quality of idealism, or naivety, or stupidity, and I was just about wiped out, a long and fraught day to come.