Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) (25 page)

‘If your mother wants you to know,’ I said, ‘she’ll tell you.’

A deft little snort. ‘Saoirse likes it when I don’t know anything.’

‘I’m sure she has your best interests at heart.’

‘Like she had Finn’s?’

‘Maybe she thought she did.’

‘She had a funny way of showing it.’

You’re funny when you try to be funny, dad
…

We came off the bridge and turned left onto Kennedy Parade, out along the river.

‘Tell me about the gun,’ I said.

‘You’re so smart,’ she said, ‘you know everything, you tell
me
about the gun.’

We’d arrived at what they call an impasse and I was too tired to care about trying to get around it. We drove the next minute or so in silence until she pulled in at the gates of Weir’s Folly, zapped the gates. They sounded a dull
thung
as they jerked open, and she nosed into the half-empty car park. I had a good look around while she found a space close to the waterfront, a view clear up the river to the lake beyond, but all the cars were empty, no shady types peering from behind upside-down newspapers. No reason there should be. If I’d been Tohill, and staking out Finn’s apartment, I’d be inside with a good cup of coffee and the sports pages, waiting for fly Harry Rigby to step into my parlour.

I opened the car door and Grainne said, ‘The gun was my father’s. Finn took it with him when he left home, a kind of memento.’ She fumbled a couple of smokes from the pack, passed one across. I snapped the filter, took the light she offered. ‘I think it was supposed to be some kind of warning,’ she said. ‘Y’know,
Don’t follow me
, some shit like that. Finn wouldn’t talk about it.’

‘And this is when they became estranged.’

‘Estranged?’

‘That’s the word your mother used.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s just the way we are, Harry. Or were, anyway. We’d blow up, there’d be a massive row, then ten minutes later it was like it never happened.’

‘So what changed?’

‘Maria. Saoirse won’t even allow her name be said in the house. Says she’s a tramp whore slut.’ She rolled her eyes.

‘You like her, though.’

She shrugged. ‘She can be a bit up herself sometimes, a bit high maintenance, but yeah, she’s okay.’ She took a hit off the Marlboro, stared off up the river. ‘She was good for Finn, and that was good enough for me. I mean, you know him, right? Finn was a total flake before Maria came along. Don’t get me wrong, he was a pretty cool big brother, he’d let me stay over some nights when I was home on holidays, we’d drink beers, smoke a joint.’ She had a good long look at her reflection in the black polish of her thumbnail. ‘But it was like every night I stayed, there’d be a different girl. One night I got in and the girl got up and left straightaway and when I asked who she was, he couldn’t
remember
her name. He made a joke of it, but I’m pretty sure she was a prostitute. Jesus,’ she said, a bitter half-smile, ‘I’d love to see Saoirse’s face if I told her
that
.’

‘She’d probably cope,’ I said, ‘seeing as she reckoned Maria was screwing Finn for his money.’

Her lips thinned. ‘That’s just Saoirse,’ she said. ‘With her, it’s
all
about money. No one does anything for any other reason.’

I was sitting in a car park delaying a commissioned B&E to nab a gun and a laptop, so I stared wistfully up at the high moral ground and kept my trap shut.

‘I just wish she’d seen them together,’ Grainne said. ‘Last time I stayed over, the Easter break, we had a hoot trying to come up with Irish-Cypriot names for their kids.’

‘I think that was the issue,’ I said. ‘Your mother was worried Maria was taking him away.’

‘To Cyprus? It’s four fucking
hours
away.’

Flying time, sure. Ten if you factor in the security checks. I crushed the smoke,
tempus
fugit
ing onwards. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose you know what this gun looks like?’

‘Small,’ she said. ‘Heavy.’

‘He showed you it?’

She shrugged. ‘He leaves it lying around.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Phil’s messy. You’ll see.’

‘There’s messy,’ I said, noting the present tense, ‘and there’s leaving a gun lying around.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’ll be right there,’ she said, deadpan, ‘in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in his office.’

‘In plain sight.’

‘Sometimes I have X-ray vision.’

‘Did he keep the drawer locked?’

‘Of course.’

‘But he left the key where it could be found.’

She nodded. ‘Taped behind the U-bend under the kitchen sink.’

‘That’s careless.’

An impish grin. ‘Isn’t it, though?’

I opened the door, said, ‘Who’s Phil?’

She flushed. ‘Pardon?’

‘Phil. You just said, “Phil’s messy”.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did.’

‘Well, I meant Finn. Obviously.’

‘Obviously. An easy mistake to make, confusing the name of your dead brother.’

I waited. She stared straight ahead, apparently entranced by the sight of Lough Gill glistering beyond the burger wrappers trapped against the chain-link fence. When she realised I wasn’t going anywhere, she looked across at me, conceding.

‘His real name is Philip. When he was adopted, Saoirse changed his name to Finn. She reckoned Philip sounded too English.’ She shrugged. ‘So I call him Phil when we’re on our own.’

Still with the present tense. ‘I never knew he was adopted.’

‘No?’ Another shrug. ‘We both are. They couldn’t have kids, there was some issue with conceiving. Saoirse never wanted to get into the details.’

‘That’s a pity.’

She bridled. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. For them? Sorry. A stupid thing to say.’

It made sense of a few things, though. Maybe it meant the passport issued under the name of Philip Winston Byrne wasn’t a fake, for one. And maybe, if you’re built a certain way, it’s
easier
to feel estranged from an adopted child than from your own flesh and blood. But it still didn’t explain why Finn had stashed the passport in the cistern, five grand tucked inside.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you stay here. I’ll go up and—’

‘No
way
.’ She opened the car door. I leaned across and grabbed her forearm with my right hand, pulled her back into the seat. She looked down at my hand, outraged. Which was ideal, because it meant she wasn’t watching what I was doing with my left.

‘Maria
needs
me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been ringing and ringing and she hasn’t picked up. She must be—’

‘Gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. Back to Dublin. Cyprus, maybe.’

‘But why would she …?’

‘Why’d Finn send you an email? How come he didn’t just call, or arrange to meet so he could tell you about the trust fund
himself
?’

‘
I
don’t know. Why?’

‘I found a passport in his studio, Grainne. Hidden in the
toilet
cistern, five thousand euro inside.’

‘So?’

‘So it was a fake passport. Put that with the email, the trust fund being changed with a lawyer in Cyprus, and I’m guessing he was planning to duck out. Before anyone copped to the changes.’

‘And Maria?’

‘He’d hardly have left without her, would he? If it was me, I’d have sent her on ahead.’

‘But, but …’ In her confusion she sounded like a small
outboard
engine. ‘If that’s what he was planning, why would he …?’

‘I haven’t a clue. If you come up with a solid theory, be sure to tell the cops.’ I got out of the car, hunkered down. ‘You have the apartment’s phone number, right?’ She nodded, still dazed and processing the new information. ‘Good stuff. You keep sketch. If anyone shows up looking a bit shifty, ring twice and then hang up.’

I stood up. ‘Harry,’ she said. She sounded far away.

I leaned in. ‘What?’

‘I’ll pay you,’ she said. ‘Whatever she’s paying you to steal the laptop, I’ll pay it.’

‘Done deal. You have twenty grand cash handy, right?’

That got her focused again. ‘Twenty
grand
?’

‘Anyway, your mother wants me to try and find Finn’s suicide note. There’s a chance that’ll be on the laptop.’

Her chin up-jutted. ‘Maybe it will,’ she said. ‘And maybe if she was more worried about how Finn felt when he was alive she wouldn’t need to read any suicide notes now.’

‘I’d say what your mother needs right now is comfort. From her daughter, say.’

‘Mother doesn’t need people. People are just something else you buy.’

‘Like you just tried to buy me?’

She’d been poised ever since I’d pulled her back into the car. Now she struck, already gouging, but by then I’d slammed the door closed, so the black-polished nails made a rattling sound on the glass. I waggled a finger at her, then dangled the car keys, pushed the button that central-locked the doors. Then, ignoring the muffled screams and thumps, I hauled my weary bones towards the apartment block. Across the river, high on the hill above the tree-line, the hospital blazed as the early sun set its glass frontage aflame.

I wondered if Dee’s parents had arrived yet, and hoped they had. The vitriol bandied about when my name was mentioned might distract her from Ben’s condition, even for a minute or two.

The stab in my gut answered one question, at least.

No, it wouldn’t be any easier to become estranged from an adopted child.

Love, whatever the hell it might be, and wherever the hell it comes from, has nothing to do with flesh or blood.

Once upon a time Weir’s Folly had been pretty well secured. You needed a zapper to get past the car park gates, and tap a four-digit code into the pad beside the lobby doors to access the building itself. Once inside, getting to the lifts meant passing a booth manned by a concierge who doubled as a security guard, who’d ring ahead just to be sure you were expected.

These days, with the recession in full slump and burglaries on the up, they’d cut back on administration fees by letting the
security
guard go. Perverse, but there it is.

I went on up to the penthouse floor, which had its own lobby, bare but for a potted bamboo standing in one corner, its leaves crisp and turning brown. Not a good look for prospective customers, given that the penthouse suite was also home to Fine Arte Investments, but then, when business gets sluggish up at the high end of the market, the potted plants are always first to feel the pinch.

The alarm didn’t go off when I stepped inside, which suggested someone was home, a fact more or less confirmed by the sound of a humming shower, its splashes echoing down the narrow hall. Finn had split the penthouse into business and home, the hallway opening into a living room converted to a spacious reception area that had the feel of a gallery, with examples of Fine Arte’s wares, or reproductions of same, dotting the walls. The far wall was floor-length windows, or would have been had the curtains been drawn back. In the corner was a closed door on which was a small black plaque with the legend ‘Finn Hamilton, Fine Arte Investment’ embossed in gold.

I crossed the reception area into another hallway, paused
outside
the bathroom door. The shower hummed merrily on but the showeree wasn’t in any mood for singing. Beyond that hallway was a living room proper, strewn with cardboard pizza boxes, foil cartons, empty bottles. Wine, mostly. The curtains were drawn there too and the light had that gritty quality that coagulates when darkness is allowed fester.

I stepped into the kitchen expecting to find unscraped plates stacked in the sink but here everything was pretty much in order except for the nine or ten wine glasses lined up atop the
dishwasher
, each one of them stained purple. Maria favoured a fruity red. Even the bin under the sink was tidy. I reached past it, found the U-bend, the key taped behind. Thus armed, I crossed the
living
room again, the shower still humming, past the master bedroom and into Finn’s study. A scuffed roll-top desk under the window, a filing cabinet behind the door. In the corner stood a recession-proof spiky palm, and diagonally opposite that a
slender
lava lamp mocked up to resemble a Joshua Tree. There was an overflowing bookcase beside the desk, but otherwise the walls were a collage of scenes of Cyprus: postcards, photographs, pages ripped from magazines and calendars. The single cardboard box on the polished pine floor made me wonder why I hadn’t seen others, or any sign at all that Finn had been packing to go away.

The laptop was sitting amidst the usual detritus on the desk, on and open but in hibernate mode. Above it, Blu-tacked to the desk frame, was a hand-written Bukowski quote:
When you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

Looked like Finn had walked away from his typewriter just that once too often.

The desk’s bottom drawer was already unlocked. It took five seconds to confirm that the gun wasn’t there and that the drawer didn’t have a false bottom. All I found was a thick buff-coloured folder labelled
Cyprus
, which contained sheaves of research notes, internet and email print-outs, bank statements, letters to and from real estate agents, most of them based in Girne. A quick flick-through elicited nothing that looked like a suicide note, about which I was mightily pleased.

The laptop, when I nudged it, came to life straight away. I found Finn’s iTunes, scrolled down, clicked on Melanie Safka’s ‘Look What They Done To My Song, Ma’. Cranked up the volume as high as it’d go. Then I went back out into the living room and liberated a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table, got it lit. I was just relaxing back into the creased old leather couch, Melanie wailing about how they’d picked her brain like a chicken bone, when the music cut out.

There was a framed poster on the kitchen door of a woman dressed in food: a pineapple for hair, a dress of assorted nuts, strawberries for earrings, that class of a thing. In the reflection of the glass I could see the darkened outline of the woman behind me, her damp hair a tangle of rats’ tails, legs apart and braced. She was using both hands to point something at the back of my head.