The Devil I Know (20 page)

‘He’s repossessing it,’ Hickey realised, and took off clambering over the debris to jump out the broken window. I listened as he started up another machine and went booting after the repossessed one, and you’ll have read in the papers how that particular confrontation panned out. He was a brave man, Hickey, I’ll give him that. A braver man than me, which is not to say much for him. I could be dead, I realised with a flutter of vertigo when they were both gone and silence had returned to the empty site. I clutched my aching ribs and rocked. Dead, I could be dead. I could be just as dead as the other Tristram St Lawrence. The lucky one.

Larney was waiting at the castle gates when I rounded the corner, standing bolt upright against the ribbed column like a Coldstream Guard. I had never seen his body unfurled before, for he had always been the crooked man who walked the crooked mile. As a child, I had believed that the nursery rhyme was about him. I would not have imagined that he could be so tall.

‘Good evening, Larney,’ I said, the lie tripping off my tongue. It was not a good evening. It was a bad one. And it was going to get worse.

‘The young master didn’t come home last night.’

I paused between the gateposts. The Gardaí must have come knocking. ‘No, I—’

‘The young master didn’t come home last night,’ he repeated, cutting me dead.

I looked him over. Something wrong there. More wrong than usual, that is. Stroke? ‘Indeed, Larney, you are quite right,’ I said carefully. ‘I didn’t come home last night. That is most observant of you.’

He squirmed with pleasure, he positively writhed, and I regretted my harsh tongue in the past. All he needed was to be thrown the odd word of praise. He was just a big child, like the rest of us.

He straightened into his sentry’s stance. Remarkable. I had presumed his twisted spine was a birth deformity.

‘There were five men going to church,’ he began, ‘and it started to rain. The four that ran got wet and the one that stood still stayed dry. Why?’

‘I don’t know, Larney: why?’

‘He was in a coffin!’

‘Ah, very good. Well, goodnight, Larney.’ I set off up the avenue. He shot forward to detain me and cleared his throat.

What is it?’

‘I don’t know, Larney. What?’

But instead of revealing the answer, he went back to the beginning and recited the riddle again in full. I gazed at the stars while I heard him out. Being civil had only encouraged him. This could go on all night.

When he had finished, I still didn’t know the answer.

‘A coffin!’ he said.

‘Another coffin. Excellent.’ I sidestepped him, but he planted himself in my path a second time because suddenly he had grown uncharacteristically nimble. Uncharacteristically nimble and uncharacteristically bold.

‘There is a coffin,’ he began. ‘The mother of the person in the coffin—’

‘That’s quite enough, Larney. Let me pass.’ I was on a short tether where he was concerned. It took no time at all to reach the end of it.

He sighed as if I were trying his patience and began again. ‘There is a coffin. The mother of the person in the coffin is the sister-in-law of your father’s aunt. Who is the corpse in the coffin?’

‘I’ll say it one last time, Larney.’

‘And so will I,’ he rejoined firmly, looking me square in the eye. I caught my breath at his daring and took a step back. He reached out and placed his index finger on my sternum to stay me, to literally stay me, for I could not move. That crooked finger arrested my progress. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin, young master?’

‘Take your hands off me.’

‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ he repeated very slowly, as if I were the simple one, not he. I looked down at my chest. His fingertip had started to burn.

‘I don’t know, Larney. Who is the corpse in the coffin?’

He left me hanging on his reply, an insect mounted on a pin, before retracting his hand. Once contact was broken, I crumpled into a coughing heap, clutching my ribs although my sternum hurt more. Look. [
Witness unbuttons his shirt to reveal a small oval scar
.] He branded me. The Devil’s fingerprint.

‘Get back,’ I gasped when I was able. ‘Get back into your little hovel!’ Larney shrivelled into a twisted form once more and retreated to the gate lodge as fast as his limp permitted, followed by the Jack Russell, which I only noticed then, it had remained so subdued throughout this encounter.

I glanced up as I was racing away from him up the avenue to see the castle burning brightly through the trees. At first I thought it was on fire. Every light shone, every door was thrown open. Even the cellar had been breached – lights glimmered up through the grates. A search party had stampeded through each wing and floor. What could they be looking for? Me, I realised. ‘The young master didn’t come home last night.’ ‘The Gardaí were looking for you.’

There was no patrol car parked on the gravel, just Father’s old Polo, but I stopped dead in shock when I crossed the threshold and found what was waiting for me inside. ‘Oh thank God,’ said Mrs Reid, jumping to her feet. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

Mounted on trestle legs in the centre of the great hall was a coffin. Candlesticks stood on either side of it, twin flames burning. Mrs Reid had been keeping vigil at the head of this coffin. And she had been crying. Her plump cheeks glistened with tears. She opened her arms to embrace me. A set of rosary beads was woven through her outstretched fingers. I held my post by the door.

The lid of the coffin was open. I could not see the corpse inside, not from my post by the door. I did not abandon my post. I looked at Mrs Reid. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ I demanded of her, as Larney had demanded of me.

‘Pet,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘I am afraid I have some terrible news. Your father . . .’ She blessed herself. ‘Last night. God rest his soul.’

I was unable to piece these clues together. I looked at the coffin, and then back at her. ‘Who is the corpse in the coffin?’ I demanded again.

‘Come here to me, pet,’ she said, after a brief hesitation. ‘You’re in shock. I have him laid out. Why don’t you come over and see him?’

I gestured at the pillar candles, the row of empty chairs, her rosary beads, the paraphernalia of Catholic mourning. ‘What do you call this?’ I sounded for all the world like Father. Or maybe she spoke first. Yes, I think that Mrs Reid may have spoken first, although I cannot swear to it. I cannot swear to anything, for normality had slipped out of sync.

The details tumbled out of her mouth in no particular
order
, for she was as disorientated as I was. Mrs Reid and I had fallen into the same pocket of chaos. We were at sixes and sevens in there. ‘I went looking for you as soon as I found him,’ she was saying. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Your bed was unslept in. I couldn’t bring him to a funeral home – he’d have hated a place like that. Dr Chapman said it was his heart. I’ve had the Guards out looking for you all day. I knew something was wrong when he didn’t come down for breakfast in the morning. You know your father – he never slept in. The military past. That’s why I laid him out in his uniform. Right as rain the day before, not a bother on him. It was how he would have wanted to go. I couldn’t have left him in a funeral home. He was born upstairs. So I laid him out myself. At least here he’s with his people.’

Meaning the portraits, I had to assume. The stark truth of the matter was that Father had no people left. The row of vacant chairs only drew attention to the absence of mourners.

The candles flickered and Mrs Reid blessed herself again. I glanced at the ceiling. The wind was whistling through the empty passages upstairs, droning in chords like an aeolian harp. I had not known that it could do that. I had never heard that sound. I realised how little I knew about the castle, but that with Father deceased I was now at the helm. Perhaps it was protocol that all doors be thrown open upon the death of the head of the St Lawrence family so that the wind could sweep through and allow the castle itself to keen. For the Castle was dead. The Castle was in the coffin. Long live the Castle.

‘Sometime during the night, love, in his sleep. It was very peaceful,’ Mrs Reid was reassuring me, although even Mrs Reid, who never failed to give me the benefit of the doubt, must have registered that I had not enquired after his suffering.

‘Where are the dogs?’ I wanted to know instead. I fully understood that I was getting it wrong, that even in death I was getting my relationship with Father irredeemably, irremediably, irrevocably wrong.

Mrs Reid clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘The dogs. I forgot to feed the dogs.’

Father fed the dogs.

‘The gate lodge is to be vacated in the morning,’ I announced. This was my first edict as the Lord of Howth.

Mrs Reid hurried to my side. ‘Sit down, love. You’ve had a terrible shock. God almighty, your hands are freezing.’ She tried to steer me into one of the mourner’s chairs but I was having none of it.

‘Larney has to go,’ I decreed. ‘That’s the end of it. We bury Father tomorrow and then we throw Larney out.’

Mrs Reid stopped trying to warm my hands with hers. ‘Larney?’

‘Yes, Larney. Furthermore, he is not welcome at the funeral. On no account is he to show his face. I want him gone.’

‘Larney
is
gone, love. He has been dead for years.’

‘Years,’ she repeated to reinforce her point when I just stared at her. ‘Sure, didn’t I lay his poor crooked body out
myself
?’

‘
What?
​'

Fergus, it gets worse. ‘Tristram!’ Mrs Reid cried after me when I broke free of her and fled the castle, but the poor soul was too terrorised to venture past the threshold, not after what I had told her – that I had seen a dead man.
Who is the corpse in the coffin?
You are, Larney! You’re the corpse.

My brain had slipped into its default groove and was chanting the usual repetitive guff – admitting that I was powerless over alcohol, humbly asking my Higher Power to restore me to sanity, accepting the things that I could not change and all the rest of it, when it struck me that it was nonsense. That I was chanting pure nonsense and had been for some time. ‘Do you hear yourself?’ Hickey had asked me, and suddenly I did. I did not accept the things I could not change. I would change the things I could not accept. Starting with Edel.

I set off uphill towards the rhododendron gardens. I could hear Mrs Reid beseeching me to come back until her voice faded along with the lights of the castle. It was dark and quiet then. I was at large.

I climbed the jungle bluff and emerged onto the open slopes of the West Mountain. The city lights glittered below. Edel had made this journey first, across the two mountains from her home to mine, wearing that dress I’d been so afraid of getting dirt on, that white sundress knotted at the nape with a butterfly.

I crossed over to the East Mountain. The lighthouses flashed messages to each other along the length of the
coastline
–
Here! I’m over here!
Where are you?
I threaded my way along the bridle tracks. It was September and the heather was in flower.
And we’ll all go together, to pick wild mountain thyme, all along the blooming heather. Will you go, lassie, go?

Although it was late, maybe one or two in the morning by my reckoning, the lights burned in the house on the edge of the moors. Edel was having a sleepless night too. I saw as I approached that a JCB was parked on the driveway. As well as a digger, a cherry picker, a steamroller and one of the gennys. But not the clawed thing that had almost killed us. The giant X had successfully made off with that. Hickey had stashed the remaining machinery where he could keep an eye on it. He was circling the wagons. Edel’s two-seater Merc looked tiny and fragile against their primitive bulk.

I made my way around the side of the house, peering in at each window until I found her. She was perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar in her science lab of a kitchen, sheaves of documents spread out around her on the polished granite worktop. I hadn’t known that she wore glasses. I was about to tap on the windowpane when I spotted her mobile phone on the counter. I took out mine.

Will you go, lassie, go​​?
I texted.

Her phone lit up but she did not. She read the text and returned to her paperwork without so much as a smile. It wasn’t quite the reaction I’d anticipated. There was a calculator on the countertop too, one of those office models that printed its results onto a roll of paper. It seemed unlikely that Edel should possess such a device. It must have belonged to Hickey. Though that seemed unlikelier still.

She tapped in digits, inputting them without raising her eyes from the stacks of paper, for hers were fingers that knew their way by touch around a numeric keypad, it turned out. She frowned at the result that the calculator churned out, tore off the strip of paper and started again. The numbers were not adding up. They never would add up, no matter how she finessed them. All of the money was gone.

I’m outside
, I texted.
Please
meet me
at your front door
.

She sat up and took notice when she opened that text, and deliberated for a few seconds before removing her glasses and slipping off the stool. I ran back around the side of the house, narrowly reaching the front step before she did.

‘Are you out of your mind showing up here?’ she whispered through a fractionally opened door – Hickey must have been inside. She took in the cut of me: the dirty clothes, the unshaven chin, the bloodshot eyes. And the smell. Not forgetting the smell. The fumes of stale booze on an empty stomach were enough to fell a donkey.

‘
Will you go, lassie, go?
’ I sang gently to her, thinking that . . . well, it’s difficult to know precisely what I was thinking, except that I was thinking it very strongly at the time. Thinking it so strongly that I could see it. Us. A future together. Life.

‘Oh my God, are you drunk?’

‘No, darling. Not any more.’

‘Look, it’s a bad time, Tristram,’ she said. ‘I don’t need this right now. There’s . . . well, you know the situation yourself. He’s lost everything. We’re trying to see what we can salvage.’

‘If you’ve lost everything, then you have nothing left to lose. Hickey has nothing left to offer you. So come with me.’

‘For God’s sake, how can I go with you?’

‘It’s very simple. Pack a bag. Or don’t pack a bag. Come as you are.’ I held out my hand, but she just looked at it.

‘Listen, Tristram, all this – us? It has to stop. I’m sorry. You should go home. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.’

She tried to close the door but I held it open. I was stronger than her. Or so I thought. ‘My father died.’

She lowered her head. ‘Yes, I heard. I am sorry for your loss.’

‘The castle is mine now. Come with me across the moors. It’s a soft night. You won’t need a coat. Make that same journey you made at the beginning of summer in your white sundress. You always wanted to see inside the castle. Now you may. You are its princess. You shall have your own wing.’

‘Tristram,’ she began carefully, and joined her palms together as if praying for the right words to come, and I couldn’t help but admire the gesture, as I had admired all her gestures, all the flourishes her hands had performed, although the solemnity of this one warned me to be afraid of what she was about to impart. She took a deep breath to fortify herself, and so did I. ‘Tristram,’ she said again, ‘I realise that this isn’t the best time for you to hear this, in light of your father’s sudden passing, but they’re going to come after your assets now, and some assets can’t be hidden. Some assets can’t be stashed. JCBs and diggers and all that junk parked on the driveway can be made to disappear, as can sums of money, but assets like a castle, assets like your grounds? There’s no place to hide assets like that. There’s no way of sheltering them. It’s unlikely they’ll remain yours for much longer, I’m afraid. All I can suggest is that you go down and strip the place of valuables while you still have a chance.’

Hickey’s voice butted in behind her. ‘Where are the Hobnobs, love?’ At a time like this.

She turned and I caught sight of him over her shoulder, standing with his back to us in the kitchen, barefoot in his jocks. Not that hairy after all. ‘They’re in the cupboard, Des.’ Wearily, as if they’d been over this a million times.

Hickey contemplated the wall of identical white high-gloss units. ‘Where’s the cupboard, love?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, I’m coming.’ She turned to me. ‘I have to go. Let’s be fair about this: we all partied. But now the party’s over. Go home, Tristram.’ She closed the door in my face.

The last thing I saw was the chandelier that Hickey had stolen from Hilltop. But why would Hickey want my chandelier? A chandelier was just a big light bulb to a man like him. It was her. She had spotted it. It had caught her eye, so she had instructed him to take it down.
Strip the place of valuables while you still have a chance
. ‘Keep it,’ I said to the shut door. ‘Keep the chandelier. It’s made of glass, just like you.’

I reeled down the driveway, turned to gape at the ranch in disbelief, reeled down the driveway some more, turned to gape in disbelief some more. I reached the row of palm trees and planted myself there like one of them, still hoping that she’d relent, as if a woman like her had the capacity to relent. A woman as hard as her, a woman as brittle as her, a woman made of glass. I could see that now. I could see right through her now. Transparent as glass.

The journey back all along the blooming heather was a series of random footholds that either rose up to meet my step or pulled sharply away. It was wild mountain time. I tripped on tussocks and plunged into ruts, checking continuously over my shoulder for her slight figure, walking backwards for whole stretches, still praying that she’d come after me, that it was a test, or a trick or, well, anything. Anything other than what it had been. Go home, she had said, knowing that there was no home. That with Father dead the castle had passed to me, and through me, the perfect conduit, and was already gone, gambled away. She had worked it out before I did. She had done her sums. Hickey hadn’t been doing the sums. She had been doing them for him all along.

Where are you
? the Baily lighthouse flashed, majestic upon its rock.

I’m down here
, the lighthouse at the tip of the East Pier flashed back
. Come get me
.

I’m trying
, the Baily signalled.
I’m stuck.

I stopped and crouched over at Michael Collins’s rock. The pain was a fist clenching my heart. ‘Please stop,’ I asked it, ‘please let go,’ but pain doesn’t listen, pain doesn’t obey. My mind was grubbing about in tiny circles. It was digging little holes. The sheer fall of mountain into the sea might have demarcated the end of the world and the end of mine. If I hurled myself into the black depths in full view of her home, she would never look out her picture window again without seeing the precipice over which she had driven me.

Don’t think I didn’t give it serious consideration.

May I have a glass of water, please?

Thank you, Fergus. That’s better. But not much.

And my father lying dead in his coffin with only his housekeeper to mourn him. His name was Amory but I always called him Father. He never called me Son.

And Larney not lying dead in his coffin. That was the
other
thing. Dead, and yet out and about.

The lighthouse beam swept the bay.
Here! I’m down here. Please come.

Oh Jesus, I can’t, I’m stuck.

I felt the tremble of an incipient mental decline, a twinge on the gossamer threads of my troubled mind, alerting me that something nasty had alighted on my web, a black and ugly article. The signal was gaining strength. Rail tracks tingle before the train comes down the line and something big was coming down mine. Then my phone started fizzling. I took it out of my pocket and stared at it. The thing was fizzling like a shorting fuse. I turned around, I don’t know why. I do know why: I sensed a presence. The moors were deserted. I needed a drink. Oh God, oh Jesus, oh anyone who would listen, I needed a drink. I needed one then, and I need one now.

Larney was lying in wait for me in the rhododendrons. Larney had been lying in wait for me all my life. Larney is lying in wait for us all. We know not the hour. He had an absolute corker ready for me; game, set and match. He chose not to reveal his face, but instead called it out from the cover of the glossy shrubs.

‘What walks upright and yet has no spine?’

I kept moving and my phone kept fizzling and the train tracks kept tingling away. Something big was coming down the line, something nasty.

He shuffled out and the whole forest shook, down to the last leaf. ‘Are you not playing?’ he taunted my retreating form. ‘Are you not playing with the rough boys any more?’

I started to run and he limped after me, the two of us threshing through the dark. He knew those trails as well as I did. Like the backs of our hands.

‘Answer me, young master: what walks upright and yet has no spine?’ I could feel him wheezing down the back of my neck.

‘You!’ he answered when I did not. ‘You have no spine.’

That wasn’t the corker. He still had the corker up his sleeve.

‘Wait, wait,
wait
,’ he called after me, demolishing the undergrowth in his path. ‘I’ve got a better one for you. Are you ready?’

This was the corker. And no, I wasn’t ready.

‘Who is Monsieur Deauville?’

I stopped dead in surprise. Larney stopped too and so did the racket. ‘Where did you hear that name?’

‘Every soul in Christendom knows that name. I’ll make you a deal: answer the riddle and I’ll let you go free.’

I took off down the hill again, listening to him, despite myself. Considering his offer. He was hard up behind me again in no time.

‘But there’s a catch, young master. You have to answer the riddle correctly. So here we go: who is Monsieur Deauville?’

M. Deauville is my sponsor.

I didn’t speak the answer. I merely thought it. But Larney contrived to hear it all the same.

‘Wrong answer, young master,’ he declared with glee. ‘Monsieur Deauville is not your sponsor. Now, as I said, there’s a catch.’

We emerged from the gardens onto the top of the avenue. And that’s when I heard it.
Tocka tocka
. The catch. I turned around. Larney was trotting across the tarmac. My eyes dropped to the source of the sound.

‘Larney,’ I said, and pointed. ‘Your feet.’

Larney looked down at his feet. His teeny tiny little feet, not much bigger than champagne corks. He broke into a mocking jig to showcase them.
Tocka tocka, tocka tocka
. Not fingertips flying across a keyboard but the sound of hooves.

‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘oh Jesus.’

‘
Deh
,’ said Larney, ‘not
doh
.’

That cultured tone. He was speaking in M. Deauville’s voice.

‘
Deh
,’ he said again, ‘not
doh
.’

‘What?’

‘
Deh
,’ he repeated, ‘not
doh
.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘
Deh
not
doh
,
deh
not
doh
,
deh
not
doh.’

At that, I turned and made a run for it. No spine. He followed in close pursuit. We lashed down the hill together, going at it hell for leather, an Armageddon of noise on the dark still avenue.
Deh
-not-
doh
,
deh
-not-
doh
,
deh
-not-
doh
– his infernal chant was charged with the rhythm and momentum of a runaway train. Something big had come down the line, something huge.