The Devil I Know (22 page)

The garda had coffee waiting for me in a polystyrene cup. ‘Not the standard you’re used to, I’m afraid,’ he apologised as he handed it over. I smiled. Nobody knows what I’m used to.

‘So what are the charges?’ I finally asked when he began making noises about taking his leave. The doctors wanted to keep me in overnight for observation. The guard could hardly slap on the cuffs there and then.

He had been about to place his hat on his head but he lowered it and frowned. ‘The charges?’

‘Yes. What have I been arrested for?’

‘You haven’t been arrested, Mr St Lawrence. Your housekeeper reported you as a missing person. And now you’re found.’

‘I see. So when am I going to be charged?’

‘With what?’

‘I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m asking you. Economic treason?’

‘That isn’t a crime.’

‘Isn’t it?’

The garda put his hat on. ‘I don’t think so. But I can check?’

‘Would you mind?’

He left the room and I waited for him to get back to me. I’m still waiting. Everyone is still waiting. That was eight years ago now.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr St Lawrence. That concludes matters.'

Do you think? Not for me it doesn’t. Nothing can conclude matters for me. I figured that while I’m here, Fergus – while I am back in the country for this brief spell to answer your questions – I might as well pay a visit to the castle before departing these shores again. See what became of it sort of thing. It could be decades before I return again, if I ever return at all. I have no idea who even owns it any more, or whether anyone even owns it. It may languish still in that holding pen created by the Irish State for all I know, that portfolio of unsaleable property generated by the doom – I mean, the boom; impounded like a stray in the dogs’ home begging passers-by to take pity on it. Good home wanted for a good home. One careless owner. I am afraid to ask. I am afraid to ask what became of my castle. Why am I smiling? Because I’m sad. Because it’s sad. Because I don’t know what else to do with my big stupid mouth.

It was a dry, brisk, bright afternoon when I finished giving my evidence. I recounted the exchange with the garda in the hospital (‘Pray charge you with what, noble sir?’ ‘Why, you jackanapes, with economic treason!’) and that was the end of that. The stage hook appeared to haul me off. A clerk led me out and a cavity opened within. I was yesterday’s man.

I did not immediately leave the court building but instead sat brooding on the headmaster’s bench in the public area. There was a clue I must have neglected to impart, a damning detail to nail the case once and for all and finally make someone pay, but no matter how I wracked my brains I could not put my finger on what that incriminating particular might be.

I took out my phone and searched for the next available flight back to Mumbai. There was nothing until the following evening. It was Easter and the airlines were booked out. A whole afternoon to kill and no notion of how to kill it. The Devil makes work for idle hands. For trembling ones too, for hands with the DTs. I booked a room in an airport hotel.

I set off on foot up the Quays along the silver Liffey.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs
. Do you remember? It used to be written on the tenner back when we still had our own currency.

On O’Connell Street preparations were afoot outside the GPO for the celebration of the Centenary of the Easter Rising. One hundred years since the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and our sovereignty had been hocked. It was Holy Thursday and the panic-drinking was already under way, what with the pubs shutting to mark Good Friday. It would get messy on the streets of Dublin that night.

I caught a northbound train. In case you haven’t already rumbled me, I am unable to drive. I’ve gotten through my whole life making that admission to no one. I may as well get everything off my chest while I’m on a roll. The Dart passed Hickey’s construction graveyard before pulling into the station. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was all still there: the tombstone blocks with their gaping doorways, the building rubble, even the forlorn tower crane, untouched except by vandals and the elements. The Claremont site had been neither levelled nor completed but simply abandoned, stranded as it had stood the day all the money ran out, a war memorial. The show apartments were occupied but already betraying symptoms of their slipshod construction: cracks running the length of the façade, mossy stains weeping from the gutters, the bloom of rust beneath each balcony. In place of the Maserati carrying a surfboard was a neon Dyno-Rod van, its crew rodding the sewers.

Access was still via the construction gate, the grand entrance depicted on the sales brochures having failed, like everything else, to materialise. Hickey’s Portakabin was still there, crushed like a can of Coke, and my paint-spattered chair was no doubt in the vicinity had I the heart to look; I did not. The thirteen storeys of his eleven-storey hotel were draped in tattered netting like a famine refugee. I keep saying it was Hickey’s hotel, but it was mine too. I was equally responsible, equally irresponsible.
Scum
was spray-painted at periodic intervals along the perimeter hoarding.

I crossed the road to the ribbed columns of the castle entrance.
Sir Tristram has passencore rearrived
.

The iron gates were open. That threw me. I had presumed I’d find them chained shut, that I’d have to scramble over the orchard wall. I passed between the pillars and braced myself for the trip-trap crabwalk of Larney. My blood fizzed like anaphylaxis. It ionised in my veins.

Nothing. Still as a rock pool. As chilly and silent too. I pushed my way through the glossy shrubbery to the glade in which the gate lodge stood. Windows were broken and roof slates missing. A buddleia sprouted from the chimney stack and the garden was a poisonous ragwort thatch. I hadn’t laid eyes on the place since my childhood, about a thousand years before, and although I had been dragging my weary carcass around ever since, I did not think I could find the strength to drag it much further. The gatekeeper’s cottage was a derelict wreck and so was I.

Something was coming over me. It was taking hold. I had never known exhaustion like it. I laboured up the avenue in search of Mrs Reid. I had no right to expect to find her sitting at her kitchen table as if nothing had changed, but I did, and on some level I still do. For a full eight years, the figure of Mrs Reid had been sitting at her kitchen table in my mind’s eye, a refuge for my thoughts when a refuge was needed, which was often, a night light during the many bad dreams. The mind needs to preserve chambers of sanctuary and she was mine. But her net curtains were torn and the padlock clamping her door shut had streaked the paintwork with rust. I am ashamed to say that I have no idea what became of Mrs Reid. It did not occur to me that she would be evicted upon the seizure of my assets. Never thinking of others; that was me all over then. All of me, all over then.

Equally, and oppositely, I did not expect to find M. Deauville’s brass plaque, his tarnished calling card, still on display by the front door, but then, who was left to remove it? Not a soul. The castle was gaunt and deserted. They say it has a ghost now. I would like to join him. At times I think I already have.

My key did not fit in the lock. That was a kick in the teeth.

I went around the back. The castle was boarded up like the rest of the country. A carpet of bindweed had smothered the sunken gardens. I paused at the tradesman’s entrance but continued around to the vandal’s entrance and climbed through that instead, seeing as I was the biggest vandal of them all. They had pulled off the plywood boards and broken the catch on a sash window. Cider cans littered the parquet floor like autumn leaves.

The interior was suspended in gloom. I flicked a light switch. The power had been disconnected. It hardly mattered. I didn’t need lights. There was nothing left to bump into. The furniture had been removed. I made my way along the corridor, throwing open door after door. The silverware, the china, the paintings, the books in the library, the bookcases themselves: gone. The marble fireplace bearing the family motto had been prised from the great hall, exposing an aghast and toothless mouth. I gaped at it and it gaped back.
Qui Panse
. Not any more. Strip the place of valuables, Edel had warned me. Why am I still banging on about her? No one is listening any more.

In the rhododendron gardens, the invasive common species had prevailed. Father had culled the ponticums annually, identifying them by marking their barks with a slather from his pot of white paint while they were in flower, but the collection had been left unattended for so many years that the specimen varieties had been choked. I closed my eyes and raised my face. Spring sunlight shimmered down on me through a canopy of translucent new leaves. It was on a sunshot day in early summer that I had found Edel here, or she had found me, and all these years later I could still see her picking her way through the showy blossoms like a woodland fawn. The garden path up which she led me had long since been swallowed by briars. I would never find that dell of bliss again, if I ever really found it in the first place. She is up in the house on the edge of the moors, I am told, still trying to make the sums add up. Hickey signed it over to her and then she threw him out. The last I heard he was driving a taxi.

I was thinking of them both when the rambler joined me. ‘Nice old pile, isn’t it?’ he remarked. I turned to him but he kept his gaze on the castle, which, when I contemplated it through his eyes, framed by the boughs of spring blossom, could have been an illustration from a child’s storybook, a fairytale with a prince and a princess and a wicked elf. ‘Desperately sad, really, when you think about it,’ the rambler continued. ‘The first St Lawrence, Sir Amoricus, was a
descendant
of Sir Tristram, a knight of the Round Table, or so it is alleged. And now it has all come to such an undignified end . . .’

Ah, a local historian. God preserve me from local historians. The things they have written about our family. My door is open to real historians, but a local historian is merely a nosy local by another name. This one carried with him an upturned golf club, and he leaned his weight on its moulded head, a man who was not yet ready to admit to the world that he required a walking stick to get about. ‘Continuous succession to the Barony of Howth remained in the direct male line from 1177. But the final son was a bit . . .’ The local historian spun his finger by the side of his head to indicate a churning brain. ‘A bit funny. You know yourself.’

I did.

‘A tragedy, really. He died recently.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. Overdosed in an airport hotel.’

‘When?’

‘Soon. Tonight.’ The historian checked his watch. ‘It is happening as we speak.’

It took me an age to absorb this information. An age, an age. I am still grappling with it. I am floundering to this day. I looked to the historian. ‘Can’t anyone save him?’

‘Like who? There is no one. He has no one left. The hotel cleaners will find his body in the morning.’

‘But he’s not in the hotel room. He’s here. He’s with us.’

The historian shook his head. ‘He couldn’t bring himself to make the journey home when it came down to it. Couldn’t face up to witnessing the damage he’d done, so he went straight to the hotel instead. Locked himself into the room, switched off his phone, knocked back a jar of sleeping pills with the contents of the minibar. A coward right to the bitter end.’

The historian reached forward and used the vulcanised handle of the golf club to raise the shoot of bramble that strayed across our path and hook it back on itself. I marvelled at the offhandedness of this gesture under the circumstances. A man was dying, a young one, barely forty. ‘The benighted fool had squandered everything, you see. Every last farthing and more besides. What past generations had laboured to create, destroyed just like that.’ The historian clicked his fingers. ‘A whole way of life gone. He racked up a debt that can never be settled. But a debt must be settled, mustn’t it? Isn’t that the nature of a debt?’

I lowered my head in shame and noticed that the historian had etched an eye in the earth with the handle of the club. I took a step back. ‘He had notions, the young master. Thought he could make millions overnight. They all thought they could make millions overnight. But that’s the problem with setting yourself up as a little god. You invite the other fella in. Don’t you?’

‘Don’t you?’ the historian persisted when I failed to answer.

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘Desperate, the devastation they wreaked. It is nothing short of diabolic.’

At this word, the birds stopped. The secret creatures in the undergrowth stopped. The very air, I tell you, stopped. I looked up. The historian and I stood alone on a spotlit stage, waiting to say our lines. We had been waiting to say them for years.

‘I know who you are,’ he said softly.

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

‘No. That was you.’

‘I thought I was dead.’

‘You are now. The family line has come to an end.’

Down the hill, where the whitewashed trees opened onto the expanse of gravel, the castle had begun to keen. The historian lowered his head as a mark of respect. Bearing this news had afforded him no pleasure. If one thing stands out about my miserable tale, it is this: that it has no winners.

The historian squinted at the setting sun. I was stricken by an overwhelming sense of things coming to an end, of the torch being passed on, or not passed on, just extinguished. ‘It’s getting late,’ he told me, barely telling me at all. ‘It is time to leave the garden.’

I found myself at a loss and looked about frantically. Quite what I was searching for, exactly, I still do not know, and I possibly never will know, but I felt certain that I was forgetting something, that I was leaving some critical belonging behind, some vital possession without which everything, everything, everything would go awry. I appealed to the historian. ‘Now, you mean?’ I asked him, panic surging up my throat.
Doom, doom
went my heart. ‘Do you mean we’re leaving now?’

‘Yes, now, I’m afraid.’

I was afraid too. Afraid and unprepared. I glanced up. The sky was rapidly dimming.

He guided me to the exit – or was it the entrance, and if so, the entrance to what? – and he extended a crooked hand when we reached the crooked stile. ‘After you,’ he said, but I refused to move, just dug in like a petrified animal.
Doom, doom
. ‘What about my mother?’ it occurred to me in a wild flash of hope. ‘Does this mean I’ll see my mother again? Will my mother be waiting for me there?’

‘Your
mother
?’ The historian rolled his eyes in derision. ‘No, you fool, of course not.’ Whereupon my back buckled
into
a crooked spine and I was propelled by force through the stile. When we were both on the other side I heard it, heard them.

Tocka tocka
.

Deauville had come to collect. A debt must be settled. That is the nature of a debt. The Devil linked my arm and we began the descent. I closed my eyes but my eyes would not close. They would not close. I tried and tried. I’ll keep trying. I must keep trying. I can only keep trying. I am afraid of what I will see.