The Devil I Know (4 page)

The smile guttered at my tone but it quickly lit up again. ‘I have a riddle for you, Master Tristram. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

‘I don’t know, Larney. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

‘Death.’

‘Death,’ I repeated.

His smile hovered in the seething darkness, just his smile, as if his skin were black around it. ‘Yes, death,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks you are dead.’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I informed him, and hurried away with a curt goodnight.

The avenue was longer than I recalled, and steeper too. Graveyard ivy clotted the orchard walls in grotesque guises – cut-throats, hanged corpses, ghouls. I am a troubled man. I have a troubled mind. I see things in the dark. For a panicked moment I thought I had lost my phone and clapped a hand to my heart, but no, there it was in my pocket. Finally, the avenue opened out onto a familiar expanse of gravel. The pebbles formed a pale moonlit square at the foot of the castle steps. It was a long stretch to cross, a long and exposed stretch past all those looming windows.

I doubled back down the avenue and ducked around the old tower to Mrs Reid’s apartments. Through the gap in her curtains I saw her sitting at her kitchen table with a magazine, feeding chocolate digestives into the slot of her mouth like documents into a shredder. Larney had claimed her as a distant cousin, an allegation she denied, although everyone from the village was related to everyone else. You weren’t a real local unless your mother was from your father’s side of the family.

I tapped on the windowpane. Mrs Reid spilled her tea in fright. ‘It’s only me, Mrs Reid,’ I called to reassure her. A pause as she processed my voice.

The porch light came on and she opened the door a fraction, the safety chain tautened above her top lip like a brass moustache.

‘Hello, Mrs Reid.’

She blinked in astonishment then shut the door in my face. I took an affronted step back. Then I heard the chain sliding across. Mrs Reid flung open the door and gathered me to her, just like in the old days. She was a good woman, a kind one, and most certainly a forgiving one. I am sorry to have dragged her name into this.

‘My poor pet,’ she crooned, ‘your hands are freezing.’

‘You didn’t think I was dead, did you?’

‘Tristram! What a question.’

‘But you didn’t, Mrs Reid, did you?’

‘No, of course not. Your mother told us before she passed away that it was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

‘Nobody told me she was dying.’

Mrs Reid wasn’t willing to drag that whole ugly business up again, so she ushered me in to the warmth of her kitchen and set about producing dishes of food, trying as she had always tried to fill some hole she perceived in me, but I wasn’t hungry. The red door loured beside us, connecting her quarters to the castle proper. She glanced at it from time to time, wary of rousing the big bad ogre who lived on the other side. Surely the old bastard was deaf by now? What was he, after all – ninety?

When the teapot was empty and our cups drained, Mrs Reid nodded at the clock over the stove. ‘You really should go in before he retires for the night,’ she advised me, standing up to clear away the plates. ‘He heads upstairs around midnight. I’d show my face before then if I were you. If he hears you stealing around in the night, he’ll take you for an intruder and shoot you on sight. You know what he’s like.’

I did. I knew what he was like. Both of us knew what
Father
was like.

The connecting stone passage was littered with cigarette butts. He was still rolling his own. Mrs Reid was no longer able to bend down to pick them up, or perhaps she was no longer willing to bend down to pick them up, in the hope that Father might get the message and stop generating extra work, for he was a man who had never had to clean up after himself, being the last in a long line of patriarchs. He had sired me, his only child, at an advanced age with a considerably
younger
wife. His initial joy at fathering a son was short-lived. His disappointment in me, on the other hand, knew no limits.

I knocked before entering the dining hall, and pushed open the door when I received no reply. The hall was dark and empty. I crossed over to warm myself by the fire. Even with it burning, even in May, that room was cold. I ran my fingers over the engraving on the architrave of the mantelpiece.
Qui Panse
; ‘Which Heals’. The family motto.

A commotion broke out as two setters exploded through the far door. They skidded to an aghast halt at the sight of me, then crouched and growled.

‘Get out of that!’ I commanded them, and although they were young dogs and had never laid eyes on me before, instinctively they understood that they should submit, and they flattened their long bellies against the floor. They recognised me as their breed, just as I recognised them as my breed, since there have always been Irish setters in the castle. Several were depicted at their masters’ feet in the family portraits lining the hall. But I’m not here to give a history lesson.

I got down on my hunkers to caress their long ears. These two were beauties, the breed at its best – alert and agile, muscular and sleek, a map of liver-brown continents on the white sea of their backs. They kept their handsome heads on the floor and swallowed contritely. ‘That’s better,’ I told them.

They heard him first. Their bodies tensed. I looked up.

A tall lean figure of military bearing was watching us from the doorway. Arnhem 1944, rank of colonel. I got to my feet. Father lowered the rifle.

‘Heel,’ he said coolly in his own good time, and the two dogs scrambled over and prostrated themselves at his feet. He propped the rifle against the frame of the door and clasped his hands behind his back. I raised my chin and aimed a thousand-yard stare at the wall.

‘Why have you returned here?’

‘This is my home.’

‘This most certainly is not your home.’

‘I am your son.’

‘Only when it suits you.’

This was how we spoke, Father and I. If we spoke at all. I rested my eyes briefly on his face. Ninety-odd years of age and still possessed of his silver helmet of hair. He was already grey by the time I was born although old photographs reveal him to have been blond. It was about the only feature I had inherited from him. The fair hair and the height.

He circled me slowly, examining my person. The inspection had commenced. I directed my gaze at the wall again, or at a point just beyond it.

‘Have you come to apologise?’

‘I have not.’

‘Then this conversation is over.’

With that he left, collecting the rifle upon his exit. ‘Heel,’ he instructed the setters once more and they fell in line behind him. I remained standing to attention for some time in the wake of his departure, listening to the embers settle in the grate as the fire faded beside me, as I faded beside the fire. I don’t know why I’m talking about all of this in the past tense. Nothing is past. Everything is tense. You’ll forgive me, Fergus, if I leave it there for the moment.

‘Mr St Lawrence, returning to the brief conversation you conducted with Mr Hickey on the steps of the Summit Inn on 26 May 2006 in which he mentioned that he had a business proposition for you: at what point did you enter into a partnership with him?'

Not for a number of weeks, and when I did enter into a formal business arrangement with Mr Hickey, I did so at M. Deauville’s instigation. He called me the following morning wanting to know how I had come to find myself in one of my old haunts. ‘It was late,’ I said, ‘where else was I supposed to go?’ presuming he meant the castle, but no, he meant the Summit Inn. How had I come to find myself in the Summit Inn? I had no answer to that.

Didn’t I realise how foolhardy that was? he persisted. Didn’t I grasp that I was treading on thin ice? There were danger zones, areas of unusual turbulence, like sunspots on the sun, M. Deauville explained, and they were to be avoided at all costs. The Summit Inn was one such zone. The old man – if he was an old man: it was difficult to gauge M. Deauville’s age, but he was my old man in a way – the old man had kept me sequestered in airport hotels and conference centres. But I had strayed from the path.

‘I am sorry, M. Deauville.’ I was such a sorry soul that it was hard to quantify. Crossing Christy’s threshold had been reckless in the extreme. I blamed the shock of the crash, or the emergency landing, and I blamed D. Hickey. I still do.

‘D. Hickey?’ The name piqued M. Deauville’s interest.

‘Yes. Desmond Hickey.’

Tocka tocka
on the keyboard as M. Deauville ran a check. ‘The property developer Desmond Hickey?’

I thought of the bag of grit sleeping it off in the back of his truck, arm in arm with the shovel. ‘Well, he’s more what you’d call a builder.’

‘And why did you agree to enter licensed premises with this individual?’

‘He said he had a proposition.’ Clearly, this was a disingenuous representation of the previous evening’s sequence of events. I had entered the licensed premises because I was gasping for a drink. Hickey only mentioned his proposition as I was leaving.

‘A business proposition, did Mr Hickey say?’

‘Yes.’

Tocka tocka
. ‘See what he wants.’

‘Well, it’s obvious. He wants to make money.’

‘And what is so wrong with that?’

He had me there. You could say that M. Deauville brought Hickey and me together. Yes, I think it would be fair to say that.

Hickey was back that afternoon, tugging on the bell pull on the front door and not pushing the buzzer by the tradesman’s entrance. I looked out the window and saw his truck parked below on the gravel.

The tails of the setters thumped the floor in welcome when I appeared downstairs, then they remembered themselves and angled worried eyes at Father, who was standing at the window looking out at Hickey’s truck. I had hoped that the castle might be large enough that we should not have to rub up against each other in this fashion. ‘Do you know that . . . ?’
Father
groped for a suitable word as he contemplated the hairy spectacle of Hickey. ‘
Character
,’ he eventually managed.

‘Yes.’

‘Kindly go out and inform him that we’ve nothing left to steal.’

Hickey had already cased the joint in the time it took me to get down to him. ‘Gutters need replacing,’ he pointed out. ‘Chimley’s bollixed. Rotten windows. State a them slanty walls. An here, have you seen this?’ The cracks under the sills. ‘Subsidence.’ He sucked air through his teeth. ‘You’re talking big money there, big money.’

I opened the passenger door of his truck and got in. ‘I believe you have something to show me, yes?’

Hickey drove as a dog might, with some part of his anatomy – his elbow or sometimes his head – shoved out the window. The apple on the dashboard rolled to my side when he swung a right onto Harbour Road. ‘See that?’ He indicated a chipper facing the marina. ‘Built that in ’04. Do you remember what was there before?’

Nope, I admitted, I didn’t.

‘That’s because there was nothing there!’

‘Gosh.’ You would think he had invented matter. I never met a man with a higher opinion of his abilities.

The tour-guide commentary persisted up the hill as my attention was drawn to this converted shopfront and that new townhouse. ‘Small fry,’ he protested with false modesty, as if such an assortment of odd jobs could be interpreted as anything other than small fry, but then, I suppose they were big fry to a man like Hickey. ‘Wait’ll you see what I’m up to next, Tristram.’ He flashed me a wolfish smile.

At the church in the village where the road forked, Hickey blessed himself and took a right, speaking with great animation about his next project. A posh old pile, he said over the engine, which was struggling with the gradient. The apple toppled off the dashboard. I caught it and placed it in the handbrake well. He dropped down to second gear, and then first, telling me he hoped to get it off the owner at a fair price. It had been vacant for some years now and was a bit the worse for wear. Not in the same state as the castle, obviously. I mean, it wasn’t totally banjaxed. Huge gardens though, he added, nodding to himself. A good eight acres at least, though he hadn’t had the land surveyed since the property hadn’t come to the market yet. The zoning in the area was one dwelling per eighth of an acre, so he estimated he’d get permission for a small luxury development on the eastern boundary. Large family dwellings, five bedrooms, a jacks for each arse sort of thing. Retain the mature trees, obviously, or a few of them at least. Mature trees sold a development. Pain in the hole building around them but there it is.

Windgate Road still retained the leafy air of a country lane. A country lane punctuated by ten-foot-high electronic security gates, but a country lane nonetheless. Verges of cow parsley, honeysuckle, buttercups. Anyway, Hickey continued, the house itself was probably a protected structure since it was Victorian, or Georgian, or Edwardian, or something, but he reckoned he could still squeeze twelve or so luxury apartments behind the façade.

He slowed down when we reached the highest point of Windgate Road, the blind bend before it began its descent over Dublin Bay. I hoped he wasn’t bringing me where I thought he was. And then he did.

Hickey pulled in at the old stone gate pillars. The name of the house was barely legible. ‘Hilltop’
it read beneath the clusters of lichen. The house itself was screened from view by the woodland garden. The bluebells were still in blossom, thousands of them lining the forest floor.

Hickey jumped out of the truck and grabbed the rusty padlock on the gate. He selected a key from his key ring and unlocked it. I rolled down the window.

‘Where did you get that key?’

He pretended that he couldn’t hear me over the huffing and puffing and grunting and belching required to lever open the gates, which had sagged over the years into the tarmac. He glanced at the rust staining his palms before climbing back into the cabin, a slick of sweat across his forehead.

‘Where did you get that key?’ I repeated.

‘You could a helped,’ was all I got out of him.

We proceeded up the driveway – he’d chosen the shorter one; there were two – and emerged from the trees to encounter the elevated prospect of the house. Hilltop was mounted on a plinth and divided into two wings to capitalise on the view, one of the finest on the hill, if not the city. Ships sailing across the glittering water, Bray Head a cresting whale in the distance. The harbour and islands on the other side. Forgive me if I sound like an estate agent. I have nothing left to sell. The lawn had reverted to a wildflower meadow, alive with butterflies and the hum of bees.

Hickey sighed. ‘Told you it was special. Come on an I’ll give you the tour.’

Why wasn’t I surprised when he produced the key to the front door also? Like the gate, it was sagging on its hinges, as if the departure of the family from the family home had caused Hilltop to slump in dejection. Hickey prodded the scuffed kickboard with his toe. ‘Whole door’ll have to be replaced. An these windows will have to go. Jaysus, have you ever seen so many cobwebs?’

We continued through to the hall. He flicked a few light switches but the electricity had been cut off. It was an internal hall with a deep red carpet and the doors leading off it were shut. We shuffled along in darkness.

‘The main reception’s down here,’ he said, although it was not. The main reception was upstairs where the view was best. ‘An this is the dining room,’ he continued, indicating the study. ‘An in here . . .’ the two of us wandered into the music room, ‘we have the lounge.’

I looked around. Remarkably little had changed since the house had last been occupied. Same furniture, same carpets, same books on the shelves – the same photographs, even, displayed in the same photograph frames. The place still even smelled the same, for the love of God. It was as if the owners had just popped out and might return at any moment. Or as if we might happen upon them in another part of the house, two interlopers barging in on top of them as they read the morning papers. Hickey was back out on the corridor blundering through the darkness, throwing open doors, a man working his way through the carriages of a train in search of an empty seat. He went at everything in that manner: bullishly, and in haste, and he was heading, by the sounds of it, for the French doors.

‘Watch out for the—’ I called, but too late. He’d gone on his ear where the level of the house dropped. He picked himself up and dusted himself down. No harm done. A man that short hadn’t far to fall.

Back out on the terrace, Hickey examined the set of keys on his palm before turning to the mews. ‘There’s a sort a granny flat that comes with it.’

‘Yes, the party room.’

‘Ha,’ he said, thinking this a joke.

We followed the path to the portico and Hickey tried a number of keys before hitting on the right one. The pair of us wandered in. Maple dance floor stippled by stilettos immemorial, balcony for the band, ornate plasterwork. I glanced at the ceiling. The Waterford Crystal chandelier was missing. I turned to Hickey.

‘Where’s the chandelier?’

He assumed the wilfully blank expression that had seen him through school. I indicated the ceiling.

‘The chandelier, Dessie. The Waterford Crystal chandelier that was commissioned to hang in this room. Where is it?’

‘You seem very familiar with the spec.’

‘My mother was born here.’

‘How was I supposed to know that?’ he countered angrily, meaning: I wouldn’t have nicked the chandelier had I known it belonged to you. Actually, who knows what he meant.

I walked out of the party room and he faffed about with the keys behind me. ‘Don’t bother locking it,’ I muttered. The valuables had already been plundered. I dug my nails into my palms. Accept the things you cannot change, I silently coached myself. He joined me at the top of the driveway.

‘Anyway,’ he said, looking on the bright side, ‘if it’s your ma’s gaff, you’ll know where the boundaries are.’

‘I never found them.’

He was delighted with that. You could see him regaling the lads with it down the Cock.
He never found the boundaries!
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, scratching his armpit, ‘we had that problem with the back gardens in Grace-O too.’ The local corpo estate. ‘Seriously though, where does the garden stop an the West Mountain start?’

‘I told you. I never encountered a fence or a wall. It was a jungle, even back then. You’d need to hack your way through.’

‘This is not a problem.’ Hickey reached into the flatbed of the truck and produced a pickaxe and a hatchet. He gave me the hatchet. ‘Hammertime.’

‘What about gloves?’ There were briars and nettles down there.

‘Gloves,’ he snorted. ‘Don’t be such a puff,’ and then, ‘Oh sorry man, no offence.’

It grew shady to the point of cavernous as we progressed down the long driveway. The trees had not been cut back in years, and at intervals their branches enmeshed overhead to form a tunnel lanced by shafts of sunlight. The dappled surface of the driveway was mossy and crumbling away.

Hickey and I split up and set off in different directions. He hacked a path parallel to the road and I headed uphill towards the West Mountain. The rhododendron bushes had bolted to the size of caravans, and what had once been the lower lawn was now a drift of ferns. I came upon a pair of rusting barrels in the centre, the remnants of one of the jumps I’d built for the pony. The pony! How could I have forgotten the pony? Girls came out of nowhere to pop him over the jumps. They plaited his mane and oiled his hooves, clipped his coat and spent their pocket money on fancy brow bands. I, the lovelorn boy, looked on as he joggled them about, wondering what he had that I didn’t. The girls called him Prince and he was. He was their monarch.

I lifted one of the showjumping poles and panicked woodlice scurried down its length. The grass underneath was moulded into a curd-white channel speckled with slugs. I could have broken the pole in two over my knee, it was so rotten. Most of the paint had flaked away but it was still possible to tell that it had once been striped white and blue. I had painted those stripes on myself, setting out my little trap to lure the jodhpured girls. Life was simpler then.

My phone rang.
Unknown
. I dropped the pole back in the grass and glanced around before answering. No sign of Hickey. Which did not mean he wasn’t lurking.

‘Hello, M. Deauville.’

I listened for a protracted period as M. Deauville outlined an unexpected proposal. It came at me out of the blue. ‘I see,’ I said every so often to reassure M. Deauville that I was still there, still within coverage, but mindful not to allow my responses to betray the content of the conversation, what with Hickey sniffing around. Instinctively, I relinquished the open ground of the drift of ferns for the cover of the trees.

M. Deauville’s proposal necessitated that I live in Ireland. Domiciled, was the word he used. Was I willing to remain domiciled in the Republic of Ireland? he enquired, explaining that a position had come up in a company that was seeking to open an office in a low-taxation jurisdiction with benevolent regulation policies. I looked at my hatchet.

M. Deauville sensed the waves of reluctance radiating from me as I contemplated the prospect of returning to the sunspot, the danger zone, the area of unusual turbulence where the trouble had kicked off in the first place, and although I did not express these misgivings to M. Deauville, I did not have to. He sighed. ‘Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forwards, Tristram,’ he stated in the firm, coaxing tones of the early days, the scraping-by days, the talking-me-down-from-the-ledge days. His voice on the other end of the line had guided me through the darkest episodes imaginable. I will not trouble you with that period of my life here. Suffice it to say that M. Deauville had held my hand through it, and that I quite literally owed him my life.