by Declan Burke
‘This posturing,’ he said. ‘Your contrived antipathy towards money. And yet all it took was five hundred euro in cash to lure you here tonight.’
I didn’t like the sound of that ‘lure’.
‘Money’s not the issue,’ I said. ‘Money’s fine. If the sun ever goes out, we’ll have something else to help the world go round.’
‘So it’s not the money per se, it’s who offers it.’
‘And the why.’
‘Undoubtedly. But money is a wonderfully democratic concept, Mr Rigby. It cares not a whit for the history or social position of the person who spends it.’
‘Money’s a gun. Harmless until it winds up loaded in the wrong hands.’
‘Loaded?’
‘With influence, access, self-interest. For such a democratic concept, money seems awfully dependent on wearing the right tie in the right place.’
‘You need to attend a polling booth to vote,’ he purred. ‘And they’d hardly be inclined to let you in if you arrived naked, would they?’
‘I don’t know. Depends on how badly the Germans need the latest referendum passed.’
He nodded, smiling indulgently. ‘I’m not asking you to come to work for me, Mr Rigby. I’m simply suggesting that, should the opportunity arise, you might—’
‘I’m allergic to evictions, Gillick. Crying kids bring me out in a rash.’
He inclined his head, slid me another oily smile. ‘Think it over. Talk to Jimmy if you want. If you change your mind, my door is always open.’
‘With all due respect to Jimmy, my probation depends on me not knowingly associating with known criminals.’
‘Everyone who comes to me is innocent until proven otherwise. That’s the law.’
‘The law is what the law says it is.’
‘Your loss.’
‘I’ll live.’
‘Yes,’ he said with an apologetic wince. ‘But how well?’
12
A stone staircase swept up and around to a first-floor balcony but we didn’t go up there. Simon and Gillick went away into the shadows at the far end of the hall, leaving me dawdling outside the study without so much as a fat giraffe for company. I heard Simon knock on the mahogany doors at the end of the hallway. They waited for a summons and then merged with the gloom.
I rolled a smoke and set sail down the plush Tigris of Persian carpet. Outfitting that hall cost more than I had earned in my entire life and even at that they hadn’t included a single necessary object. The chandelier was a Milky Way in crystal, the walls covered with the therapeutic dribbles of blind amputees which constitute modern art, a couple of facing Knuttels giving one another a slit-eyed dare, a few blobs that could well have been sunrises or sunsets or psychedelic cow-pats on a low simmer. There were potted palms at regular intervals, the pots burnished copper and the foliage clipped tight, the leaves dusted, gleaming. The pots, at least, were useful for tipping ash into. The spindly legs on the facing set of antique velvet-covered couches suggested they’d been designed to accommodate Tinker Bell and her little friends, even if the little friends would have to take turns sitting down.
It struck me as odd that no room had been found for even one of Finn’s landscapes, but then the décor was exquisitely refined, a statement of intent that let you know, in discreet whispers, that you were entering a home in which elegance was prized above passion, taste rather than feel. It was the interior design equivalent of a dinner party conversation, archly polite and excessively mannered, the ultimate goal being a consensus of no consequence lest any guest take offence. In that hallway a Finn Hamilton would have stood out like a turd on a communion wafer.
Yeah, and maybe it was just that Saoirse Hamilton didn’t want any reminding that her son had learned to paint in a loony bin.
He’d spent months sleepwalking up and down the drab olive corridors, the doctors fiddling with his dosage. You’d come upon him standing stiffly in some alcove, vacant and dull, a thousand-year stare in the dead blue eyes. Like some waxwork crafted in praise of futility. A terracotta soldier escaped from the Forbidden City, fully biddable but useless for the want of orders, some final doomed assault on an impregnable hold. Even the perverts steered clear.
But if he was a basket case when he was down, the up days were just as bad. This cruelly manic energy that had him bouncing off walls, on his knees in the shower punching tiles. A black crackling in the veins that burned off caution and fear, made him a prodigy as a kid, a skateboard wunderkind, a BMX champ. Telling me all this from the bottom bunk, never able to meet my eyes. All the while racking up an A&E rap sheet of broken bones and concussions, a twice-fractured skull, a detached retina. Sacrifices on the altar of Finn, tokens offered up as he pushed beyond his limits against the ungiving world, graduating to fast cars and skis and snowboards, from riding waves to piercing them from cliffs that were never quite high or sheer enough.
The shrink’s theory was that it was this urge that manifested itself in the torched buildings. That they were straw men, projections of himself. It sounded simplistic to me, but Finn allowed she might be right, this on the principle that nothing good ever came of disagreeing with a woman with cell keys jangling at her hip, metaphorically or otherwise.
Mainly he agreed because she encouraged him to paint, to express himself, to purge as benignly as polite society requires. In the end he learned to harness if not quite tame it, to suspend himself between high and low, a canvas primed and stretched and pinned so tight to the wood you could hear the hum.
‘You’ve come to the wrong place.’
When I glanced up the staircase she was already halfway down, gliding, one hand on the banister, wearing paint-spattered dungarees and not a lot of anything else. Barefoot and on the verge of giggling, although maybe that was the way genetics had the baby-pink lips primed. I watched her all the way down the stairs and she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised.
‘The body’s in the morgue,’ she said. ‘What’s left of it, anyway.’
Six feet away and gaining fast. Shy as Gilda. She wore no make-up but the skin was a flawless latte tan, the eyes almond-shaped and the kind of elusive blue you find buried deep in a diamond. Late teens, if memory served, maybe a little older.
‘I’m not the undertaker.’
‘You’re not?’ Close enough now to see the pants, white shirt and black tie for what they really were. A faint blush spreading under the latte tan, embarrassed at mistaking me for one of the menials. ‘You knew Finn?’
‘That’s right. I’m Harry.’
‘I don’t remember him mentioning you.’ She held out a delicate hand. ‘I’m Grainne.’
‘I know.’ I gave the cool flesh a faint squeeze. ‘We’ve met before,’ I said, ‘at Paul and Andrea’s wedding. I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘Why?’ A blaze of cobalt. ‘Was it your fault?’
‘I was there.’
‘You mean you could have stopped him.’
‘If I’d known,’ I said, ‘yeah.’
‘Against his will?’
‘If I had to.’
‘Some friend.’
‘A better one than I feel right now.’
The blaze flickered, snuffed out. ‘It’s traditional to feel personally responsible. You’ll get over it.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
‘Do you think I’m cold?’
I thought she was vacant. Still in shock, and sedated. Once you got past the cobalt haze the eyes were a little too rounded for their sockets, the gaze dislocating when she tried for a piercing stare. They were diamond eyes, alright, cold and glittering and ageless.
‘I think you might get cold,’ I said, ‘running around like that. Do you paint anything other than dungarees?’
She giggled, but it wasn’t at my crack. ‘I remember you now,’ she said. ‘You were at the wedding.’ She frowned. ‘Who was it got married?’
‘Paul and Andrea.’
‘That’s it, yeah. She wore that retro dress.’
/> ‘She did.’ I wondered what was taking Simon and Gillick.
Grainne giggled again. ‘Are you okay?’ I said.
She shook her head, blinked heavily. ‘I am trying,’ she announced, picking her words like some drunk negotiating a flash of clarity, ‘to remember if there is such a thing as a fear of not falling. Wouldn’t it be funny if Finn suffered from some kind of reverse vertigo?’
I thought about the crisping blob of broken jelly that had once been her brother. ‘From here, maybe.’
‘Although technically speaking, vertigo’s not so much a fear of heights as falling off them. I really do hope he enjoyed it.’
Everyone copes with death their own way. Some weep and wail, don sackcloth. Others play it cool, make with the cheap jokes and hope they’ll get slapped so hard it’ll make them cry.
We were still holding hands. I let go.
‘You’re a sentimentalist,’ she said. It was an accusation. ‘You’re just like all the rest, you don’t want to hear the truth.’
‘Maybe it’s just you they don’t want to hear.’
The elusive blue blazed again. She made a sound like a curious cat. ‘Oh, you’re different. You and I, we should talk.’
‘Any time. Just ring the Samaritans, I’m always on call.’
I shouldn’t have dropped her hand, but it was late, I was exhausted, and that’s when mistakes get made. She raked me down the left cheek. No back-lift. She just reached and clawed.
It was too smooth. I wasn’t the first.
I backed away with a hand to my cheek, checked the damage. She’d drawn blood. The sight, or maybe the scent, seemed to enrage her. This time she lunged, swinging wild. I planted a palm on her forehead. She made a couple of swipes that grazed my chest and then tried to kick in my shins with her bare feet, grunting all the while through bared teeth, a bubble of saliva in the corner of the baby-pink lips.
I heard a door open.
‘If you would be so kind, Mr Rig—Grainne!’
She came out of it like overstretched elastic, snapped and sagged and pee-yonged away up the staircase. A door slammed.
I found an Abrakebabra napkin in my pocket and dabbed at my cheek while Simon apologised on Grainne’s behalf.
‘She’s distraught, as you might expect. The doctor gave her some sedatives but …’ He tailed off, shrugged. ‘She’s a law unto herself at the best of times.’
Scupper that. Simon made excuses, not apologies.
‘Any chance we could get this done?’ I said. ‘I’ve had a long night.’
‘Of course. Come this way, please.’
I went that way holding the napkin against my cheek, hoping the bereft Mrs Hamilton wouldn’t suck out my eye in a paroxysm of grief.
13
I was expecting a couple of priests, maybe even a monsignor, but I had to make do with the bishop-sized Gillick. He stood to one side of the marble fireplace, his body language, consciously or otherwise, mimicking the chest-puffed profile of the patrician figure in the portrait on the chimney breast.
Bob Hamilton, I presumed, larger than life, although he’d been plenty large in life. A swarthy cove to begin with, the artist had given him a piratical mien, placing Big Bob on the deck of a yacht where the breeze could amuse itself for all eternity in ruffling his dark curls, or at least until someone decided a Knuttel molls-and-gangsters pastiche was more in keeping with the ambience. Gillick’s presence suggested that that day wouldn’t be long coming. The brandy balloon in his chubby fingers gave the gathering an incongruous air of celebration.
That room could have fit a small helicopter, although the pilot would need to be the barnstorming type to avoid mangling the by now obligatory squiggles and scrawls that defaced three walls. The fourth, the rear wall, was composed entirely of glass. The crushed-velvet drapes were drawn back, affording a view of a dawn-drained North Atlantic that stretched most of the way to Iceland and a sky like Carrera marble, hard and cold behind the faint pink blush.
Gillick looked pretty comfortable standing beside the fireplace. The nonchalant stance made me wonder if his relationship with Mrs Hamilton was one that required him to stand by that fire on a regular basis, lapping brandy out of a balloon big enough to breed guppies.
I couldn’t fault his taste. In among the high-backed Victorian armchairs, French-polished mahogany and a foot-high brass Cupid pinging his arrow from the distressed-oak coffee table, Mrs Saoirse Hamilton was by some distance the best preserved antique in the room. She reclined on a couch angled towards the log fire, the flames taking their cue from her auburn mane. The ripe side of fifty, luscious as fresh mango, she wore a knee-length nightgown in lavender silk that most women would have happily worn to a wedding, this providing they had a grudge against the bride. A peignoir trimmed with lacy frills would have completed the look, but she’d accessorised, using the word loosely, with a fluffy pink bathrobe, Dennis the Menace-striped leggings and knee-length riding boots. None of which disguised the fact that she had more curves than the Monaco Grand Prix. The drawl suggested she gargled Sweet Afton.
‘Mr Rigby. So good of you to come.’
‘I’m sorry for your troubles, Mrs Hamilton.’
‘You are too kind.’ She inclined her head towards the facing armchair. ‘Please, won’t you sit?’
I sat. She held up her glass. ‘Will you join us in a toast?’
It wouldn’t be her first and they’d have drank on without me, so Simon built me a Jack and ice. We toasted Finn in silence. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘could you leave us for a moment?’
Being no gentleman, I was expected to stay. She watched Simon and Gillick leave, then turned dreamy eyes on mine. Grainne had been sold short with the cobalt blue. Her mother’s eyes were the Aegean on a hazy June dawn. ‘What can you tell me, Mr Rigby?’
‘Not much more than I told Simon, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
‘Yes. Simon told me you were here earlier. Very thoughtful of you, Mr Rigby.’
‘Anyone else would’ve done the same.’
‘I wish that were true. But I am inclined to believe that most people would have washed their hands of the whole sorry mess.’
‘I knew Finn, Mrs Hamilton. I thought it’d be better coming from me than the cops.’
‘So I understand. Unfortunately, Simon was rather vague on the details. Apparently Finn jumped off the PA building shortly after speaking with you.’
‘That’s right.’
She flicked some wayward silk back up onto her ankle. ‘And how was Finn when you spoke with him?’
‘Good form, yeah. He was, y’know, Finn.’
‘And you noticed nothing that might …’ She hesitated, then steeled herself. ‘That might explain why Finn would want to take his life?’
‘Nothing. Really.’
‘May I enquire as to what it was you spoke about?’
‘It was Finn who did most of the talking. He was pretty excited about this new development.’
Her forehead shimmered, which I took to be a Botox frown. ‘Development?’
Gillick, already under some strain hoisting the brandy balloon, had obviously left the heavy lifting to me.
‘It was supposed to be a surprise,’ I said, ‘a wedding present. Luxury apartments, with a salon for Maria.’
‘And where exactly,’ she drawled, glancing away to rearrange some more silk, ‘did he propose to establish this development?’
‘Cyprus.’
‘Cyprus?’
‘That’s right. Northern Cyprus.’
‘They were going to live there?’
‘So he said, yeah.’
‘For how long?’
‘All going well, for good.’
She considered that. ‘And did he say when this was likely to happen?’
‘He wasn’t sure. Red tape was holding them up at the Cyprus end. And he was funding it from the sale of the PA building, so …’
Her forehead glistened. ‘The PA?’
‘The Port Authority buildi
ng.’
‘I know what it is, Mr Rigby.’ She sat up straight, sloshing some martini onto the cuff of the fluffy bathrobe. ‘What is it exactly,’ she said, a cold storm brewing in the Aegean dawn, ‘you are trying to achieve?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The question is straightforward. What is it you hope to achieve by telling me lies?’
‘What lies? I don’t—’
‘That property wasn’t Finn’s to sell, Mr Rigby. It belongs to Hamilton Holdings. And no one knew that better than Finn.’ A mocking smile. This much, at least, she was sure of. ‘So how could he have been planning to sell it?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. You wanted to know what Finn was talking about tonight, and I’m telling you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s your choice, but Finn told me he was selling the PA. If you’re saying he couldn’t, then I don’t know, maybe you should be having this conversation with Gillick. Maybe there’s some loophole in the setup that allowed Finn to sell.’
She stared imperiously, and I guessed I was supposed to find a hole to crawl into, or just whimper a little. I sipped some Jack.
‘You do appreciate,’ she said, ‘that what you’ve just told me is entirely ridiculous.’
I wondered how ridiculous she’d find it if I mentioned Finn’s sudden desire to settle in a place where family still meant something. I set the Jack on the coffee table, being careful to avoid the glazed tile coasters. ‘Here’s what I don’t appreciate, Mrs Hamilton. Getting called a liar. Spending half the night in the cop shop for trying to do the right thing. Having my taxi wrecked.’ I fingered my grazed cheek. ‘Let me know when you’ve heard enough. There’s more.’
‘If it’s compensation you’re—’
‘I’ve been paid, Mrs Hamilton, not bought. The Queen’s shilling doesn’t go as far as it used to these days.’
If looks could kill I’d have been cremated on the spot. ‘How dare—’
