by Declan Burke
‘So you get a flat tyre or some shit. Listen, Harry, it’s a ten grand score. There and back, you pay off on the weed. Simple.’
The torque started to bite, the inevitability of it all winding tight like some metal band slowly crushing my skull. Sparks flaring behind my eyes. Herb waited while I rolled a smoke and sparked it up, coughed out some lung I wasn’t using right then. ‘I’ll need a couple of hundred up front,’ I said. ‘I’m behind on Ben’s maintenance. And Dee’ll need some kind of sweetener if she’s to lend me the car.’
He thought about that. ‘Done,’ he said.
‘I’m making no promises. It’ll all depend on what kind of mood she’s in.’
‘Horseshit. She’ll be in a bad mood, she’ll be looking at you. Your job is work around that. A grand is a grand.’
If there was a flaw in his logic, I couldn’t see it.
16
When Herb left I had myself a Mexican shower in the tiny bathroom downstairs. The mirror could have hung in Saoirse Hamilton’s drawing room, titled ‘Something the Cat Coughed Up’. A mad and possibly evil taxidermist had fitted me with the eyes of a dipsomaniac racoon. The blackened blood under my nails washed out easily enough, but the shave proved rather more Herculean. The tremors in my hands could have had Richter shuddering in his grave, and the shredded hands and gash above my eye had already filled my laceration quota for the week.
I brushed most of the fuzz off my front teeth and went back upstairs to change my Jack-soaked shirt for its greyer but slightly less damp and sticky twin. The tie and pants were of yesterday’s vintage, but I figured Ben would need every scrap of help he could get at the PTA meeting, and a scruffy shirt-tie combo was better than turning up a tattered coat upon a stick.
Then, primed for another day, powder dry-ish, my trust in God no shakier than usual, I shouldered the Adidas hold-all containing ten grand and stumbled down the three flights of stairs and into Early ’Til Latte, where I had Inez put a small bucket of triple-shot latte on my tab. While the elixir brewed I sat in at the computer terminal at the rear of the shop and typed ‘Tohill Garda Síochána detective’ into Google.
He was a new one on me, Tohill. I don’t spend a lot of time hanging around the cop shop logging the new arrivals, but generally speaking, when you drive a cab in a place of Sligo’s size, it’s not long before you know all the cops, by sight at least. Which meant he was probably a recent transfer. What I wanted to know was why, and if he had form.
Nought-point-two-eight seconds later I had 2,311 results. Only the first seven related to Detective-Sergeant Daniel Tohill of An Garda Síochána, but there was more than enough in that little lot to suggest that Saoirse Hamilton’s desire to find Finn’s suicide note, if such existed, was prompted by rather more than a grieving mother’s need for closure.
I sipped on the bucket of latte and ran another search, this time on Hamilton Holdings, which almost caused the modem to melt down. Most of the results, when I refined the search to include only the last year’s offerings, confirmed that Finn hadn’t been exaggerating. The Hamilton Holdings website still claimed that the company could provide the only property investment portfolio I’d ever need, with blue-chip returns available in Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Florida, but the main thrust of a quick sample of clicks was that Hamilton Holdings was effectively owned by NAMA, which was hell bent on offering everything on the Hamilton books at fire-sale rates. Or would, once it had negotiated the barbed-wire legal hoops erected by one Arthur Gillick.
Let me do you this one favour, he’d said. Half an hour later, Finn was a scorched lump of frying flesh.
Which was possibly why Detective-Sergeant Tohill, an upstanding and well-regarded member of An Garda Síochána, but currently seconded to the Criminal Assets Bureau, was reserving his opinion as to whether Finn had jumped or been pushed.
All of which left this tattered coat fluttering in No Man’s Land, bogged down in the mud and likely to be crushed between the inexorable creeping advance of opposing forces.
Unless, of course, one of Toto McConnell’s snipers took me out from the flank first.
I sipped some more latte and logged off, wiped my searches. Wondering how much Saoirse Hamilton might be prepared to pay me to go looking for Finn’s suicide note, and what Tohill might be persuaded to do if I found it.
I strolled along Castle Street and turned right up Teeling Street towards the cop shop. Paused at the corner for a quick sketch around to make sure no one was watching before sidling across the road into the station, a squat block of Stalinist functionality rendered even greyer by the retro-Gothic glory of the Courthouse across the way. It wasn’t even noon but the shade on the desk was in dire need of a second shave. Bull-shouldered, a blocky head, small eyes set wide apart. His greeting registered somewhere between a snort and a bellow, and if it wasn’t for all the budget cuts I’d have assumed he was an actor employed to remind visitors they were about to enter the labyrinth.
‘I need to see Detective-Sergeant Tohill,’ I said.
‘In connection with …?’
‘It’s in connection with Detective-Sergeant Tohill.’
‘Sorry.’ He had yet to look up from the sports pages. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Maybe he’s top secret. He’s a big shot, I know that, gets to spit in people’s faces.’
The head slowly came up. His eyes were stale mercury. ‘You want to make a complaint?’
A comedian, this guy. ‘I just want to talk to him. Sign that statement I made last night.’
The mercury glistened. ‘Hold on there,’ he said, reaching for the phone. He turned away hunching a shoulder, so all I heard were some grunts and a snort, possibly a fart. ‘Says he’ll see you outside,’ he said, crunching the phone down. ‘Five minutes.’
A man can get a bad name for himself loitering outside a cop shop, so I strolled across the road and rolled a smoke while pretending to read the plaque on the wall of the building facing the Courthouse that bore the legend, Argue and Phibbs, Solicitors.
A horn parped behind me. Tohill was double-parked and waving me across. I did a little shoulder-rolling and pfffing, then slouched over to his Passat and slid in, tucked the hold-all between my feet. ‘A rum pair, Argue and Phibbs,’ Tohill grinned as we edged forward, heading south up the Pearse Road. ‘Apparently, during the 1920s, they were planning to take another partner on board, an English lawyer called Cheetham.’
‘Hilarious, yeah. The law, it’s just a sick joke, right?’
‘Can’t fault the lads for a sense of humour.’
‘It’s like William Gaddis said, you get justice in the next world—’
‘And the law in this. So I hear. Funny,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t have had you down as the religious type.’ He took my silence for assent. ‘So I guess we’re all stuck with the law. Tell me more about wanting to sign your statement, go back inside for wilful obstruction.’
‘A couple of things first.’
‘Go on.’
‘Gillick I know nothing about. Last night was the first time I met him.’
‘Okay.’
‘Second thing is, I know nothing about Finn that might interest the Criminal Assets Bureau. Far as I know, he was clean.’
‘Duly noted.’
‘Same goes for the Hamiltons. About all I know there is what Finn told me last night, they’re up to their oxters in NAMA.’
‘Great. Is there anything you do know?’
‘A few bits and pieces, yeah. First I need to find out what they’ll buy me.’
‘That’d depend on what they were worth, wouldn’t it?’
‘Sure.’
There was silence then, until we rolled to a stop at a red light opposite Markievicz Park. ‘I won’t know what they’re worth until you tell me what they are,’ he said.
‘I get that,’ I said. ‘But first I need to know what the market’s like.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘What I’m wondering, why I’m here, is why CAB is int
erested in Finn. I’m also wondering if CAB taking an interest wasn’t what pushed him off the PA.’
A grin wrinkled in the cracked leather of his tough boot face.
‘You think it’s funny?’ I said. ‘That Finn jumped?’
‘Not at all. Where are we going, by the way?’
‘Rasharkin.’
‘Where’s that?’
We were passing the Sligo Park Hotel by then, driving south towards Carraroe, so I told him to head for Maugheraboy, skirt the town, come in through the industrial estate at Finisklin. He turned west off the Carraroe roundabout across the new road, an arrow-straight model of everything the modern bypass aspires to be, apart from the fact that it cuts straight through the town and splits it in two. Took the Oakfield Road, the ditches a-bloom with dusty blue blossoms and silky-peach leaves.
‘Last night,’ he said. ‘I was out of order.’
‘The intimidation or the spitting?’
‘The spitting. That’s not me.’
‘Then you’d want to watch out for that evil twin of yours. A fucking pest, he is.’
‘See it my way. You’re telling barefaced lies, signing off on a statement.’
‘Keep it up. They’ll have Tom Hanks play you in the movie.’
In theory, a cop car is a place of work, which meant no smoking. That didn’t stop Tohill finding a cigarillo in his breast pocket, sparking it up. I went for the makings and followed suit.
‘Okay,’ he said, exhaling heavily. ‘So now we’ve established that you’re a radical free-thinker, you’re out there on your own believing all cops are fascist pigs. I’m some kind of Nazi, right?’
‘Try Black and Tan.’
‘Nice. Historical. I like it.’ He tapped ash from the cigarillo. ‘Except here you are, chasing me up for quid pro quo. What’s that make you, some kind of collaborator?’ He winked, but there was no humour in it. ‘And you weren’t so proud the last time either, were you? Happy enough to let Brady pull some strings when you killed your brother, buy you easy time in Dundrum.’
‘Buy me?’
‘That’s what the man said.’
‘Funny, that. Because the way it was sold to me was, I’d be doing them a favour keeping quiet about this dirty cop who was in bed with ex-paramilitaries, the guy looking to establish a nice little coke empire for himself. And then I go and take Gonzo out, save them the bother, all those pesky reports and public inquiries and therapy sessions. The least they could do, they reckoned, was make sure my pillows were nice and soft in Dundrum.’
He drove on. A glorious summer day, a warm sun high above Queen Maeve’s grave on Knocknerea. Midges swarming the hedgerows in search of a pharaoh to plague. ‘I spoke with Brady this morning,’ he said. ‘Not very talkative, is he?’
‘Can’t say I know him that well.’
‘He’s not particularly fond of you, either. Said I should carry one of those forked sticks snake-handlers use, and wear Kevlar. Maybe grow an eye in the back of my head.’
‘He said a lot for someone who doesn’t like to talk.’
‘I’m good at deciphering meaningful silence.’ He took a long drag on the cigarillo and exhaled slow, came to a decision. ‘He said you were a stone-cold killer, no doubt about it. Ice all the way down. But he reckons you know how to keep your part of a deal. So quid-pro, yeah? I tell you about Finn and CAB, you give me what you have on Gillick, anything he said last night, at the PA or after he picked you up. How’s that?’
‘Sounds good.’
He inclined his head towards the back seat. ‘There’s an Irish Times back there. See page seven, three paragraphs down the right-hand side.’
It was a report on a court case, in which a named Italian art dealer was suing an unnamed purveyor for breach of contract and damage to reputation. The gist was that the Italian had been peddled a fake Paul Henry landscape, although things were complicated by the fact that the Italian wasn’t trying to sue the purveyor, who swore he bought the Paul Henry in good faith, but instead a third party who had sold the purveyor the fake. The third party was also unnamed, and was currently lobbing in all kinds of injunctions to slow proceedings down, soak up the Italian’s war chest. The judge was to make a decision today as to whether the third party could be named and dragged into the mire.
By the time I’d finished reading we were cruising around by Finisklin, on the docks aiming for Hughes’ Bridge.
‘I take it the third party is Fine Arte Investments,’ I said.
‘I’d be in contempt of court if I confirmed that,’ he said, nodding.
‘Shit.’
‘Actually it’s pretty clean,’ Tohill said. ‘Iceberg tips generally are.’ He tapped some ash. ‘A nice scam, if you’ve the money to get in on the ground floor. Buy a painting for some investor who wouldn’t know a Pollock from a boot in the hole, knock off a copy, put the fake into circulation under the investor’s name. The original goes to someone who can keep his trap shut.’ He shrugged. ‘What’s daft about it is, the fake retains all the value and the original gets sold at a discount because it can’t go on the open market. Fucking art, eh?’
‘They know what they like.’
Irish gangsters had been targeting art long before the Criminal Assets Bureau was set up, the idea behind CAB being to target the gangs and their untouchable wealth, which was generally salted away in offshore accounts and real estate. A noble endeavour, given that the Bureau was a kind of monument to the murdered investigative reporter Veronica Guerin, and largely effective, although the gangs had adapted quickly, found other ways of laundering their cash.
Back in the day, the IRA, or the General, would just wander up to Russborough House of a dark and stormy night and filch an occasional Goya or Vermeer from the Beit’s private gallery. This latest scam was a bit more sophisticated. Buying the originals low, stashing them away. In ten years’ time, maybe more, there’d be a hoo-hah about a painting hanging in some gallery, an expert taking a close look during an exhibition and querying its provenance, maybe declaring that the certificate of authenticity was real enough, a pity about the actual painting. And hey presto, the original is discovered lying in some cellar or up in somebody’s attic, worth at least what the market had been prepared to pay when it first disappeared, and very probably more.
No wonder Finn’d been planning to bolt for Cyprus, and Northern Cyprus at that. The TNRC not being renowned, exactly, for its alacrity in responding to extradition requests.
‘So who tipped you off?’ I said.
‘I’d be in contempt of court,’ he said, staring straight ahead, ‘if I named our source as Finn Hamilton.’
‘Finn?’
‘The very man.’
‘The flaky fuck.’
Tohill nodded agreeably. ‘So you can see why we might be interested in why Gillick swung round to see Finn so late last night. Specifically, if Finn mentioned anything about what Gillick might have said about how Hamilton Holdings propose to deal with the judge’s decision today, which is very likely to rule on behalf of our Italian friend.’
‘It never even came up.’
‘No?’
‘Gillick was taking the piss out of Finn alright, about how much his own paintings were worth, or weren’t. But that was about it.’
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘I dunno. Something about how art is priceless because dead materials, paint and canvas, make something come alive.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘What about after, when Gillick took you for a spin?’
‘Nothing, no. He wanted me to go see Saoirse Hamilton, I was the last person to see her son alive.’
‘What’d she say?’
‘What you’d expect. She wanted to know what kind of form he was in, why he might’ve wanted to jump. I didn’t tell her anything I hadn’t already told you.’
‘And that’s all you have?’
‘Far as they’re concerned, I’m the hired help. Not the typ
e that gets confided in. All I can tell you is that they were both asking me pretty much the same questions you are, wondering if Finn said something. But separately, yeah? Gillick quizzing me on the way out there, Saoirse Hamilton waiting until Gillick was out of the room before she started in on me. Like they were worried Finn was saying something he shouldn’t.’
We were stuck in traffic, Hughes Bridge a bottle-neck.
‘Now I know he was talking to CAB,’ I said, ‘it makes more sense. What I don’t get is what was in it for Finn.’
Tohill nodded. ‘You’re right, you don’t get that. How are you fixed now with Gillick?’
‘Great, yeah. Last night he offered me a job. Promised to take me away from all this.’
‘What kind of job?’
‘Oh, y’know. Evictions, debt collections, that class of a lark. Generalised thuggery. I’m guessing he’s concerned his boy Jimmy might keel over from ’roid rage one of these days.’
‘His boy Jimmy being James Callaghan, aka Limerick Jim.’
‘The very man.’
‘I doubt you’d be replacing him, Rigby. Not unless you’re hiding some serious lights under your bushel.’
‘I could learn to use a knife. How hard could it be?’
‘Harder than pulling a trigger, I’d say.’ A grating now in his tone. ‘For one, you need to get up close, make it personal.’ He looked across, a bleak quality in his eyes suggesting he’d like nothing more than to put the hard old boot of his face right through mine. ‘Besides, you wouldn’t have our friend Limerick Jim’s range. His depth, maybe, but until you’ve blown a car bomb outside a hospital’s ER department you’re only in the ha’penny place.’ The cigarillo switched sides. ‘Say you were to take Gillick up on his offer, though. Sit down with him, have a chat about this job.’
‘Work some freelance, sure. All wired for sound, no doubt.’
He shrugged. ‘You want to volunteer, great. It’d set my mind at ease, I wouldn’t have to worry about how maybe you’re onside with Gillick. Leaving my mind so placid, maybe, that it’d let that obstruction of justice charge sink all the way down to the murky depths.’
