Slaughter's hound hr-2

by Declan Burke

  I wondered if Dee’s parents had arrived yet, and hoped they had. The vitriol bandied about when my name was mentioned might distract her from Ben’s condition, even for a minute or two.

  The stab in my gut answered one question, at least.

  No, it wouldn’t be any easier to become estranged from an adopted child.

  Love, whatever the hell it might be, and wherever the hell it comes from, has nothing to do with flesh or blood.

  29

  Once upon a time Weir’s Folly had been pretty well secured. You needed a zapper to get past the car park gates, and tap a four-digit code into the pad beside the lobby doors to access the building itself. Once inside, getting to the lifts meant passing a booth manned by a concierge who doubled as a security guard, who’d ring ahead just to be sure you were expected.

  These days, with the recession in full slump and burglaries on the up, they’d cut back on administration fees by letting the security guard go. Perverse, but there it is.

  I went on up to the penthouse floor, which had its own lobby, bare but for a potted bamboo standing in one corner, its leaves crisp and turning brown. Not a good look for prospective customers, given that the penthouse suite was also home to Fine Arte Investments, but then, when business gets sluggish up at the high end of the market, the potted plants are always first to feel the pinch.

  The alarm didn’t go off when I stepped inside, which suggested someone was home, a fact more or less confirmed by the sound of a humming shower, its splashes echoing down the narrow hall. Finn had split the penthouse into business and home, the hallway opening into a living room converted to a spacious reception area that had the feel of a gallery, with examples of Fine Arte’s wares, or reproductions of same, dotting the walls. The far wall was floor-length windows, or would have been had the curtains been drawn back. In the corner was a closed door on which was a small black plaque with the legend ‘Finn Hamilton, Fine Arte Investment’ embossed in gold.

  I crossed the reception area into another hallway, paused outside the bathroom door. The shower hummed merrily on but the showeree wasn’t in any mood for singing. Beyond that hallway was a living room proper, strewn with cardboard pizza boxes, foil cartons, empty bottles. Wine, mostly. The curtains were drawn there too and the light had that gritty quality that coagulates when darkness is allowed fester.

  I stepped into the kitchen expecting to find unscraped plates stacked in the sink but here everything was pretty much in order except for the nine or ten wine glasses lined up atop the dishwasher, each one of them stained purple. Maria favoured a fruity red. Even the bin under the sink was tidy. I reached past it, found the U-bend, the key taped behind. Thus armed, I crossed the living room again, the shower still humming, past the master bedroom and into Finn’s study. A scuffed roll-top desk under the window, a filing cabinet behind the door. In the corner stood a recession-proof spiky palm, and diagonally opposite that a slender lava lamp mocked up to resemble a Joshua Tree. There was an overflowing bookcase beside the desk, but otherwise the walls were a collage of scenes of Cyprus: postcards, photographs, pages ripped from magazines and calendars. The single cardboard box on the polished pine floor made me wonder why I hadn’t seen others, or any sign at all that Finn had been packing to go away.

  The laptop was sitting amidst the usual detritus on the desk, on and open but in hibernate mode. Above it, Blu-tacked to the desk frame, was a hand-written Bukowski quote: When you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

  Looked like Finn had walked away from his typewriter just that once too often.

  The desk’s bottom drawer was already unlocked. It took five seconds to confirm that the gun wasn’t there and that the drawer didn’t have a false bottom. All I found was a thick buff-coloured folder labelled Cyprus, which contained sheaves of research notes, internet and email print-outs, bank statements, letters to and from real estate agents, most of them based in Girne. A quick flick-through elicited nothing that looked like a suicide note, about which I was mightily pleased.

  The laptop, when I nudged it, came to life straight away. I found Finn’s iTunes, scrolled down, clicked on Melanie Safka’s ‘Look What They Done To My Song, Ma’. Cranked up the volume as high as it’d go. Then I went back out into the living room and liberated a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table, got it lit. I was just relaxing back into the creased old leather couch, Melanie wailing about how they’d picked her brain like a chicken bone, when the music cut out.

  There was a framed poster on the kitchen door of a woman dressed in food: a pineapple for hair, a dress of assorted nuts, strawberries for earrings, that class of a thing. In the reflection of the glass I could see the darkened outline of the woman behind me, her damp hair a tangle of rats’ tails, legs apart and braced. She was using both hands to point something at the back of my head.

  Her voice was cold, burnished.

  ‘Was it you?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  The reflection blurred as she moved forward. Cocking the gun, the click loud as a shot. She touched the muzzle to the top of my spine.

  ‘Was. It. You.’

  ‘Maria,’ I said, ‘you’re not thinking-’

  ‘I’ll be gone before they find you.’ She ground the barrel into my neck, forcing my head forward. ‘Last time. Was it you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ She relaxed, allowing the muzzle fall away. I was twisting my head to look up at her when she poked it under my cheekbone. ‘And if you ever try to tell me what I’m thinking again, I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

  ‘Duly noted.’

  The first time I met Maria I told her that her eyes reminded me of Lauren Bacall’s. Narrow green slits under severely cropped brows. Now, like Lauren’s, they were dead. The nose was still imperious, though, straight as a tent pitched on a downhill slope, its haughty aspect softened by cheeks left rosy by the shower and a tiny apple chin. The mouth was wider than a melon slice and luscious as split peach.

  I guess I was hungrier than I’d thought.

  ‘You couldn’t have rung ahead?’ she said. Hungover, her voice had the metallic whine of a wasp trapped in a pipe. ‘Christ, I nearly shit myself in the shower.’

  I put the pair of coffees down on the glass-topped table and liberated a bottle of Courvoisier from the sideboard, slopping a generous dollop into both mugs. She bypassed the coffee and went straight for the bottle, taking a three-swallow slug before coming up for air.

  I took a decent wallop from the coffee and then rolled a smoke from the detritus of Finn’s makings on the table while the brandy hectored my corpuscles like a Sarn’t-Major bawling drills. She made a brusque gesture. I tossed across the cigarette. She dug a lighter from the pocket of the kimono-style dressing gown that didn’t contain a.38 Detective Special, lit up and exhaled without taking her eyes from mine.

  ‘So how’ve you been?’ I said.

  ‘How would you be?’

  ‘Drunk.’

  ‘That’s how I’ve been.’

  She sat back into the high-winged armchair, tucking a bare foot under her thigh. The kimono damp where it stuck to her shoulders, dark stains on the pockets from the film of oil on her palms. For a memento, Finn kept the.38 in good working nick.

  Maria didn’t look too bad either.

  Dried out and spruced up, Maria Malpas was hands down the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in the flesh. Bereft, hungover and raw from the shower, hair like Medusa’s in an Arctic gale, she was still top three, easy.

  ‘How’d you hear?’ I said.

  ‘Yesterday morning, at work. I’d only just got in. Mary saw me coming and started flapping around, how brave I was. She’d heard it on the news in the car.’ Her mouth went thin. ‘The fucking bitch couldn’t make one fucking phone call.’

  Said bitch, I presumed, being Saoirse Hamilton. She sucked down another couple of inches of brandy. ‘How about you?’ she said.

  ‘I r
ang, but I didn’t want to tell you in a message.’

  She nodded a vague acknowledgment. ‘I mean, how did you hear about it?’

  ‘I was there.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘When it happened.’

  Her mouth was a bouncy castle, the words a helpless tumbling. ‘And did he …? Was he …?’

  I told her what I’d been telling everyone else, except this time I included the bit about being at the PA to deliver grass. I expected a big hoo-hah about how no one orders in that much smoke and then jumps off nine stories, but all she did was crack a grimace that was half-smile, half-snarl. ‘That’d be right,’ she said. ‘That’s Finn.’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘Yeah, that was Finn.’ She toasted me with the bottle, had herself another swig. Eyes wet and hard as black ice. I felt a guilty twinge at not taking the brandy away, but Maria wasn’t the kind who looked fondly on intervention even when she wasn’t packing a gun in her pocket. And I had twenty grand to earn.

  ‘Y’know what?’ she said. ‘Fuck Finn, fuck his mother, fuck the whole shitty inbred lot of ’em.’

  ‘Skol,’ I said, raising the coffee mug. ‘So what’re your plans?’

  A sloppy shrug. ‘Wait for the funeral, I suppose. Then go home. But I don’t know, even the thought of packing up …’

  She was trapped in the moment, unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that she had to move on.

  ‘I’m guessing the salon’s a non-runner,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t be going back there.’

  ‘I mean, the one in Cyprus. Finn’s development.’

  Her eyes became arrow slits. ‘Fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘Finn had plans,’ I said. I told her about the apartment complex, Finn selling up, the changes to Grainne’s trust fund. ‘It was supposed to be a surprise. A wedding present, like.’

  She stared for a moment, then shook her head, and then she laughed, but it cracked halfway through and she wound up on a coughing jag. I crossed over to the armchair and patted her between the shoulders. She cringed away. Chastened, I shuffled back to my pew on the other side of the glass table.

  ‘Finn move to Cyprus?’ she said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Finn said a lot of things.’ She was staring again, and I wondered if I shouldn’t look at her in the reflection of the glass-topped table, lest I be turned to stone. She tapped the cigarette’s filter with the ball of her thumb, so that ash toppled onto the carpet. ‘He’d talked about it, yeah,’ she conceded. ‘But he kept on talking about it. A whole year he was talking about it. But he was never leaving, Harry. Never. She had him on a leash, and, and …’

  She choked something back, then launched the bottle at the red-brick fireplace. It shattered, showering the rug with splinters of glass and a not inconsiderable amount of expensive brandy. I’d have paid good money to see her and Saoirse Hamilton let loose in a china shop. ‘The latest thing,’ she said, ‘was he reckoned we should think about taking a break. Can you believe it? I’m the one waiting a year for the bastard to make up his mind, and then he says maybe we should take a break.’

  ‘He say why?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ The smile was a raw wound. ‘The bitch was on his case. Dump me or she writes him out.’

  ‘He actually said that.’

  ‘In so many words.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What could I say?’ She waggled her hands, a crude caricature of a zany clown. ‘“Hey, pick me instead, I’m worth millions.”’

  ‘You’d have been selling yourself short.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Not now, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘Now’s not the time.’

  ‘Maria, he’d changed the trust-’

  ‘Sssssh.’ She put a finger to her lips, the eyes still closed. ‘Not now,’ she said again. She let the cigarette fall away and cradled herself, rocking in a mute keening. I got up and went around the table, retrieved the cigarette, put it in the ashtray. Then I sat down beside her.

  ‘Let me do this,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. But it might help.’

  I put an arm around her shoulders, gave a gentle squeeze. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away either. I increased the pressure, pulling her towards me, and suddenly the tautness in her shoulders snapped. She turned into me, burying her face in my chest, bawling as she gripped a handful of T-shirt in each white-knuckled fist. I rested my chin on the crown of her head and felt each sob shiver my ribs like a jump-start to the heart. Something hard grinding into my side.

  ‘You put the safety back on that gun, right?’ I said.

  She nodded and snuffled, then half-laughed. ‘I fucking hate you,’ she told my sternum, the words coming muffled.

  ‘I know.’ It’s cruel, really, but I can’t help liking women who don’t like me. I think it’s that I respect their intelligence. ‘Listen, Maria — are you listening?’ The head bobbed. ‘I think you’re in shock. You should see a doctor, get some painkillers prescribed, a sedative. I’ll take you if you want.’

  She blew a sigh that set my athlete’s foot tingling, then struggled upright, smearing the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her palms. She pushed me away and looked around, and it was as if she was seeing the place for the first time.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  The phone rang, once, twice, three times, cutting off midway through the fourth ring. Maria didn’t even glance in its direction. ‘Guilt’s a bitch,’ she said. She was staring into space, at some point that lay between where we were and who she used to be.

  ‘You’ve absolutely no reason to feel guilty,’ I said, trying to remember the speech Dutch had given me. ‘If he really wanted to go, there’s no way you could have stopped-’

  ‘Not me.’ The words were dry feathers. ‘Finn.’

  ‘Y’think?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s my theory, yeah. Finn being Finn, his mother bearing down, he couldn’t stick the-’

  ‘His father, Harry. His father.’

  She reached into her pocket, took out the gun. An ugly sight. Maria had fine slim fingers, the manicure perfectly finished, a hand capable of creating the most subtle of artistic strokes. The gun, its sheen of oil notwithstanding, was dull, black, blunt and snubby. A purely functional killing machine.

  ‘What about his father?’ I said.

  ‘No one told you?’

  ‘Finn told me he drowned.’

  ‘Did he tell you he was there when it happened?’

  ‘No,’ I said. The lies came easy with Maria too. ‘He forgot to mention that bit.’

  She poked at an oily stain on the kimono with the barrel of the.38. ‘Apparently he was giving Finn the one-day-all-this speech. Just the two of them, down at the deepwater. Anyway, his father asked Finn to get out of the car, he was parked pretty tight to the edge of the dock. So Finn got out. Afterwards they said it was just one of those things, he put the car into first rather than reverse. Not used to the new gear-stick.’

  I’d done it myself, except never on the edge of a deepwater quay.

  ‘Finn says the last thing he saw was his father’s face,’ she said, ‘he was hunched up over the steering wheel. Then he was gone. Just like that. Toppled over. Finn freaked out. But what’s he supposed to do, jump in after him? Finn wasn’t much more than a kid at this stage, hardly out of his teens. And by the time he got to a phone …’ She made a meaningless gesture with the hand not holding a gun. ‘Afterwards he had to make a statement to the cops, then the insurance company had to have their own investigation. It all dragged on for about two years.’

  ‘That has to be tough.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know if he ever got over it.’

  ‘And she blamed Finn.’

  She looked up at me, taking a second or so to focus. The brandy bedding in nicely now. ‘Who, Saoirse?’

  ‘She told me they were estranged. I thought it was an odd word
for a mother to use about her son but I guess it makes sense.’

  A sardonic twitch pulled at the corner of her mouth. ‘Estranged?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Saoirse fucking Hamilton doesn’t make many mistakes, Harry. If that’s the word she used, then that’s exactly what she meant.’ She hesitated, then slid me a sly look. ‘Y’know, with Finn being there, the only witness, no one could say for sure it wasn’t suicide.’

  ‘Guys driving Beamers don’t generally top themselves, Maria.’

  ‘No one could say it was, either.’

  ‘What’re you trying to say?’

  ‘We were down there one night last summer,’ she said, ‘just sitting on the dock, smoking a draw. Finn was supposed to be up in the studio but he’d left a CD playing, he had the car doors open, the radio on. One of those lovely half-moons up over Cartron … Anyway, out of nowhere he said he’d killed his father.’

  That one hung in the gritty, festering air. She was drunk, cunning and mean with it, lashing out just like Finn’s mother and sister before her. On balance I preferred Grainne’s raking nails. A primitive approach, sure, but at least it had the virtue of being instinctive, honest.

  ‘You said it yourself,’ I said. ‘He was young, he saw it happen. That’s a lot to take on your shoulders, and at that age you think everything’s your fault, wars and famines, the whole lot. And if his mother held him responsible …’ She waited me out, smirking now. ‘I’m guessing,’ I said, ‘that he already had the guilties about not jumping in, trying to pull his father out. Give that kind of shit enough time, enough pressure, and it’s bound to — whoa, point that somewhere else.’