Slaughter's hound hr-2

by Declan Burke

  ‘I am the executor of Finn’s will, Mr Rigby. I would be derelict in my duty were I not to do my utmost to convince Grainne that certain decisions would not be in her best interests.’

  ‘The girl knows what she wants.’

  ‘She’s distraught, Mr Rigby. Bereaved. She and Finn were very close, you know.’

  ‘So she says. Close enough that he told her about the changes he made to the trust fund.’

  The porcine little eyes glittered, as if he’d caught sight of a trove of truffles. ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘I saw it myself.’

  ‘Did you, indeed?’ He sat forward and reached for the coffee and had himself a sip, the pinky finger shooting the moon. ‘And what else did you see?’

  ‘Not much.’

  A wry smile. ‘Please, Mr Rigby. According to Jimmy you were in Finn’s apartment for approximately forty minutes. I can only assume that you found this information on the laptop.’

  ‘Assume again.’

  ‘Where else might you have seen it?’

  ‘That’s between me and Grainne.’

  Another sip of Colombia’s finest. ‘I do hope,’ he said, ‘that you’re not taking advantage of that girl’s misfortune. It’s perfectly understandable that she’s angry right now, and disappointed, and seeking, in that unfortunate way people have, to strike out and cause others to feel a pain akin to her own. Mrs Hamilton wants only the best for Grainne, but that’s not always how-’

  ‘What Mrs Hamilton wants is the Mac.’

  ‘Well, yes, she does want her property returned. But in terms of the bigger picture, her instincts are to-’

  ‘And the gun.’

  ‘Gun?’

  I reached around and untucked the.38, laid it on the table. A couple of chins wobbled as he slumped in the chair. From the expression in his eyes he was watching the trove of truffles being carted away. Then he heaved himself more or less vertical and reached for the gun.

  I snaffled it back. More nodding, more chins a-wobble. A weariness to him now. ‘I can only assume,’ he said, ‘that this is why the price has jumped so exorbitantly.’

  ‘You’d want to rethink that whole assuming lark,’ I said. ‘It’s getting you nowhere fast. This,’ I pointed the gun at his face, ‘is here to kill you. Simple as that.’

  This time I got through. Maybe it was staring down that little black hole, and maybe it was the way I said it, but he realised there was no negotiating involved, no tactics.

  ‘Mr Rigby,’ he said, ‘I must tell you that I’m not in any position to pay over any more money than has already been-’

  ‘Forget the fucking money, Gillick. This isn’t about money.’

  Now he was truly at a loss. Eyes wide, mouth agape. I could almost hear the cogs whirring in the back of his head.

  If it wasn’t about money, what could it possibly be?

  It was fascinating to watch on a purely anthropological level. Gillick looked a lot like a squid that had found itself high and dry on a mountain peak with a sudden but somewhat vague understanding of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

  To confuse him further, I lobbed the bundle of notes at his face. Notes fluttered in the air, and his instinct was to reach and grab.

  By then I was halfway across the desk, landing ankle-deep in a wobbly mess of chins. We hit the floor in a tangle of leather, chrome and flailing limbs. Being about a hundred pounds lighter and feeding off a murderous rage, I was first to my knees. Yanked the chair out of the way and cracked him flush on the mouth with the butt of the.38, followed up with a left cross to his right jaw that cracked the knuckle of my little finger. I heard myself yelp. Gillick flopped back, his eyes rolling up in their sockets.

  By the time he came back I’d ripped the sash-cords off the blinds and got his hands bound behind his back. No mean feat when the knuckle of your little finger has swollen to the size of a decent conker.

  I clenched my left fist, felt the pain shoot up into my elbow and ricochet off into the icy core.

  ‘How’d you know about Ben?’ I said.

  He blinked, groggy, the eyes round and owlish. ‘Wha …?’

  ‘Jimmy said he heard from you that my boy was in hospital. How’d you know?’

  The flattened prim beak leaked blood and a couple of teeth as he half-spat, said, ‘I don’t-’

  ‘Slow down. You’re not thinking.’

  I got up and righted the chair. Put the gun on the desk and retrieved the crystal-cut ashtray, the cigar, from where they’d landed near the filing cabinet. Then I sat down on the chair. When the cigar was glowing I leaned in and exhaled in his face.

  ‘Cuban,’ I said. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Rigby, I know nothing about your kid.’

  ‘You knew enough to know he was in hospital.’

  ‘It was on the news, for Chrissakes. The accident.’

  ‘The accident, maybe. Our names were strictly under wraps.’ I took a good pull on the cigar, got the tip glowing again. Held it close to his lower lip. His eyes flared and he twisted his head away, so I singed his earlobe instead. He squealed.

  ‘That’s so you know I’m serious. Every time you move, you get burnt. Okay?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Jimmy told me,’ I said, ‘that he heard it from you. So that means you called it, or whoever called it told you. Which?’

  He shook his head and half-shrugged, helpless. I scooched in close, placed the tip of the cigar half an inch from his chin. His head tilted back so that he was looking into my eyes.

  ‘Are you religious?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. Lapsed Catholic. Still, the old learning dies hard.’ I tapped my eye-patch. ‘An eye for an eye and all that.’

  ‘But I don’t know-’

  ‘Gillick,’ I said gently, ‘there’s no cavalry coming. Jimmy’s fucked. So focus, man. It’s you and me, and I just lost my son. Which pretty much means I’ve got nothing left to live for. I don’t know, maybe that’ll pass, they say it does. But right now I don’t give a flying fuck what I do or who I do it to. Are we clear?’

  We were, albeit a little too clear. Somewhere in there I’d lost him, taken away his last hope.

  Do that, all you leave a man is his dignity.

  The way his hands were tied it was physically impossible for him to square his shoulders. But it was there in his eyes. A sudden hardness behind the damp gleaming, as if he’d scraped through to bedrock.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he whispered. Then he spat a bloody gob.

  He was nowhere as practised as Tohill. The gob flopped to one side, dribbled away down his cheek. I puffed on the cigar again. His jaw muscles tightened. There was pain in the post but his mind was a-swirl, drunk on dignity. Sweat glistening on his forehead.

  ‘Last chance,’ I said. ‘From here on in, there’s no rules.’

  ‘Fuck. You.’

  ‘Your call.’

  I flexed my fist, felt the pain burn. Then I sat back and placed the cigar on the crystal-cut ashtray. Bent in again, thumbs cocked.

  He started to frown before he realised what I was about. He shrieked, but by then I was already digging in.

  I had no idea a man’s eye socket could be so deep. My thumb was buried to the second knuckle when I scraped back and out. His scream set the fillings in my teeth a-shiver as I puffed again on the cigar. The eyeball lay on his cheek like a wobbly marble, still attached by stringy muscle. Tears seeped out of the socket and down his cheek, under the eye. I touched the tip of the cigar against the wetness. It hissed.

  ‘Jesus Christ no,’ he rasped.

  The coming together of a glowing ember and the vitreous substance encasing an eyeball is an unedifying sight, but I’d been expecting that. What I hadn’t factored in was the smell. It was that of a half-boiled egg jammed against a hot pan.

  Twice I raised gritty blisters singeing the eyeball.

  The second time he knew there’d be a third, a fourth.

  ‘Grainne,’ he gulped. ‘I
t was Grainne Hamilton.’

  ‘Bullfuckingshit.’

  ‘She heard you …’ He gasped. ‘Heard you on the phone. When you rang the hospital from … from the Grange.’

  That made a kind of sense. ‘And she told you?’

  A nod.

  ‘No way Grainne Hamilton ran anyone off the road,’ I said. ‘So who did it?’

  He didn’t know. Or so he said. I had myself another pull on the cigar and he broke. Everyone does in the end. He started babbling, begging. His theory being that so long as he was talking, I wouldn’t be singeing.

  It took a couple of slaps around the head to get him focused, and then I pointed the.38 at his good eye, slipped the safety off, cocked the hammer.

  ‘Listen good,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t you, you don’t need to die. But I know you have a best guess.’

  He did, and when it all tumbled out it sounded like I was mostly to blame for Ben’s dying, this because I’d told Saoirse Hamilton on the phone that I’d come see her after I got back from Galway, and that I already had what she was looking for.

  There’s only one Galway-Sligo road. I’d been driving Finn’s Audi. The rest had been easy.

  ‘She thought I had Finn’s suicide note,’ I said. He closed his good eye and nodded. The raw socket mocked me, its eyelid flopping. ‘What was she so worried about?’ I said. ‘What’d she think it’d say?’

  ‘The safe,’ he moaned. ‘The safe.’

  I got up and crossed to the painting of exploding meatballs, pushed it aside. Inside the safe were a number of slim manila envelopes of varying sizes, all blank. A small case in black velvet, inside of which was a matching necklace-and-earring set in jade.

  ‘What am I looking for?’ I said.

  He directed me to the top right-hand corner of the rear wall, told me to feel around. ‘There’s a catch,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Isn’t there always?’

  I slid my finger up the right side of the safe, felt a small bump. I jiggled it back and forth, up and down, then pressed hard. There came a soft click. The back wall of the safe sprung, leaving a half-inch gap. Behind was a single buff manila envelope. Inside was a blank CD in clear plastic and two pale blue Basildon Bond envelopes, one blank, the other with an address handwritten in Finn’s flowing cursive script.

  Back at the desk I slipped the CD into Gillick’s laptop. When the folder popped up, I clicked it open. It contained a single document, a spreadsheet. The first page was titled ‘Irish’.

  O’Leary, George: 17/3/2010 — €12k

  Smyth, Val: 24/5/2010 — €14k

  McCaul, Manus: 09/6/2010 — €21k

  Walsh, Padraig: 11/8/2010? €8k

  Callaghan, Cormac: 21/9/2010 — €11k

  O’Toole, Hugh: 14/11/2010 — €17k

  Byrne, Brian: 05/2/2011 — €13k

  Kelly, Paul Christopher: 12/3/2011 — €9k

  Flynn, Bryan: 23/3/2011 — €19k

  Morris, Colin: 04/5/2011 — €12k

  Carruthers, John: 27/6/2011 — €5k

  O’Rourke, Laurence: 19/8/2011 — €27k

  And so it ran, for almost six pages, the lists divided into various nationalities. The total topped out close to seven hundred grand.

  ‘Who are they,’ I said, ‘shareholders?’

  ‘Artists,’ he whispered.

  The Fine Arte portfolio, I presumed, but as always I was just that bit behind the curve. The list did detail some of the Fine Arte portfolio, but only those artists who’d been copied, strictly one per artist, the originals sold on to private collectors, the fakes left hanging in courthouses and libraries and county council offices to gather hefty tax deductions for their philanthropic owners along with a thin film of dust.

  It had been Gillick, not Finn, who’d tipped off Tohill about the scam, buying himself some credit when CAB started to squeeze.

  It wasn’t fool-proof, of course. It helped that Finn had focused entirely on impressionistic takes on landscapes, but even so it depended heavily on the art world’s assessors and experts being largely incapable of differentiating between a modern masterpiece and a blurry fart.

  Finn had needed Gillick for the legal side, cutting him in for a percentage. They’d left Saoirse Hamilton out of the loop. The first she’d heard of it was when the Italian art dealer with a keen eye for a blurry fart had sued for breach of contract, and the defendant pointed the finger at Fine Arte for originating the fake.

  She wasn’t, to put it mildly, best pleased. It wasn’t so much the Italian suing, this on a blood-from-a-stone basis. No, Saoirse Hamilton was far more concerned about the public ridicule that would inevitably follow.

  Being wiped out financially was one thing, and just about bearable so long as everyone else in the Golf Club was leveraged up the ass all the way to the tonsils and beholden to NAMA for a modest stipend to keep themselves in freshly pressed silk kimonos. But the idea that the Hamiltons were grifters, and were to be dragged through the courts as petty thieves who had preyed on the gullibility, greed and unsophisticated eye of their peers, was a social embarrassment that would deliver the coup de grace to her reputation. And all for what was, by Hamilton standards at least, chump change.

  The kicker, and the reason Gillick wanted a squint at the laptop before handing it over to Saoirse, was that Gillick had taken it upon himself to invite some valued clients of his to the party. Specifically, the rootin’ tootin’ McConnell boys, who were always keen to avail of the opportunity to give a dirty wedge a nice spring-clean.

  It made sense, of course, that a man of impeccable Republican credentials and sewer-level morals like Gillick would represent Ted McConnell, ex-INLA killer and bank blagger of note.

  ‘Now Saoirse’s pissing herself Finn made a confession in his suicide note,’ I said.

  He was a pitiful sight, had there been anyone in the room capable of pity. Like an abused child baring his gritted teeth, desperately clinging to the belief that if only he could smile hard enough it would all go away. He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the pale blue envelope, the blank one. ‘The proof,’ he whispered.

  The document inside was a birth certificate. The date seemed right — October 28, 1994 — and the stamp looked official. But it was a fake.

  ‘I don’t know what this is supposed to be proof of,’ I said, ‘but whoever put it together got the name wrong.’

  From somewhere he found a second wind, even if the words came halt and hoarse. ‘The name is correct.’

  ‘She was adopted, Gillick. They both were, Big Bob Hamilton was shooting blanks. So the birth cert wouldn’t read Grainne Hamilton, it’d be Grainne something else. And the way Saoirse likes changing her kids’ names to Irish, maybe not even Grainne.’

  ‘Genuine,’ he said, although it took him about four seconds to push it all the way out.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Finn,’ he said, then swallowed thickly. His good eye closed. I looked around for some water but there was nothing to hand.

  ‘What about Finn?’

  Nothing. I tapped him on the chin with the.38. ‘Gillick?’ I said. ‘I’m giving you five fucking seconds to-’

  ‘Robert couldn’t live with that.’ He meant the birth cert.

  ‘But why would he want to kill himself over-’

  Except Gillick wasn’t saying Big Bob topped himself. He was saying Bob couldn’t live with knowing what his wife had done, was moving back to London and planning to divorce her.

  Saoirse had panicked, even though Gillick had reassured her that Bob had confirmed the truth would stay hidden.

  ‘What truth?’

  ‘That truth.’ Again he meant the birth cert.

  ‘What fucking truth?’

  For a moment he found himself, the old Gillick, supercilious and smug, although the effect when he smiled was rather ruined by the fact that his teeth were pink. ‘No wonder,’ he whispered, ‘you failed as a private detective.’

  That did it. I reached behind myself, scrabbling on the de
sk for the cigar, and came up instead holding the ornate paper-knife.

  ‘We could’ve done this the easy way,’ I said. I plonked myself down on the broad saddle of his chest, a knee either side. He gasped a fine spray of blood. ‘But this way we’ll have ourselves some fun.’

  I gripped him under the throat to hold his head steady. His good eye bulged. He tried to say something but it came out a strangled squawk.

  ‘Day late,’ I said, ‘dollar short.’ Then dug in.

  When I’d finished carving the ‘T’ into his forehead, and eased off on his throat, it all fell out like some third-rate Jacobean farce, Gillick squealing like a one-man chorus about murder and incest, blood and gore. How Saoirse Hamilton had seduced her teenage son, maybe even convincing herself it was somehow okay given that he was adopted, not flesh and blood. Then falling pregnant, Grainne arriving, Big Bob not knowing shit from shinola, but suspecting shinola. Blazing rows, threats of violence, the inevitable mooting of divorce. Saoirse taunting Bob about being half the man Finn was.

  All this Gillick knew from Finn, who’d gone to Gillick as some perverse kind of priest. A scared and very confused young man, no more than a boy, with nowhere else to go and confusing the idea of client confidentiality with the sacred oath of the confessional.

  Telling Gillick, putting the gun on his desk, that he’d shot his father down at the docks, tumbled him into the water, then reversed the Beamer into the quays.

  ‘With that gun,’ Gillick gasped.

  ‘So I’ve heard. Paranoid bullshit.’

  Not so, apparently. And Gillick being Gillick, he’d sniffed leverage, juice. Started grooming Finn as some kind of dauphin, this with one eye on the Hamilton Holdings fortune Finn would some day inherit. Never guessing for a second that he might be the one being groomed, manipulated into a false position of power, as they schemed their way towards isolating and undermining Saoirse Hamilton’s position.

  It made a lot of sense. At least, it went a long way towards explaining Finn’s bipolar mood-swings, the arson, the constant need to reinvent himself, to lose himself in his art or in diving off cliffs. And why, just when he believed that he was getting out from under it all, squirreling away enough nuts to get him a new start in Cyprus, he might take a stroll off the ninth floor when he discovered that Maria was pregnant, only not with his kid. Going down in style and up in flames, taking everyone with him, yours truly included.