Slaughter's hound

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 decor 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 amp;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.