Slaughter's hound

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 Siochana 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 Siochana, 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 Siochana, 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 interested 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 type 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.’

‘You want me to tout?’

He winced, inhaling in a little hiss. ‘Tout’s an ugly word, Rigby.’

‘It’s an ugly business.’

‘It is that,’ he conceded. ‘Was it any more handsome when you were calling yourself a private eye, got paid to blow the whistle?’ He flicked some ash. ‘Didn’t think so. And anyway, it’s no uglier than a bullet in the back of the head.’

‘And there’s the threat.’

‘Absolutely. Only it’s not coming from me.’

‘So who?’

He jammed the cigarillo in the corner of his mouth, talked around it. ‘Gillick’s lodged a proposal at the Town Hall, wants to build a village down at the docks.’

‘I heard.’

‘From Finn.’

‘Yeah, but he reckoned it was a bust. Five years ago, okay. But now? Who’s going to fund that kind of development? Who’d buy into it?’

‘Finn mention anyone else involved?’

‘Nope.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘I don’t move in those kind of circles, Tohill.’

‘Me and you both.’ A rueful grin as he worked the solidarity angle. I rubbed at my cheek where his snotter had landed. The grin died fast. ‘Look, all I’m asking is if Finn mentioned any names,’ he said. ‘Or anything at all that might help us pull a thread.’

‘What kind of thread?’

‘Gillick’s name is all over the planning applications, but we know he doesn’t have the capital to carry it off on his own. Like you say, he’s into debt collection now, scraping what he can out of the Hamiltons to keep NAMA at bay.’

‘You’re saying, I should nail down the contract on this job he’s offering.’

He scratched his jaw, the fingernails blunt and faintly yellow. ‘Gillick’s pulling strings behind a research-development company set up to pursue the proposal. Said company being the kind, you’ll get a tan if you want to sign the AGM’s minutes. There isn’t a single connection to Hamilton Holdings.’

‘The rat deserts the sinking ship. So what?’

‘Except Gillick’s the solicitor for Hamilton Holdings, covers their whole portfolio. Including the PA building.’

‘Liquidating assets on the sly. Doing NAMA’s job for them.’

‘Sure. But who’s buying?’

‘No one, according to Finn.’

‘No one official, anyway. And Gillick’s a big man, Rigby. Throws a lot of shade. So you tell me why he’d want to keep his backers’ money out of sight.’

‘I’d imagine it’s dirty.’

He grunted. ‘Okay, progress at last. Next question: why’s Finn Hamilton a midget in the morgue?’

I flipped my smoke out the window. ‘Maybe he couldn’t take the pressure of touting.’

‘Finn was remarkably cool about helping us with our inquiries. A model fucking citizen, that lad.’

‘Finn’s the kind, he’d be too lazy to let it show.’

‘You think?’ A careless shrug. ‘Me, I got the impression he liked it. Got off on the kick. You see it a lot, people think they’re playing God. A little power goes a long way.’

Sounded like Finn, alright. Something slimy squirming in my guts as we turned right at Feehily’s Funeral Home, towards the hospital. Tohill cut left for Rasharkin and then we were crawling along in second gear, a funeral at St Joseph’s Church spilling out, more traffic backed up. We inched by, rolled on down the hill to Rasharkin. Tohill pulled up opposite Abbott’s beside the alleyway that cut into the estate. I released the safety belt. ‘One thing,’ he said, his jaw set hard.

‘What’s that?’

‘When you were up there last night, talking about nothing with Finn. You see any binoculars?’

‘The infrareds? Sure. I used them myself after Gillick left. So don’t go trying to nail me for-’

‘They were gone by the time we got up there.’

‘Maybe he’d put them away.’

‘We tossed the place, looking for infrared binoculars specifically. No go.’

‘Why the binoculars?’

‘Because Finn saw something one night through them. The landing, we assume, of what’s known as undisclosed imports. Very probably coke or smack. This being the added bonus,’ he said, ‘to Gillick’s proposal to rejuvenate the docks. They’ll have privately owned facilities, harbour masters recruited for their ability to look the other way. Warehouses guarded by their own security firm. Point being, if there’s no infrareds, how’ll we prove Finn saw what he saw?’

‘How could you prove it anyway? Put a corpse on the stand?’

‘If someone took the infrareds, there’s a reason they took them. If we find out who, it’s a thread. Pull that, things might start to fall apart.’ He closed his eyes, pinched the corners. ‘So that’s where we are. Or were, until Finn went out that fucking window.’

‘I’m still not seeing what it has to do with me.’

‘You were there.’

‘Okay. But Finn told me nothing about any of that shit. All I saw was a guy planning for a big future, then taking a dive.’

‘Maybe, before he went, he told you what he’d seen.’

‘He told me nothing.’

‘Sure. But if you say he did, how can they prove otherwise?’

‘First I’m touting, now I’m perjuring myself. Is that it?’

‘They’d be Finn’s words, your name on them. Confirming his statement.’

‘Fuck that.’

‘Worst case scenario, we get an injunction against Gillick, tie him up.’

‘Stymie the development.’

‘Indefinitely, yeah. We have precedent, so we’re solid there.’

‘Nice job.’

‘Could be, yeah. All we need is-’

‘I mean, your job. It’s a nice job.’

He frowned. ‘Don’t get all fucking moral on me now, Rigby. You burnt that fucking bridge a long time ago.’

‘I’m just saying, you’ve a job. Which is nice.’ I pointed across the road at the Abbott building. ‘Don’t know if you heard, but a couple of months ago those guys announced 175 new jobs in there.’

‘So?’

‘So the last time anyone announced new jobs in Sligo was Queen Maeve, she was short a few spears for her little jaunt to the Cooley Mountains.’

Tohill wearing a poker face now, jaw and lips hard and straight as pokers. ‘This is dirty money we’re talking about here, Rigby.’

‘Tohill, man — do you seriously think anyone in Sligo gives a fuck about who’s investing? Someone wants to create jobs with laundered cash, so what? No Dublin bastard’ll do it. If Sligo drifted off to fucking Iceland next week, it’d only make the news because the deer got frostbite.’

He was chewing the butt of the cigarillo into a soggy mess. ‘Let me clarify where this dirty money comes from, Rigby.’

‘I know where-’

‘In this case, specifically, we’re talking about the boys still fighting the good fight. Y’know, the Socialist Republic lads who knock off a bank here and there to grease the wheels.’

‘Fuck the fucking banks.’

‘Yeah, well, these raggy-arsed philanthropists, they’re socialist enough to want to share the wealth, only they do it in kind, pumping heroin into their own back yards. Or they’ll splash the cash by trafficking in women, spread a little happiness there if you’ve a few quid to spare and don’t mind screwing a zombie. You have a problem with that? No worries, here’s a double-tap in the knees, no charge. Or maybe they’ll bugger you to death with sewer rods and then rape your grieving wife, on the off chance she might get some daft notion about justice.’

‘You’re forgetting the bullet to the back of the head.’

‘You can live with that?’

‘You’d be surprised by what I can live with.’

‘Surprised, no. Disappointed, yes.’

‘That’s cute. A disappointed cop.’

He thought that over. ‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘How long d’you think it’d take me to have your taxi licence revoked?’

‘Dunno. Ten minutes?’

‘Don’t be daft. It’d take at least a day.’

‘You’re giving me a whole twenty-four hours?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t thank me. I blush easy.’

I thought about that. Not for long, or I’d have laughed out loud at Tohill’s big play, taking away a licence to drive a cab that’d gone up in flames. Instead I thought about how perjuring myself would go on the record, there in black and white should Tohill ever decide he needed another favour from an ex-con.

‘I’m signing nothing,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be wearing no wires.’

‘Your call. But if we do it the hard way, have you up on the stand to testify you saw infrareds in Finn’s studio, actually used them, this to corroborate Finn’s statement about what he saw, then you’ll be stepping down without a friend in the world. So think on about your new friend Gillick, how you might like to have a chat with him in the very near future, reminisce about Finn.’

I opened the door and made to get out, then hesitated. ‘There was one thing,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘This goes under the radar. Call it an anonymous tip.’

He leaned towards me, turning his head away as he put a forefinger behind his ear. ‘It’ll go no further than these four doors,’ he said.

‘Wouldn’t be much point in me saying it then, would there?’

‘No, I mean-’

I hawked up a goober, spat in his ear. By the time he struggled out of the safety-belt, got his door open, I was halfway down the alleyway and gone.