Slaughter's hound

27

She was waiting for me in the woods. Sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, smoking, facing out over the little cove below. Dressed for mourning this time, black T-shirt, black denims. At first I thought she’d been beaten up, but a closer look revealed a make-up job of shaded purples and thick kohl.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey,’ I said, not stopping to discover which Carmen she was today, the vicious Miss Sternwood or the gypsy lover driven to operatic hysterics by unrequited arias.

She dropped the cigarette and ground it out, hurried to keep up. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. I was a half-stride ahead, staying out of range of her nails, which weren’t any shorter than when she’d raked me in the hall. ‘You were in shock, bombed on pills, you didn’t know what you were-’

‘Not that.’

‘Oh.’

‘I was listening in on the phone,’ she said. ‘Before, when you were talking to your wife about your son.’

‘She’s not my wife.’

‘Well, I hope he’ll be okay.’

‘Thanks, yeah.’

‘So what does she want?’

‘Ben to get well. What d’you think?’

She put on a spurt as we reached the fringe of the woods, placed a hand on my arm, tugged on it. I stopped, took a step back.

‘You know who I mean,’ she said.

She’d given the nails about four coats of black varnish. I prised her hand free as gently as I could. ‘If it’s your mother you’re asking about, then that’s between her and me. Client confidentiality. Sorry.’

Which wasn’t strictly true, there being no ethical contract existing between a B amp;E man and the person who commissions them to steal. Unless it’s good old-fashioned honour among thieves.

‘But it’s to do with Finn, right?’

‘Sorry, I can’t say.’

It was still gloomy beneath the trees but even so her eyes were a delicate faience-blue. She tried to bat the eyelashes but there was too much gunk plastered on. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ she said.

‘Same difference, really.’

I walked on down into the grassy dell, across the gravel to the Sierra. She caught up as I opened the driver’s door, put a hand on it.

‘This is stolen,’ she said. ‘Am I right?’

‘You’re better off not knowing.’

A sickly smile. ‘Have you any idea,’ she said, ‘how often I’ve heard that in the last two days?’

‘None. Now take your hand off the-’

‘You could probably do with a car the cops won’t be looking for,’ she said. ‘Sounds like you need a phone, too.’

‘Trust me, you don’t want to get involved.’

‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. ‘How can I not be involved?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ I was acutely aware that we were having the conversation in full view of about twenty windows, from any of which a pair of eyes could be watching. ‘What I’m saying is, I have a job to do. And I don’t need any-’

‘I can help.’

‘I doubt that very much.’

‘I can.’

‘You don’t even know what the-’

‘She wants the laptop,’ she said. ‘And the gun.’

We agreed that she should do her very best to slap my face without drawing blood, this for the benefit of any watching eyes, and then storm over to her Mini Cooper and drive off, and that I would shrug and get in the Sierra and follow at a more sedate pace, and that we would rendezvous at the gates of The Grange. And so I shrugged and watched her go, a hand to my poor abused cheek, and got into the Sierra, and followed her down the driveway.

At the gates I pulled up beside her and indicated that she should wind down her window, the Sierra’s being already busted and needing no winding in either direction, and told her to follow me.

Out to the main road and straight across, up the back road to Ballintrillick that winds around the rear of Benbulben. Half a mile or so up the road I branched off onto a narrow track and pulled in at the first bog cutting. I told her to get turned and face back down the mountain, borrowed her cigarette lighter. Knotted together six tissues from the box of Kleenex in the footwell of the Sierra’s passenger side, unscrewed the petrol cap, got the tissues nicely soaked.

Two minutes later we were on our way again, the Sierra blazing merrily. The sun cleared the mountain as we reached the main road, spangling the landscape a luminous gold.

It was another beautiful Sligo morning, another glorious fucking day.

Grainne favoured Marlboro Lights. I snapped the filter and sucked on some poison that didn’t taste of mint. ‘Tell me about the gun,’ I said.

‘You first.’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Not the gun. Finn.’

‘What about him?’

‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. She sounded solemn but then came a half-gulp and it all rushed out in a sulky wail. ‘My only brother’s dead and something’s going on and no one will tell me anything.’

‘Maybe there’s nothing to tell.’

‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘I’m not a fucking child.’

I couldn’t contradict her there. She had her mother’s genes and they were brewing up nicely, swelling to plateaus in all the appropriate places. But it was in the eyes you saw it best, the eyes that didn’t film with tears despite the tremulous voice. Her mother’s eyes, pellucid and skewering.

‘What do you think is going on?’ I said. A shrink’s gambit.

‘I don’t know. It’s like …’ She paused. ‘You were at the PA,’ she said. ‘Right? Thursday night.’

‘Yeah, I was.’

‘And you saw it happen.’

‘Correct.’

‘That’s why you came out to the house, to tell my mother.’

‘Sure. I thought it’d be better that way. Rather than-’

‘But you actually saw him jump, right?’

‘I did, yeah.’

‘Did he say anything?’

About her, she meant. For all that she was trying to play the sullen ingenue, she sounded as plaintive as a woman querying the salt content of the ocean in which she was drowning.

‘He said lots of things. If you’re asking if he said anything about you specifically, then no. Same goes for wanting to end it all. He was in pretty good form.’

‘So why did he jump?’

‘I don’t know.’ I’d always wondered what the number umpteen felt like. Maybe I needed to get I Don’t Know tattooed to my forehead. ‘My best guess is he cracked under the pressure.’

‘Pressure?’

‘Well, your mother doesn’t seem to be very fond of Maria.’

She hooted at that, loud and harsh. ‘You mentioned Maria’s name?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Did she call her a trollop?’

‘Let’s just say there were variations on a theme.’

‘She called her the Whore of Babylon once.’

‘Nice, yeah. Biblical.’

She adjusted her visor as we rolled down into Drumcliffe, the sun streaming in. ‘Problem there is,’ she said, ‘that was always a bonus for Finn. Anything that pissed off Saoirse was good with him.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so.’

‘Good for you.’

‘So if it wasn’t the pressure, why did he jump?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest clue.’ I stole another Marlboro Light, got it lit. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said, ‘the cops don’t believe he jumped. They think he was pushed.’

‘Pushed?’

‘Yeah, but don’t get your hopes up. They think it was me pushed him.’

I was glad I’d stolen the smoke before breaking that one. A chill settled between us. ‘Why would they think that?’

‘Because I was there and they can’t think of any reason why he’d want to jump. And before you start thinking like a cop too, I should point out that Finn’d have taken me with him if I’d been sitting in the cab when he landed on it.’

‘I didn’t know he …’ She swallowed hard.

‘Well, he did.’ It was the first time I’d said it out loud, one of those moments when you realise you’ve been thinking something a long time and not really known you were thinking it. I should be dead.

I felt the crash coming on hard, this on top of damn all sleep and too much coffee, the concussion and the shock, and Ben, Christ, Ben in a coma. I laughed out loud, heard it thin and shivery. ‘It’s kind of weird, y’know? Like drowning witches in a pond. If I’d been in the cab, I’d be in the clear but dead. Except I wasn’t, so now I’m in the frame. Jesus,’ I said, ‘I never thought I’d need an alibi for someone’s suicide.’

She flinched, then glared across. ‘You’re a horrible human being.’

‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

‘Why would you even say such a thing?’

‘Because you’re asking all these bullshit questions so you won’t have to face the fact that Finn’s dead and gone and didn’t care enough about anyone to say goodbye before he went.’

I guess that one made us even. It wasn’t exactly a slap in the face, but she recoiled, her colour draining away, and then she flushed. I edged towards the door in case she reached and raked, but when she took a hand from the steering wheel it was to cup her mouth, perhaps to catch the single precious whimper that emerged.

‘Grainne,’ I said. I tried to soften my tone but it came out like a frog gargling gravel. ‘In the long run, it’s better if you deal with it sooner rather than later. Trust me.’

Her eyes were wet, hard and bright. For some reason I thought of Fiver in Watership Down. Then she ruined it with a sneer. ‘Oh yeah? Your only brother committed suicide?’

It wasn’t just the eyes. She had her mother’s way with the hired help, too.

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I killed him.’

That bought me a nifty goldfish impression. ‘You …?’

‘Killed him. And watch the fucking road before you kill the rest of us.’

‘But why would you …?’

‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is I buried it when I should have been purging and now it’s too late. So my advice to you is to take yourself off to a dark room and have a good long think about how Finn’s gone. And I mean, forever. You know how you were hoping he’d be the one to link you up the aisle the day you get married? It’ll never happen now.’

‘Jesus,’ she whispered, ‘why are you saying these-’

‘Because it’s his fault it’ll never happen. Stop blaming yourself, start blaming him. Otherwise you’ll go daft.’

‘But-’

‘But nothing. Maybe, okay, he had his reasons. But whatever they were, they had nothing to do with you. So let it go, cry him into the ground, move on.’

‘You’re a cold fucking bastard.’

‘Yeah, well, someone has to be.’

We were on the long straight into town now, passing Bertie’s Pitch amp; Putt, which was just as well, because she jammed on and swerved onto the hard shoulder without so much as a glance in the rear-view. I reached over, knocked on the hazard lights. She sat with her shoulders hunched, knuckles white on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead without seeing much of anything at all. Not so much Fiver, now. More Bigwig. Or Woundwort, maybe.

I did a quick tally of the pros and cons of swiping another couple of Marlboros, decided against. Reached for the door handle.

‘Don’t get out,’ she said, still staring ahead, the words softly desperate, an old monk’s prayer.

‘Grainne …’

‘He didn’t do it. He didn’t jump.’

‘If that’s the way you need to-’

‘Just listen a second,’ she said quietly. ‘Listen, okay?’ And then the rocket fuel sparked in the back of her mind and she punched the steering wheel and suddenly she was screaming at the windscreen. ‘All I want is someone to fucking listen to me for once!’

I got the message.

In behind the pellucid eyes and layers of kohl and Arctic cool, the grief and the rage, Grainne Hamilton was very badly scared.