Slaughter's hound

2

How it began was a balmy night, twenty past ten, the caller ID flashing Finn-Finn-Finn. I put down the book and turned on the radio to check his mood. Tindersticks, tiny tears filling up a whole ocean.

Not promising.

Still, business is business. I picked up.

‘How goes it?’

‘Good, yeah. You busy?’

‘Not right now.’

‘How’s the weather?’

‘Balmy. You off on holidays?’

‘Hoping to.’

‘For how long?’

‘Three weeks, if I can swing it.’

‘You deserve it, squire. See you later.’

‘Alright.’

I knocked off the cab’s light and turned out of the rank, heading west on Wine Street, across the bypass and out along the Strandhill Road. Switched off the radio. Finn played good tunes but you had to be in the mood. Some nights he went off on a jag: Santa Claus with a straight razor in his mitt, black dogs howling down the moon. Spend long enough driving a cab listening to Finn and you’d wind up with a Mohawk cruising underage whores trying to think of a politician it’d be worth the bullet to plug.

Five minutes later I was turning up Larkhill and into Herb’s driveway, zapping the security gates. A stately semi-D, two bay windows to the front, five bedrooms upstairs and a cellar that wasn’t on the plans. A double garage on the side. Herb’d had most of the front garden ripped out for tarmac, the better to allow the cabs come and go. Mature sycamore and horse-chestnut fringed the high red-brick walls of the perimeter.

I drove around the back, opened the garage door, eased in beside a Golf I didn’t recognise, a three-year-old model that meant Herb had company. Tapped the four-digit code into the pad on the connecting door, waited for the high-pitched beep, pushed on through to the kitchen. Knocked on the kettle.

‘Herb?’ I called. ‘I’m making a brew. What d’you want?’

‘In here, Harry.’

From his tone I was expecting trouble but even at that Ross McConnell, in person, was bad news. Standing up as I crossed the hall and went in through the arch into the living room, making it look like he was being polite, waiting to be introduced, not making a fuss about being on his feet, his eyes level with mine.

Herb had a mop of curly red hair not generally seen outside of Stephen King books about killer clowns. He sat building a spliff on the coffee table, the plasma TV on with the sound muted, watching black-and-white grainy documentary footage of what might have been the Russian Front.

‘Ross,’ he said, ‘this is Harry. I don’t think you met him before.’

‘Don’t think I have,’ he said, sounding faintly adenoidal. He took his time putting out his hand, taking in my black shoes and black pants, the white shirt and loosely knotted black cotton tie. A respectable ensemble, from a distance at least.

I guessed, from the way his lower lip twitched, that he approved more of my ambition than the actual style. ‘Ross McConnell,’ he said. We shook. A dry, solid handshake. Not limp and not a power-play, nothing you’d remember after except that he’d shaken your hand and met your eye doing it.

He was nothing special, Ross McConnell. A little taller than average, wearing beige chinos, brown deck shoes and a crisp pale blue shirt over a V-neck white tee. A plain gold band on his ring finger but otherwise no jewellery or gewgaws. Ross McConnell, better known as Toto, a joke name he’d been stuck with as a skinny kid because he fancied himself as a prospect, a gimlet-eyed striker in the mould of Toto Schillaci, aka the Sicilian Assassin who’d ended Ireland’s hopes in the 1990 World Cup, Ross sixteen or seventeen at the time. Except Ross, aka Toto, had been nothing special. Pushing forty now and no longer skinny but not running to fat either, no sign of gym pumping or anywhere slack, the brown hair neat under a number four blade and all of it where it should and needed to be, but no more, no less. Nothing special. The eyes no harder than a bank manager’s on a Monday morning and no colder, really, than that last crawling yard to the Pole. But nothing special, no.

Different, sure, because he was Ted McConnell’s younger brother and de facto consigliore. But not so remarkable that he might get picked out of a line-up by an eye-witness to a point-blank drive-by, even on his third or fourth parade, the cops getting desperate, surrounding him with dwarfs and one-legged jugglers.

No, he was nothing special, not Ross McConnell. They never are.

‘Harry …?’ he enquired, one eyebrow cocked. He already knew, of course. I’d have been checked out long before I slid in behind the wheel of a McConnell cab. When you’re an ex-INLA blagger trying to go legit, like say for example one Ted McConnell, you need to be that bit squeakier clean than the competition.

‘Rigby,’ I said.

‘Harry Rigby,’ he said. ‘Rigby, Rigby, Rigby …’ He glanced down at Herb, who was roaching the jay, then back at me. ‘You’re never the Rigby who killed his brother,’ he said. I nodded. ‘Gonzo,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I knew him. Years ago now, but yeah. Mad fucker.’

It wasn’t a question so I let it go. From the kitchen came the sound of a thin whistle. ‘Kettle’s boiled,’ I said. ‘Anyone else for a brew?’

‘Ross was just leaving,’ Herb said.

‘I’ll take a quick espresso,’ Ross said. ‘If it’s not a bother.’

‘No problem.’

He was still standing when I got back, head tilted, one whole wall given over to Herb’s books, most of them hardbacks and mostly non-fiction, travel and adventure, war histories, some popular science. A Patrick Leigh Fermor biography tucked under one arm. He toasted me with the espresso, had a sip, winced at its bitterness.

‘So what’s it like out there?’ he said. ‘Busy?’

‘Quiet enough so far,’ I said. ‘It’ll pick up later on.’

‘Good, good.’

So there we all were, the two of us sipping coffee, Herb on a toke in the armchair, a quarter million Germans frozen solid in Stalingrad and still hoping Von Paulus’d tell Hitler to stick his Sieg Heil up his Austrian hole. The silence getting brittle, Toto glancing up again at the bookshelves. I rolled a smoke and wandered over to the far wall, Herb’s gallery, framed photographs from when he’d worked as a snapper, some of them standalone shots, portraits, a couple of full-length newspaper covers. The one I liked best was a Sligo Champion cover from a couple of election campaigns ago, Bertie Ahern touring the provinces, shocked, staring down at the egg that had just been smashed against his tie, and over it the headline, ‘Bertie Scrambling for Power’.

Herb leaned forward to tap some ash, knocked a musical little tinkle out of the glass ashtray, loud enough to get Toto and I looking around. Herb cleared his throat. ‘Anything cooking?’ he said.

Me he was asking. I glanced at Toto. He put his hand up in mock surrender. ‘I’m not even here,’ he said. ‘You have business to do, don’t let me stop you.’

Herb nodded me on. ‘Finn rang,’ I told him. ‘Looking three bags.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Just now.’

‘He got three last month, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s a lot of personal use.’

Herb didn’t do half-measures. Five-ounce bags of primo bud. Sweet as Bambi going down, a kick like Thumper dreaming snares. He could’ve cut it with oregano, packed the bags with branch, the way some of Toto’s dealers did, but Herb liked his customers happy, his trade steady and sure.

‘The surfers are in next week,’ I said, ‘out to Enniscrone. The wild water women, something like that.’

‘So he’s what, dealing now?’

‘I doubt it. Probably just sorting some people out.’

Toto with another book in his hand, Schrodinger’s Kittens, one of John Gribbin’s. Taking a keen interest, it looked like, in radical quantum mechanics.

‘But sorting these people out,’ Herb persisted, ‘for money.’

‘What I’m saying is, Finn doesn’t need to deal.’

‘Hardly giving it away free though, is he?’

‘Want me to have a word?’

‘Suss him out, yeah. See what’s what. Last thing we want is some amateur pissing about. There’s cops in Bundoran running around with boogie boards now.’

‘Will do.’

Toto put his espresso down on the coffee table, held up the Gribbin. ‘Herbie,’ he said, ‘d’you mind …?’

‘No worries, man. Work away.’

The Gribbin went under his arm with the Leigh Fermor. ‘I’ll drop them back next time,’ he said. ‘Harry?’ He raised an eyebrow and nodded towards the hallway. ‘Mind if I have a word?’

For some reason I took my coffee with me, following on as he ambled out through the kitchen, into the garage. He pressed the door-release button, said, ‘How’s your probation going?’

‘Alright, yeah. Five more months, thereabouts.’

A wry smile. ‘Thereabouts?’

‘Five months, four days.’

‘And you’re clean, right?’

He wasn’t just talking smack or coke. He meant anything that might cause him trouble if I was pulled over driving a cab in which Ted McConnell had a 40 percent stake. A daft question. I was hardly going to fess up to a sideline dealing kiddie porn from the cab’s trunk. Then again, it wasn’t really a question. Especially as Toto McConnell’s definition of clean didn’t include the bags of grass I trundled around town for Herb.

He opened the door of his three-year-old nothing-special navy Golf and got in, put the books on the passenger seat. ‘This Finn guy,’ he said, ‘wants the three baggies. You vouch for him?’

‘He’s never let me down yet. Pays up front.’

‘But you know him, right?’

I nodded. ‘It’s Finn Hamilton.’

He cocked his head. ‘The property Hamiltons?’

‘That’s the family, yeah. Except Finn’s an art dealer.’

‘Bob Hamilton’s boy.’ Now he was nodding, filing it away. Might be useful to know somewhere down the line. ‘Has a gallery down the docks,’ he said, ‘the old PA building. Or am I mixing him up with someone else?’

‘No, that’s him.’

‘Nice work if you can get it,’ he grinned. ‘Am I right?’

‘If you like art.’

He shrugged. ‘I like it. What’s not to like?’ He turned the key in the ignition, the Golf giving a throaty roar before settling down to a purr. He closed the car door, then wound down the window. ‘Meant to ask you,’ he said, ‘if you knew Malky Gorevan.’

Letting me know, he knew I’d done my time, or a good chunk of it, in Dundrum. And maybe letting me know he knew more, that I’d walked earlier than I should have all things considered, a six-year stretch erring on the liberal side when you go down for blowing away your brother, especially when that was enough, in the first place, to have you banged up with all the rest of the criminally insane. Tipping me off that people might be wondering why I’d skated out so soon, and if maybe some kind of deal hadn’t been done, Harry Rigby agreeing to payback, a juicy morsel in the right ear once in a while, for his early release.

‘Yeah, I knew Malky,’ I said. ‘Mad fucker.’

‘Wouldn’t be in Dundrum if he wasn’t,’ Toto said.

‘True enough. How’s he doing?’

Malky Gorevan had the distinction of being one of the very few ex-paramilitaries not to walk on a Good Friday pardon, partly because no one really gave a shit if the INLA ever went back to war, but mainly because Malky, who was serving multiple concurrent sentences, would have been designated Ireland’s first bona fide serial killer had he not wrapped himself in the flag. If Malky ever got out of Dundrum it’d be for the short ride north to face a sheaf of outstanding warrants, Malky a hero in certain circles for being that rarest of gems, an INLA man who’d figured out the intricacies of the mercury tilt car bomb.

‘Malky’s Malky,’ Toto shrugged. ‘Last I heard he was still talking about sell-outs, Adams and McGuinness on his shit-list.’ He shrugged again, Malky old news, yesterday’s man. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Herbie might have a bit of work for you, if you’re available. No problem if you’re not.’

‘What’s doing?’

‘Herbie’ll fill you in.’ He stuck his hand out, and we shook again. ‘Good to meet you, Harry.’ The nothing-special eyes grey and cold as grave chippings. ‘Catch you later.’

He reversed out, got turned and was gone. I waited until I heard the front gates close, then wiped my hand on the seat of my trousers and tossed what was left of the cold coffee into a potted bush that needed watering. Six days since it had rained.