Slaughter's hound

34

The scream came while I was upstairs changing into a pair of Herb’s jeans.

I took the stairs four at a time, beat Herb through the living room door by a short head.

The sisterhood was no more, or else the initiation rituals were a lot more arcane than I’d imagined.

Grainne crouched low, coming crab-like at Maria, a scissors clutched in her right hand. Maria backing into a corner, the laptop she was using as a shield already scored a couple of times.

I hurdled the coffee table, clamped a forearm around Grainne’s throat, grabbing her forearm with the other hand. Forcing the hand holding the scissors down and around, behind her back.

‘Drop it,’ I hissed.

A schoolboy error. She was a bag of drowning cats, spitting and twisting, her left hand clawing for my eyes. The point of the scissors pierced my right thigh just above the knee. A dart of pain, the shock enough to send me stumbling backwards, hauling Grainne with me as we tumbled over the coffee table and bounced off the couch. The rebound threw us sprawling onto the carpet, Grainne still gripping the scissors. I balled a fist and punched down on the back of her wrist. Her fingers splayed, the scissors fell free. I tossed them out of reach and fell back against the couch again. Her nails dug into my forearm, so I tightened the choke-hold. ‘Do that again,’ I panted, ‘and I’ll snap your neck.’

For a second or two she seemed to be considering it, weighing up the pros and cons. Then she relented, went limp. I relaxed my grip and gave her another couple of seconds, then pushed her off, slipped out from underneath. I was half-expecting her to rear up again, start lashing out, but she only turned away and stretched out beside the couch and bawled into the carpet.

By then Herb was easing Maria into an armchair. I got to my feet. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’

Maria shook her head, bewildered. ‘I just wanted to check the flight times,’ she said. Stunned, the laptop still braced in both hands, protecting her midriff. ‘All of a sudden, she was screaming, coming at me with, with …’ She broke off, shuddered.

‘Next time use your phone,’ I said. I nodded down at Grainne. ‘She’s a bit protective of the laptop.’

I sat down on the couch, pulled up the jeans to the knee. The scissors had punctured the skin but the cut wasn’t so deep I’d bleed out any time soon. I rolled down the jeans again, leaned across to pat Grainne on the shoulder. ‘Hey, are you okay?’

Muffled sobs.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘the laptop’s yours. No one’s taking it away. Alright?’

Right on cue Herb placed the Mac on the coffee table. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘See? It’s all yours.’

She told the carpet something.

‘Grainne,’ I said, ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying. And I don’t have time to be sitting-’

She turned her head, looked up at me. ‘You said we had a deal.’

‘Yeah, well, all bets are off. The laptop’s yours. I don’t want it.’

She wriggled into a sitting position. ‘But it’s no good … I mean, I thought we were doing it together.’

‘That was never happening. You were paying me to give it to you instead of your mother. Now I don’t need the money.’

‘But …’

‘Forget it.’ I looked across at Maria. ‘You okay?’

She nodded.

‘Change in plan,’ I told her. ‘Herb’s going to drive you to the airport.’

‘Like fuck,’ Herb said. ‘And anyway,’ he gestured at Grainne, ‘we can’t leave her here on her own.’

‘Not my problem. Not right now.’

Herb swore. Maria snorted, like she’d heard it all before. Grainne tugged at my jeans.

‘What?’ I said, looking down at her, but she didn’t have to say anything. She was staring up at me, her expression half-hopeful, shyly expectant and desperate not to be refused. She might as well have stabbed me in the heart with the scissors.

I’d seen that expression not twenty-four hours ago, Ben glancing up at me from under his fringe, his wan smile anticipating my latest failure, the latest round in the raising and dashing of hopes. The unsaid promises, the wordless craving of a fatherless child for something he didn’t fully understand except in its absence.

‘I don’t have anyone else,’ she whispered.

I looked across at Herb. He shrugged. Maria had her head tilted to one side, eyes watchful, a sneer on the brew.

‘There’s no way I’m driving the two of them anywhere,’ Herb said. ‘Are you kidding? Fucking world war three it’d be.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

Herb said he’d take care of the clean-up, burn my trousers and socks, the shoes. He didn’t say anything more about my going to see Ben. I was guessing that meant he’d only brought it up as a way of buying time, hoping the rage would burn itself out. Which was why he wanted me to be the one to take Maria to Knock, put her on a flight. The idea being that an hour there and an hour back would help me cool off. Herb with no idea the rage was ice cold.

Saoirse Hamilton rattling around my head, her voice scabrous as she asked me if I honestly believed one day might make any difference to how she felt about her dead son.

We turned out of the driveway onto the Strandhill Road, headed for town. It felt like my brain was swimming in black ink. Ben a stab in the heart every time I drew breath and suffering a weird kind of horizontal vertigo, the world accelerating away. The sense of loss like a black and poisoned kind of light. It was everywhere, infusing every last thing with a corrosive despair, eating away even as it fed on itself. The heart turned iron, so that all I felt was the gaping, tugging vortex he’d left behind and a hatred of everything alive, of the world itself for being the world without Ben in it.

‘… fucking disappointed when she opens that baby up.’

‘What?’

‘I said, Grainne’ll be …’ She paused, looked across. ‘Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?’

‘No.’

We’d reached the railway station, were stalled in traffic on Lord Edward Street, the lights red. I had no memory of getting there.

Maria sipped from a bottle of water, tapped the cap home again with the heel of her palm. ‘I’m talking about the laptop.’

‘Forget it. We’re not going back.’

‘Who said anything about going back?’

‘I’m getting you out. That’s all you need to know.’

‘I’m owed, Harry.’ The brandy still working its old black magic. A bolshy tilt to her chin. ‘Finn made promises.’

‘Finn said a lot of things.’

‘Maybe he did, but it’s not just about me.’ She placed her hands, very deliberately, on her midriff. ‘Is it?’

‘You don’t even know it’s his,’ I said.

She conceded that by pursing her lips and nodding slowly. ‘Maybe not,’ she said, ‘but see it my way. It’s either Finn’s or it’s some flake who killed his brother, already has a kid of his own. Sorry,’ she needled, ‘had a kid of his own.’

The lights turned green. I eased off the clutch and trundled around onto the bypass, knocked the car out of gear again as we rolled up behind a Ford Focus.

‘Someone’s going to die for Ben,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t have to be you.’

‘Oh yeah? You’d kill your own kid, maybe? Just when you’ve lost another? Oh, wait — he wasn’t actually yours, was he?’ She patted her tummy. ‘At least this time,’ she said, ‘you know there’s a chance it’s yours.’

‘Maria, I know you’re drunk but I swear to God, one more fucking word about Ben and I’ll drive you straight to Saoirse Hamilton myself.’

‘And tell her what?’ she said. ‘That Finn jumped because you got me pregnant?’

I had a sudden urge to vomit. A flash of Gonzo flopped prone in a chair, a hole punched in his chest, the gun in my hand and the thick whiff of cordite. The sickening thrill of it.

‘Don’t tempt me,’ I said.

‘You never wondered?’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Why you.’

‘Not really. You’re a gold-digging bitch who got bored, needed to kick-start Finn. And I was, y’know, there.’

She seemed pleasantly surprised, if a little disappointed I’d stolen her thunder. ‘And here you are again,’ she said.

The lights turned green. This time we managed to make it through two sets before getting caught behind a red again. ‘What’re you saying?’ I said.

‘I’m saying, the Hamiltons will do okay. Me and you, we’re walking away with nothing. But if we were to-’

‘Forget it. You’re going to Knock and you’re getting on that plane.’

‘Right. And then go home and tell them I’m pregnant and we all live happily ever after.’

‘Not my problem.’

‘No?’

‘Not right now.’

‘Except you don’t know the baby isn’t yours.’

‘You want me and you to play happy families?’

‘I’m saying, Harry, that you already lost one kid today. You want to make it a twofer?’

She was good, no doubt about it. The lights went green again. We cleared the roundabout opposite Summerhill, heading south now, the road clear.

‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘I’ll abort. No way I’m going home to Ozankoy carrying some kid I don’t even know who the father is.’

I pulled over onto the hard shoulder, parked up, got the hazard lights flashing. She watched me roll a smoke, spark it up.

‘Forget the laptop,’ I said.

She smirked. ‘You’re the one keeps banging on about the laptop. You seriously think Finn’d be dumb enough to keep anything useful on it? Saoirse could’ve sent some scumbag in any time she wanted, break into his apartment, the studio.’

‘So why’s everyone want the Mac?’

‘Saoirse wouldn’t be exactly up to speed on the latest in computing. So long as she thought everyone else wanted the Mac …’

‘The woman’s looking for a suicide note. Wants to know why her son-’

‘Come on, Harry. You still believe that crap?’

It didn’t matter a fiddler’s fuck what I believed anymore. ‘So if there’s nothing on the laptop …’ I prompted.

‘There’s a flash drive.’

‘Right.’

‘Finn buried it all.’

‘I hope he marked it with an X.’

‘In cyberspace,’ she said.

‘Christ.’

She was talking about Grainne’s trust fund. How Gillick had worked with Big Bob Hamilton on a rewrite of his will, this not long before Big Bob went for a header off the dock. Essentially, the changes put Finn in control of the trust fund once he came of age.

The flash drive had all the codes, the passwords, the details of the electronic transfers Finn had been making over the last couple of years as he bled the fund dry.

‘How much are we talking?’ I said.

‘Well, the downturn has changed everything. It’s not worth anything like-’

‘How much?’

‘One-point-eight million,’ she said.

‘Jesus.’

I wondered how Ben might have turned out, bright kid that he was, had there been a trust fund waiting for him when he came of age. A tidy little nest egg to put him through college, maybe set him up in business designing his own computer games.

The pain of him throbbing now, as if I’d become entirely an abscess, skin stretched taut across a pus-filled void.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

‘I’m just wondering,’ I said, ‘what happens if you get your hands on this one-point-eight.’

‘We do a split,’ she said.

‘Wrong answer. But what I’m asking is, what’s to stop you taking the money, aborting the baby and taking off for Monte Carlo to find another sap like Finn?’

‘Because I need it for something else.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘To break Saoirse.’

‘Say again?’

‘I’ll be needing most of it,’ she said, ‘to break Saoirse.’

Which was interesting. ‘How’ll you do that?’

‘The first thing,’ she ticked it off on her finger, ‘is a paternity test proving the baby is Finn’s.’

‘Which might be expensive,’ I said. ‘Especially if it’s not.’

‘Meanwhile,’ she went on, ‘I need to hire a PR company, get a campaign organised to let all the investors know where they really stand with Hamilton Holdings. Get enough of them on board to call an EGM, bring in some outside accountants to take a look at the books. At the same time we’re asking some questions of NAMA, making sure the right journos have the inside line on how HaHo is setting up to buy back the choicest bits of its portfolio at rip-off prices, screwing the taxpayer.’ She’d thought it through. Not all the way, maybe, but at least she was facing in the right direction. ‘The newspapers love all that family feud shit, don’t they?’

‘Their readers do, anyway.’ I took a last drag off the smoke, dropped it out the window. ‘You’re serious about this?’

She got herself half-turned in the passenger seat so she was facing me. ‘You can think what you want about me and Finn,’ she said, ‘all that gold-digging crap, but I never gave a fuck about his money. It was Saoirse who was all about the money. And now Hamilton Holdings is fucked, about all that’s left is Grainne’s trust fund. Which was why Saoirse was pressuring Finn, giving him all this family-first bullshit. Time to circle the wagons, start again. Why do you think he started making transfers out of the fund in the first place?’

‘Knowing Finn, I’d say it was because he reckoned one-point-eight million would buy him a nice slice of the easy life in Cyprus.’

‘Because you’re like all the rest. One time,’ she cracked a grimace, ‘Saoirse told him the money was his crutch. Saoirse, of all fucking people. Telling him he needed to stand up straight, learn to walk on his own.’

‘Maybe she knew him better than you think.’

She nodded at that, slowly. ‘She knew him well enough to know what buttons to press,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care what any inquest says, it was Saoirse who walked him out that window and pushed.’

And then he came down on my cab and blew my life to shit, taking Ben with him as collateral damage.

It had a nice symmetry, alright. Grab Saoirse Hamilton’s blood money and make her choke on it.

‘This flash drive,’ I said. ‘It could be anywhere.’

‘Sure,’ she said. A nasty little grin. ‘Except you knew Finn, his perverse sense of humour. If Saoirse was giving him grief about money being his crutch, where would he be likely to hide the flash?’