Slaughter's hound

35

The PA yard still stank of burnt petrol, warm tar. The crime scene tape hanging limp.

‘Didn’t take them long to move on, did it?’ Maria said.

Budgets and resources being what they are these days, I was more surprised they hadn’t taken the crime scene tape with them when they left. The chalk outline, too.

We gave the scorch mark a wide berth, the jam stain on the tarmac that was still purple at its centre but mostly sun-browned and flaking. It was worth trying the door, on the off-chance the cops had wandered away without locking up, but no joy. So I left Maria out front and went around the side, scaled the rusted fire escape again. Came in through the studio as the phone Herb had given me beeped, a text message to say Maria’s flight was booked, 7.30 PM to Gatwick out of Knock. Which gave us about three hours. I went on down the metal stairs to the ground floor, padding across the silent gallery. Let Maria in, directed her to the window.

‘You keep sketch,’ I said. ‘If anything moves, do that scream thing again.’

Then I crossed to the rear of the gallery, went through to the storage area behind. Opened the metal door and got a half-second warning, the clickering of nails on concrete, realising too late I hadn’t announced my presence. A furry Panzer exploded out of the dark. Jaws open, teeth gleaming in the gloom. I ducked away, rearing back, so the crown of his head hit me full-force in the chest. Heard the jaws snap and then I was down, bowled over. He skittered on the concrete as his paws scrabbled for grip, and then he bunched and sprang again.

Sprawled on my back, winded and weak, it was all I could do to meet his lunge halfway, bounce an elbow off his snout, grab a handful of rough fur beneath his throat. Gobs of spittle spattering my face as he slavered and snarled, forepaws on my chest, the rear scraping in my groin like he was rucking out a scrum. I tried kneeing him off but he had all the weight and momentum, his relentless twisting and snapping wearing me down.

There came a shrill whistle with a neat little trill. His head shot up as if jerked by a chain, ears pricking. A plaintive whine.

‘Bear,’ Maria urged. ‘C’mere, Bear!’

One last gouge in my groin and he was gone, launching himself at Maria like some grotesque teddy bear, all snuffles and short barks, skittish now. I sat up, shaking so hard I could barely tug my shirt free, wipe the drool from my face.

Starving, I guessed, and maddened for the want of water cooped up in that heat. Had the cops fed him before they’d left? Doubtful.

I went into the storage room and opened a couple of well-gnawed cans of dog food, scooped them into a bowl. Brought that outside and put it down on the ground, slid it across the concrete in his general direction. He’d wolfed it all down when I got back from the bathroom with a bowl of water, Maria hunkered alongside tugging his ears, so I opened another couple of cans of food while he inhaled the water, lapping at it so fast he splashed more than he drank.

‘He’s just a big dopey kid really,’ Maria crooned, tears in her eyes as she tickled Bear under the throat. ‘Aren’t you, Bear?’

A big dopey kid, sure. When you weren’t eyeball to eyeball, his jaws crunching, eyes rolling back white in their sockets. All the better, my dear, to inspect the instinct that had taken his lupine ancestors all the way from the tundra to the ground floor of an art gallery a couple of million years later.

A big dopey stone-cold killer.

Except it wasn’t really Bear she was talking to. It was the other big dopey kid, the one with the Brian Jones fringe and shit-don’t-matter grin, the one who’d walked away forever when he’d taken a stroll off nine stories out into the big empty. I was tempted to suggest she’d be better off talking to the jam stain out in the yard, but I let it slide, went through to the storage room again. The place stank of stale piss and shit, although at least Bear’d had the good grace, or sense of self-preservation, to leave all his deposits in one corner. The pile of crutches lay loosely stacked behind his kennel. I picked one up, shook it. Then another. The rattle of their hitting the concrete alerted Maria to the reason we were there, and she slipped in beside me, picked up a crutch.

She swallowed hard, although whether that was from the rancid stench or some repressed emotion was anyone’s guess. ‘We were supposed to be bringing these home to Cyprus,’ she said.

‘I heard, yeah.’ Finn, the part-time philanthropist. ‘Noble as all fuck, he was.’

She shook the crutch, tossed it aside. Bear wandered in, licking his chops. ‘No need to get pissy,’ she said.

‘I just said he was noble as all fuck. What more do you want?’

She shook another crutch, threw it down. Bear had a nuzzle at it, wandered off. ‘Some people used to get sniffy about it, alright,’ she said. A tart edge now to her tone. ‘Mainly because it made them feel bad about not helping out.’

‘Not me.’

She gave a light shrug. ‘I guess some people are more inclined to help.’

‘Spare me the noblesse fucking oblige, alright? The guy had more time and money than was healthy, he was working off his guilt and impressing the pants off you in the process. Nice work if you can get it.’

‘Jealous much?’

‘Keep talking,’ I waved a crutch at her, ‘and you’ll be needing one of-’

A dull clunk. Her eyes widened.

The crutches were telescopic, the kind with holes punched in the lower half so they were adjustable to the user’s height. I pushed the metal knobs in, twisted the bottom half of the crutch free. A silver-grey flash-drive dropped out onto the concrete.

Neither of us reached for it. Instead we stared at the rolled-up canvas protruding from the top half of the crutch.

‘What’s that?’ Maria said.

I slid the canvas free, unfurled it. A landscape scene, some upland moor of rock and heather, a vast sky, a storm brewing.

There were sixty-plus crutches in the pile. We went through them all. Twenty minutes later we were staring at nine canvases in total, all landscapes. Each one signed, none of them by Finn.

The one that caught my eye was a fiery sunset, a vermillion blaze I could’ve sworn I’d seen in the very recent past, hanging opposite a bank of elevators in a hospital lobby. Not that my testimony would’ve been worth shit. Any half-decent lawyer would’ve torn me to shreds, this on the basis that I’d been pie-eyed on pills at the time, and perhaps understandably distracted as I staggered upstairs to visit my son, comatose in intensive care.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

‘Maybe the crippled orphans were supposed to pin them on their walls,’ I said, ‘brighten up the place a little.’