Slaughter's hound

39

The evening was closing in, the sky a rotten peach. I told Maria to get her stuff from the Phaeton and went and had a look at Gillick’s Saab in the garage. Unlocked, no keys. A minute later I was easing in beside the Phaeton.

I put her bags on the back seat, debating whether to leave Bear where he was. Maria wouldn’t hear of it. So he got transferred to the Saab too.

I drove up the steep track and into the pines, flicking on the lights against the thickening gloom. The Saab so quiet, even in first gear, that I heard an owl whoo-hoo over the engine’s hum. Up across the razor-back ridge, down into the valley again.

‘How’d he get out?’ I said.

A hardy joker, Toto McConnell. Had squirmed across Jimmy and kicked in the back panel, come scrambling through from the boot, Bear trapped in the well behind the front seats. Maria’d bailed out and made for the trees, squeezing the Beretta’s trigger. Its safety on.

The rest I knew.

The dash lights gave her pallor a ghastly blue sheen. Hands trembling, the adrenaline rush sending her into delayed shock, how close a gun had been to her belly and what was in it.

‘Stop the car,’ she said.

‘We don’t have time to-’

She gagged, put a hand to her mouth. There was no hard shoulder, nowhere to go.

‘Harry!’

I jammed on, skidding. She was pushing out the door even before we’d stopped, and vomited quietly onto the verge.

It was a one-puke deal. She sat back into the seat, eyes closed. Pale as raw vellum now, a diamante gleam to the sweat prickling her forehead.

With her eyes still closed she found her bag, fumbled inside. Came up with a bottle of water, some tissues.

‘You alright?’

She took a swig, gargled, spat onto the verge.

‘Just get me to the airport,’ she whispered.

It was that horrible time to drive, dusk sifting into night, when the lights of the oncoming cars are harsh, dazzling. My skull a damp sandbag, grit drifting in at the back of my eyes. Trees flooding by on both sides. Tremors in my hands that had nothing to do with the swollen knuckle, the adrenaline effort of carving ‘TOUT’ into a man’s forehead.

I was fritzing, the synapses shorting out even as they fired and flared, trying to process what Gillick had said.

It made no sense.

It made perfect sense.

Exhausted now, long past the brink.

Maria didn’t speak until we hit the roundabout at Carraroe and I turned off, heading back towards Sligo.

‘Where’re we going?’ she said.

‘One last pit stop.’ I heard myself sound hollow, as if on the other end of a long-distance call. ‘Then we’re good.’

‘I’m going to miss that flight, Harry.’

‘If you do I’ll drive you to Dublin.’ I looked across at her. ‘Maybe get on the plane with you.’

‘The fuck you will.’

‘And what if it’s mine?’

‘All the more fucking reason,’ she said, placing her hands on her stomach, ‘to keep it a million miles away from you.’

Maybe she had a point.

I shifted in the seat, pulled the pair of pale blue envelopes from my back pocket. The one with a cheque for seventy-five grand inside, and addressed in Finn’s handwriting to Andrea Toner, 18 O’Neill Crescent, Carton — I tucked that under my thigh. Handed Maria the other.

‘You might want to see that,’ I said.

She was only mildly curious opening the envelope, and had to peer at it closely in the bluey light. Then she realised it was a birth certificate.

‘Gillick had this?’ she said.

‘That’s right. He reckons Finn is Grainne’s father.’

‘So?’

‘You knew this?’

‘Sure. Finn told me. That night he told me about killing his father. He told me everything, Harry.’

I doubted that. The best liars tell only mostly the truth.

‘Kind of sweet of him really,’ she said. An acid bite to her tone. ‘I mean, I was taking him in sickness and in health, right? The least he could do was tell me how sick he could actually be.’

She didn’t know the half of it.

‘And you told Grainne you knew,’ I said. ‘Which is why she went for you with the scissors.’

‘She wanted everyone to pretend Finn was some kind of saint.’ She shrugged. ‘About fucking time she grew up, learned a few things about how the world really works.’

‘Right. Because every girl needs to find out, at some point, how her brother is her father too. Doing her a favour really, weren’t you?’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘And now you’re going to steal her trust fund, use it to destroy the Hamilton name. Maybe drop some incest into the mix to spice things up.’

‘That’s the general idea, yeah.’ She held up the envelope. ‘Mind if I keep this?’

‘It’s all yours.’