Slaughter's hound

5

Finn Hamilton was doomed from the start, named by his mother for the great hero of Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and left in no doubt, from a very early age, that he was expected to grow into a man apart: hunter, warrior, legend, king.

No pressure.

And then, still a kid, he sees his father drown.

I guess they were lucky it was only a few buildings he’d burned down.

He’d had his epiphany in the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, how to use the Hamilton name and the resources that went with it. Stopped resisting and went with the flow, folding back into the family like a fifth columnist, a saboteur bent on good deeds and charitable works. The cops turned a blind eye to McCool FM on the basis that it wasn’t a commercial enterprise, its rare advertisements being on behalf of St Vincent de Paul and the Lions Club and similarly minded charities and organisations, its website offering directions and links to Aware and the Samaritans, the Model Arts Centre and the Irish Cancer Society, as well as hosting examples of work available in the gallery on the PA’s ground floor, his own included, a third of each sale going to the charity of the artist’s choice.

His latest idea, still in the embryonic stage, was SpiritusMundi, a loose collective of artists, musicians and writers all operating out of the PA, a kind of urban take on Annaghmakerrig, a retreat for those of a creative bent. Last I’d heard he was in talks with Blue Raincoat, offering them rehearsal space, the idea being that they’d relocate their theatre from the town centre to the docks, Finn dangling the carrot of a long-term lease on very favourable terms.

I buzzed two short and one long, waiting for the beep, the ka-chunk, before slipping inside. The tiny lobby had a single spotlight recessed in the roof, a security camera high in one corner. I glanced up at it, waited for the second beep, then pushed on through to the gallery. Finn had stripped out the ground floor, leaving nothing to distract the eye from the canvases he’d mounted on support pillars and the bare brick walls, the space echoey under a high ceiling. I left the lights off and snuck across to the window, peeked out into the yard. Jimmy was sitting half-out of the Saab, smoking and jotting down the cab’s number, head at an angle, phone tucked between shoulder and ear.

The efficient type, Jimmy.

By now Bear was barking fit to shiver the foundations. I made my way through to the rear, gave the metal door the double tap, made shushing sounds, then shunted the door inwards. Bear’s nails clickered on the concrete as he reared up to plant a paw on either shoulder. Full-bred Irish wolfhound. Up on his hind legs he’d have held his own in a line-out. I staggered under his weight, waltzed backwards a little, then pushed him off and tousled his ears.

‘Not tonight, Bear. Sorry.’

I kicked the crutch he’d been mauling back into the pile in the corner and found the box on the top shelf, scattering a handful of bone-shaped biscuits into his metal bowl, topping up his water. Finn loved that hound, had rescued him as a terrified pup from a shelter, but he had a theory that a hungry watchdog made for an alert watchdog. Put that with Finn’s prodigious appetite for psychotropic grass and a general attitude to life that if charted on a graph of ambition and endeavour would resemble a hammock, and you had a dog that was on occasion leaner and meaner than his doggie god creator intended.

While I was at it I ducked my head into his kennel to check on the bedding. It seemed fresh and clean, and by the time I backed out Bear had settled himself in a corner to gnaw at a biscuit, toying with it, three or four others still in the bowl. Which meant Finn was on the case and Bear was well fed, which was a pity of sorts. I’d been entertaining the idea of taking him out for a stroll in the yard, just to see how efficient Jimmy might be with 160 pounds of war hound bearing down at full throttle.

There was no lift in the PA building. What you got was nine stories of rusted metal stairs bolted to the inside walls. Once upon a time a set of four stairs would have taken you up to a new floor, but the insides had long ago been ripped out. Now, once you cleared the gallery space, the building was a silo all the way to the top floor. A stiff climb, but nothing a reasonably fit man couldn’t manage without breaking a sweat. By the time I reached the top I could have done with an oxygen mask and a brace of Sherpas.

I rapped a tattoo on the studio door.

‘Yeah, Harry?’ Finn’s voice came muffled. ‘C’mon in.’

The studio took up most of the ninth floor, with a mixing-desk tucked into the far corner. Egg-boxes covered the ceiling and most of the walls. Finn was behind the desk, headphones around his neck. Tall and lean even sitting down, shoulders bony under the white crew-neck tee. He almost always wore the same ensemble: white T-shirt, faded Levis, brown suede moccasins, coarse blond stubble. No socks. The flaxen hair cut into the shaggy bowl favoured by post-smack Brian Jones. In behind the fringe he had a wide-awake face, an engaging grin, bright blue eyes.

Behind him were amps, processors, serried ranks of vinyl LPs. The muted rattle was The Wedding Present turned down low. It sounded like ‘Brassneck’, but then one Weddoes sounds a lot like the rest when it’s turned down low.

The near half of the studio was dominated by a rough wooden table covered with tubes of paint, brushes in jars, palette knives. A pair of easels stood side-by-side, both covered with paint-spattered tarps. Canvases stood stacked four and five deep against the wall, some framed, some not. In the corner a Stratocaster in the classic yin-yang black-and-white stood propped on a stand, two strings missing, a third hanging by a thread.

The far wall was the reason Finn had picked the PA for his studio: a full-length window, looking out across the docks and the deepwater to the sea and Benbulben beyond. A pane had been slid aside to allow a faint breeze waft through and create a draught with the fire escape door, which was wedged open on the opposite side. On a summer evening, with the equipment humming, the day’s heat rising and Finn huffing weed, the studio could get stifling, the air thick enough to chew.

The guy in the tailored suit swamping the couch under the window put me in mind of William Conrad without the moustache. Finn waved in his direction. ‘You meet Gillick before?’

‘I’d have remembered,’ Gillick purred.

Arthur Gillick’s rep was choice. Put a bullet in a cop’s face at the passing out parade in Templemore, Gillick’s was the number you dialled when they finally gave you your call. He’d made a name for himself starting out, this in the late ’70s, all through the ’80s, as the Provos’ go-to silk, although it’d be pushing it to say he was politically motivated. Unless, of course, his politics stretched to some kind of convoluted anarchist theory that involved keeping every last smack-dealing lowlife, recidivist wife-beater and sticky-fingered Traveller on the streets. Last I’d heard he’d been diversifying, feeding off the economic downturn by moving into debt collecting and facilitating evictions, although his crowning glory had come a couple of years back, when he’d defended the upstanding citizen who’d strangled his daughter and dumped her body in the lake when the girl finally decided that, at the grand old age of thirteen, she was old enough to decide who took her pants down.

Now he hauled his huge frame forward, rising with the ponderous grace of a bishop who understands that without dignity a bishop is just another fat man. A large head under a flat swirl of sleek grey hair, the face full rather than fat, jowled but healthy. The tan helped. Big round eyes gave him an owlish aspect, the mouth prim and beaky under a prominent nose. He held out his hand. It was small and pudgy, not unduly encrusted with precious gems. The handshake was surprisingly dry and firm.

‘Arthur Gillick,’ he said.

‘Harry Rigby.’

He took a beat longer to look away than he should have. Then he let go my hand. ‘Harry,’ he said. ‘A fine, princely name.’

I slid him a leer, trying to work out if it was more odd that he was trying to needle me off the bat or that he was doing it by suggesting I was second-in-line to the English throne. Not that Arthur Gillick was in any position to start tossing rocks around the glasshouse.

‘It’s short for Harrison,’ Finn said. ‘His mother loved My Fair Lady, named him for Rex Harrison.’

‘Really?’ Gillick was amused.

‘Could’ve been worse,’ I said. ‘She might have called me Pygmalion.’

‘Because then,’ Finn put in, ‘we’d be calling him Pyggy. And that might get confusing.’

Gillick’s smile didn’t dim by so much as a quark but something went out in his porcine eyes.

It wasn’t me he was trying to needle. It was Finn, adopted in England and raised there, given an Irish name to offset what his mother believed was a taint akin to the mark of Cain.

‘I see you appreciate the classics, Mr Rigby,’ Gillick said. A smooth voice, warm chocolate oozing. He gestured towards the stack of canvases. ‘Are you a patron of the arts too?’

‘Not since my portfolio crashed, no.’

‘Ah, but Mr Rigby.’ I was getting diabetic just listening to him. ‘Great art is priceless, surely. Its worth resides in its power to evoke the fragility of life when juxtaposed against the, ah …’ He glanced across at Finn.

‘Against a universe almost entirely composed of dead matter,’ Finn finished.

‘Indeed. Particularly when art itself is generated of dead matter.’

Finn gave him a slow handclap.

‘A pity,’ Gillick observed, ‘that this priceless wonder costs so much to hang on a wall. On those rare occasions when it sells at all.’

Finn gave him a sloppy grin and sat back in his swivel chair, hands behind his head. ‘You’re confusing cost and worth again, Arthur.’

A dainty bow from Gillick. ‘Precisely my point to you.’ A wristy little wave that finished with the forefinger pointing at Finn, thumb cocked. ‘Call me,’ he said. ‘Let me do you this one favour.’

He took his time leaving because he’d have waddled if he hadn’t. I stepped up onto the couch to where the window was open and straddled the sill, my back against the frame, foot resting on the narrow ledge outside. The rising heat carried the acrid odour of tar cut with the ocean’s salty tang. I rolled a smoke and waited for the clanging to die away down the metal stairs, then reached Finn’s night-sight binoculars off the hook where they lived, leaning out to train them on the cars directly below. Jimmy was still sitting half-out of the Saab.

From across the water in Cartron came the faint drone of traffic. Even fainter, from the direction of town, the tinny whirr-whirru of a siren, cop or ambulance I couldn’t say. Someone’s alarm was a waspy whine.

‘He just get a call?’ I said.

‘Gillick? No. Why?’

‘Just wondering.’

He propped his moccasined feet on the desk. ‘No joy with the weed?’ he said.

‘I left it in the cab when I saw the bruiser outside.’

‘Limerick Jimmy.’

‘Jimmy, yeah, but he sounded more Derry.’

Finn made an elaborate flourish, then thrust forward. ‘Tasty with a blade. Or so they say.’

‘Ah.’

He clamped a headphone to one ear, eased some knobs up and down the mixing desk. The headphones slid down onto his neck again as he slumped back in the leather chair, hands folded on his midriff.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘I never knew Gillick was a fruit.’

‘Gillick a fruit?’ Finn grinned. ‘Try again. Man’s the worst minge-hound in Christendom.’

‘So why’s he giving me the juju eye?’

‘It’s just his thing, how he remembers people. Says it’s like taking a photo.’ He double-tapped his temple. ‘Clickety-click.’

A dull roar rumbled up from the yard. I trained the infrareds, caught the Saab pulling out through the gates. It disappeared behind the wall, then emerged onto the quay heading back towards town. I hung up the infrareds, climbed down from the couch. ‘Coffee?’

‘Got one here,’ he said. ‘You work away.’

I went through to the kitchenette and put the kettle on, stepped into the shoebox bathroom to make room for the fresh brew. Washed and flushed, then winced. The way the old cistern clanked and growled, you were only supposed to flush when Finn was playing Tom Waits, and preferably something from Rain Dogs.

The Stones were playing by the time I got back, ‘Get Off My Cloud’ cranked all the way up. Finn with a stubby jay on the go. I perched on the windowsill, sipped some coffee and nodded along. That high up, looking down the docks out over the deepwater, you could see an awful lot of nothing much at all: gaunt buildings, forty shades of shadow, the silvery-green sheen of moon on oily water.

Finn did his thing sliding knobs. Billy Bragg came on, ‘A New England’. Finn lowered the volume, and I nodded towards the bathroom. ‘Sorry about the flushing.’

‘Just one more fucking thing, man.’ He shrugged it off, had himself another toke. Which reminded me.

‘Listen, these three baggies,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Herb’s wondering, it was three last month too. Says that’s a lot of personal use.’

The sloppy grin. ‘Depends on the person, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah, but he’s worried you’re punting on. That it’ll come back to bite him.’

‘Tell him relax.’

‘I’ll need a bit more than that.’

‘What’ll he do, cut me off?’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger, man.’

He thought about that, then came to a decision, shrugged again. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘I’ll be telling you soon enough anyway.’

‘Go on.’

‘The weed,’ he said, ‘I’m putting it away.’

‘You’re telling me? Three bags a month, man, that’s-’

‘I’m stashing it,’ he said. ‘Like, squirreling it away.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’re going, Harry. Taking off in a couple of weeks, it’s supposed to be a holiday. But that’s us, gone.’

‘Shit. Seriously?’

‘I’ll tell you what’s shit, seriously,’ he said. ‘Raising a kid in this fucking hole any time in the next twenty years. That’s shit. Seriously.’

Not the first time I’d heard that. The government kept telling us we’d dig our way out of recession with an export-led recovery. The main export, naturally, being people, and especially those still young enough to be ambitious and bright enough to read the runes.

‘So where to?’ I said.

‘Where d’you think?’

Everyone has their get-out, the place they’ll be when the planets eventually align, and as long as I’d known him Finn had been angling to get away. In the beginning it hadn’t really mattered where, it was all about getting out. Which made perfect sense at the time, or as much sense as anything ever made in Dundrum: when you weren’t talking about getting a proper feed for once, you were plotting your escape, digging tunnels in your mind.

Except Finn never shook it off, even after he got out. And once he met Maria it was all about Cyprus, and specifically that enclave known and unbeloved by the world at large as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. A place, according to Finn, where they were building temples while Europe was wallowing in the filth of its caves, but was still real, still raw. Especially up in the mountains, where the light was, pace Durrell, God’s eyeball.

He slid a record out of its sleeve, got it up on the turntable. Tim Buckley, ‘Song to the Siren’.

‘A big move,’ I said.

‘It’s jump or be shoved is what it is.’ He took a hefty hit off the jay, held it down. Exhaled it slow. ‘It’s all fucked, Harry. NAMA’s on board and they’re playing for keeps.’

‘That bad?’

‘We can hang on here,’ he said, ‘all huddling around a fucking candle and eating nettle salads. Or we can cash in now, cut our losses, start again. Somewhere,’ he jabbed the stub of the jay in my direction, making his point, ‘where family still means something.’

That was twice now. Kids, family. I felt something dislodge and shift sideways inside and it was only then I realised how much I’d miss him. His crazy schemes, the manic energy. The way he could call at any hour, or I’d call him, and we we’d shoot some pool and talk music or surfing or movies or books. Or say nothing at all. The thing unsaid, the black pool, dammed between us. Until the next time it started to seep through the cracks.

‘So what’s the plan? Anything lined up?’

He bob-bobbed his head, considering. ‘Maria’s been talking about doing something real,’ he said. ‘Something that matters, y’know?’

‘A beauty salon that matters?’

He ignored the cheap crack. ‘That’ll pay its way, sure. But she wants to set up a school too, a kind of training college. Give these girls skills they can take anywhere in the world. You ever see Cypriot women? Man, they know how to look after themselves.’

‘Yeah, well, if Maria’s anything to go by …’

‘Here’s the kicker, though. She wants the training done through English, she reckons she read something in Newsweek about how the ability to speak English is the single most important factor, world-wide, if you want to work.’

‘She’d be better off teaching them Mandarin.’

‘Or Russian, maybe. Anyway, the Chinese and the Russians aren’t offering education grants. The EU is, and the EU wants Turkey, and Turkey means Turkish Cyprus. Except Maria’s having huge problems converting her qualifications from here into what’s needed over there.’

‘The EU’s falling apart, squire. You’re talking frying pan and furnace.’

‘Might be an issue,’ he said, easing out from behind the mixing-desk, ‘if this was about the EU and Ireland anymore, if it wasn’t about you and me and taking care of number one.’ He headed for the emergency exit. ‘Excuse me,’ he winked, ‘while I take care of a number one.’

He went out onto the fire escape to piss in the fresh air, as was his wont, so that he wouldn’t have to flush afterwards. Herb, I could hear him already, would have something suitably cynical to say about Finn Hamilton living like a prince among the Cypriot paupers, the part-time philanthropist who’d spent a good chunk of his extended adulescence wandering through Europe in his customised camper van, chasing the next big breaker, the latest fall of crisp snow, boozing, snorting, squandering money he’d never had to earn. What I couldn’t tell Herb was what a shrink had once asked Finn during one of our group therapy sessions, whether Finn thought he was reacting against his father’s suicide, either by blocking it out or trying it on for size.

I’d thought he was done running, that he’d learned you never outrun it. That it’s not a race but a wrestle, and the best you can hope for is an honourable draw. I got up from the couch and wandered over to the stacked paintings, ran a fingernail down his latest take on St Hilarion. From the other side of the room it was another of his riffs on a Gothic kind of impressionism, sheer crags and soaring peaks, barren slopes, a blowsy sunset bleeding across a wine-dark sea. But as always, up close, as the image dissolved, each stroke was a vivid scar etched into the skin of something savage that seemed almost ready to snarl, the frame doubling as the bars of its cage. Even the proverbial blind man could see, by means of braille, that the artist in Finn was not a happy man. He painted in oils, and thickly, leaving a texture so crude it was as if he worked from a palette of blood, bile and coarsely grained gunpowder, a gritty and glutinous blend that you feared to examine too closely lest a spark of light, the faintest transference of heat, cause some raw and lurking quality to spontaneously combust. He favoured for inspiration Oscar Epfs, but for me his landscapes were crude variations on early El Grecos or Caravaggios, men who had harrowed a hell of their own making, and where his canvases lacked for technique they offered a banked rage, the tensile pause in the moment before the world exploded from the frame.

Finn had found his metier inside. All the hours of the day to devote to his craft. Too fanciful to say that every artist paints out his own soul, but even my untrained eye could tell that Finn was so engaged, for better or worse. Whether it was good or bad art was almost incidental: it was startling, arresting, in and of itself. Was it worth money? Is any man’s soul? Yes, with the inevitable caveat of caveat emptor.

I liked them, sure, but I wouldn’t have wanted one on my own wall, even if I could have afforded the two or three grand they generally went for, when they went. Too unsettling, always watching it from the corner of your eye as it prowled the frame, snuffling and growling and poised to spring.

He came back in from the fire escape, got some Sonic Youth going, ‘Teenage Riot’.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this deal with the beauty salon.’ He took one last drag of mainly roach, stubbed out the jay. ‘That’s kind of under wraps for now, at least until we get the red tape sorted.’

‘No worries.’

‘Mind you, the way things are going, it could take years.’ He fiddled with the bass levels, not that there was anything wrong with the bass levels. ‘No wonder the place is in the shitter. There’s a million middle-men to go through, everyone’s dipping their beak, except everything gets done tomorrow. Y’know?’

‘Pity they couldn’t be a bit more Irish, eh?’

‘It’s actually worse over there, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s jobs I’m offering, proper investment.’

‘No disrespect, but I’d say beauty salons aren’t top of their list of investment priorities.’

He did the bob-bob thing with his head again, the shaggy mop falling in front of his eyes. ‘The salon, sure. That’s Maria’s gig. Me, I have other plans.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You haven’t been out there, Harry. It’s like here twenty years ago, every second lot is a building site, except you have the sun, the climate. Last summer I took a wee wander, had a look at some show houses, these villa developments. One place, I got chatting with the site manager, right? Three hundred and twenty grand sterling per villa, twelve villas per development, beach-side, they’re being built for a quarter of that, and even that’s off the books, it’s all cash-in-hand. The Turks are bunkered in, there’s more Russians than flies, the border’s relaxing, everyone knows the EU is on the way. That place is a gusher ready to blow.’

‘You’re going solo?’

‘Sort of, yeah. The seed capital is coming from Hamilton Holdings but I’m the one brought it to the board, so it’s my gig.’

He fleshed it out, a high-end development of two-storey apartments fronting a beach about eight miles east of Girne, one pool to each apartment block, playgrounds, a gym, putting greens, on-site restaurants and bars. Maria’s salon. Hands waving as he sketched it out in the air, how the kicker was that it wasn’t just a build-and-sell project, it was all about the long term. Managing the development for foreign investors, maybe tying in a car rental operation, some kind of quasi-official tour guide operation, some of the profits siphoned off for a Cypriot getaway for any of Spiritus Mundi’s mere anarchists who fancied a tan. Grinning all the while like the idiot second son who’s just been bought a one-way ticket to Happy Valley. ‘All we need now,’ he said, ‘is Ryanair to start flying direct to Ercan and we’re minted.’

‘So you’re running the show for Hamilton Holdings,’ I said, ‘and Maria’s happy as a lark working for you, managing this beauty salon.’

‘The salon’s a separate issue. It’ll be on-site but independent. Maria’s own place, like.’ He grinned self-consciously, tugged at his nose. ‘I mean, you couldn’t give someone a wedding present with strings attached, could you?’

And there it was.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Another good woman bites the dirt.’

He winced through the grin. ‘If she’ll have me,’ he said. ‘Actually, it’s a pity the salon’s a wedding present, I could set her on these Cypriot fuckers holding up the show. Bastards have cost me nearly three hundred grand already, and counting.’

‘Christ. That’s serious kickback, man.’

‘No, I mean with Gillick. This time last year he was offering nine hundred grand for the PA, the sixteen acres. His latest offer, he’s down to six and change.’

‘Take his fucking hand off, Finn. Are you kidding?’

‘Gillick’s a fly fucker. Soon as I jump he’ll find himself caught short, cash-flow issues, he’s over-leveraged, the works. So he’ll come back with, I don’t know, half that, maybe less. Fifty grand up front, then I’m chasing the rest, and trying to do it from Cyprus.’

‘So fuck him. Go with someone else.’

‘This is going with someone else. Gillick’s brokering the deal, he’s fronting for some consortium. And the way things are now, there isn’t exactly a queue for sixteen acres of Sligo dockland.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. What’s he planning, a prison?’

Finn shrugged. ‘Originally, this is back when everything was flying, he was talking up a self-contained village, its own shops, a restaurant or two, a pub. At the start he had a marina attached, dock-space going with every unit along the quays. He had me draw up an artist’s impression, it looked good. Keeping all the old brick, the facades, he reckoned the yupniks eat that shit up with a spoon.’

‘Yupniks?’

‘Yuppie rednecks.’ He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Anyway, that’s all scuppered for now.’

‘But he still wants it.’

‘Yeah, he’s bunkering in, buying low. Except he’s good-cop bad-cop all on his own. One minute he’s all, “You need to sell now, Finn.” Next he’s going, “It’s a buyer’s market, Finn.” Schizophrenic, the fucker is.’

‘You shouldn’t be dealing with him direct. Get yourself a solicitor, put some space between you. Get the solicitor to play hardball.’

‘Just another fucking thing, man. Gillick is my solicitor.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s complicated. He’s the family solicitor, always has been. Plus there’s the fact that he likes the Cyprus idea, wants in on the ground floor.’ He shrugged it off. ‘Anyway, there’s no panic. By the time we get all the red tape sorted on Cyprus, he’ll be throwing money at me.’

‘I wouldn’t bet the farm on that one, Finn. I think we’re in for the long haul this time.’

‘Yeah, well …’ His shoulders slumped. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘keep it under your hat for now.’

‘I’ll buy a hat special, just to have something to keep it under.’ I toasted him with my coffee mug. ‘Fair fucks, man. Bon voyage.’

‘Cheers.’

I drained the coffee, took the mug into the kitchen, rinsed it out. He had The Only Ones on when I got back, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’. ‘Expecting anyone else?’ I said.

‘No. Why?’

‘I’ll bring up the score.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘No need, I’m nearly finished. I’ll follow you down. Oh, here.’ He reached under the desk, clickety-clicked through some CD cases, came up holding a blank. Frisbee’d it across. He’d scrawled Songs to Dance and Make Babies To # VII in flowing script on the white insert card. ‘See if you can work it out.’

‘That reminds me. Herb was looking for some Motown. Some Smokey if you have it.’

‘No problem. See you in ten.’

As it happened, it took him twenty. He arrived in a hurry, though. When he ploughed head-first into the cab he must have been doing damn near sixty miles an hour.