Slaughter's Hound E-Book

Declan Burke

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

"I glanced up but he'd already jumped, a dark blur plummeting, wings folded against the drag like some starving hawk out of the noon sun, some angel betrayed. He punched through the cab's roof so hard he sent metal shearing into the petrol tank. All it took was one spark. Boom . . ."Harry Rigby is right there, an eye-witness when Finn Hamilton walks out into the big nothing nine stories up, but no one wants to believe Finn is just the latest statistic in Ireland's silent epidemic. Not Finn's mother, Saoirse Hamilton, whose property empire is crumbling around her; and not Finn's pregnant fiancé, Maria, or his sister Grainne; and especially not Detective Tohill, the cop who believes Rigby is a stone-cold killer, a Slaughter's Hound with a taste for blood . . . Welcome to Harry Rigby's Sligo, where death comes dropping slow. Studded with shards of black humour and mordant wit, Slaughter's Hound is a gripping noir from one of the most innovative voices in Irish crime fiction.

Leseprobe

SLAUGHTER’S HOUND

A Harry Rigby Mystery

Declan Burke

For Vincent Banville

‘Crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavour.’

– W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle

Author’s Note

Author’s Note:

Originally bred to fight wolves and accompany their owners into battle, the Irish Wolfhound (Cú Faoil) is a breed old enough to feature in Irish mythology, with cú translating as ‘hound’, ‘war hound’ or ‘Irish hound’. According to legend, the young warrior Sétanta became Cú Chulainn by killing the hound of Culann and then offering to replace it. Cú Chulainn, also known as the Hound of Ulster, owned a number of árchú, war hounds feared for their love of slaughter.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Thursday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Friday

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

Saturday

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

Thursday

1

It was a rare fine night for a stroll down by the docks, the moon plump as a new pillow in an old-fashioned hotel and the undertow in the turning tide swushing its ripples silvery-green and a bird you’ve never heard before chirring its homesick tale of a place you might once have known and most likely now will never see, mid-June and almost midnight and balmy yet, the kind of evening built for a long walk with a woman who likes to take long walks and not say very much, and that little in a murmur you have to strain to catch, her laughter low and throaty, her humour dry and favouring lewd, eyes like smoky mirrors of the vast night sky and in them twinkles that might be stars reflecting or the first sparks of intentions that you’d better fan with soft words and a gentle touch in just the right place or spend the rest of your life and maybe forever wondering what might have been, all for the want of a soft word and a touch gentle and true.

It was that kind of evening, alright. That kind of place.

You ever find yourself there, say something soft, and be gentle, and true.

Me, I found myself hunched over the charred dwarf that had once been Finn Hamilton, parts of him still sizzling in a marinade of oily flesh and melting tar, and all around the rank stench of singing hair and burnt petrol, seared pork.

Midnight, and balmy yet.

I’d seen him jump. Pacing the yard below, phone clamped to my ear. ‘Listen, Ben, she’s under pressure at work, okay? You need to take that on— What? Yeah, I know. But look, sometimes your mum says things she—’

I heard him, first. Faint but clear from nine storeys high.

‘Bell jars away …’

From instinct I glanced up with the next line already forming, let’s be fearless with our promises, but by then he’d jumped, a dark blur plummeting, wings folded against the drag like some starving hawk out of the noon sun, some angel betrayed.

I guess he punched through the cab’s roof so hard he sent metal shearing into the petrol tank. All it took was one spark.

Boom …

The blast smashed me ten feet into a heap of scrap metal, left me deafened and half blind, limbs rubbery as I scrabbled around ripping my hands on rusty steel. Stunned and flopping in the aftermath of a quake that tore my insides apart

lie down stay down

lungs pounded by hammers O Jesus breathe, breathe and a roaring in the ears of blood tortured to a scream

‘Dad?’

coming tinny and distant

‘Dad? Are you there?’

the phone two feet and a million miles away, dirt thick in my teeth

‘I think you’re breaking up, Dad …’

and the taste of roasting flesh and metal thick on my tongue.

A hot knife pierced my ribs as I reached for the phone.

‘Ben?’ A harsh grating. ‘Ring you back, Ben.’

I lurched to my feet on spongy knees and stumbled across the yard towards the blaze. The air all a-shimmer so that his feet looked submerged, some weirdly wavering polyps. One of his moccasins came away as I pulled him free and at first I thought I’d ripped him in half. Then I thought he’d dropped a dwarf on the cab. Strange the things you think when you’re trying not to think at all, dragging a man from a torched wreck and his flesh frying in lumps on the melting tar.

As I twisted my head, guts already heaving, I realised why he seemed so short.

He’d dived, come down arrow-straight, in the final instant pulling back his arms so that the impact drove his head and shoulders back up into his chest. There was still some remnant of what had once been his neck but the head had pulped like so much ripe melon.

I puked until the heaves came dry and then rang it in. Globs of grey grease spitting on the cab’s skeletal frame.

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, Schrödinger’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.

3

‘That’s his fourth,’ Herb groused as I came back into the living room. ‘First it was a Joe Campbell, last time it was a nice hardback on Spinoza, the feeling brain. The fuck am I, a library?’

‘Maybe you need to start imposing fines.’

‘Right, yeah.’ A bleak grin. ‘Maybe skim off the top, tell Ted it’s all Toto’s fault.’

Camped about six thousand miles due west, the McConnells would have been a shit-kicking rabble of inbred, rebel-yelling, crank-cooking sister lovers. They were the first to organise properly in Sligo, this something of a spin-off from the Peace Dividend up North, Ted being the kind of diehard ex-INLA who wouldn’t be fully happy until everything was the way it’d been before the Ulster Plantation, when every chief had his own fief and a surfeit of spears. They’d started with dope, moved on up to coke and E, were dabbling now in H. They had hardware and were happy to use it, generally for hoot-‘n’-holler drive-bys but at least once to lethal effect. Cold. Opening a van door in the middle of town, three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. One round through the forehead, two in the chest. The backsplash spattering the guy’s girlfriend, the kid she held in her arms.

The dogs in the street knew Toto’d been the shooter. The problem there being, dogs don’t do so well on a witness stand, tend to crumble under cross-examination.

Herb took a drag on the jay, held it down, popped a smoke-ring. Settled back in the Ezy-Chair. ‘What’d he want, anyway?’

‘Was asking about Finn, if I vouched for him.’

‘I hope you didn’t, the flaky fuck.’

Herb took a dim view of what he reckoned were Finn’s unnatural proclivities for skiing, surfing and charitable innovations. Herb being of the opinion that if Finn wanted to help those less well-off than himself, which was pretty much everyone bar the Hamiltons these days, he might consider donating a chunk of Hamilton Holdings’ before-tax profits instead of haranguing people to dig into their own pockets.

‘I told him,’ I said, ‘Finn always pays up front.’

‘You tell him who he was?’

‘That he’s Finn Hamilton, sure. The rest he knew.’

‘Dundrum?’

‘He knows I was in Dundrum, yeah. Asking if I knew Malky Gorevan.’

‘But you didn’t tell him about celling with Finn.’

‘No.’

Sins of omission. What the bishops like to call mental reservations.

‘Maybe that’s what he was asking about,’ Herb said.

‘Don’t sweat it. At the end there he was offering me more work, said it was there if I was available.’

‘He mentioned that?’

‘What’s the gig?’

‘A run to Galway tomorrow, there’s a shipment due in. Small enough, ten grand’s worth, but the good stuff. He was asking me to take it on, but, y’know.’

Herb didn’t get out much, in part because he was a low-level paranoiac, but mainly because he just didn’t like people. His credo was pretty simple: always assume everyone’s an idiot.

He’d been a snapper once, a good one, hooked up with an agency. We’d worked as a team for a few years, freelancing local news, stringing for the nationals. I did the words, Herb took the shots, and once in a while we’d work some off-the-books research consultancy, which was a fancy name for what amounted to prowling hotel car parks for proof of some wayward husband’s mid-life crisis.

Happy days.

Then Herb got his face stove in. Someone had told someone else that Herb had a photograph the someone else wanted.

I was the someone who’d done the telling. Inadvertently, as it happened.

Not that the who mattered. The bruisers were still walking around, free to stove at will. Herb stayed home, his complexion pasty, skin like old dough. The way it can get when most of both jaws and one cheekbone are underpinned by steel plate. Anyway, Herb ended up staying home a lot, huffing mucho weed. One day Toto McConnell, this back when Toto was still dealing himself, asks if Herb’ll rent him some space. Herb’s not interested in any sublets, but Toto’s talking about turning the upstairs, the attic, into a grow-house.

A couple of years later Herb’s salting away a couple of grand a month to top up his disability benefit, easy money. Two years after that, he moved out to Larkhill, went to Toto with his idea for a couple of cabs, nice cover for deals-on-wheels. A front to get him onto the Revenue’s books and keep them sweet, so no one got the urge to pick up the phone and ring the Criminal Assets Bureau, wondering how no-income, disability benefit Herb could afford a four-bed on its own grounds out in the burbs.

‘How come the short notice?’ I said.

‘His regular guy popped a kneecap last night.’

‘And now he’s under wraps.’

‘No, I mean he popped his own kneecap. Five-a-side up at the Sports Complex, went in for a sliding tackle and up she blew.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah. So what d’you think? Toto’s pretty keen to get it tomorrow, has the stuff promised for Saturday night. Says he’ll do twenty percent.’

‘Two grand?’

‘I get the impression, reading between the lines, Toto’s greasing some serious wheels.’

‘So we’re not talking smoke.’

‘Coke, yeah.’

‘Shit.’

‘Two grand, Harry. Five big to me for brokering, okay, but that’s still tidy money for a spin to Galway.’ He sat forward in the Ezy-Chair, offered across the spliff. When I declined he slotted it into the ashtray, stood up. ‘Just think about it, okay? No harm at all in seeing Toto right.’

He took a little side-wobble setting off, then stabilised and headed for the hall. Right on cue my phone rang, the caller ID flashing up Dee-Dee-Dee.

I sat the phone on the coffee-table, rolled a smoke and let it ring out. Herb came back in with Finn’s three baggies, tossing them on the table just as the message-minder buzzed, the screen lighting up to let me know I’d missed four calls from Dee.

‘Reminds me,’ he said. ‘Dee rang earlier. Said to call her.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Said something about Ben’s parent-teacher meeting tomorrow.’

‘I got her messages, yeah.’

He plucked the jay from the ashtray, subsided into the Ezy-Chair again. ‘How’s Ben doing these days?’ he said.

‘Grand. Not a bother on him.’

‘A good kid, that lad.’

Herb hadn’t seen Ben in years. To be fair, though, he’d been there for Dee while I was inside, letting her know she wasn’t on her own, a few quid available if she was ever badly stuck. Not that Dee took advantage, but sometimes just knowing there’s somewhere out there can make all the difference.

Another favour I owed him.

‘So what d’you think,’ he said, ‘about Toto’s gig?’

‘I’ll do it, yeah.’

‘Nice one, Harry.’

‘If Dee rings again, you haven’t seen me.’

‘Roger and Wilco.’

I stubbed the smoke, gathered up the three baggies. Herb aimed the remote control at the TV. ‘Hold up,’ he said, bringing up the menu, flicking down through the options to digital radio. ‘Let’s see what kind of mood this fuckwit’s in.’

He tuned to McCool FM in time for the last couple of verses of Townes van Zandt’s ‘St John the Gambler’.

‘Christ,’ Herb muttered.

From van Zandt to Joy Division, ‘She’s Lost Control’. Then straight into Big Star’s ‘Holocaust’.

Herb cracked first.

‘There’s any amount of Motown in there,’ he said, pointing the spliff at his CD rack. ‘I want you to bring it down to the docks, tie that part-time fucking philanthropist to his chair and tell him from me he’s getting no score until I hear Smokey.’

‘Will do.’

4

I took Going to a Go-Go, the three baggies, got in the cab. By the time I got to the bottom of Larkhill the fuel gauge was glowing orange, so I crossed town to the all-night petrol station on Pearse Road, where a taxi driver with the right contacts can get a free cup of something that smells like black coffee with every fill-up. The phone rang as I was coming up off Mailcoach Road, Dee-Dee-Dee.

I could have ignored it but she’d have just kept ringing.

‘Dee?’

‘Did you get my message?’

‘What message?’

‘The one I sent Herbie.’

I pulled in at the pumps, detached the hands-free and got out, phone clamped between shoulder and ear. ‘I haven’t seen Herb since Tuesday,’ I said, ramming the nozzle into the petrol tank. ‘What’s up?’

‘The parent-teacher meeting, Harry. I just want to be sure you remembered it.’

‘You’re breaking up, Dee. Can you say that again?’

‘I’ll fucking break you up. Did you hear that?’

‘Look, Dee, you know I sleep during the—’

‘We’ve a stock-take on tomorrow, Harry. I told you this. I can’t miss it.’

‘But it’s okay for me to not earn. So you can do your job.’

‘This once in a blue fucking moon, so you can do something with Ben? Yeah, I think that’s okay.’

The old argument. I let it lie.

‘I need you to do this one thing, Harry. And for Ben, not me. And maybe for yourself, too.’

Not saying it nasty. Sounding weary instead, with the little quiver she got in the back of her throat contemplating the sorry dregs of her third glass of whatever plonk was on special that week.

‘Any chance we could push it back to four o’clock?’ I said. ‘At least that way I could—’

‘Harry,’ she said, no quiver now, all arrow, ‘the meeting’s at two. Be here at one-thirty to pick up Ben or I swear to God, I’ll tell him.’

The old, old threat. Maybe she was already into glass four. The nozzle clicked, choked off the flow.

‘Do you hear me?’ she said.

‘Why don’t you just tell him, Dee?’ He’d hear about it sooner or later, how the man he thought was his dad had put a bullet in the man who was but never wanted to be his father. Better it came from Dee than some schoolyard taunt.

‘If I knew where he was,’ she said. ‘I swear, if he was home right now …’

‘What, he doesn’t have his phone with him?’

‘You try ringing him. Go on, ring him right now, see how far it gets you.’ I realised the rumble I’d thought was thunder was Dee drumming her fingers on the phone. ‘One-thirty, Harry. Be here.’

She hung up. Matters weren’t improved any by the news that a fifty-seven euro fill-up left me with little more than coppers in my pocket. Then I made the mistake of trying to cut through town rather than take the bypass. It was better out in the suburbs, and it was mostly suburbs, but the town was a heart-attack of concrete and chrome. Old streets, high and narrow, arteries so thick and gnarled the traffic trickled or didn’t move at all. The light a frozen glare shot with greens and reds, blinking pink neon, fluorescent blues. Boom-boom blasting from rolled-down windows, deep bass pulsing out muscles of sound. On a bad night it took fifteen minutes to crawl the two hundred yards from the Abbey to Lady Erin. The mob shuffling around outside the chippers wore hoodies over baggy denims, frayed hems dragging. Night of the Living McDead. The girls in cropped tops over bulging bellies, the low-slung jeans showcasing cheese-cutter thongs. In case anyone might think they weren’t wearing any underwear at all, maybe.

I skipped O’Connell Street heading west, turned north down Adelaide and then left at the new bridge onto Lynn’s Dock, a grapefruit moon hanging low over the quays. Finn playing the Northern Pikes, ‘Place That’s Insane’. Out along Ballast Quay and the docks proper, onto Deepwater Quay, black water on my right, warehouses and depots to the left, the Connacht Gold co-op lit up like a rocket launch. Beyond the co-op loomed the unlovely Port Authority building, and behind that a jungle of weeds and a rusty marsh. Once in a while there’d be talk of turning the marsh into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.

I turned into the PA’s yard, slaloming between the potholes, tooling along in second gear, the yard lined with rusting containers, piles of scrap metal and trailers of mouldy timber. High weeds clumped in bricked-up doorways. The day had been hot and it was still warm, the acrid hum of hot tar thickening the air.

The PA building was nine stories of stark 1960s’ modernism, an appropriately ugly monument to hubris, built when the docks were buzzing and Lemass had all boats on a rising tide. Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored offshore. Russians jumped ship and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.

Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the PA. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.

Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to.

Big Bob Hamilton came in like the cavalry. By then he’d pretty much dry-lined every last square inch of Thatcher’s London, and when they finally kicked out the Iron Lady, Bob took that as his cue. Came home in ’91, sniffed the wind. He sold high in London and bought low all over Sligo and the northwest. Joined the Rotary Club, the Tennis Club, Golf and Lions, damn near every club in town bar the Tuesday night Chess in the Trades. Turned up on the local board of the IDA about four months before he bought up sixteen acres of dockland that included the PA building and the rusty swamp and not a hell of a lot of anything else.

Finn telling me all this from the bottom bunk in Dundrum. Sounding dull and half-muffled but telling it straight. How the word had been that Big Bob was personally responsible for the new stationery factory over in Finisklin, a staff of three working flat-out to meet the demand for brown envelopes. Serious investment on its way, a port rejuvenation, Bob all set to make a killing. The investment never did arrive, although there was a killing of sorts alright, this in ’98, Finn just about to turn eighteen and right there to see his father’s brand new Beamer topple off the quay and into the water, Bob still at the wheel. The official verdict was death by misadventure, even if the inquest failed to establish a satisfactory explanation as to why all the Beamer’s windows might have been open down at the deepwater late one January evening.

It wasn’t long after that, he reckoned, that the arson started, Finn on the fast-track to his first crack-up.

I turned into the small car park at the front of the PA and saw a sleek maroon Saab gleaming under the single bare light over the door. Which was odd. McCool FM was a one-man show, and DJs playing Leonard Cohen don’t get groupies since John Peel passed on, bless his cotton socks. Which meant Finn had unexpected company or he was working middle-man, punting the baggies on.

Either way, not good.

The Saab’s driver already getting out.

The baggies were under the spare wheel in the boot, so I eased up to where the driver stood, then three-pointed, reversing back into the space beside Finn’s black Audi, leaving the boot tight against the PA’s wall. Got out and locked the cab, strolled around towards the PA’s door. The driver with a hand up, palm out, saying, ‘Far enough, big man.’

His accent wasn’t quite harsh enough to be Derry, the hint of a lilt suggesting north Donegal. Built like an upside-down cello, wearing a white shirt with the collar button open, a thin black tie with a loose knot. Patent leather shoes, in the reflection of which he could have flossed his even white teeth. Through the Saab’s open door I could see, hung on a hangar, the top half of a dark suit silk-lined in red paisley. Italian, maybe. The eyes were eight-gauge, sawn-off.

I pulled up six inches shy of where I guessed his swing would land. ‘I’m expected,’ I said.

‘Not by me you’re not.’

‘True for you.’

The trouble there was, if one guy gets to thinking he can tell you what you can do, it’s only a matter of time before the rest start feeling the same. Then you’re on the skids. And I was already on the skids.

‘I’m going on up,’ I said.

‘Fine by me, big man. Just not yet.’

I craned my neck to glance up at the ninth floor, the window’s dull yellow glow. ‘He makes you wear a tie?’ I said.

That didn’t work him at all. ‘You know what I like?’ he said. ‘Cars, threads and quim. He pays me to drive a Saab, wear good suits.’

‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’

‘I make out.’ He up-jutted his chin. ‘Finn’s expecting you?’

‘That’s right.’

He glanced over my shoulder. ‘Something wrong with his Audi?’

‘Other than it’s not a Porsche?’

‘Too fucking right.’ He backed off a step, ushered me on through. ‘Jimmy,’ he said.

‘Rigby.’

He leaned in as I went past, sniffing, his nostrils flared. I glanced up at him going by and stared straight up those sawn-off barrels, black and cold, and nary a light to guide a weary pilgrim.

‘Stay useful, Rigby.’

‘I’ll try.’

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.’