Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

‘Except you’re saying, the mother reckons that couldn’t happen.’

‘That’s what she told me.’

‘Maybe Gillick found a way around it.’

‘That’s what I said. But Gillick’s in tight there, covers all the legal shit for Hamilton Holdings. Always has. I doubt he’d blow a sweet deal like that for a one-off on the PA, a piece of shit no one wants.’

‘So maybe it’s someone else.’

‘Who? Finn’s a good guy, Dutch, he’s in the Champion every second week with some charity or other. Runs the artist’s co-op, Christ, he’s out on a limb for-’

‘Sure, yeah. But a good-looking guy like that, plenty of cash to flash, he liked to put it about …’

‘Not since Maria. Not that I heard, anyway.’

‘He’d hardly go broadcasting it on the radio, would he?’

‘No, but he was making plans, getting married. Moving to Cyprus.’

‘Sure,’ Dutch said, ‘one step ahead of the posse, some father waving a shotgun. I mean, this Cyprus move, it’s all a bit sudden, right?’

‘Last night was the first I heard of it, yeah. But who knows how long he was planning it? And anyway, it was nothing he actually said, but …’

‘What?’

‘He mentioned kids, Dutch. How Cyprus was this great place for raising a family.’ I shrugged. ‘I got the feeling, just the way he was saying it, that Maria is pregnant.’

He winced. ‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How is she?’

‘I don’t know. I went around there but she wasn’t home, and I couldn’t raise her on the phone.’

‘Does she even know?’

‘No idea.’

‘Christ.’

‘I should ring her again,’ I said, and suddenly the tiredness was an ache in my bones.

Dutch hauled himself out of the deckchair, laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘A few more hours won’t hurt. Get some sleep, get your head straight.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘And Harry, this suicide note bit.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t get sucked in. Family shit like that, you don’t want to get involved. The mother wants it found, let her find it herself.’

He left. I tumbled into the deckchair, had one last suck on the spliff and waited for what Mailer once called the biles and jamborees of the heart.

Nothing stirred.

Too soon, maybe. Still in shock. Too numb to feel and too exhausted to start building bridges between what had been and what would have to be. And maybe it was just that he wasn’t dead, not tonight. Not until I closed my eyes and rolled across the stones and woke up tomorrow with Finn sealed in yesterday’s tomb.

Just one more fucking thing, man …

Yeah, I could nearly hear him now, that hollow chuckle, how being dead was just one more fucking thing. It had been our mantra inside, our koan. No matter how bad it got, it was just one more fucking thing, no worse there is none …

The night I met Finn he was walked into the cell, eyes glazed, a screw to each arm. And yeah, he stank like the pit lane at Le Mans. He crawled onto the bottom bunk and lay on his back all night, hardly able to breathe, unblinking and endlessly fascinated with whatever it was he saw in the pattern of rusty springs and bare mattress above his head. Next morning I tried to rouse him and if he hadn’t been warm I’d have said he was dead. I left him to it. A good-looking guy with a shaggy mop of blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Bad enough, but he was limp and vacant, passive and beyond caring. A walking invitation to the kind of man who doesn’t need an invitation, prefers not to be invited.

The days spun out. Finn slouched through them dull and unaware. He moved when they told him to, popped every pill they put on his tongue. A tiny jerk of the head when spoken to, as if called to from the top of a very deep well. His face hardly changed. Asleep or awake, it was a hard-cornered mask. About the only muscles that moved were those hinging his jaws. He chewed with a mechanical indifference, staring into the space between the shoulders across the table. None of which was unusual in Dundrum.

He’d been there six weeks or so when we finally clicked. A group session, shooting the shit with the shrink and lying through our collective teeth, when Finn, at my shoulder, started in with this sing-song murmur. ‘ Trying to get well, no lies here lies …’

I glanced across and caught an anarchic flicker in the pale blue eyes. The line triggering the next, so that we half-hummed it together, ‘ Swab the temples of the untapped dreamboy, a jagged day in life …’

He nodded. ‘So how’s that temple swabbing coming on?’

I shrugged. ‘Just trying to get well.’

And just like that, it was on.

Sometimes that’s all you need. One line, the faintest of connections. Both of us convinced of Rollerskate Skinny’s greatness. Pet Sounds , according to Finn, being the tinkling of nursery rhymes on a xylophone by comparison.

But yeah, it all flowed from that one line. By the end of the week he’d told me about his father drowning, Cap’n Bob going down with the HMS BMW. How the big fat joke was that it’d been his mother, Saoirse, who’d filed the papers and had him locked up. Saoirse, meaning freedom. This after Finn had moved on, moved up, from torching sheds and half-built houses on derelict estates, had been caught gas-handed outside The Grange itself.

I’d told him about Ben, how he’d been born five days overdue, which made him, as close as science could guess, nine months, three weeks, five days and forty-two minutes old when I held him for the first time. Not much bigger than a volleyball, even swaddled, a tiny and badly peeled turnip wobbling on the skinny neck. How I’d cradled him in my arms and made no extravagant promises: no harm would come, I’d whispered, so long as I had any part to play. How that was promise enough to put a bullet in his father.

I’d told him that Ben wasn’t mine, okay, but that blood doesn’t think, doesn’t feel and doesn’t hurt. Blood pumps and blood bleeds and that’s as far as blood goes.

We laid it all out, every card on the table. A weird kind of poker with no bluffs or blinds, where everyone walked away a winner. I even told him my real name, what Harry was short for. I’d never told anyone that, not even Dee, not even when we were good.

He’d done eleven months. The night before he checked out, he popped his three pills and said, ‘Listen, just tell them what they want to hear. They think you’re a looper anyway, always will. What they need to believe is you’ve convinced yourself, not them.’

He’d walked out of Dundrum with a stack of canvases and an idea. Took a couple of months to work up the outline of a project, then went to the financial controller of Hamilton Holdings to sound her out with an informal proposal. Three days later he was standing before the board making a proper balls of a PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t matter. The idea was sound, and by then Hamilton Holdings had one foot in NAMA and hurting bad, looking for ways to diversify. And so Finn was appointed to the official position of art consultant with Fine Arte Investments, a division of Hamilton Holdings dedicated, according to the literature, to the creation and management of art portfolios for the discerning investor.

It didn’t exactly work out like that. Very few of the clients even wanted to see the art. ‘The fucking price tag, yeah, that they’ll frame.’ Finn’s role was to match a client to a particular work, so that it looked to the casual observer that there was some kind of coherence to the portfolio, and then get busy donating the pieces to any place that’d make space on its walls — hospitals, town halls, municipal buildings, libraries. The idea being that charitable donations could be written off against tax. ‘Leave a painting long enough on someone else’s wall,’ he reckoned, ‘it pays for itself. Then sell the fucker on.’