Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

Let me do you this one favour , he’d said. Half an hour later, Finn was a scorched lump of frying flesh.

Which was possibly why Detective-Sergeant Tohill, an upstanding and well-regarded member of An Garda Siochana, but currently seconded to the Criminal Assets Bureau, was reserving his opinion as to whether Finn had jumped or been pushed.

All of which left this tattered coat fluttering in No Man’s Land, bogged down in the mud and likely to be crushed between the inexorable creeping advance of opposing forces.

Unless, of course, one of Toto McConnell’s snipers took me out from the flank first.

I sipped some more latte and logged off, wiped my searches. Wondering how much Saoirse Hamilton might be prepared to pay me to go looking for Finn’s suicide note, and what Tohill might be persuaded to do if I found it.

I strolled along Castle Street and turned right up Teeling Street towards the cop shop. Paused at the corner for a quick sketch around to make sure no one was watching before sidling across the road into the station, a squat block of Stalinist functionality rendered even greyer by the retro-Gothic glory of the Courthouse across the way. It wasn’t even noon but the shade on the desk was in dire need of a second shave. Bull-shouldered, a blocky head, small eyes set wide apart. His greeting registered somewhere between a snort and a bellow, and if it wasn’t for all the budget cuts I’d have assumed he was an actor employed to remind visitors they were about to enter the labyrinth.

‘I need to see Detective-Sergeant Tohill,’ I said.

‘In connection with …?’

‘It’s in connection with Detective-Sergeant Tohill.’

‘Sorry.’ He had yet to look up from the sports pages. ‘Never heard of him.’

‘Maybe he’s top secret. He’s a big shot, I know that, gets to spit in people’s faces.’

The head slowly came up. His eyes were stale mercury. ‘You want to make a complaint?’

A comedian, this guy. ‘I just want to talk to him. Sign that statement I made last night.’

The mercury glistened. ‘Hold on there,’ he said, reaching for the phone. He turned away hunching a shoulder, so all I heard were some grunts and a snort, possibly a fart. ‘Says he’ll see you outside,’ he said, crunching the phone down. ‘Five minutes.’

A man can get a bad name for himself loitering outside a cop shop, so I strolled across the road and rolled a smoke while pretending to read the plaque on the wall of the building facing the Courthouse that bore the legend, Argue and Phibbs, Solicitors .

A horn parped behind me. Tohill was double-parked and waving me across. I did a little shoulder-rolling and pfffing, then slouched over to his Passat and slid in, tucked the hold-all between my feet. ‘A rum pair, Argue and Phibbs,’ Tohill grinned as we edged forward, heading south up the Pearse Road. ‘Apparently, during the 1920s, they were planning to take another partner on board, an English lawyer called Cheetham.’

‘Hilarious, yeah. The law, it’s just a sick joke, right?’

‘Can’t fault the lads for a sense of humour.’

‘It’s like William Gaddis said, you get justice in the next world-’

‘And the law in this. So I hear. Funny,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t have had you down as the religious type.’ He took my silence for assent. ‘So I guess we’re all stuck with the law. Tell me more about wanting to sign your statement, go back inside for wilful obstruction.’

‘A couple of things first.’

‘Go on.’

‘Gillick I know nothing about. Last night was the first time I met him.’

‘Okay.’

‘Second thing is, I know nothing about Finn that might interest the Criminal Assets Bureau. Far as I know, he was clean.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘Same goes for the Hamiltons. About all I know there is what Finn told me last night, they’re up to their oxters in NAMA.’

‘Great. Is there anything you do know?’

‘A few bits and pieces, yeah. First I need to find out what they’ll buy me.’

‘That’d depend on what they were worth, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sure.’

There was silence then, until we rolled to a stop at a red light opposite Markievicz Park. ‘I won’t know what they’re worth until you tell me what they are,’ he said.

‘I get that,’ I said. ‘But first I need to know what the market’s like.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘What I’m wondering, why I’m here, is why CAB is interested in Finn. I’m also wondering if CAB taking an interest wasn’t what pushed him off the PA.’

A grin wrinkled in the cracked leather of his tough boot face.

‘You think it’s funny?’ I said. ‘That Finn jumped?’

‘Not at all. Where are we going, by the way?’

‘Rasharkin.’

‘Where’s that?’

We were passing the Sligo Park Hotel by then, driving south towards Carraroe, so I told him to head for Maugheraboy, skirt the town, come in through the industrial estate at Finisklin. He turned west off the Carraroe roundabout across the new road, an arrow-straight model of everything the modern bypass aspires to be, apart from the fact that it cuts straight through the town and splits it in two. Took the Oakfield Road, the ditches a-bloom with dusty blue blossoms and silky-peach leaves.

‘Last night,’ he said. ‘I was out of order.’

‘The intimidation or the spitting?’

‘The spitting. That’s not me.’

‘Then you’d want to watch out for that evil twin of yours. A fucking pest, he is.’

‘See it my way. You’re telling barefaced lies, signing off on a statement.’

‘Keep it up. They’ll have Tom Hanks play you in the movie.’

In theory, a cop car is a place of work, which meant no smoking. That didn’t stop Tohill finding a cigarillo in his breast pocket, sparking it up. I went for the makings and followed suit.

‘Okay,’ he said, exhaling heavily. ‘So now we’ve established that you’re a radical free-thinker, you’re out there on your own believing all cops are fascist pigs. I’m some kind of Nazi, right?’

‘Try Black and Tan.’

‘Nice. Historical. I like it.’ He tapped ash from the cigarillo. ‘Except here you are, chasing me up for quid pro quo. What’s that make you, some kind of collaborator?’ He winked, but there was no humour in it. ‘And you weren’t so proud the last time either, were you? Happy enough to let Brady pull some strings when you killed your brother, buy you easy time in Dundrum.’

‘Buy me ?’

‘That’s what the man said.’

‘Funny, that. Because the way it was sold to me was, I’d be doing them a favour keeping quiet about this dirty cop who was in bed with ex-paramilitaries, the guy looking to establish a nice little coke empire for himself. And then I go and take Gonzo out, save them the bother, all those pesky reports and public inquiries and therapy sessions. The least they could do, they reckoned, was make sure my pillows were nice and soft in Dundrum.’

He drove on. A glorious summer day, a warm sun high above Queen Maeve’s grave on Knocknerea. Midges swarming the hedgerows in search of a pharaoh to plague. ‘I spoke with Brady this morning,’ he said. ‘Not very talkative, is he?’

‘Can’t say I know him that well.’

‘He’s not particularly fond of you, either. Said I should carry one of those forked sticks snake-handlers use, and wear Kevlar. Maybe grow an eye in the back of my head.’

‘He said a lot for someone who doesn’t like to talk.’

‘I’m good at deciphering meaningful silence.’ He took a long drag on the cigarillo and exhaled slow, came to a decision. ‘He said you were a stone-cold killer, no doubt about it. Ice all the way down. But he reckons you know how to keep your part of a deal. So quid-pro, yeah? I tell you about Finn and CAB, you give me what you have on Gillick, anything he said last night, at the PA or after he picked you up. How’s that?’