Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

Not much, but it’d have to do.

I spent the eternity or so it took the ambulance to arrive looking for something that might do for a slim jim, this before it occurred to me to wonder if Finn might have left his Audi unlocked. He had. I was cursing him for a feckless fool, aloud, when I realised I was only doing it out loud because I knew there was no one around, never was, not that late down at the PA. I half-expected to find the keys in the ignition, but even Finn wasn’t that hopeless. Two minutes, some loosened wires and a couple of sparks later and I was mobile again. The Audi was badly scorched all along its left-hand side, the windows smoke-blackened, so they looked like they’d been given a botched tint job. But it would run.

When the paramedics arrived, and looked and winced, I identified Finn and told them what I’d seen. The guy in charge seemed competent, solid, so I drifted away. He heard the Audi’s door close and strolled over, knuckled the window. I rolled it down.

‘You okay to drive?’ he said.

‘Sound, yeah.’

‘Watch out for the delayed shock. If you start feeling sick, dizzy, tired, any way off, pull over straight away.’ He peered a little closer, taking in the singed eyebrows, the bloody hands dried black. ‘And you’ll be needing a stitch or two in those.’

‘I’ll do for now.’

‘You know you’re not supposed to leave until the cops get here.’

‘Someone should tell his folks.’

‘The cops’ll do that.’

‘Yeah, but it should be somebody who knew him.’

‘Fair enough, but they’ll have my balls if I don’t write down your reg.’

‘Work away. I’ll swing back this way when I’m done. If I don’t find them here, I’ll head in to the cop shop. Should take about an hour out and back.’

He tap-tapped the roof, straightening up. ‘Better you than me,’ he said, walking away.

He didn’t know the half of it. I pulled out of the PA yard and headed for town. Ten minutes later I was outside Weir’s Folly, the four-bed penthouse suite of which had balcony views of Yeats’ Bridge to the north and Lough Gill to the east, and was officially registered as the office address of Fine Arte Investments. Two of the bedrooms had been converted into actual office space, which left two-thirds of the penthouse for the director of Fine Arte Investments, aka Finn Hamilton, to call his own, rent-free. That perk was impressive enough, given that a four-bed penthouse in the heart of town could be pulling down anything up to fifteen hundred a month, but the office address allowed Finn to claim practically every aspect of its upkeep as a tax write-off.

Money buys money.

NAMA might have been across Hamilton Holdings like some Biblical plague, but there were no eviction notices pinned to the doors of Weir’s Folly. And I was pretty sure too that when I drove on out to The Grange, there’d be no For Sale signs to take the look off the place.

I buzzed on the bell again, still wondering how I’d begin. No matter how I started out it always fell apart when I got to the part where I said his name. Which was when Finn’s voice cut in, talking about family and kids, his plans for Cyprus. Then the flesh spitting on hot metal, that oily, rank whiff …

I buzzed a fourth time, but the place was dark and it was obvious Maria wasn’t home. I gave it another thirty seconds or so, then dug out my phone and dialled her number. It rang out, went to her answering machine.

‘Hi, this is Maria. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but if you leave your name, number and a short message, I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.’

‘Maria, it’s Harry. Call me back whenever you get this. It’s, ah, it’s important.’

I hung up, wondering if she already knew. If she was in there with all the lights turned off, sitting in the darkness with her hands cradling her belly, staring blindly into the void where her future used to be.

We’d been having a freakish spell, an early Irish summer, the kind that can last two months or two hours but always goes on too long. To date we’d had nearly a week of sunny days and mild nights, and the sunset earlier on had been a ruddy shepherd’s delight. Which meant it’d be a bright, warm and beautiful morning when I told Herb his cab was a write-off, this courtesy of Finn, his flaky fuck du jour.

I wondered if Herb’s insurance covered suicides jumping from nine floors up. Not that it mattered, any insurance hike or replacement would come out of my end. The deal we had was, anything that happened on my watch was my call.

And then there was the three baggies of Toto McConnell’s finest weed, all gone up in smoke.

Just one more fucking thing …

I drove north out the Bundoran Road. Still shaky, thumbs drumming on the steering-wheel’s leather. I felt horse-kicked and brutalised, heart pounding, mouth dry. A ripping of some fabric deep inside and I don’t care if you call it the spirit or the soul or the electric charge that keeps the machine running, but it was fritzing up sparks, flashes of lightning glimpsed behind thunderheads massed along some dark horizon and only a matter of time before the storm broke and the loneliness came roaring down out of the hills, black hounds howling fit to bust a lung.

The Furies unleashed and Gonz in the vanguard, teeth bared and monstrous in a pitiless snarl.

Finn had been the only one to understand. Said his own dreams were full of kraken and creatures half-shark and half-squid, surging up from the dark depths to snatch him from the shore, drag him down. Drowning dreams, or dreams where he sat on the ocean floor trying to drink the Atlantic down, although the dreams when the slimy tentacles transformed into his father’s arm were the worst, the hand grasping for Finn’s, and Finn reaching, always reaching, his father’s fingers slipping away beneath the waters and gone.

You didn’t have to be Freud to work it out. Neither of us had needed a therapist to pick through the entrails.

How to live with it, though. Nothing in the textbooks about that. No clues to be deciphered from the clipboards they consulted, no hieroglyphics printed in invisible ink between the lines of their endless questionnaires.

I was wallowing, yeah. Anything to keep my mind off what was to come, the standing before a mother, a widow, with the worst words she would ever hear.

And then the long crawl into the deep dark hole and the pulling over of the earth to deaden every sight and every sound that might remind me I was still alive.

The Audi purred along, down the long curve into Rathcormack, out the straight run into Drumcliffe village nestled ’neath bare Benbulben’s head. The pretty little church with its lights all ablaze and somewhere in there W.B. casting his cold eye on death, and life. The Audi’s tyres hissing slick on the sweat of the German tax-paper, who’d paid for every straight yard of road built in this country in the last forty years. McIlhatton ya blurt, we need ya, cry a million shaking men, and what rough beast, his hour come round, slouches towards a mother to break her heart …

Sweating now. The Audi veering across the white line. I sat up in the seat and flipped my smoke out the window, reached for the stereo and pumped the volume. Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, Thom Yorke’s wailing about raining down from a great height. Nice timing, Thom. The kicker being that Finn had the Audi’s stereo tuned to McCool FM, the personalised Spotify pre-records he’d broadcast to the world all night, or that part of the world within a fifteen-mile radius of the PA building at least.

Too much.

I dug out his CD, Music to Make Babies To , slipped it into the deck. Hoping for a little distraction. Finn’s compilations were musical crossword puzzles, each song a clue. Except Rollerskate Skinny were first out of the traps, ‘Swingboat Yawning’, and that was way too close to the bone, heaven to be overcome, what are you going through the only thing I can ask you , even before they hit the whimsical hook, Now my future is all behind me …