Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

When the sound of the motorcycle had faded from the avenue, I brought the envelope to the dining table and sat down. A document of great consequence was contained inside — I see you have it in your possession. Exhibit A, or a portion of it. Yes, I can confirm that that is my signature.

That document possessed a distinct magnetic pull. It had its own field of gravity. The fact that it is presently being passed around the room in silence corroborates that it is no ordinary piece of paper. Exhibit A, you will find, is a remittance advice, a salary slip. The staggering figure of €100,000 is printed in the Payable box. And the staggering name in the Payee box is mine.

I stood up from the dining table.

I sat down again.

I stood up.

I sat down again.

I tried to concentrate.

It was very hard.

My eyes shuttled compulsively between those two electric points on the page: Tristram St Lawrence — €100,000.00 — Tristram St Lawrence — €100,000.00, until it felt like incipient epilepsy. At the bottom of the page, divided by a row of perforations, was a tear-off cheque drawn on a bank account in the Cayman Islands. The cheque portion, as you can see, was subsequently detached. By me.

The cheque was made out to Tristram St Lawrence and the amount was the same. Two new points of seismic activity for my eyes — they started their compulsive shuttling again. Then an irregularity leapt out. A key portion of the cheque was blank. The authorised signature was missing. The cheque was invalid.

Then I spotted my name again. Beneath the dotted line where the signature should be: Tristram St Lawrence, Director, Castle Holdings. I was the authorised signatory. I had to sign the dotted line to get the money. I turned the document over in search of further instructions. The reverse was blank.

My name, the zeros, my name, the zeros — my eyes cranked up their shuttling. Money disrupts the cognitive process. It gums electrodes to your skull and scrambles your brain. That document was a test, I see now, of my character. A test I failed. Tristram St Lawrence I wrote at the bottom of the page. Everyone has a price.

That’s when I became the Director of Castle Holdings. The sixth of June 2006, it says here. In accepting the money, I was accepting the position.

Yes, that is correct: Castle Holdings was a shell company. It bought nothing, sold nothing, manufactured nothing, did nothing, and yet, as your piece of paper states there, it returned a profit of €66 million that first year. Huge sums of untaxed money were channelled through it out to the shareholders of its parent companies, which is perfectly legal under Irish tax law, as you know. I did not make the laws. You made the laws. You are the lawmakers and must shoulder some blame. Me? I was merely the conduit. My appointment struck me as appropriate on a mordant level. Who better to direct a shell company than a shell of a human being? M. Deauville could not have chosen a more fitting candidate. Uncanny. That was the word they used.

I went straight to the bank, as their records will confirm, and lodged the cheque into my account. Yes, into my personal account. I have no other type. At least I had a bank account, which is more than the Minister for Finance could say. I wrote out a second cheque while still at the counter. This one was made out to Father for €15,000. That sum represented his commission — no, commission is the wrong word — I take it back. Father had no hand, act or part in Castle Holdings. He never took a penny from them. His money came from me. Father’s cheque was drawn on my account, not theirs. I put it in an envelope and placed it on the console table outside his study. Guilt money, you could call it. This offering was accepted, or, at least, when I came down in the morning the envelope was gone. The €15,000 was lodged by him, as you can see. I noted when leafing through the subpoenaed records that he deliberated for a number of weeks before cashing it.

The same procedure was followed with every cheque M. Deauville’s courier delivered. I signed them, lodged them into my personal account, and made out a second cheque to Father, which I left in a sealed envelope outside his study. The way I’d heard it, the owner could use a few readies.

The envelopes were removed, the cheques were cashed, and no mention was made of the matter. Money was not a topic Father was equipped with the vocabulary to discuss, yet I suspect it was all he ever thought about. I suspect it ate him up. How could he but think about money, or the want of it, when the roof was leaking and the plaster was mouldering and the floorboards were caving in beneath his feet? Watching it all fall around him and knowing that when he passed away it would be entrusted to his fallen son. It is a mercy that he did not live to see this day.

I soon learned to take up sentry duty in front of the brass plaque at 3 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month, waiting for that envelope like a junkie for his fix. The cheques M. Deauville’s courier delivered were generally as substantial as that first one, yet the hit was never as intense. Always, I was left craving more. I became addicted to waiting for the man because that is my nature. M. Deauville had me exactly where he wanted me. Hi, my name is Tristram and I’m an alcoholic. And an addict and a diabolical gambler.

‘Mr St Lawrence, what precisely is the nature of your relationship with the financier Mr Deauville?’

Ha! What a question!

‘Just answer it, please, Mr St Lawrence.’

I’m not sure I can, Fergus. To try to do so, I’ll have to go back to the beginning. I’ll tell you everything I know about M. Deauville, which isn’t all that much for a variety of reasons, one being that the gentleman in question is an extremely private individual, and another that our relationship was focused from the outset exclusively on me and my sobriety, seeing as I was in dire need of saving when he found me. I did all the talking and he did all the listening — pretty much the same set-up as here, I’ve just noticed. What does that say about me? Nothing positive.

I need hardly point out that M. Deauville would be most displeased at finding himself under such scrutiny, the chief witness being a former… how shall I describe myself? A former protégé. I am not of his church now. Our relationship had not always been a business one, you will have gathered. It ran far closer to the bone than that. M. Deauville was my sponsor. Everyone in the fellowship has a sponsor, someone you can talk to in your hour of need.

I joined Alcoholics Anonymous — or first attended it, rather, since it is not a movement you can really join as such, just as it is not a movement you can really leave as such — in May 2005, three or four days after missing a flight home to attend to my mother who had been hospitalised. Nobody told me she was dying. I missed the flight because I was too drunk to board the plane. M. Deauville was the man who saved me. From what? Lord, do you really need to ask? From myself.

The morning after I missed the flight, I did not wake up. The cleaning staff admitted themselves to my room when I failed to check out on time. I was in a Brussels airport hotel, though to put it bluntly I did not know where I was. Did not know who I was either. I had methodically popped a full month’s supply of sleeping tablets out of their blister packs and knocked them back with the contents of the minibar.

The cleaners found me comatose and called 999, but the phone must have been upside down and 666 dialled in the panic because it was Hell that I was despatched to, and not hospital, make no mistake. Sheer hell. I had hit what is known in the trade as rock bottom.