A cold sweat starting to ice in the small of my back.
This’ll be a car I’m not insured to drive,’ I said slowly, ‘to go to Galway and pick up a score. What’re you on, PCP?’
‘She won’t loan you the car?’
‘If I swear I’ll drive straight into the first cement truck I meet, maybe.’
‘Tell her you’ve a regular fare, he’s flying out of Knock. You can’t let him down.’
‘That’s a two-hour round trip, max. I’ll be gone, what, five or six hours?’
‘So you get a flat tyre or some shit. Listen, Harry, it’s a ten grand score. There and back, you pay off on the weed. Simple.’
The torque started to bite, the inevitability of it all winding tight like some metal band slowly crushing my skull. Sparks flaring behind my eyes. Herb waited while I rolled a smoke and sparked it up, coughed out some lung I wasn’t using right then. ‘I’ll need a couple of hundred up front,’ I said. ‘I’m behind on Ben’s maintenance. And Dee’ll need some kind of sweetener if she’s to lend me the car.’
He thought about that. ‘Done,’ he said.
‘I’m making no promises. It’ll all depend on what kind of mood she’s in.’
‘Horseshit. She’ll be in a bad mood, she’ll be looking at you. Your job is work around that. A grand is a grand.’
If there was a flaw in his logic, I couldn’t see it.
16
When Herb left I had myself a Mexican shower in the tiny bathroom downstairs. The mirror could have hung in Saoirse Hamilton’s drawing room, titled ‘Something the Cat Coughed Up’. A mad and possibly evil taxidermist had fitted me with the eyes of a dipsomaniac racoon. The blackened blood under my nails washed out easily enough, but the shave proved rather more Herculean. The tremors in my hands could have had Richter shuddering in his grave, and the shredded hands and gash above my eye had already filled my laceration quota for the week.
I brushed most of the fuzz off my front teeth and went back upstairs to change my Jack-soaked shirt for its greyer but slightly less damp and sticky twin. The tie and pants were of yesterday’s vintage, but I figured Ben would need every scrap of help he could get at the PTA meeting, and a scruffy shirt-tie combo was better than turning up a tattered coat upon a stick.
Then, primed for another day, powder dry-ish, my trust in God no shakier than usual, I shouldered the Adidas hold-all containing ten grand and stumbled down the three flights of stairs and into Early ’Til Latte, where I had Inez put a small bucket of triple-shot latte on my tab. While the elixir brewed I sat in at the computer terminal at the rear of the shop and typed ‘Tohill Garda Siochana detective’ into Google.
He was a new one on me, Tohill. I don’t spend a lot of time hanging around the cop shop logging the new arrivals, but generally speaking, when you drive a cab in a place of Sligo’s size, it’s not long before you know all the cops, by sight at least. Which meant he was probably a recent transfer. What I wanted to know was why, and if he had form.
Nought-point-two-eight seconds later I had 2,311 results. Only the first seven related to Detective-Sergeant Daniel Tohill of An Garda Siochana, but there was more than enough in that little lot to suggest that Saoirse Hamilton’s desire to find Finn’s suicide note, if such existed, was prompted by rather more than a grieving mother’s need for closure.
I sipped on the bucket of latte and ran another search, this time on Hamilton Holdings, which almost caused the modem to melt down. Most of the results, when I refined the search to include only the last year’s offerings, confirmed that Finn hadn’t been exaggerating. The Hamilton Holdings website still claimed that the company could provide the only property investment portfolio I’d ever need, with blue-chip returns available in Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Florida, but the main thrust of a quick sample of clicks was that Hamilton Holdings was effectively owned by NAMA, which was hell bent on offering everything on the Hamilton books at fire-sale rates. Or would, once it had negotiated the barbed-wire legal hoops erected by one Arthur Gillick.
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.’