He frowned. ‘Don’t get all fucking moral on me now, Rigby. You burnt that fucking bridge a long time ago.’
‘I’m just saying, you’ve a job. Which is nice.’ I pointed across the road at the Abbott building. ‘Don’t know if you heard, but a couple of months ago those guys announced 175 new jobs in there.’
‘So?’
‘So the last time anyone announced new jobs in Sligo was Queen Maeve, she was short a few spears for her little jaunt to the Cooley Mountains.’
Tohill wearing a poker face now, jaw and lips hard and straight as pokers. ‘This is dirty money we’re talking about here, Rigby.’
‘Tohill, man — do you seriously think anyone in Sligo gives a fuck about who’s investing? Someone wants to create jobs with laundered cash, so what? No Dublin bastard’ll do it. If Sligo drifted off to fucking Iceland next week, it’d only make the news because the deer got frostbite.’
He was chewing the butt of the cigarillo into a soggy mess. ‘Let me clarify where this dirty money comes from, Rigby.’
‘I know where-’
‘In this case, specifically, we’re talking about the boys still fighting the good fight. Y’know, the Socialist Republic lads who knock off a bank here and there to grease the wheels.’
‘Fuck the fucking banks.’
‘Yeah, well, these raggy-arsed philanthropists, they’re socialist enough to want to share the wealth, only they do it in kind, pumping heroin into their own back yards. Or they’ll splash the cash by trafficking in women, spread a little happiness there if you’ve a few quid to spare and don’t mind screwing a zombie. You have a problem with that? No worries, here’s a double-tap in the knees, no charge. Or maybe they’ll bugger you to death with sewer rods and then rape your grieving wife, on the off chance she might get some daft notion about justice.’
‘You’re forgetting the bullet to the back of the head.’
‘You can live with that?’
‘You’d be surprised by what I can live with.’
‘Surprised, no. Disappointed, yes.’
‘That’s cute. A disappointed cop.’
He thought that over. ‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘How long d’you think it’d take me to have your taxi licence revoked?’
‘Dunno. Ten minutes?’
‘Don’t be daft. It’d take at least a day.’
‘You’re giving me a whole twenty-four hours?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t thank me. I blush easy.’
I thought about that. Not for long, or I’d have laughed out loud at Tohill’s big play, taking away a licence to drive a cab that’d gone up in flames. Instead I thought about how perjuring myself would go on the record, there in black and white should Tohill ever decide he needed another favour from an ex-con.
‘I’m signing nothing,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be wearing no wires.’
‘Your call. But if we do it the hard way, have you up on the stand to testify you saw infrareds in Finn’s studio, actually used them, this to corroborate Finn’s statement about what he saw, then you’ll be stepping down without a friend in the world. So think on about your new friend Gillick, how you might like to have a chat with him in the very near future, reminisce about Finn.’
I opened the door and made to get out, then hesitated. ‘There was one thing,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘This goes under the radar. Call it an anonymous tip.’
He leaned towards me, turning his head away as he put a forefinger behind his ear. ‘It’ll go no further than these four doors,’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t be much point in me saying it then, would there?’
‘No, I mean-’
I hawked up a goober, spat in his ear. By the time he struggled out of the safety-belt, got his door open, I was halfway down the alleyway and gone.
17
Sligo gets to call itself a city because it has a cathedral and smack. The sprawling suburbs are just the lily’s flaking gilt. Rasharkin lies to the north-east, a mile from O’Connell Street and just inside the borough boundary, seventy or so three-bed semis loosely arranged around a central green, an estate twenty years old and aging fast. Damp patches discolouring the red-brick facades.
Dee’s tiny lawn needed a trim and a sprinkle, its border beds a riot of dandelions and bindweed, the grass crunchy with tinder-dry moss. Three doors up from where I stood behind her living room window, twitching the curtain, a burnt-out Ford Focus sat skew-ways across the mouth of the alleyway.
No Tohill appeared.
A stupid thing to do, gob in a cop’s ear. But if you sit still for menace, just once, it never ends.
Ben was sitting Buddha-like before the TV, thumbing furiously at the Playstation gamepad, his face a ghastly kaleidoscope of greens, reds and yellows. FIFA 2012, the curtains pulled tight to eliminate sun-dazzle on the screen and the possibility that he might accidentally glimpse real people outside kicking an actual football around. He wore Puma trainers, beige tracksuit bottoms with white piping and an orange football shirt bearing the legend ‘V. Persie’ above the number nine.
I hunkered down behind, tousled his shock of dirty-blond hair. ‘Hey,’ I said.
He wriggled out from under without glancing away from the screen. ‘Hey.’
‘How’s tricks?’
‘Fine.’
‘Yeah? Who’s winning?’
‘Me.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘Upstairs.’
Two syllables was progress of sorts and akin to an entire conversation from a twelve-year-old lad. Or my twelve-year-old lad, anyway. ‘Want a coffee?’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
He pfffed his cheeks. ‘No thanks.’
I went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on, slid open the patio doors and stepped out to roll a smoke. Dee was death on smoking in the house. She said a smoker’s house was harder to sell and Dee was always hoping to sell. There were all kinds of reasons, but mainly it was that she didn’t feel right still living in the house we’d bought when she got pregnant with Ben. Said she looked around some nights and felt baby snakes slithering in her pants. Hard to say if she was casting aspersions on my six pounds of dangling dynamite or just being sentimental. Dee can be tough to second-guess.
The garden was small, enclosed on three sides by a high pitch-pine fence that blocked out most of the sunshine and all the neighbours. A wooden shed sagged in the right-hand bottom corner, one of its window panes cracked and lined inside with a Cornflakes box. Flagstones led from the tiny patio to a rotary washing line that skreeed whenever the breeze changed its mind. The grass was lush, ankle-deep and clumping where the dog shit had been left to rot.
Dee came through onto the patio humping a half-full basket of laundry on one hip.
‘Boo,’ I said.
She whirled, clamping the free hand to her chest. ‘Jeesus!’
‘Dee.’
She glared daggers as the fight-or-flight blush spread like bushfire across her face and throat. ‘Will you for Chrissakes knock the next time? No, first ring ahead, then knock when you get here.’
‘Can do, will do.’
She was a good-looking woman, Dee, angry, alarmed or otherwise, although my experience of her was that she was generally angry or alarmed. A sun-rinsed blonde with wide-set eyes, chipmunk cheekbones and Pirelli lips. The white blouse had wide sharp collars and the rest clung to her all the way from the neck to the flared hips, where a hint of flat belly peeked out from above the bottom half of a trouser suit in dark charcoal with a faint grey pin. The ox-blood boots had a two-inch kitten heel and looked like they could kick holes in a bishop’s dreadnought hull. If they didn’t, the eyes could always laser through instead. I balanced the cigarette on the windowsill and took the laundry basket from her, shuffled down the flagstones to the rotary line, began pinning up the damp clothes.
She leaned back to glance into the kitchen, then picked up the cigarette. ‘This is a straight, right?’