‘You break them, you buy them,’ Dee said when I wrapped on the shades. Ben snickered from the rear. I drove along through a Gucci-tinged world, honing my justification should Tohill pull us over. The problem being, as I saw it, that the homo sapiens is trapped roughly halfway between micros and cosmos, derived from quantum chaos yet peering at the stars, smart enough to appreciate the elegance in every part of the universe that is not human and yet so unevolved we confuse harmony with order; and being human, crave that which is beyond our reach, and wish to tame that which we do not understand, never realising, or at least not admitting to ourselves, that we are the elements out of kilter with all else, an army of intestinal parasites declaring war on their host, eternity, until it hands over the one quality it does not possess: justice.
Hence the loogie in Tohill’s shell-like.
I dropped Dee off at the hospital, crossed town to Ben’s school, the lunchtime traffic heavy but moving. Ben stayed in the back, a Gameboy plink-bleeping in his hands.
‘Good news and bad,’ I said.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘This meeting. I won’t have time to see all your teachers.’
‘Cool.’
‘So we’ll have to focus on the ones giving you bad reports.’
‘Crap.’
‘So who do I need to see?’
‘Dunno. All of them?’
He was exaggerating, sure, but not by much. The school had a system whereby you were handed an A4 sheet as you went into the gym where the teachers sat at desks attending crocodile lines of parents. An hour later, we were back outside staring at the graph of Ben’s progress report, which strongly resembled the Black Run at Klosters. He was good at art, computer studies and religious instruction.
‘Looking on the bright side,’ I said, ‘you’ll make a marvellous cyber-pope. Your grandmother would’ve been so proud.’
He squirmed, shoulders hunched as he scuffed at the Mini’s tyres.
‘Listen, Ben, we need to talk about this. I’m serious, now. We’ll sit down later on when I get back from Knock, but in the meantime,’ I rattled the A4 sheet, ‘I need you to really think about this.’
‘Where am I going now?’
‘To class. Where else?’
‘But there’s no class today.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘It’s parent-teacher day, dad. All the teachers are busy.’
‘So your grades are failing, and the best thing they can think of is to give you the day off?’
He hoisted a shoulder, let it slump. ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I need to work. I’ve a run to Knock to do.’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
His quiet tone was a blade in the heart. ‘It’s not your fault, son. Look, who usually keeps an eye on you when your mother’s out?’
He frowned at the idea of being babysat. ‘Katie,’ he said. ‘But she’ll be at school.’
‘Of course she will. Okay, get in.’
I rang Dee. The conversation was brief and terse. No, she hadn’t known Ben would be free for the afternoon. Yes, Katie was out of the loop. Yes, leaving a twelve-year-old at a loose end for the afternoon was insane. No, the problem was mine, deal with it.
Exeunt Dee, pursued by bears.
‘Right,’ I said, climbing into the Mini Cooper. ‘Looks like it’s you and me.’
Another shoulder slump, the Gameboy plinking away. But I could’ve sworn I caught the glimpse of a grin behind the unruly fringe.
I cut back through town, across the bridge and out along the docks, turned into the PA’s yard. The scorched hull of the cab was still in place, and I wondered who’d be paying for it to be towed away.
‘What’re we doing here?’ Ben said.
‘Seeing a dog about a dog.’
He rolled his eyes, then noticed the burned-out cab, the scorch marks on the wall of the PA, the X of yellow tape fluttering at the door. A uniformed cop shading her eyes as I pulled in beside Finn’s Audi. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is this, like, a crime scene?’
‘You’ll be seeing a crime scene soon enough, son. Your mother’s lining up a firing squad.’
He crossed his eyes this time, went back to the Gameboy. I got out and waved at the cop to acknowledge her presence, taking care to step across the black rubbery smears. She put away the mobile she’d been texting on and raised a firm hand, palm facing.
‘This area,’ she announced, ‘is off-limits to unauthorized personnel.’
I kept going, wondering if that was the standard spiel or if she was auditioning for CSI. She had the looks for it, quirky and fey, striking grey eyes, a button-cute chin.
‘I appreciate that,’ I said, nodding agreeably. ‘But I’m here to feed the dog. You’ve heard him, right?’ I edged by her, kicked the metal door. My reward was a fusillade of deep-throated barks. She flinched, but she was adamant. No dice.
There followed a quick chat about her orders and my responsibilities to my dead friend Finn and Bear’s voracious appetite. The ISPCC got a mention. Then I told her about how Bear had broken out the last time he’d been let go hungry for two days. ‘Go ahead and ring it in,’ I said, nodding at her crackling radio. ‘Maybe the dog-handler guy will come down and take care of it.’
Budgets being what they are these days, that was about as likely as some doggy Jesus wandering by with a basket of loaves and fishes.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was in there last night, they already know that. So it’s not like I’d be polluting the crime scene or anything. But look,’ I shrugged, ‘I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.’ I kicked the door again. Bear hurled himself at the other side of it, howling up a storm. ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be me who feeds him, just so long as he’s fed.’
‘I don’t have a key,’ she said.
Thirty seconds later I was around the back and hauling myself up onto the rusted fire escape. It didn’t yaw any more than an oak in a storm, but then I’d have been leery of climbing an oak in a storm too. The stench of drying kelp was thick as a shroud.
The emergency exit door had a deadbolt on the inside but I was guessing that Finn hadn’t bothered to lock up before he took his last dive. For once I was right. I slipped my fingers into the gap between the reinforced metal and the frame and gave a hefty tug, and it came away so easy that it nearly toppled me backwards over the waist-high barrier.
Inside was a dead stillness and the whiff of stale smoke and tortured howls echoing up from downstairs. I opened the studio door and called down to him. A pause, and then came a metallic pounding, the clickering of his toenails an ominous tattoo.
He was all business now, no howling.
‘Bear! Good boy. Good boy, Bear!’
The acoustics confused him and he skittered to a halt three landings below. A querulous whine. I advanced down the steps slowly, calling his name, and soon we were reunited in a slobbery blizzard. I pushed him off and led him down to the ground floor, scooped three cans of ground meat into his bowl. He wolfed it down, one quizzical brown eye watching me as I poured fresh water. I knew this because I was keeping a quizzical eye on him. All dogs, when you go back far enough, were wolves once, but the wolfhound, to the best of my knowledge, was the only breed specifically bred to hunt its own ancestor.
Hard to trust any dog that disloyal or stupid, or both.
Once he was finished eating I opened some more cans of meat and dumped them out, left him to it. Back up in the studio, blowing hard now, I took a quick rummage through the drawers beneath the mixing desk, one eye cocked for Finn’s note, the other for his binoculars. Not that I had a lot of hope of finding either. He wouldn’t have written a note and then hidden it away, and I only had Tohill’s word for the infrareds being missing.
The place had already been dusted, and my prints were all over it anyway, so I tossed the kitchen too: cupboards, fridge, freezer, bin. No joy. Back into the studio, a sooty residue thick on my fingers. I was running out of time, and the cop’d be wondering if I hadn’t fed myself to Bear. I crossed to the window, which had been left open, poked my head out to make sure she was still there. She was strolling in a wide circle, texting on her mobile again, once in a while glancing at the PA building. But all seemed calm. Ben hadn’t even begun to spin doughnuts in his mother’s car, being more intrigued by Finn’s Audi, walking around it, admiring its lines. The water beyond was flat and still, petrol-blue opposite the PA, darkening to magenta as it neared the deepwater. Sounds wafted across from Cartron on the faint breeze, the low thrum of traffic, a gull’s screech, children’s laughter from the schoolyard on the point.