‘Finn believed Maria was the best thing for him.’
She was shaking her head even before I said her name. ‘She wanted to take him away, Mr Rigby. To Cyprus. The north coast of Cyprus, to be precise, a poverty-stricken hell-hole run by Russian gangsters. Where my grandchildren would eventually sink into penury while she squandered Finn’s inheritance on her whims and fancies.’
‘And the noble Hamilton name goes down the tubes.’
‘You betray yourself, Mr Rigby. Reverse snobbery is every bit the vice of its mirror image. And is it really such a crime to hope that your grandchildren might enjoy a superior quality of life?’
‘I don’t suppose it is. But maybe that’s why Finn was bailing out.’
A flash of something lethal in the azure eyes, a bolt from the blue so vicious it damn near toppled me off the wall. Then she glanced away, bowed her head. ‘Sit down, please, Mr Rigby. Looking up at you is giving me a pain in the neck.’
I swallowed the quip, settled into the wicker armchair again. She pointed out across the bay, all the way to Queen Maeve’s grave on Knocknerea. Gilded now, shimmering. Not a cloud in the sky. It was going to be another scorcher.
‘Do you know your local history, Mr Rigby? I’m asking specifically about Queen Maeve.’
‘I’ve heard of her, yeah.’
‘An iron woman. Fierce.’
‘Dead, I’m told.’
She nodded. ‘Dead this two thousand years and more,’ she said, ‘and yet here we are, still talking about her.’
She was, anyway. ‘And Finn, you’re saying, doesn’t get it.’
‘Finn, as we know, was always prone to overreacting. He had panic attacks as a boy, did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t know that. Look, Mrs Hamilton-’
‘This is an old country, Mr Rigby. There are passage tombs up on the hills of Carrowkeel and their stones gone mossy long before the pyramids were built. There were Greeks sailing into Sligo Bay when Berlin was still a fetid swamp in some godforsaken forest. Take a detour off our shiny new roads and you’ll find yourself in a labyrinth, because no Roman ever laid so much as a foundation brick on this island. Hibernia, they called it.’ A wry smile. ‘Winterland.’
‘Well, the roads run straight enough now.’
‘Indeed. Irish tyres hissing slick on the sweat of the German taxpayer, who will tell you that he has paid for every last yard of straight road built here in the last forty years. You know,’ she said, ‘there have always been those who turned their back on Brussels and Frankfurt, and not everyone who professes to ourselves alone is a Sticky or a Shinner. But I could never understand that. I quite liked the idea that Herr Fritz was spreading around his Marshall Plan largesse to buy himself some badly needed friends.’ She shrugged. Her voice gone dead and cold, as if she spoke from inside a tomb. ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Herr Shylock has returned demanding his pound of flesh, and it appears he is charging blood debt rates. Straight roads, certainly, and more suicides in the last year than died in traffic accidents.’
‘It won’t last,’ I said. ‘Nothing ever does.’
A hard flash of perfect teeth. ‘My point entirely, Mr Rigby. I’m told that the latest from Frankfurt is that our German friends are quietly pleased that the Irish are not Greeks, that we take our medicine with a pat on the head. No strikes, no burning of the bondholders, or actual banks. Apparently they’re a little contemptuous, telling one another as they pass the latest Irish budget around the Reichstag for approval that we have been conditioned by eight hundred years of oppression to perfect that very Irish sleight of hand, to tug the forelock even as we hold out the begging bowl.
‘They are children, Mr Rigby, our German friends. Conditioned themselves, since Charlemagne, to believe want and need are the same instinct. Hardwired to blitzkrieg and overreach, to forget the long game, the hard lessons of harsh winters bogged down in foreign lands.’ Tremulous now. Not the first time she’d delivered this speech. ‘The Romans were no fools. Strangers come here to wither and die. Celt, Dane, Norman and English, they charged ashore waving their axes and swords and we gave up our blood and took the best they have, and when they sank into our bogs we burned them for heat and carved our stories from their smoke and words.’
I got the message. Big Bob was long gone and Finn couldn’t take the heat. But Saoirse Hamilton was still foursquare at the furnace, smelting away, an Iron Queen beating ploughshares back into swords.
‘I blame myself, Mr Rigby, for allowing Finn to lead something of a sheltered existence. As a result his understanding of life’s requirements weren’t always rooted, shall we say, in practical concerns.’
‘No nose for the long game.’
‘That is one way of putting it.’
‘And soft enough to let Maria scam him.’
‘I have always believed so, yes. And what you told me about this ridiculous notion of building a property empire in Northern Cyprus only confirmed my suspicions.’
‘For what it’s worth,’ I said, ‘Maria’s no con artist.’
A faint, ghastly smile. ‘A moot point now, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I might, yeah, if you weren’t offering me ten grand to rip off Finn’s laptop. What’re you worried about?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m asking,’ I said, ‘what it is you want from the laptop.’
‘I want his computer, Mr Rigby. That is what I am paying you for and all you need to know.’
‘Not good enough.’ I flipped the More out into the void and stood up, watching the tiny orange ember whirl down towards the waves. ‘You’ll be needing someone else.’
But I made no effort to leave. We stared one another down, both knowing she had no other option.
‘You haven’t already realised?’ she said eventually.
‘Obviously not.’
‘Think, Mr Rigby. Who gains from Finn’s death?’
‘Seeing as how he jumped, I’d have to say Finn.’
She brushed that one aside. ‘You have no way of knowing this, but Finn had a comprehensive life assurance policy.’
‘Which’d pay out on suicide so long as it was in place more than two years before he jumped. Except that puts you in the frame, as his next-of-kin. Finn and Maria weren’t even engaged.’
‘In theory,’ she nodded, ‘yes. But there is the not insignificant matter of Finn’s will.’
‘Of course. The will.’
The cobalt skewers glittered. She flung the coffee bowl aside, shattering it against the near wall. I really didn’t know what Saoirse Hamilton’s problem was with Finn marrying Maria. She’d have had a whale of a time at a Cypriot wedding.
I settled back on the balcony wall, folded my hands in my lap. ‘So,’ I said, ‘the will.’
She composed herself by smearing some coffee stains into the silk. Then, low, she said, ‘I have very good reason to believe that that tramp was being unfaithful to my son, Mr Rigby. And I’ll be damned if I’ll allow her to benefit from his naivety.’
‘I don’t know where you’re getting this idea that Maria was-’
‘If I find a single reference to an infidelity on his computer, even the vaguest hint, then I will deploy every resource I possess to have her charged with contributing to my son’s death. Are you satisfied?’
‘You’ll need a better lawyer than Gillick to make that one stick. I mean, even if you were to plant something on the laptop …’ I shrugged. ‘Not that I’m suggesting that the thought had occurred.’
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I will be forced to explore other avenues.’
The threat was there. She was obviously distraught and lashing out, but even so I made a mental note to tip off Maria.
‘So that’s it,’ I said. ‘Swipe his laptop and mess the place up, make it look like a break-in.’
She inclined her head. ‘Naturally, while you are at the apartment, I would like you to see if you can locate his suicide note.’ Fainter now. ‘If it exists.’
‘Without, presumably, checking the laptop for one.’
‘Correct.’