He was wrong, of course, but then Paul was the kind who was nearly always wrong, stumbling along through life piecing together answers from second-and third-hand information and choosing the wrong option every time and never realising it until it was too late, if at all. Christ, the guy was a drummer.
Finn wasn’t just another endorphin junkie. His was a compulsion that scorched the wings of any adrenaline addict unthinking enough to flutter too close to his flame. He was textbook Freud, the unsettled soul shattered by too harsh a light and ceaselessly beating back towards some shadowed peace.
One time I asked Paul why he still hung around when he couldn’t surf anymore, couldn’t drum. How he could stick the sight of Finn.
His shoulder stiffened. ‘When you’re in,’ he’d said, ‘you’re in.’
I couldn’t fault him on that.
From above, faint but clear, came Finn’s cry.
Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …
The drumming ceased. The chanting shushed.
A nervous giggle. Surf washing on sand.
Finn rose from his crouch. For the longest moment he hung poised on the ledge, cruciform, face raised to the rising sun.
Then he pushed off, arms arrowing, and sliced into the light.
27
She was waiting for me in the woods. Sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, smoking, facing out over the little cove below. Dressed for mourning this time, black T-shirt, black denims. At first I thought she’d been beaten up, but a closer look revealed a make-up job of shaded purples and thick kohl.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hey,’ I said, not stopping to discover which Carmen she was today, the vicious Miss Sternwood or the gypsy lover driven to operatic hysterics by unrequited arias.
She dropped the cigarette and ground it out, hurried to keep up. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. I was a half-stride ahead, staying out of range of her nails, which weren’t any shorter than when she’d raked me in the hall. ‘You were in shock, bombed on pills, you didn’t know what you were-’
‘Not that.’
‘Oh.’
‘I was listening in on the phone,’ she said. ‘Before, when you were talking to your wife about your son.’
‘She’s not my wife.’
‘Well, I hope he’ll be okay.’
‘Thanks, yeah.’
‘So what does she want?’
‘Ben to get well. What d’you think?’
She put on a spurt as we reached the fringe of the woods, placed a hand on my arm, tugged on it. I stopped, took a step back.
‘You know who I mean,’ she said.
She’d given the nails about four coats of black varnish. I prised her hand free as gently as I could. ‘If it’s your mother you’re asking about, then that’s between her and me. Client confidentiality. Sorry.’
Which wasn’t strictly true, there being no ethical contract existing between a B amp;E man and the person who commissions them to steal. Unless it’s good old-fashioned honour among thieves.
‘But it’s to do with Finn, right?’
‘Sorry, I can’t say.’
It was still gloomy beneath the trees but even so her eyes were a delicate faience-blue. She tried to bat the eyelashes but there was too much gunk plastered on. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ she said.
‘Same difference, really.’
I walked on down into the grassy dell, across the gravel to the Sierra. She caught up as I opened the driver’s door, put a hand on it.
‘This is stolen,’ she said. ‘Am I right?’
‘You’re better off not knowing.’
A sickly smile. ‘Have you any idea,’ she said, ‘how often I’ve heard that in the last two days?’
‘None. Now take your hand off the-’
‘You could probably do with a car the cops won’t be looking for,’ she said. ‘Sounds like you need a phone, too.’
‘Trust me, you don’t want to get involved.’
‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. ‘How can I not be involved?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ I was acutely aware that we were having the conversation in full view of about twenty windows, from any of which a pair of eyes could be watching. ‘What I’m saying is, I have a job to do. And I don’t need any-’
‘I can help.’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘I can.’
‘You don’t even know what the-’
‘She wants the laptop,’ she said. ‘And the gun.’
We agreed that she should do her very best to slap my face without drawing blood, this for the benefit of any watching eyes, and then storm over to her Mini Cooper and drive off, and that I would shrug and get in the Sierra and follow at a more sedate pace, and that we would rendezvous at the gates of The Grange. And so I shrugged and watched her go, a hand to my poor abused cheek, and got into the Sierra, and followed her down the driveway.
At the gates I pulled up beside her and indicated that she should wind down her window, the Sierra’s being already busted and needing no winding in either direction, and told her to follow me.
Out to the main road and straight across, up the back road to Ballintrillick that winds around the rear of Benbulben. Half a mile or so up the road I branched off onto a narrow track and pulled in at the first bog cutting. I told her to get turned and face back down the mountain, borrowed her cigarette lighter. Knotted together six tissues from the box of Kleenex in the footwell of the Sierra’s passenger side, unscrewed the petrol cap, got the tissues nicely soaked.
Two minutes later we were on our way again, the Sierra blazing merrily. The sun cleared the mountain as we reached the main road, spangling the landscape a luminous gold.
It was another beautiful Sligo morning, another glorious fucking day.
Grainne favoured Marlboro Lights. I snapped the filter and sucked on some poison that didn’t taste of mint. ‘Tell me about the gun,’ I said.
‘You first.’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Not the gun. Finn.’
‘What about him?’
‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. She sounded solemn but then came a half-gulp and it all rushed out in a sulky wail. ‘My only brother’s dead and something’s going on and no one will tell me anything.’
‘Maybe there’s nothing to tell.’
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘I’m not a fucking child.’
I couldn’t contradict her there. She had her mother’s genes and they were brewing up nicely, swelling to plateaus in all the appropriate places. But it was in the eyes you saw it best, the eyes that didn’t film with tears despite the tremulous voice. Her mother’s eyes, pellucid and skewering.
‘What do you think is going on?’ I said. A shrink’s gambit.
‘I don’t know. It’s like …’ She paused. ‘You were at the PA,’ she said. ‘Right? Thursday night.’
‘Yeah, I was.’
‘And you saw it happen.’
‘Correct.’
‘That’s why you came out to the house, to tell my mother.’
‘Sure. I thought it’d be better that way. Rather than-’
‘But you actually saw him jump, right?’
‘I did, yeah.’
‘Did he say anything?’
About her, she meant. For all that she was trying to play the sullen ingenue, she sounded as plaintive as a woman querying the salt content of the ocean in which she was drowning.