I crossed the reception area into another hallway, paused outside the bathroom door. The shower hummed merrily on but the showeree wasn’t in any mood for singing. Beyond that hallway was a living room proper, strewn with cardboard pizza boxes, foil cartons, empty bottles. Wine, mostly. The curtains were drawn there too and the light had that gritty quality that coagulates when darkness is allowed fester.
I stepped into the kitchen expecting to find unscraped plates stacked in the sink but here everything was pretty much in order except for the nine or ten wine glasses lined up atop the dishwasher, each one of them stained purple. Maria favoured a fruity red. Even the bin under the sink was tidy. I reached past it, found the U-bend, the key taped behind. Thus armed, I crossed the living room again, the shower still humming, past the master bedroom and into Finn’s study. A scuffed roll-top desk under the window, a filing cabinet behind the door. In the corner stood a recession-proof spiky palm, and diagonally opposite that a slender lava lamp mocked up to resemble a Joshua Tree. There was an overflowing bookcase beside the desk, but otherwise the walls were a collage of scenes of Cyprus: postcards, photographs, pages ripped from magazines and calendars. The single cardboard box on the polished pine floor made me wonder why I hadn’t seen others, or any sign at all that Finn had been packing to go away.
The laptop was sitting amidst the usual detritus on the desk, on and open but in hibernate mode. Above it, Blu-tacked to the desk frame, was a hand-written Bukowski quote: When you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Looked like Finn had walked away from his typewriter just that once too often.
The desk’s bottom drawer was already unlocked. It took five seconds to confirm that the gun wasn’t there and that the drawer didn’t have a false bottom. All I found was a thick buff-coloured folder labelled Cyprus, which contained sheaves of research notes, internet and email print-outs, bank statements, letters to and from real estate agents, most of them based in Girne. A quick flick-through elicited nothing that looked like a suicide note, about which I was mightily pleased.
The laptop, when I nudged it, came to life straight away. I found Finn’s iTunes, scrolled down, clicked on Melanie Safka’s ‘Look What They Done To My Song, Ma’. Cranked up the volume as high as it’d go. Then I went back out into the living room and liberated a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table, got it lit. I was just relaxing back into the creased old leather couch, Melanie wailing about how they’d picked her brain like a chicken bone, when the music cut out.
There was a framed poster on the kitchen door of a woman dressed in food: a pineapple for hair, a dress of assorted nuts, strawberries for earrings, that class of a thing. In the reflection of the glass I could see the darkened outline of the woman behind me, her damp hair a tangle of rats’ tails, legs apart and braced. She was using both hands to point something at the back of my head.
Her voice was cold, burnished.
‘Was it you?’ she said.
‘Don’t be daft.’
The reflection blurred as she moved forward. Cocking the gun, the click loud as a shot. She touched the muzzle to the top of my spine.
‘Was. It. You.’
‘Maria,’ I said, ‘you’re not thinking-’
‘I’ll be gone before they find you.’ She ground the barrel into my neck, forcing my head forward. ‘Last time. Was it you?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ She relaxed, allowing the muzzle fall away. I was twisting my head to look up at her when she poked it under my cheekbone. ‘And if you ever try to tell me what I’m thinking again, I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
‘Duly noted.’
The first time I met Maria I told her that her eyes reminded me of Lauren Bacall’s. Narrow green slits under severely cropped brows. Now, like Lauren’s, they were dead. The nose was still imperious, though, straight as a tent pitched on a downhill slope, its haughty aspect softened by cheeks left rosy by the shower and a tiny apple chin. The mouth was wider than a melon slice and luscious as split peach.
I guess I was hungrier than I’d thought.
‘You couldn’t have rung ahead?’ she said. Hungover, her voice had the metallic whine of a wasp trapped in a pipe. ‘Christ, I nearly shit myself in the shower.’
I put the pair of coffees down on the glass-topped table and liberated a bottle of Courvoisier from the sideboard, slopping a generous dollop into both mugs. She bypassed the coffee and went straight for the bottle, taking a three-swallow slug before coming up for air.
I took a decent wallop from the coffee and then rolled a smoke from the detritus of Finn’s makings on the table while the brandy hectored my corpuscles like a Sarn’t-Major bawling drills. She made a brusque gesture. I tossed across the cigarette. She dug a lighter from the pocket of the kimono-style dressing gown that didn’t contain a.38 Detective Special, lit up and exhaled without taking her eyes from mine.
‘So how’ve you been?’ I said.
‘How would you be?’
‘Drunk.’
‘That’s how I’ve been.’
She sat back into the high-winged armchair, tucking a bare foot under her thigh. The kimono damp where it stuck to her shoulders, dark stains on the pockets from the film of oil on her palms. For a memento, Finn kept the.38 in good working nick.
Maria didn’t look too bad either.
Dried out and spruced up, Maria Malpas was hands down the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in the flesh. Bereft, hungover and raw from the shower, hair like Medusa’s in an Arctic gale, she was still top three, easy.
‘How’d you hear?’ I said.
‘Yesterday morning, at work. I’d only just got in. Mary saw me coming and started flapping around, how brave I was. She’d heard it on the news in the car.’ Her mouth went thin. ‘The fucking bitch couldn’t make one fucking phone call.’
Said bitch, I presumed, being Saoirse Hamilton. She sucked down another couple of inches of brandy. ‘How about you?’ she said.
‘I rang, but I didn’t want to tell you in a message.’
She nodded a vague acknowledgment. ‘I mean, how did you hear about it?’
‘I was there.’
‘There?’
‘When it happened.’
Her mouth was a bouncy castle, the words a helpless tumbling. ‘And did he …? Was he …?’
I told her what I’d been telling everyone else, except this time I included the bit about being at the PA to deliver grass. I expected a big hoo-hah about how no one orders in that much smoke and then jumps off nine stories, but all she did was crack a grimace that was half-smile, half-snarl. ‘That’d be right,’ she said. ‘That’s Finn.’
‘Was.’
‘Yeah, that was Finn.’ She toasted me with the bottle, had herself another swig. Eyes wet and hard as black ice. I felt a guilty twinge at not taking the brandy away, but Maria wasn’t the kind who looked fondly on intervention even when she wasn’t packing a gun in her pocket. And I had twenty grand to earn.
‘Y’know what?’ she said. ‘Fuck Finn, fuck his mother, fuck the whole shitty inbred lot of ’em.’
‘Skol,’ I said, raising the coffee mug. ‘So what’re your plans?’
A sloppy shrug. ‘Wait for the funeral, I suppose. Then go home. But I don’t know, even the thought of packing up …’
She was trapped in the moment, unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that she had to move on.
‘I’m guessing the salon’s a non-runner,’ I said.