‘I won’t be going back there.’
‘I mean, the one in Cyprus. Finn’s development.’
Her eyes became arrow slits. ‘Fuck are you talking about?’
‘Finn had plans,’ I said. I told her about the apartment complex, Finn selling up, the changes to Grainne’s trust fund. ‘It was supposed to be a surprise. A wedding present, like.’
She stared for a moment, then shook her head, and then she laughed, but it cracked halfway through and she wound up on a coughing jag. I crossed over to the armchair and patted her between the shoulders. She cringed away. Chastened, I shuffled back to my pew on the other side of the glass table.
‘Finn move to Cyprus?’ she said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘That’s what he told me.’
‘Finn said a lot of things.’ She was staring again, and I wondered if I shouldn’t look at her in the reflection of the glass-topped table, lest I be turned to stone. She tapped the cigarette’s filter with the ball of her thumb, so that ash toppled onto the carpet. ‘He’d talked about it, yeah,’ she conceded. ‘But he kept on talking about it. A whole year he was talking about it. But he was never leaving, Harry. Never. She had him on a leash, and, and …’
She choked something back, then launched the bottle at the red-brick fireplace. It shattered, showering the rug with splinters of glass and a not inconsiderable amount of expensive brandy. I’d have paid good money to see her and Saoirse Hamilton let loose in a china shop. ‘The latest thing,’ she said, ‘was he reckoned we should think about taking a break. Can you believe it? I’m the one waiting a year for the bastard to make up his mind, and then he says maybe we should take a break.’
‘He say why?’
‘Why do you think?’ The smile was a raw wound. ‘The bitch was on his case. Dump me or she writes him out.’
‘He actually said that.’
‘In so many words.’
‘What did you say?’
‘What could I say?’ She waggled her hands, a crude caricature of a zany clown. ‘“Hey, pick me instead, I’m worth millions.”’
‘You’d have been selling yourself short.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Not now, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘Now’s not the time.’
‘Maria, he’d changed the trust-’
‘Sssssh.’ She put a finger to her lips, the eyes still closed. ‘Not now,’ she said again. She let the cigarette fall away and cradled herself, rocking in a mute keening. I got up and went around the table, retrieved the cigarette, put it in the ashtray. Then I sat down beside her.
‘Let me do this,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. But it might help.’
I put an arm around her shoulders, gave a gentle squeeze. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away either. I increased the pressure, pulling her towards me, and suddenly the tautness in her shoulders snapped. She turned into me, burying her face in my chest, bawling as she gripped a handful of T-shirt in each white-knuckled fist. I rested my chin on the crown of her head and felt each sob shiver my ribs like a jump-start to the heart. Something hard grinding into my side.
‘You put the safety back on that gun, right?’ I said.
She nodded and snuffled, then half-laughed. ‘I fucking hate you,’ she told my sternum, the words coming muffled.
‘I know.’ It’s cruel, really, but I can’t help liking women who don’t like me. I think it’s that I respect their intelligence. ‘Listen, Maria — are you listening?’ The head bobbed. ‘I think you’re in shock. You should see a doctor, get some painkillers prescribed, a sedative. I’ll take you if you want.’
She blew a sigh that set my athlete’s foot tingling, then struggled upright, smearing the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her palms. She pushed me away and looked around, and it was as if she was seeing the place for the first time.
‘Shit,’ she said.
The phone rang, once, twice, three times, cutting off midway through the fourth ring. Maria didn’t even glance in its direction. ‘Guilt’s a bitch,’ she said. She was staring into space, at some point that lay between where we were and who she used to be.
‘You’ve absolutely no reason to feel guilty,’ I said, trying to remember the speech Dutch had given me. ‘If he really wanted to go, there’s no way you could have stopped-’
‘Not me.’ The words were dry feathers. ‘Finn.’
‘Y’think?’
‘I know.’
‘That’s my theory, yeah. Finn being Finn, his mother bearing down, he couldn’t stick the-’
‘His father, Harry. His father.’
She reached into her pocket, took out the gun. An ugly sight. Maria had fine slim fingers, the manicure perfectly finished, a hand capable of creating the most subtle of artistic strokes. The gun, its sheen of oil notwithstanding, was dull, black, blunt and snubby. A purely functional killing machine.
‘What about his father?’ I said.
‘No one told you?’
‘Finn told me he drowned.’
‘Did he tell you he was there when it happened?’
‘No,’ I said. The lies came easy with Maria too. ‘He forgot to mention that bit.’
She poked at an oily stain on the kimono with the barrel of the.38. ‘Apparently he was giving Finn the one-day-all-this speech. Just the two of them, down at the deepwater. Anyway, his father asked Finn to get out of the car, he was parked pretty tight to the edge of the dock. So Finn got out. Afterwards they said it was just one of those things, he put the car into first rather than reverse. Not used to the new gear-stick.’
I’d done it myself, except never on the edge of a deepwater quay.
‘Finn says the last thing he saw was his father’s face,’ she said, ‘he was hunched up over the steering wheel. Then he was gone. Just like that. Toppled over. Finn freaked out. But what’s he supposed to do, jump in after him? Finn wasn’t much more than a kid at this stage, hardly out of his teens. And by the time he got to a phone …’ She made a meaningless gesture with the hand not holding a gun. ‘Afterwards he had to make a statement to the cops, then the insurance company had to have their own investigation. It all dragged on for about two years.’
‘That has to be tough.’
‘I honestly don’t know if he ever got over it.’
‘And she blamed Finn.’
She looked up at me, taking a second or so to focus. The brandy bedding in nicely now. ‘Who, Saoirse?’
‘She told me they were estranged. I thought it was an odd word for a mother to use about her son but I guess it makes sense.’
A sardonic twitch pulled at the corner of her mouth. ‘Estranged?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Saoirse fucking Hamilton doesn’t make many mistakes, Harry. If that’s the word she used, then that’s exactly what she meant.’ She hesitated, then slid me a sly look. ‘Y’know, with Finn being there, the only witness, no one could say for sure it wasn’t suicide.’
‘Guys driving Beamers don’t generally top themselves, Maria.’
‘No one could say it was, either.’
‘What’re you trying to say?’
‘We were down there one night last summer,’ she said, ‘just sitting on the dock, smoking a draw. Finn was supposed to be up in the studio but he’d left a CD playing, he had the car doors open, the radio on. One of those lovely half-moons up over Cartron … Anyway, out of nowhere he said he’d killed his father.’
That one hung in the gritty, festering air. She was drunk, cunning and mean with it, lashing out just like Finn’s mother and sister before her. On balance I preferred Grainne’s raking nails. A primitive approach, sure, but at least it had the virtue of being instinctive, honest.
‘You said it yourself,’ I said. ‘He was young, he saw it happen. That’s a lot to take on your shoulders, and at that age you think everything’s your fault, wars and famines, the whole lot. And if his mother held him responsible …’ She waited me out, smirking now. ‘I’m guessing,’ I said, ‘that he already had the guilties about not jumping in, trying to pull his father out. Give that kind of shit enough time, enough pressure, and it’s bound to — whoa, point that somewhere else.’