She was aiming the.38 at my good eye, about twelve inches from my face.
‘Finn said he killed him, Harry.’ She lowered the.38, laid in on her thigh. ‘Put a gun against his head, pulled the trigger …’
‘And now he’s dead, yeah. Christ, Maria, he was quoting you Bohemian fucking Rhapsody.’
‘I got that, thanks. Saoirse say why she wanted the gun back?’
‘No, she didn’t. But that’s bollocks. The autopsy would’ve-’
‘Autopsy?’
‘Sure. There’s always a coroner’s report when-’
‘There was no body, Harry. Officially, they reckoned Bob made it out of the car alright, through the open window, and then got swept away.’
I stared at her, trying to remember exactly what Finn had told me about his father’s drowning. If he’d said anything about their not finding a body. ‘Maria,’ I said, ‘why the fuck would Finn want to shoot his father?’
‘Harry,’ she mimicked my tone, ‘why would Saoirse even think about wanting the gun back?’
‘It was her husband’s. She’s entitled.’
‘Sure, yeah. Except it’s a bit fucked up that the first thing she thinks of when her son commits suicide is the gun that Finn says he used to kill his father.’
There was something in that, and there might even have been something in it for me if I gave a shit about Finn, Saoirse and Big Bob Hamilton. But I had a job to do. Saoirse Hamilton wanted the gun and was prepared to pay to get it. Story, end of.
‘Forget about the gun,’ I said. ‘Forget about Finn and his father. What you need to worry about is that Saoirse blames you for Finn jumping, and was talking crazy earlier on, making all sorts of threats. If you want my-’
The phone rang again: once, twice. It went dead, then rang again. I reached over and picked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘I need to use the bathroom.’
‘We’re on our way down. Cross your legs and sit tight.’
‘But-’
‘Sit fucking tight.’ I hung up, faced Maria. ‘I’m serious about Saoirse. She could cause you problems.’
A sardonic smile, albeit a little sloppy. ‘Saoirse’s been causing me problems since I got here, Harry.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m talking about her doing you actual harm. No kidding, the woman’s not well right now. And when she wants shit done, it gets done.’
‘She can try.’
‘You can take her. Is that it? In a bitch-fight, you’ll slap her down.’
The shrug was flip, arrogant.
‘It won’t be her, Maria. It’ll be a couple of blokes, boozed up and well paid to fuck you over. Maybe all the way.’
This time she waved an airy hand.
‘Sound,’ I said, getting up. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it …’ I stepped around the coffee table balling my fist, leaned in and punched from the shoulder.
She squealed and shrank away, curled into the corner. ‘Imagine that’s your face,’ I said, pointing at the cushion I’d crumpled.
‘You fucking-’
‘Pretend I have a knife. Or a chisel. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like women, can only get the horn when a woman’s already screaming and bleeding.’
She bellowed something harsh and came up fast, hurling the cushion and lunging hard in its wake, wielding the.38 like a small, stubby hammer. I made a grab for her wrists but only caught one. The other fist flailed at the back of my head. I backed away, still gripping her wrist, and bunched my hand again, cocked it high. She flinched and ducked away and her adrenaline rush went south. She sagged, went limp. I hauled her upright again, and we lumbered around the room like the last couple in They Shoot Horses until I got her propped and steady on her feet. I put a finger under her chin and tried to tilt her face upwards, but she twisted away, jerking her head back. I prised the.38 from her fingers, then let her go, stepping back in case she was playing passive as a bluff.
‘Pack a bag,’ I said. ‘Put your passport in it. You get five minutes.’
She gave a defiant sniffle, but she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room. I waited until I heard her shuffling around in the bedroom, then had a quick look at the.38. Found the release and pushed out the cylinder. Five rounds, just waiting to go. I emptied them out, then pushed the cylinder home and slid the safety off, cocked the hammer and dry-fired. Even the dry click sounded lethal.
I went through to the kitchen and washed the oil off my hands, then wiped down the gun. Wondering why, when he had such a perfectly designed killing machine to hand, Finn had jumped. With such whimsical diversions we fill our days. I swaddled gun and shells in kitchen towel, found a stash of green cotton shopping bags under the sink. Then I followed Maria up the corridor, went into Finn’s study. The folder went into the bag on top of the gun, and I was about to close down the laptop when I spotted my name in Finn’s iTunes.
Skinny for Harry.
I clickety-clicked on the listing and away they went, ‘Swingboat Yawning’ booming out, the laptop still set to full volume. I clickety-clicked again and silence filled the room. The kind that echoes.
It didn’t make any sense. I’d thought it was a mistake that night at the PA, that Finn had burned off the wrong CD and given me Rollerskate Skinny instead of his latest compilation. Except here was his iTunes telling me he’d planned it in advance. But why would he think I’d need a burned copy of HorsedrawnWishes when I already had a perfectly serviceable version at home?
One last pathetic gesture, maybe. A reminder of how we’d met, and why. And typically Finn, landing somewhere between quixotic and sentimental.
I closed everything down and was about to switch off the Mac when I remembered something Tohill had said. So I brought up Google, typed in James Callaghan hospital car bomb.
It wasn’t quite as dramatic as Tohill had claimed, possibly because I had visions of Jimmy detonating a car bomb in the underground parking lot of a hospital, planning on bringing the whole edifice down, but it was there alright, how the upstanding James Callaghan had been convicted, this back in ’94, of planting a bomb under the engine of an Assistant Commissioner’s Ford Sierra while the man was inside Derry’s Altnagelvin hospital, visiting his wife and newly arrived baby daughter. The guy had lost both legs, apparently, but survived, this because the engine block took the brunt of the blast. Jimmy had served four years and then strolled on a Good Friday pardon.
Which was useful to know. The laptop went into the bag on top of the folder and the gun. Another wonderful swag.
I watched her pack from the doorway. The bed unmade, floor littered with the shrapnel of a laundromat bombing. She was bundling clothes into a suitcase propped open on the floor, changing her mind, unpacking half of them, packing some more. She had her back to me, bending over, the damp towel clinging to the sinuous curves where her thighs narrowed into her waist and flared again. A faint hint of perfume, all the more seductive for being elusive, undefined. I put down the bag and took two steps forward, placed a hand on her hip. She stiffened, then straightened up. ‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘I won’t,’ I said, drawing aside the tendrils of straggling hair and kissing the fine, silvery hairs at the nape of her neck. She shook her head and her hair brushed my face like some subterranean apple-scented fronds and then she was turning into me muttering something crude and for a while, a very short while, we were tensed flesh and thrumming blood and there was no love in it, no love at all.
30
Afterwards she rolled away from me and got off the bed and went into the bathroom. When she came back she wouldn’t look at me, just knelt on the ground and resumed packing the suitcase.
‘If you forget anything,’ I lied, ‘I’ll come back for it later.’
‘Fuck you.’ She gathered two handfuls of pants and bras, dumped them into the suitcase, then half-zipped it closed. When she straightened up to face me, flushed but somehow drained, her expression was a lot like a rusty tuba might sound. ‘Do you think he knew?’ she said.