‘There’s a flash drive.’
‘Right.’
‘Finn buried it all.’
‘I hope he marked it with an X.’
‘In cyberspace,’ she said.
‘Christ.’
She was talking about Grainne’s trust fund. How Gillick had worked with Big Bob Hamilton on a rewrite of his will, this not long before Big Bob went for a header off the dock. Essentially, the changes put Finn in control of the trust fund once he came of age.
The flash drive had all the codes, the passwords, the details of the electronic transfers Finn had been making over the last couple of years as he bled the fund dry.
‘How much are we talking?’ I said.
‘Well, the downturn has changed everything. It’s not worth anything like-’
‘How much?’
‘One-point-eight million,’ she said.
‘Jesus.’
I wondered how Ben might have turned out, bright kid that he was, had there been a trust fund waiting for him when he came of age. A tidy little nest egg to put him through college, maybe set him up in business designing his own computer games.
The pain of him throbbing now, as if I’d become entirely an abscess, skin stretched taut across a pus-filled void.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘I’m just wondering,’ I said, ‘what happens if you get your hands on this one-point-eight.’
‘We do a split,’ she said.
‘Wrong answer. But what I’m asking is, what’s to stop you taking the money, aborting the baby and taking off for Monte Carlo to find another sap like Finn?’
‘Because I need it for something else.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘To break Saoirse.’
‘Say again?’
‘I’ll be needing most of it,’ she said, ‘to break Saoirse.’
Which was interesting. ‘How’ll you do that?’
‘The first thing,’ she ticked it off on her finger, ‘is a paternity test proving the baby is Finn’s.’
‘Which might be expensive,’ I said. ‘Especially if it’s not.’
‘Meanwhile,’ she went on, ‘I need to hire a PR company, get a campaign organised to let all the investors know where they really stand with Hamilton Holdings. Get enough of them on board to call an EGM, bring in some outside accountants to take a look at the books. At the same time we’re asking some questions of NAMA, making sure the right journos have the inside line on how HaHo is setting up to buy back the choicest bits of its portfolio at rip-off prices, screwing the taxpayer.’ She’d thought it through. Not all the way, maybe, but at least she was facing in the right direction. ‘The newspapers love all that family feud shit, don’t they?’
‘Their readers do, anyway.’ I took a last drag off the smoke, dropped it out the window. ‘You’re serious about this?’
She got herself half-turned in the passenger seat so she was facing me. ‘You can think what you want about me and Finn,’ she said, ‘all that gold-digging crap, but I never gave a fuck about his money. It was Saoirse who was all about the money. And now Hamilton Holdings is fucked, about all that’s left is Grainne’s trust fund. Which was why Saoirse was pressuring Finn, giving him all this family-first bullshit. Time to circle the wagons, start again. Why do you think he started making transfers out of the fund in the first place?’
‘Knowing Finn, I’d say it was because he reckoned one-point-eight million would buy him a nice slice of the easy life in Cyprus.’
‘Because you’re like all the rest. One time,’ she cracked a grimace, ‘Saoirse told him the money was his crutch. Saoirse, of all fucking people. Telling him he needed to stand up straight, learn to walk on his own.’
‘Maybe she knew him better than you think.’
She nodded at that, slowly. ‘She knew him well enough to know what buttons to press,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care what any inquest says, it was Saoirse who walked him out that window and pushed.’
And then he came down on my cab and blew my life to shit, taking Ben with him as collateral damage.
It had a nice symmetry, alright. Grab Saoirse Hamilton’s blood money and make her choke on it.
‘This flash drive,’ I said. ‘It could be anywhere.’
‘Sure,’ she said. A nasty little grin. ‘Except you knew Finn, his perverse sense of humour. If Saoirse was giving him grief about money being his crutch, where would he be likely to hide the flash?’
35
The PA yard still stank of burnt petrol, warm tar. The crime scene tape hanging limp.
‘Didn’t take them long to move on, did it?’ Maria said.
Budgets and resources being what they are these days, I was more surprised they hadn’t taken the crime scene tape with them when they left. The chalk outline, too.
We gave the scorch mark a wide berth, the jam stain on the tarmac that was still purple at its centre but mostly sun-browned and flaking. It was worth trying the door, on the off-chance the cops had wandered away without locking up, but no joy. So I left Maria out front and went around the side, scaled the rusted fire escape again. Came in through the studio as the phone Herb had given me beeped, a text message to say Maria’s flight was booked, 7.30 PM to Gatwick out of Knock. Which gave us about three hours. I went on down the metal stairs to the ground floor, padding across the silent gallery. Let Maria in, directed her to the window.
‘You keep sketch,’ I said. ‘If anything moves, do that scream thing again.’
Then I crossed to the rear of the gallery, went through to the storage area behind. Opened the metal door and got a half-second warning, the clickering of nails on concrete, realising too late I hadn’t announced my presence. A furry Panzer exploded out of the dark. Jaws open, teeth gleaming in the gloom. I ducked away, rearing back, so the crown of his head hit me full-force in the chest. Heard the jaws snap and then I was down, bowled over. He skittered on the concrete as his paws scrabbled for grip, and then he bunched and sprang again.
Sprawled on my back, winded and weak, it was all I could do to meet his lunge halfway, bounce an elbow off his snout, grab a handful of rough fur beneath his throat. Gobs of spittle spattering my face as he slavered and snarled, forepaws on my chest, the rear scraping in my groin like he was rucking out a scrum. I tried kneeing him off but he had all the weight and momentum, his relentless twisting and snapping wearing me down.
There came a shrill whistle with a neat little trill. His head shot up as if jerked by a chain, ears pricking. A plaintive whine.
‘Bear,’ Maria urged. ‘C’mere, Bear!’
One last gouge in my groin and he was gone, launching himself at Maria like some grotesque teddy bear, all snuffles and short barks, skittish now. I sat up, shaking so hard I could barely tug my shirt free, wipe the drool from my face.
Starving, I guessed, and maddened for the want of water cooped up in that heat. Had the cops fed him before they’d left? Doubtful.
I went into the storage room and opened a couple of well-gnawed cans of dog food, scooped them into a bowl. Brought that outside and put it down on the ground, slid it across the concrete in his general direction. He’d wolfed it all down when I got back from the bathroom with a bowl of water, Maria hunkered alongside tugging his ears, so I opened another couple of cans of food while he inhaled the water, lapping at it so fast he splashed more than he drank.
‘He’s just a big dopey kid really,’ Maria crooned, tears in her eyes as she tickled Bear under the throat. ‘Aren’t you, Bear?’
A big dopey kid, sure. When you weren’t eyeball to eyeball, his jaws crunching, eyes rolling back white in their sockets. All the better, my dear, to inspect the instinct that had taken his lupine ancestors all the way from the tundra to the ground floor of an art gallery a couple of million years later.
A big dopey stone-cold killer.
Except it wasn’t really Bear she was talking to. It was the other big dopey kid, the one with the Brian Jones fringe and shit-don’t-matter grin, the one who’d walked away forever when he’d taken a stroll off nine stories out into the big empty. I was tempted to suggest she’d be better off talking to the jam stain out in the yard, but I let it slide, went through to the storage room again. The place stank of stale piss and shit, although at least Bear’d had the good grace, or sense of self-preservation, to leave all his deposits in one corner. The pile of crutches lay loosely stacked behind his kennel. I picked one up, shook it. Then another. The rattle of their hitting the concrete alerted Maria to the reason we were there, and she slipped in beside me, picked up a crutch.