‘Fuck. You.’
‘Your call.’
I flexed my fist, felt the pain burn. Then I sat back and placed the cigar on the crystal-cut ashtray. Bent in again, thumbs cocked.
He started to frown before he realised what I was about. He shrieked, but by then I was already digging in.
I had no idea a man’s eye socket could be so deep. My thumb was buried to the second knuckle when I scraped back and out. His scream set the fillings in my teeth a-shiver as I puffed again on the cigar. The eyeball lay on his cheek like a wobbly marble, still attached by stringy muscle. Tears seeped out of the socket and down his cheek, under the eye. I touched the tip of the cigar against the wetness. It hissed.
‘Jesus Christ no,’ he rasped.
The coming together of a glowing ember and the vitreous substance encasing an eyeball is an unedifying sight, but I’d been expecting that. What I hadn’t factored in was the smell. It was that of a half-boiled egg jammed against a hot pan.
Twice I raised gritty blisters singeing the eyeball.
The second time he knew there’d be a third, a fourth.
‘Grainne,’ he gulped. ‘It was Grainne Hamilton.’
‘Bullfuckingshit.’
‘She heard you …’ He gasped. ‘Heard you on the phone. When you rang the hospital from … from the Grange.’
That made a kind of sense. ‘And she told you?’
A nod.
‘No way Grainne Hamilton ran anyone off the road,’ I said. ‘So who did it?’
He didn’t know. Or so he said. I had myself another pull on the cigar and he broke. Everyone does in the end. He started babbling, begging. His theory being that so long as he was talking, I wouldn’t be singeing.
It took a couple of slaps around the head to get him focused, and then I pointed the.38 at his good eye, slipped the safety off, cocked the hammer.
‘Listen good,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t you, you don’t need to die. But I know you have a best guess.’
He did, and when it all tumbled out it sounded like I was mostly to blame for Ben’s dying, this because I’d told Saoirse Hamilton on the phone that I’d come see her after I got back from Galway, and that I already had what she was looking for.
There’s only one Galway-Sligo road. I’d been driving Finn’s Audi. The rest had been easy.
‘She thought I had Finn’s suicide note,’ I said. He closed his good eye and nodded. The raw socket mocked me, its eyelid flopping. ‘What was she so worried about?’ I said. ‘What’d she think it’d say?’
‘The safe,’ he moaned. ‘The safe.’
I got up and crossed to the painting of exploding meatballs, pushed it aside. Inside the safe were a number of slim manila envelopes of varying sizes, all blank. A small case in black velvet, inside of which was a matching necklace-and-earring set in jade.
‘What am I looking for?’ I said.
He directed me to the top right-hand corner of the rear wall, told me to feel around. ‘There’s a catch,’ he mumbled.
‘Isn’t there always?’
I slid my finger up the right side of the safe, felt a small bump. I jiggled it back and forth, up and down, then pressed hard. There came a soft click. The back wall of the safe sprung, leaving a half-inch gap. Behind was a single buff manila envelope. Inside was a blank CD in clear plastic and two pale blue Basildon Bond envelopes, one blank, the other with an address handwritten in Finn’s flowing cursive script.
Back at the desk I slipped the CD into Gillick’s laptop. When the folder popped up, I clicked it open. It contained a single document, a spreadsheet. The first page was titled ‘Irish’.
O’Leary, George: 17/3/2010 — €12k
Smyth, Vaclass="underline" 24/5/2010 — €14k
McCaul, Manus: 09/6/2010 — €21k
Walsh, Padraig: 11/8/2010? €8k
Callaghan, Cormac: 21/9/2010 — €11k
O’Toole, Hugh: 14/11/2010 — €17k
Byrne, Brian: 05/2/2011 — €13k
Kelly, Paul Christopher: 12/3/2011 — €9k
Flynn, Bryan: 23/3/2011 — €19k
Morris, Colin: 04/5/2011 — €12k
Carruthers, John: 27/6/2011 — €5k
O’Rourke, Laurence: 19/8/2011 — €27k
And so it ran, for almost six pages, the lists divided into various nationalities. The total topped out close to seven hundred grand.
‘Who are they,’ I said, ‘shareholders?’
‘Artists,’ he whispered.
The Fine Arte portfolio, I presumed, but as always I was just that bit behind the curve. The list did detail some of the Fine Arte portfolio, but only those artists who’d been copied, strictly one per artist, the originals sold on to private collectors, the fakes left hanging in courthouses and libraries and county council offices to gather hefty tax deductions for their philanthropic owners along with a thin film of dust.
It had been Gillick, not Finn, who’d tipped off Tohill about the scam, buying himself some credit when CAB started to squeeze.
It wasn’t fool-proof, of course. It helped that Finn had focused entirely on impressionistic takes on landscapes, but even so it depended heavily on the art world’s assessors and experts being largely incapable of differentiating between a modern masterpiece and a blurry fart.
Finn had needed Gillick for the legal side, cutting him in for a percentage. They’d left Saoirse Hamilton out of the loop. The first she’d heard of it was when the Italian art dealer with a keen eye for a blurry fart had sued for breach of contract, and the defendant pointed the finger at Fine Arte for originating the fake.
She wasn’t, to put it mildly, best pleased. It wasn’t so much the Italian suing, this on a blood-from-a-stone basis. No, Saoirse Hamilton was far more concerned about the public ridicule that would inevitably follow.
Being wiped out financially was one thing, and just about bearable so long as everyone else in the Golf Club was leveraged up the ass all the way to the tonsils and beholden to NAMA for a modest stipend to keep themselves in freshly pressed silk kimonos. But the idea that the Hamiltons were grifters, and were to be dragged through the courts as petty thieves who had preyed on the gullibility, greed and unsophisticated eye of their peers, was a social embarrassment that would deliver the coup de grace to her reputation. And all for what was, by Hamilton standards at least, chump change.
The kicker, and the reason Gillick wanted a squint at the laptop before handing it over to Saoirse, was that Gillick had taken it upon himself to invite some valued clients of his to the party. Specifically, the rootin’ tootin’ McConnell boys, who were always keen to avail of the opportunity to give a dirty wedge a nice spring-clean.
It made sense, of course, that a man of impeccable Republican credentials and sewer-level morals like Gillick would represent Ted McConnell, ex-INLA killer and bank blagger of note.
‘Now Saoirse’s pissing herself Finn made a confession in his suicide note,’ I said.
He was a pitiful sight, had there been anyone in the room capable of pity. Like an abused child baring his gritted teeth, desperately clinging to the belief that if only he could smile hard enough it would all go away. He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the pale blue envelope, the blank one. ‘The proof,’ he whispered.
The document inside was a birth certificate. The date seemed right — October 28, 1994 — and the stamp looked official. But it was a fake.
‘I don’t know what this is supposed to be proof of,’ I said, ‘but whoever put it together got the name wrong.’
From somewhere he found a second wind, even if the words came halt and hoarse. ‘The name is correct.’
‘She was adopted, Gillick. They both were, Big Bob Hamilton was shooting blanks. So the birth cert wouldn’t read Grainne Hamilton, it’d be Grainne something else. And the way Saoirse likes changing her kids’ names to Irish, maybe not even Grainne.’
‘Genuine,’ he said, although it took him about four seconds to push it all the way out.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Finn,’ he said, then swallowed thickly. His good eye closed. I looked around for some water but there was nothing to hand.