‘So what?’
‘Did you tell her Finn was the father?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Mainly because you couldn’t know for sure. Unless you’ve already had a test done.’
‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Harry.’
‘Ideas aren’t really my thing.’
‘Good. Keep it that way. Now let’s-’
‘I need to know.’
She sat there with her hands on the steering-wheel, thumbs tapping the soft leather grip. ‘Archu,’ she said, so softly I barely heard her.
‘What?’
‘You don’t recognise your own name?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Finn.’ She looked up at me then, and there was hate in her eyes, and hurt, and something that might even have been tender. ‘He said it was the night you pulled him back from the edge. Telling him about your brother. How you killed him over a kid who wasn’t even your own.’
Odd. The way I remembered it, Finn had been the one who’d dragged me back from the edge. Telling me about the arsons, the pressures that opened up the fissures deep inside, left him bipolar, suicidal and clinging by his fingertips to that sheer black cliff.
We’d ended up laughing at one another. The way you do when a spark of hope flares. That god-given moment when you realise there’s someone even more fucked-up than you. That there might even be a way back.
Of course, we traced it all back to our mothers. Saoirse for changing Finn’s name from Philip, starting him early down that road of hiding who he really was, the brain-bending strain of pretending to be someone else, always.
‘Is it true?’ she said.
‘Nope.’
‘No?’
‘You know what Finn was like,’ I said. ‘He wanted everyone else to be someone else too.’
She nodded. ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Archu, the Hound of Slaughter. Has a nice ring, just trips off the tongue.’
‘I like Harry better.’
‘I’ll bet you do.’
I got out of the Saab and went around to the first cab in line. When I told him he was up for a run to Belfast, he nearly shit. Hopped out, scuttled around the back of the Saab, started transferring Maria’s bags.
I sat back into the Saab. Maria with the sun-shield down, touching up her eyes in the mirror.
‘You haven’t had any tests done,’ I said, ‘have you?’
She found that funny in a sour kind of way. ‘What’re you saying, Harry?’ She cocked an eyebrow. ‘You actually give a shit?’
‘If it’s mine, yeah.’
‘And what if I said it was?’
‘Then I’ll come find you.’
She closed her handbag with a sharp click. ‘The baby’s mine, Harry. Right now that’s all I know for sure.’
‘That’s enough to get started.’
A wry smile. ‘You’ve never met my father.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Maybe I will,’ she said. ‘It seems to be all the rage.’
She got out, went around the Saab to where the cabbie was holding the door open. I watched the taxi pull away from the kerb, roll down to the intersection, pause and cut right. She didn’t look back.
43
In the end it was all pretty civilised, if a little cold and excessively formal. But that’s the way of it with executions.
I turned in at the gates of the Grange and drove on a couple of hundred yards until I hit a narrow stretch, the forest encroaching on both sides. Eased the Saab to a halt and then reversed back in a half-circle, blocking the road. I checked the.38, gave the cylinder a spin, tucked it back into my belt.
‘Okay, Bear. Let’s go.’
He loped along beside me as we advanced towards the clearing, ears pricked, a querulous whine in the back of his throat. Familiar territory, even if the smells and sounds were strange. He sniffed greedily at the night air, head turning and twisting, and I wondered how long it had been since he’d found himself outside, in his ancient environment of sycamore and oak. The trees densely bunched, a black-on-dark chiaroscuro charcoal etching. From somewhere came an owl’s whoo-whoo and Bear’s head jerked up, whipped around. A low growl.
‘Sssshhh, boy.’
Not that it’d have mattered if he’d tap-danced up to the house wailing be-bop on a kazoo. I had no plan other than kill or be killed.
Duty and the protocols demanded the former.
As for the latter, well, that had its fringe benefits too.
I paused on the fringe of the forest, clicked my tongue at Bear. He pawed at the ground as I dug out the phone, dialled Grainne’s number.
‘Mr Rigby?’
‘I’m outside.’
‘Please, Mr Rigby. Do join us.’
Eighty yards away the faux-Georgian monument to survival stood stark and silent, the upper storey’s windows ablaze with light. The front door dark and gaping open, as if the house was about to scream.
Us.
Maybe she meant Grainne, and maybe she meant Simon. But I didn’t think so.
He was there.
I could almost taste him.
There came a piercing whistle that cut off with a little trill. Bear stiffened, nostrils flaring as he sifted the night. Then he tossed that massive head, reared back and howled. Lunged forward across the immaculate lawn, howling still, cleared the ornamental pond in one leap.
I stepped out of the trees, followed on. Just strolled across the lawn, angling wide of the pond and the fountain, cutting back again towards the broad steps leading up to the front door.
An easy target, sure. But there were no marksmen in the Grange that night, no snipers. I figured they’d let me get close, talk up the paintings, try something to distract me and then put me down.
Sweat dripping from my fingertips, pooling in the arches of my feet.
Another balmy night.
I went up the steps one at a time, easing the.38 from my belt. The cross-hatched grip feeling clammy. Half-expecting someone to step out of the hallway’s gloom, maybe a herd of suicidal giraffes stampeded in my direction.
Getting through the door, I reckoned, would be the toughest part. I’d be back-lit going through, a black shape against the moonlit lawn behind, unmissable for anyone lurking behind the potted bamboo.
So I hauled out the Jimmy Dean roll for one last tired tumble, ducking through the door low, rolling to one side, coming up fast with the.38 extended.
Nothing. Only the door at the end of the corridor slightly ajar, offering a thin slice of yellow light.
I trudged along through the deep carpet, both hands braced on the butt of the.38, a weather eye on the balcony above. A murmur of conversation growing louder from the end of the hall.
Don’t go in there, Rigby.
There’s lunatics in there with guns, Rigby.
Desperate folk, Rigby, and at least two of them want you dead.
And all the while I was moving towards the door, realising, or finally admitting, that I hadn’t trekked all the way out to the Grange to kill or be killed.
I’d come to be wiped out. For all to be void.
And yet when I pushed in the door I found myself stepping back, half-expecting the SIG to start blazing away.
The only sounds the crackle of burning logs, a snuffling from Bear.
I stepped inside.
‘When you said you would bring the gun, Mr Rigby,’ said Saoirse Hamilton from the couch, ‘I didn’t realise you planned on arriving like John Wayne.’ Her tone mock-severe, as if chiding a spectacularly stupid child. ‘Should I raise my hands?’
Grainne crouched in the other corner of the couch, feet drawn up beneath her, arms wrapped around her shins. Chin resting on her knees and staring blankly into space. Eyes dull, blank.
On the far side of the coffee table, angled away from the fire, Finn sprawled in an armchair, one leg hooked over its arm. The lazy grin starting.
‘Harry,’ he said. ‘You’re a hard man to put down, y’know it?’
Tickling Bear’s ear, scratching at the fur on the back of his head. Bear squirming pleasurably, driving his head into Finn’s lap.