‘But you’re a pimp. Monsieur Deauville wouldn’t do business with a pimp.’
The Viking lowered his head and shook it. He shook it for a long time before picking up his mobile phone and rising from the table. ‘Fuck you, St Lawrence. I amn’t charging Hickey for the girl.’
*
Dark thoughts, black thoughts, dark thoughts, black thoughts, fuelling the headlong charge home, dictating the rhythm of my feet. I stumbled like a drunk in my haste to escape from him, from them, from that place, that door, Staff Only. I didn’t trust the whoremonger not to spike my drink and M. Deauville had accepted him into a consortium.
I told myself over and over again that I accepted the things that I could not change, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t, but I had to. ‘Ring,’ I urged my phone, holding it out like a compass to guide me, clenching it so hard that the casing creaked. My mind howled with the need to speak to M. Deauville. Perhaps it was a test. If so, I was failing.
*
Larney didn’t care or dare to show his face when I passed between the stone pillars that should have been crowned by winged dragons or hooded crows, something clawed that feasted on carrion. Instead, he chose to call out his riddle from the safety of the bushes. There is no safety, I wanted to tell him. You may as well come out of there.
‘The more you have of it, the less you see,’ came his voice, which was trembling with anticipation. ‘What is it?’
I didn’t have to give it a second’s thought. It was so obvious that I almost cheered up. I had a heart and a mind and a soul that was full of it. ‘That’s easy, Larney. Darkness.’
‘Well done,’ came the response in a dry, cultivated voice that did not belong to the gatekeeper. I stopped dead, turned to the trees.
‘Who’s there?’
Silence.
I took a step towards the verge. A swarm of teeming shadows. I strained my eyes to discern a human form but detected only leaves. ‘Show yourself,’ I commanded him, but he did not. I clenched my fists. ‘Show yourself!’ I bellowed as loudly as I was able, and the whole demesne quaked in the night because a man’s roar is amplified by darkness. Everything is amplified by darkness, particularly fear.
After an extraordinarily fraught pause, the leaves rustled and a twig snapped. Larney emerged slowly, wrists and elbows first, for his arms were raised to shield his head.
‘Come here, Larney. I’m not going to hurt you.’
He inched forward in the undulating, weaving manner of a snake and came to a halt a few feet shy of me, his body crouched and averted from mine like a blackthorn growing on a cliff. Tears, snot and spittle were trickling down his face, and his eyes rolled from side to side in his head, looking up and down the avenue in search of an escape.
‘Was that your idea of a joke?’
‘He made me.’
‘Who made you?’
‘He made me,’ Larney repeated, gulping air like a sobbing child.
‘Who made you?’
‘The man.’ Larney glanced up the avenue and shuddered. I turned around. Nobody was there. ‘The man,’ he said again. ‘He made me.’
‘What man? What was his name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he look like?’ Somehow I had him by the collar of his shirt. He weighed nothing at all. When he recoiled to avoid my eye I gave his bones a shake. ‘Answer me, Larney: what did the man look like?’
Larney braced in anticipation of a blow. ‘He looked like you.’
I released his collar and he slunk back into the shrubbery. I wheeled around. The avenue was still empty. There was just the darkness. It was everywhere.
Seventh day of evidence, 21 MARCH 2016
~ ~ ~
‘To return to this barbeque at his house that Mr Hickey invited you to following the success of the Claremont launch. Other members of the Golden Circle have specified that it was at this event that the decision to bid on the Pudong site was reached. Is that your recollection?’
~ ~ ~
That would be my general understanding although I wasn’t party to the actual conversation. I was late arriving at Hickey’s ranch. I had assumed that he was being facetious in his use of this term until I saw the place. Hickey had built a mock-colonial ranch on the side of the East Mountain. He had cultivated the gorse and heather into lawn. A row of floodlit palm trees delineated the end of nature’s dominion over the moors and the beginning of the reign of the developer.
I got out of the car when the driver could proceed no further and picked my way through a parked gridlock of executive vehicles, all of which were black. Money kills the imagination. It makes us want the same thing. Yes, of course some of the guests had arrived in helicopters. I don’t know which ones. I was hardly going to ask.
Music and the smell of charred meat drifted on the early evening air. I headed up the steps to the ranch. The front door stood open. Hanging in the atrium was my grandparents’ chandelier, the one stolen from Hilltop. I was staring at it when Edel appeared. She was dressed in silk the same cream as the travertine floor, which offered her pale colouring camouflage, as if this were the natural habitat of her species, just as I am stony and grey from having evolved in a castle. ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me. She was carrying a foil-covered dish.
‘I was just admiring your chandelier.’
Edel raised her head and looked at the chandelier as if considering it for the first time. ‘Yes. It’s an antique, I believe.’
‘It certainly is. It’s a valuable family heirloom, in fact.’
Another door swung open into the atrium and Hickey bulldozed in, catching me staring at his wife, and his wife staring at my property strung from his ceiling. ‘Where are me Jaysus steaks?’ he said. ‘I’ve thirty starving people out there.’ He took the dish from Edel. ‘Come on,’ he said to me, shouldering the door open, ‘the lads are waiting.’
‘You’re a common thief,’ I told him once Edel was out of earshot. He gave no indication that he had heard me. Such names were of no great consequence to D. Hickey. He had been called a lot worse in his time.
I followed him into a high-gloss white kitchen that looked like a science lab and through a sun room out onto a terrace. The Bills were dressed in business casual and drinking bottles of Heineken. Their wives had orange skin and yellow hair, constituting a strangely hued tribe in the pink dusk, for the sun had set on the peninsula, tinting the peaty earth of the moors a shade of purple.
‘Ah, here’s Lawrence!’ said McGee, slapping me on the back. ‘Nice bit of horse-trading you did during the week down at the beach. That, gentlemen, is what I call a tidy profit.’ Absolutely, like, fair fucks, the others assented, clinking their bottles together. The Viking raised his bottle to his temple. ‘How’s tricks, Tristram?’
Hickey had built the barbeque with his own two hands, a selection of hot coal grills staggered at various levels like a drum kit. He stood in the middle with a set of tongs, moving from grill to grill to flip steaks, shish kebabs and gourmet sausages. ‘Here, Tristram, I’ve the best a gear for ya. Didn’t I always supply you with the best a gear? Ah relax an show us your plate.’ A slab of glistening beef dangled from his tongs. ‘Fillet steak from Lambay Island.’
‘You know I don’t eat meat.’
Hickey bared his teeth at me, the enamel gleaming through his black beard like bone exposed in a wound. ‘Now how would I be expected to know a thing like that, Tristram? You’ve never lowered yourself to eat with me.’ He threw the fillet back on the grill and fished a foil parcel from the ashes and dumped it on a plate. ‘There y’are. Baked potato. Condiments an salad on the table.’