Free Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) by Declan Burke Page B

But money is a wonderfully democratic concept , Mr Rigby. It cares not a whit for the history or social position of the person who spends it.’
    ‘Money’s a gun. Harmless until it winds up loaded in the wrong hands.’
    ‘Loaded?’
    ‘With influence, access, self-interest. For such a democratic concept, money seems awfully dependent on wearing the right tie in the right place.’
    ‘You need to attend a polling booth to vote,’ he purred. ‘And they’d hardly be inclined to let you in if you arrived naked, would they?’
    ‘I don’t know. Depends on how badly the Germans need the latest referendum passed.’
    He nodded, smiling indulgently. ‘I’m not asking you to come to work for me, Mr Rigby. I’m simply suggesting that, should the opportunity arise, you might—’
    ‘I’m allergic to evictions, Gillick. Crying kids bring me out in a rash.’
    He inclined his head, slid me another oily smile. ‘Think it over. Talk to Jimmy if you want. If you change your mind, my door is always open.’
    ‘With all due respect to Jimmy, my probation depends on me not knowingly associating with known criminals.’
    ‘Everyone who comes to me is innocent until proven otherwise . That’s the law.’
    ‘The law is what the law says it is.’
    ‘Your loss.’
    ‘I’ll live.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said with an apologetic wince. ‘But how well?’

12
     
     
    A stone staircase swept up and around to a first-floor balcony but we didn’t go up there. Simon and Gillick went away into the shadows at the far end of the hall, leaving me dawdling outside the study without so much as a fat giraffe for company. I heard Simon knock on the mahogany doors at the end of the hallway. They waited for a summons and then merged with the gloom.
    I rolled a smoke and set sail down the plush Tigris of Persian carpet. Outfitting that hall cost more than I had earned in my entire life and even at that they hadn’t included a single necessary object. The chandelier was a Milky Way in crystal, the walls covered with the therapeutic dribbles of blind amputees which constitute modern art, a couple of facing Knuttels giving one another a slit-eyed dare, a few blobs that could well have been sunrises or sunsets or psychedelic cow-pats on a low simmer. There were potted palms at regular intervals, the pots burnished copper and the foliage clipped tight, the leaves dusted, gleaming. The pots, at least, were useful for tipping ash into. The spindly legs on the facing set of antique velvet-covered couches suggested they’d been designed to accommodate Tinker Bell and her little friends, even if the little friends would have to take turns sitting down.
    It struck me as odd that no room had been found for even one of Finn’s landscapes, but then the décor was exquisitely refined, a statement of intent that let you know, in discreet whispers, that you were entering a home in which elegance was prized above passion, taste rather than feel. It was the interior design equivalent of a dinner party conversation, archly polite and excessively mannered , the ultimate goal being a consensus of no consequence lest any guest take offence. In that hallway a Finn Hamilton would have stood out like a turd on a communion wafer.
    Yeah, and maybe it was just that Saoirse Hamilton didn’t want any reminding that her son had learned to paint in a loony bin.
    He’d spent months sleepwalking up and down the drab olive corridors, the doctors fiddling with his dosage. You’d come upon him standing stiffly in some alcove, vacant and dull, a thousand-year stare in the dead blue eyes. Like some waxwork crafted in praise of futility. A terracotta soldier escaped from the Forbidden City, fully biddable but useless for the want of orders, some final doomed assault on an impregnable hold. Even the perverts steered clear.
    But if he was a basket case when he was down, the up days were just as bad. This cruelly manic energy that had him bouncing off walls, on his knees in the