Slaughter's Hound (Harry Rigby Mystery) Read Online Free

on my right, warehouses and depots to the left, the Connacht Gold co-op lit up like a rocket launch. Beyond the co-op loomed the unlovely Port Authority building, and behind that a jungle of weeds and a rusty marsh. Once in a while there’d be talk of turning the marsh into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.
    I turned into the PA’s yard, slaloming between the potholes, tooling along in second gear, the yard lined with rusting containers , piles of scrap metal and trailers of mouldy timber. High weeds clumped in bricked-up doorways. The day had been hot and it was still warm, the acrid hum of hot tar thickening the air.
    The PA building was nine stories of stark 1960s’ modernism, an appropriately ugly monument to hubris, built when the docks were buzzing and Lemass had all boats on a rising tide. Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored offshore. Russians jumped ship and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.
    Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the PA. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.
    Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to.
    Big Bob Hamilton came in like the cavalry. By then he’d pretty much dry-lined every last square inch of Thatcher’s London, and when they finally kicked out the Iron Lady, Bob took that as his cue. Came home in ’91, sniffed the wind. He sold high in London and bought low all over Sligo and the northwest. Joined the Rotary Club, the Tennis Club, Golf and Lions, damn near every club in town bar the Tuesday night Chess in the Trades. Turned up on the local board of the IDA about four months before he bought up sixteen acres of dockland that included the PA building and the rusty swamp and not a hell of a lot of anything else.
    Finn telling me all this from the bottom bunk in Dundrum. Sounding dull and half-muffled but telling it straight. How the word had been that Big Bob was personally responsible for the new stationery factory over in Finisklin, a staff of three working flat-out to meet the demand for brown envelopes. Serious investment on its way, a port rejuvenation, Bob all set to make a killing. The investment never did arrive, although there was a killing of sorts alright, this in ’98, Finn just about to turn eighteen and right there to see his father’s brand new Beamer topple off the quay and into the water, Bob still at the wheel. The official verdict was death by misadventure, even if the inquest failed to establish a satisfactory explanation as to why all the Beamer’s windows might have been open down at the deepwater late one January evening.
    It wasn’t long after that, he reckoned, that the arson started, Finn on the fast-track to his first crack-up.
    I turned into the small car park at the front of the PA and saw a sleek maroon Saab gleaming under the single bare light over the door. Which was odd. McCool FM was a one-man show, and DJs playing Leonard Cohen don’t get groupies since John Peel passed on, bless his cotton socks. Which meant Finn had unexpected company or he was working middle-man, punting the baggies on.
    Either way, not good.
    The Saab’s driver already getting out.
    The baggies were under the spare wheel in the boot, so I eased up to where the driver stood, then three-pointed, reversing back into the space beside Finn’s black Audi, leaving the boot tight against the PA’s wall. Got out and locked the cab, strolled around towards the PA’s door. The driver with a hand up, palm out,