“He’s the artistic one of the family,” Martin said. “Oil pastels all over his bedroom walls. Not half bad, some of them.”
He waited. When I clearly had no idea what was going on: “The exhibition you were working on, when you got bashed? Young Skanger Artists or whatever it was? Deano was one of the artists.”
I said, after what felt like a very long pause, “What?”
“We’re thinking maybe he spotted that watch on you one day, when your man Tiernan had him in to the gallery. Or spotted your car. Took a fancy to it. Got his brother or a mate in on the act, and they followed you home one night.”
All I could think was, flat and absolute and unbudging, No. Just bad luck, sheer dumb bad luck, pick the wrong day to wear my watch and end up here— “No,” I said.
Martin watched me, blank-faced. “What, then?”
Flicker of something, something I had known a long time ago and somehow forgotten, but I couldn’t— “I don’t know,” I said, after what felt like a long time.
Martin leaned his arse on the windowsill and put his hands in his pockets. “We had a couple of chats with Tiernan,” he said, “back when you got hit. Just nosing around, looking for any problems, any grudges. He told us the Gouger thing wasn’t your— Ah, fuck’s sake, Toby”—with a glance of pure disgust—“of course we knew. Took us about ten minutes to get the whole story. Tiernan told us it wasn’t your fault, the whole thing had been his idea, you had practically nothing to do with it; he was delighted you still had your gig, because this way you’d be in a position to give him a hand somewhere down the line. He was convincing. So were Deano and the rest of the skanger kids: no clue about Gouger, no clue about you, no clue what we were talking about. And you kept on insisting no one had any grudge against you. So . . .” He shrugged. “Looked like a dead end. But if Tiernan was bullshitting us; if he wasn’t happy that your boss threw him out on his ear, while you just got a few days on the naughty step . . .”
I said, “Tiernan set it up.” I should have been blown away, but it barely felt like a surprise.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“He did.” Tiernan. When I tried to picture him, the only image I could come up with was some show opening, Tiernan buttonholing me to be outraged about how one of the artists had turned him down even though he had never been anything but nice to her, bitching on and on with canapé crumbs in his beard while I went “Mm-hm” and tried to edge towards the people I was actually supposed to be talking to. I had never thought of Tiernan as anything but insignificant and mildly pathetic; on the rare occasions, that is, when I had thought about him at all.
“Got any proof? He threaten you, blame you, anything?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe.” Actually I was pretty sure I hadn’t had so much as a text from Tiernan after Gouger blew up—I remembered those three days of boredom in my flat, trying to get through to him and ask whether he had ratted me out, nothing but voicemail—but I didn’t want Martin to let go of this. “Can’t you talk to him again? Ask him, question him—”
Martin’s face had gone even blanker. “Yeah, we managed to think of that. Tiernan’s sticking to his original story. Deano’s sticking to his card game.”
“But they’re lying. Tiernan’s, he’s a, a wimp, if you just question him harder—”
It was all clear as day in my head. From Tiernan’s point of view, the whole Gouger fiasco would automatically have been someone else’s fault, and I was the obvious choice. He had been slipping Gouger into the show as just another talented sob story; I was the one who had hyped him up into the star, got Tiernan to do a big new series of paintings, told him to give Richard daily updates on his phone calls with Gouger. Except Tiernan had slipped up, hadn’t kept his story straight—my ear pressed to the office door, Richard yelling, something about a phone call . . . If I hadn’t stuck my nose in, Richard wouldn’t have been paying any special attention to Gouger, and everything would have been fine. Instead Tiernan had got fired, and I had got off scot-free.
So Tiernan had picked the craziest skanger in his bunch and filled him up with stories about the bad guy trying to scupper the show and wreck all their chances at being the next Damien Hirst: the rich bastard with a flash car, a big TV, a new Xbox; the smug prick who was asking for a few slaps. And sent him off.
“Deano’s lying, anyway,” Martin said. “Tiernan, I’m not so sure. If he is, we’ve got no way of proving it, not unless someone talks. Which they won’t. They’re not stupid.” With a small bland smile: “Sorry to disappoint you.”
There was something dizzying about it, about the fact that Tiernan could never have dreamed where that would lead. It must have seemed like such a small thing, just a tasty little lollipop of glee to suck on when the world refused to feed him what he deserved; nothing more, just like my prank emails to Dominic had been nothing more.
“You’ll have to testify at the trial,” Martin said. “If it goes that far. We’ll be in touch.”
“But,” I said. I had just figured out why all this sounded vaguely familiar. “I thought of that. That it could have been Tiernan.” Way back, all the way back in the hospital, as soon as the worst of the confusion started to wear off, the first person I had thought of had been Tiernan.
“Congratulations. If you’d bothered mentioning it, maybe we would’ve got somewhere.”
Crazy stuff, I had thought, just more evidence of my broken brain, and shoved it away. I had been right all along. “I thought it was stupid,” I said.
Martin watched me. Behind him the green of the lawn had intensified, radiant and unsettling. “You’re not going to get any ideas in your head about going after Tiernan,” he said. “Are you.”
“No,” I said.
“Because that wouldn’t be smart. You can get away with it once—apparently. Second time, you wouldn’t be so lucky.”
“I don’t want to go after him.”
“Right. I forgot. You wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And when I stared at him: “Sign and date. I don’t have all day.”
I wrote down something, trying to breathe slowly and keep my eyes off that photo. “If you think about it,” Martin said, “whoever gave you that bang on the head did you a favor. Without it, you’d be doing life in Mountjoy.”
This seemed not just false but outrageous, but when my head snapped up I met his eyes, cold and speculative and cynical as a seagull’s. “OK,” I said. “Here.” I passed him the sheets of paper.
“These two”—lifting the sheets—“if they go down, they’re not going to get off with a couple of years telling therapists their problems in a cushy joint with lavender beds and a gazebo.”
“Right.”
“So you’re in no position to get your knickers in a knot about Tiernan not getting what he deserves. Are you.”
That cold seagull eye again. “I don’t know,” I said.
“See you around,” Martin said, flipping the folder shut. He made it sound like a threat. “Behave yourself.”
“I am.”
“Good,” he said. “You keep doing that,” and he stuck the folder back under his arm and left the room without looking at me again.
* * *