‘There, girl, eat that.’ Five minutes and it was dreaming it’d found the biggest bone in the world.
I went in, stepped over it and had a look upstairs. Other than a darkroom, which contained no photographs, it was just bedrooms. Nothing worth telling you about, except that in the downstairs living room there was a framed photo of him on a horse. Which clinched what I had in mind for him. The last thing I needed was a killer who was afraid of horses.
A door to a flight of stone stairs that led down to a basement was open. If Lucille was still in one piece, she had to be in it. Which meant I couldn’t let her see me. She’d know someone was about though: as soon as I hit the halfway mark, more dogs started snarling. They sensed I wasn’t their owner, and she must have too, because she started calling out: ‘Hello, hello, help me,’ all that. I think I got her hopes up.
I came straight back out. I’d only brought enough meat for one dog. She was alive. Knowing that would do for now. As I say, there’s always an extra angle if you go looking for it. And like all angles, some people don’t see them. But I’m not some people. I’d found one, and, with any luck, it would allow me to deal with my family and get this whole thing with Chilly Winters arresting his daughter for it over and done with. And the upshot of that would be that Greg would be released. Everybody happy. Except Lucille and the Donavans of course. Still, you can’t please everyone.
I was going to make good use of Picasso at the riding stables is what I’m saying.
So I went out there. It was a Thursday night, and I knew that on Saturday night my sister Amy would be out dancing, usually in the village hall, though that shindig she’d been talking to Cormac about would do just as nicely. It sounded as if it was further away, a bigger outing than usual – in Dublin maybe. She’d be home even later then. I’d already picked up what I needed so I went for it.
That prize-winning mare of Anne’s was in a field behind Amy and Edna’s cottage. I parked along the road and walked up Conor’s drive with a bucket of feed nuts. I’d mixed follicle-inducing stimulants with them. The mare came over when I shook the bucket. I leaned in through the fence, tipped it out on the grass and stood back. She got tucked in.
I did exactly the same the following night. Then the next morning I was back at Picasso’s. Again he stayed home all day, until about eight o’clock, when he drove off in his Transit.
I went in, same story with his bitch (doped her) – only this time I’d brought a little something for him. A surveillance laptop with a built-in phone – though not the one he’d appeared on – a riding crop, a horse’s hood and a bee-keeper’s outfit.
Then I went downstairs.
The dogs weren’t the only ones making noise: such a clamour. A kind of frantic rustling. It had to be coming from Lucille’s cell. There were four cells running along a corridor at the bottom of the steps. The first two were open; the others were bolted shut.
This time there could be no mistake. She would definitely know that someone other than Picasso was down there with her.
She’d hear me as I crept past her cell, under the hatch so she wouldn’t see me, to the fourth, where the dogs were. It had an internal door.
This time she really called out. Never stopped. ‘Hello, please help me,’ crying and begging. Sorry, Lucille, I haven’t come this far to be put off now. I’d ignored her crying when she was a baby, and I could ignore it again.
So Picasso had his own private little jail. Wonder what kind of warden he was. There were a few more bone crunchers to contend with. I fed them what Sleeping Beauty upstairs was dreaming on, and checked the first two cells while they dozed off.
Each of the cells contained a big wooden crate the size of a coffin. The timber on the inside of the one I lifted had been gnawed. The bottom was caked in shit, matted with black hairs. I heard squealing and scratching below my feet, coming from under the flagstones. Rats they sounded like. So that’s what I’d been hearing rustling in Lucille’s cell. Wouldn’t fancy doing time in there.
I went into the dogs’ cell, stepped over them and opened the door that led down a flight of wooden steps into an artist’s studio. Recreational activities for the inmates – I didn’t think so. What a carry-on. I’d never seen anything like it. Human hands in the freezer in case he felt peckish, a dog’s tongue in frozen saliva. So I was right about that. It was the one he took with him when he didn’t feel like walking the rest of it.
The second room was a gallery. I’m no connoisseur, but I’d’ve given odds no art expert had ever seen paintings like his before.
The bones in the dogs’ cell more or less confirmed how his victims were paid in
