Depend on the rabbit's foot if you like,
but remember, it didn't work for the rabbit.
– R. E. Shay
The Turf, and long may we be above it.
– Jorrocks' Toast
Three weeks before Christmas, Father Vincent Tyrrell asked Tommy Owens to fill in for George Costello, who had been the sacristan at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview for thirty years until he was rushed to the hospital with inoperable stomach cancer. A lot of Father Tyrrell's parishioners were outraged, to put it mildly, since Tommy was known as a dopehead and a malingerer and a small-time drug dealer, one of the die-hard crew who still drank in Hennessy's bar, and not a retired Holy Joe shuffling about the church in desert boots and an acrylic zip-up cardigan like George Costello, God have mercy on him. And fair enough, the first time I saw Tommy on the altar in cassock and surplice, it was a bit like something out of a Buñuel film.
But what a lot of his parishioners didn't know was that Tommy had been one of Father Tyrrell's most devout altar boys until he was eleven, when the sacrament of confirmation had the unintended reverse effect of enfeebling his faith entirely, or that since Tommy's mother had dropped dead of a stroke a month ago, Tommy had been haunting the church, the only soul under seventy at ten mass every morning. Now he was standing by to clear the altar after eleven-thirty mass on the last Sunday in Advent as I stood and made the best fist I could of rejoicing with the rest of the congregation about Emmanuel's imminent arrival.
The altar cloths and hangings were purple; the tree was decorated and the great crib was installed in a side altar; the fourth candle on the wreath had been lit. Christmas hadn't meant much to me in a long while, never mind Emmanuel, but I had always liked Advent, the way the anticipation was so intense it could make you clean forget the inevitable letdown in store, just like a bottle, or a woman. Although when a priest sends for a private detective the day before Christmas Eve, the distinction between anticipation and letdown tends to blur; the only thing you can properly be prepared for is the worst.
Looking at Tommy, now he had stowed his vestments in the sacristy, I wondered if those graying parishioners streaming past me with their damp winter coats and their filmy eyes and their scent of lavender and pan stick and dust had revised their opinion of him; certainly he was a far cry from the goateed, straggle-haired ne'er-do-well of just a few months ago. The haircut and beardless chin came from the Howard case he had worked with me (a case he was in no small way the cause of; a case in which, not incidentally, he saved my life), but the rest of it-the multicolored acrylic jumper that was not a zip-up cardigan but may as well have been, the relaxed-fit cords, the soft-soled shoes-was close enough to George Costello to reassure even the most doctrinaire old biddy of the strength of his devotion. And of course, Tommy dragging his ruined foot-the result of a stomping from George Halligan for stealing his brother Leo's bike back when we were kids-surely completed the picture of harmless piety. To my eyes, it looked like nothing but the antic shades of mourning, the haphazard motley of confusion and grief.
Tommy came down the aisle toward me; I stood out from the pew and genuflected; he turned and I trailed after him to the altar, where there was another genuflection from us both, old enough to have had it bred into our bones. For all the Godless years I worked in L.A., people found it strange that I could never break the habit of crossing myself when I passed a hearse, or heard the tolling of a church bell. I still can't. I stepped up onto the altar to make for the sacristy, but Tommy turned left and exited through the side door. I followed out into the bright, cold morning and Tommy led me down a path to the rear of the churchyard. We stopped at a low metal gate beneath a row of bare sycamore and horse chestnut trees glistening with frost and Tommy, still determinedly avoiding my eyes, pointed over it to a redbrick Victorian villa fifty yards away.
"I know where the presbytery is, Tommy," I said. "Sure didn't we once have thirty sacks of pony nuts and four dozen bales of hay sent there, for the crack?"
"And Father Tyrrell knew it was us," Tommy said. "Down to the school the next day with him."
"He knew it was you," I said. "You know why? Because you gave the deliveryman your real name."
"I didn't," Tommy said. "I said Timmy Owens, not Tommy."
"Yeah. A mystery how he caught on to us, really."
"I never gave you up, Ed."
"You didn't need to, sure everyone knew we hunted as a pair. Jasus, the clatter he gave us."
"He went easy on you. They always did. They knew deep down you were a good boy. You were just easily led, that's all, by tramps the like of me."
I laughed at that, my breath pluming in the crisp air, and Tommy's face creased into something like a grin. It was the longest conversation we'd had since the funeral.
"How're you making out with this sacristan thing, Tommy?" I said, half fearing he'd say something like "'Tis a great comfort," or "Sure 'tis the will of God," in reply.
Tommy grimaced, looked over his shoulder at the last of the 'oul ones straggling out of the church, shrugged and lit a cigarette.
"It's not exactly me, is it?" he said. We both laughed at that, furtive, back-of-the-class laughter in the chill noon sunlight.
"But yeah, it's keeping me out of trouble. Out of the house. I can't face the whole, all her clothes, her paintings, the whole gaff just reminds me of her. Feels like it's haunted. You know what I mean, Ed."
I nodded. I had come back from L.A. to bury my mother, and stayed to find out what had happened to my father, who had disappeared twenty years earlier. Now I was living in the house I grew up in; living and partly living. There were days it seemed more like all I was doing was dying there: the souls of the dead hovered in the rooms like smoke, until I thought I might suffocate. I spent the time I wasn't working in one pub or another, stumbling home when I could be sure I would fall asleep straightaway, and then leaving the house first thing the next morning and starting all over again. If I wasn't thirsty, I spent time in churches, too: they were warm and quiet, and no one thought you were unwelcome there, or at least no one made you feel as if you were. I knew what Tommy meant all right.
"And Father Tyrrell's a bollocks, this we know, but he's on the level, he doesn't expect you to pray with him or pretend to be a Holy Joe or anything. And he has the inside on the ponies, of course. I'm making a mint on the tips he's giving me, and Leopardstown comin' up."
I had three beaten dockets in the pockets of my coat, and more on the floor of my car, and the opposite of a mint in the bank, but before I could ask Tommy to share a few of those tips, or to explain why a Catholic priest should "of course" know so much about horse racing, the dark-clad figure of Father Vincent Tyrrell appeared in the doorway of the presbytery, a cigarette in his hand, the smoke coiling in a wreath above his head. Tommy held a hand up to the priest and bowed his head and stood aside as if he was presenting me at court, and I thought I saw a flicker in his face and something cross his eyes: not fear, nor hatred; maybe just the lingering ghost of both. Whatever it was, he dispelled it with a wink in my direction and a grin that didn't reach his eyes and hauled himself back toward the church.
Father Vincent Tyrrell was in his sixties now but still straight-backed at five five, with a white crew cut above a flushed drinker's face whose protruding cheekbones looked like they'd been inserted artificially: they overshadowed his narrow sliver of a mouth and tiny chin; above them popped saucer eyes of the deepest blue, completing the impression of a vivid, cunning animal. He greeted me with a thin smile and showed me into a study paneled in dark wood. The mahogany table had worn dull in patches: half of it was covered with books and paperwork; the other half had three place settings, silver candlesticks and condiments, an overflowing ashtray and the remnants of three breakfast plates, one with two cigarette butts stubbed out in bacon rind. A murk of fried food, cigar smoke and aftershave clung to the air.
"My apologies for the mess. I have a lady who does-it's just, on Sunday, she doesn't," Tyrrell said. He tidied the dirty dishes together with the ashtray and took them away. I stood and looked around the room: the bookshelves of philosophy, theology, poetry and art history, the wooden crucifix on one wall, the woven Bridget's cross above the door, the reproductions of Mantegna's Crucifixion and Poussin's Last Supper and Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, the lost masterpiece that had shot to fame since its discovery on the disused parlor wall of a Jesuit retreat house in Dublin, where it had been living anonymously for years. I looked at the Caravaggio: the ever-approaching darkness, the soldiers clasping Jesus; the stricken face of the bearded Judas, already paid, and now paying, for his betrayal. When he hanged himself, having cast away the thirty silver pieces he was paid for his betrayal, the priests and elders wouldn't take back the coins, calling it the price of blood.
Tyrrell came back into the room with a bottle and two crystal goblets on a tray.
"Now Ed," he said, sitting down. "At a guess, I'd say you're not much of a sherry man. But most men who think they don't like sherry have a memory of some terrifyingly sweet liquid being forced on them by their granny. Many good reasons why they mightn't want to revisit such a traumatic primal scene. This is not cream sherry, it's Manzanilla, a salty fino, very refreshing."
He poured the yellow liquid and offered me a glass. I sat down opposite him and took a drink of the bone-dry wine, and the drink took me back to a dark-haired girl I knew in Los Angeles, a girl with Spanish blood who knew her Manzanilla from her Palo Cortado, and wanted to teach me the difference, until one day she stopped wanting to, although she didn't tell me that until it was too late. We had a child, a daughter with blond curls and the wrong kind of blood, who died before she was two, and my Spanish girl and me couldn't get past that, and maybe didn't want to, didn't really try. Now she was married again to a man she had never stopped seeing while she was married to me, and they had their own child, a son, and she had rung me last night to wish me a happy Christmas, perhaps, or to tell me about how the kid was getting on, maybe, or to taunt me with her happy life and her happy home and with how she had never really been mine and now never would be, possibly. I don't know; I saw the number come up on the caller-ID display and the answering machine wasn't on, so I waited until the phone rang off the hook and then I waited until it did it twice more, and then I waited for another while, a long while, before I got to sleep. The Manzanilla was the first I'd tasted since my marriage, and it brought it all swirling back in a storm of memory and desire, of grief and regret and yearning. That's only the beginning of what a good drink can do.
I took another swallow and lifted my eyes and said, "Very good, Father Tyrrell. Nice bite."
"How are you, Ed? Are you all right?"
Was I all right? I'd received a lot of publicity on the Howard case: a journalist called Martha O'Connor cooperated with me in return for my story. She did her best to make me look good, but I could have done without the exposure: Dublin was a hard enough city to be a private citizen in, let alone a private investigator; people wanted their secrets kept, not sprayed all over the front pages. As a result, I was having trouble finding clients. I had fallen behind on repaying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn't live long enough to enjoy; I was cashing checks I didn't have the money to back up in any pub that would let me; the bank had run out of patience and was getting ready to cut me loose. The local Guards were taking pleasure in my plight, happy at DI Fiona Reed's bidding to feed pet journalists embellished sagas about my misdeeds. I was drinking too much because I had no reason not to, or because I was stressed out over my debts, or at any rate, I was drinking too much, and I was betting on the horses with the money I didn't have because every day around drink four I became momentarily possessed by the evident delusion that my luck was in. I looked at Father Vincent Tyrrell and felt a sudden urge to confess, to throw myself on the mercy of a God in Whom I didn't believe, to be embraced by a church I had rejected long since. How was I?
"Very well, thank you," I said.
"Only I gather things haven't been going so well for you recently. In the detective business."
"Tommy been talking, has he? You should know better by now than to listen to half of what Tommy says."
"Tommy hasn't said a word. I just hear things. And read the papers. Of course, the fact that the O'Connor woman was involved didn't help."
Tyrrell twinkled beadily at me with the nice combination of sympathy and malice that had kept his parish on edge for over thirty years. Martha O'Connor was known above all for her investigative work on clerical sex abuse and medical malpractice in Catholic hospitals, and it would not have been atypical of Tyrrell's sense of humor to classify me with culpably incompetent doctors and pedophile priests. I wasn't going to rise to his bait, if that was what it amounted to, although it was probably nothing more than habit. I shrugged and finished my drink.
"What can I do for you, Father?" I said.
His lips vanished into his wet mouth as he thought about this, and I almost smiled. It was always the same, and worse if they were used to being in control, the moment when I asked them what they wanted. Because however much they wanted to conceal it from themselves, it wasn't want that drew them to me, but need: a need that family or friends, public officials, politicians or the police couldn't satisfy. Just like the need for a whore, and sometimes I took little more than a whore's bitter pride in my work.
"It's about a boy," he said.
I waited a long time for him to say something else.
"Patrick Hutton was…is his name."
There was another long silence, during which Tyrrell finished his drink and stared into his glass. He wore an open-necked black shirt and a black jacket, classic priest's mufti; the clothes themselves were finely cut, the shirt silk, but then it had always been clear not only that Vincent Tyrrell came from money but that he still had some; the crucifix on his lapel was inlaid with tiny diamonds.
"I'm sorry, I appreciate this isn't very helpful, but I'm afraid I can't tell you much more," Tyrrell said finally, the blue eyes glinting again, as if almost amused by his reserve.
"Much more? You haven't told me anything, Father. You've given me a name. I'm not overburdened with modesty about my abilities, but there's not a lot I can do with a bare name. Look it up in the phone book. But sure you could do that."
Tyrrell produced an envelope, opened it to reveal a sheaf of bills and laid it on the table between us.
"Five thousand. Just to get you going."
I stared at the money. It would sort out my mortgage debts and pay my bills and go some way toward keeping my head above water and the bank off my back until the New Year. There was need on my side too, and the thin smile spreading across Tyrrell's face showed he recognized it. I shook my head and stood up.
"This is a waste of my time. Maybe Tommy Owens has you thinking I'm some kind of charity case-"
"I told you, Tommy hasn't said a word. Or more accurately, I haven't listened to a single word he says. Even in grief, he does like to prattle. And I assure you, if this were charity, you'd hardly be a deserving beneficiary. Patrick Hutton. He was a jockey. His last known address-known to me, at least-is in the envelope. That's all I can tell you."
"But you know more," I said, suddenly seeing where this was heading.
"Yes, I know more, much more. But what I know was told to me in confession, Ed. You remember the rules about that, don't you?"
I nodded and sat down again. The sanctity of the confessional: the promise that sins confessed to a priest during the sacrament of penance will not be divulged, because of course the priest is merely the channel through which God's reconciling grace flows to the penitent; it is up to God to tell what He has heard, no one else. And God hasn't been talking much of late. Tyrrell stretched a hand toward me and patted the envelope of money on the table between us.
"Well, so do I. And even on the occasions when there are very good reasons to break them-and I fear this is such an occasion-the rules still apply. Maybe one day they won't, maybe one day the liberals' prayers will be answered, and the Church will transform itself as they believe Pope John the Twenty-third intended, and all manner of change will occur: women and homosexuals will dance together on the altars, and teenagers will copulate in the aisle, and obese children will make their first holy communions with giant hosts made of cheese-and-tomato pizza. Maybe one day the Church, like everything else on this rock of ours, will dwindle to a mere machine devoted to making us feel good. But that day will come too late for me. Thanks be to God."
Tyrrell's hand shot out suddenly and seized mine.
"I'm dying, Ed. They said I should do chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, but I don't want any therapy. I don't want to be healed. It's my time. I want to die. But not without setting a few affairs in order. Chief among them Patrick Hutton."
His hand felt like a claw; the bones shone ivory through flesh mottled like stained parchment. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I sat still and stared at his hand until he released mine. He poured another two drinks and passed me one, and held his glass up in a toast to-I don't know, to death by cancer, or to ordering his affairs, or to Patrick Hutton and the secrets Tyrrell and God were keeping.
"You'll take the case?"
"Patrick Hutton was a jockey," I said. "Tommy says you've been tipping him winners. Says you have insider information. How's that?"
"I don't," Tyrrell said. "But people always think I do."
I waited for him to explain. He looked surprised that I needed him to.
"I suppose the time you spent away means there are gaps in your local knowledge, Ed. My brother is F. X. Tyrrell. We don't speak, haven't for many years. But people don't know that, or don't believe it."
Francis Xavier Tyrrell was the trainer of the winning horse I didn't back yesterday, and of most of the winners I hadn't backed in the days before that. He'd been doing it for a long time, and you didn't have to know very much about horse racing to have heard of him: he had been a national figure for decades, stretching back to his first Gold Cup triumphs at Cheltenham in the sixties.
"Must be in the blood then," I said.
"Francis had the true feel for it-I always said Saint Martin of Tours was watching over him; the horses liked him, they didn't know me-and I couldn't stand coming second. Pride has been my besetting sin. It'll see me broken on the wheel one day."
Tyrrell smiled at the prospect of this, and I had a flash of his instructing my class in the seven deadly sins, and what the appropriate punishment for each was: avarice would see us boiled in oil; gluttony and we'd be force-fed rats and snakes; pride would have us broken on a wheel. Father Vincent Tyrrell was quite the young firebrand in those days, his blue eyes bulging with cold fervor, his hands rapping an ominous tattoo on the blackboard as he talked us through the tortures of hell. We were nine years old.
Tyrrell was a fanatic and a bully and a snob, and my rational self despised all this, but part of me insisted on liking him, the part I had no control over, the part that drank whiskey in the morning and took the wrong woman home at night, liked him for his unflinching absorption in what used to be called the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Because increasingly, these were the objects of my own devotions. The difference being, I didn't believe in Heaven.
He raised his glass and we finished our drinks and I stood up and nodded at him.
"How do you know I won't just take the money and tell you I couldn't find him?" I said.
Tyrrell's face clouded momentarily, the muscles quivering as if he were having a slight stroke; he controlled them by what looked like the angry force of his will, and directed his cold, penetrating gaze at me.
"I doubt if your footfall upon the earth is especially heavy as it is, Edward Loy. You would never act like that, never betray the only calling you have. You wouldn't do it out of fear. Profane fear: of the harm that would be done to your reputation. And spiritual fear: that if you acted so out of character, you'd run the risk of disappearing entirely."
The bells began to ring for the next mass. He drew his thin lips into a smile, and I found I couldn't meet his piercing eyes; I nodded at the floor to seal the deal. At the presbytery door he gave me a blessing I didn't ask for. Despite myself, I felt glad of it.
I wanted to ask Tommy some more about Vincent Tyrrell, but he was busy setting up for the next mass: there was a priest home from the African missions who needed minding. I couldn't wait until the mass was over; I was late already for another job. I didn't like to work more than one case at a time, but I didn't like being broke either; I wasn't in a position to turn anyone down. The car park was filling up as I walked toward the racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S that had been my father's, and that Tommy, wearing his mechanic's hat, had done up for me. I was by no means a petrol head, but looking at a roly-poly man and two boys in matching anoraks clustered around the car's bulky hood, I felt a stupid kind of pride. As I drew nearer, and they turned and looked at me and looked quickly away, I understood how stupid: what had caught their attention was not the car, but the damage done: the windscreen wipers had been torn off and laid in the shape of a cross on the hood; beneath them someone had scraped RIP on the hood. The man muttered something about not even church car parks being safe nowadays; I agreed and said that in my day, all we used to do was drink cider here and then break the bottles beneath the tires of the parked cars. He took off quickly after that, hustling his giggling sons into mass. I threw the wipers on the backseat, sat into the car and started the engine. At least it wasn't raining.
Heading south toward the Dublin-Wicklow border, I called George Halligan on his mobile.
"The fuck do you want?"
The tar-and-nicotine rasp was sandpaper harsh: he sounded like an emphysemic wildcat sizing up its prey.
"Nice talking to you too, George. Out and about, are you, taking a walk?"
"A walk? The fuck class of swish cunt d'you think I am? I'm in the parade ring at Gowran Park so I am."
"How'd you get in there, George? Do they not know who you are?"
"I'm here to see Jack of Hearts strut his stuff. Very sleek he looks an' all. And after that, I'll wander across and see him walk away with this little maiden hurdle. And I've Fish on Friday in the last race. What are you doing today, Ed Loy? Dole office not open on a Sunday, is it? Suppose that leaves the pub, if there are any left that'll give you credit. Or you could always stand outside mass with an accordion. If there isn't a Romanian there ahead of you."
"George. You told me you'd let me know when Leo got out."
There was a pause, during which all I could hear was the double-bass rumble of George Halligan's breath. When he spoke it was in as soft and careful a voice as he could summon up.
"Oh Jesus fuck. Friday. I forgot myself, to be honest with you. Why? What's he fuckin' done? Whatever it is-"
"Just some inventive damage to my car."
"Send me the bill, Ed."
"That's not the point, George."
"D'you think I don't know that? I was supposed to have him picked up outside the Joy. He hasn't been in touch. He must've been sulking all fuckin' weekend…listen, Ed, I'm surrounded by cunts here, I'll have someone, eh, look into that matter, and I'll get back to you, all right my friend?"
George's natural Dublin accent had suddenly upped anchor and set sail for the mid-Atlantic. I pictured him: a known gang boss turned property developer and "businessman" hobnobbing with the Barbour Jackets and the Cashmere Coats in the parade ring. I reeled through the scene in my mind's eye for its incongruity. Nothing doing. George'd fit in nicely there: beggars on horseback all. Although I doubted if many of the other owners and trainers had a brother fresh out of Mountjoy Prison to worry about.
"We're not friends, George, and we never will be. And you be sure and get hold of Leo and remind him why it was a very good idea Podge went down, for the Halligans as well as the rest of us."
Podge Halligan was a murderer and a rapist, an unhinged, volatile nightmare of a man, but it was only when he began to set up secret deals with rival drug dealers, in the process compromising George's attempts to take the family business legit (not to mention stealing from the business before it had acquired that legitimacy), that George had moved against him. I worked the case that helped put Podge away, with George's assistance. At the time Leo had sent word from jail that Podge should do the right thing for the family; ever since, the drumbeat coming from the Joy was that I was to blame for Podge's fate, and that I would pay when Leo came out.
"I'll get the first fifteen on that one for you, yeah? Ciao for now."
"Just remember there, George: you can't buy respectability," I said.
George Halligan's voice dropped and his accent flashed back, a whip laced with salt: "Maybe not. But if you're too broke to make a profit from it, it's fuck all use to you, isn't that right Ed?"
He ended the call before I could respond. But George Halligan getting the last word was the least of my worries. Leo Halligan had gone away for a bullet-behind-the-ear hit on a nineteen-year-old drug dealer; he was thought responsible for at least another three murders, and possibly as many as ten, some of them drug-related, some because the victims had committed the fatal error of getting in his way, or on his nerves. He was smart like George, without craving legitimacy, and ruthless like his younger brother, Podge, without being mental: easily the most dangerous of the Halligan brothers, everyone said. And now he was on my trail, in the season of goodwill. Merry Christmas everyone.
I had avoided the N11 but traffic was thick on the old roads too. I turned on the radio to pass the time. The crime reporter on the news told me that the man's body found in a shallow grave near Roundwood this morning was being examined by the state pathologist, but that "early indications were that it bore all the hallmarks of a gangland killing." Fortieth of the year, if I was counting right. On a hunch, I called Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly at home. His wife Carmel answered.
"Hey Ed. Are we going to see you? Come up to the house on Christmas Eve, we're having a party."
"My invite must've got lost in the post."
"Why'd we waste an invite? You've stood us up the last three times. And Dave the only Guard in Dublin who'll talk to you."
Dave had been with Seafield Guards until the Howard case, when his work caught the eye of someone in Garda Headquarters and he was transferred to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. They used him on murder and organized crime investigations, and he used me, and did what he could to keep me out of trouble with Superintendent Fiona Reed and her merry band.
"Is Dave there?" I said. "I…I have a horse for him."
"Do you now? And have you lost his mobile number?"
"He's not there, is he?"
"Are you fishing, Ed? You have a horse for him."
"I do."
"Fuck off."
"All right, you've got me. I was calling to see if the coast was clear. I could be there in five minutes."
"Oh, Ed," she purred, her voice all husky. "You know what we could do."
"You tell me."
"You could mind Sadie, who has chicken pox, and pick the lads up from football and cook their dinner, and put two loads of washing through the machine, and I could nip over to Dundrum and do some last-minute shopping, then have a long lunch in Harvey Nick's."
"We could do all that?"
"And I'd never tell Dave. It would be our secret."
"I don't think I could do that to him, Carmel."
"Boys' club. You're all the same, just talk."
"I'm actually in Wicklow now, Carmel. Not far from Roundwood."
"He likes you at the moment, Ed. Don't go annoying him."
"Just wanted to know."
"Christmas Eve. That's tomorrow, Ed. Bring a date. Or I'll find one for you."
South of Bray I crossed the N11 and headed west into the hills, snow-topped in the distance, then cut off onto an old road flanked on one side by the pedestrian entrance to a sprawling local authority estate called Michael Davitt Gardens and on the other by a stretch of oldish semidetached houses with asbestos tile roofs.
I pulled up outside a house with three feet of trellis on top of its perimeter walls and six-foot-high wooden gates and got out of the car. Across the road the pavement widened to include a broad patch of grass running ten yards or so by a twelve-foot concrete wall before it swung into the council estate. My client, Joe Leonard, was concerned about the garbage being illegally dumped outside his house, an increasingly common problem now that most local councils had privatized their refuse collection service. I walked across to have a look. The grass was clogged with plastic and glass bottles, pizza boxes and chip papers, sacks of household waste, broken bicycles and scooters, disabled stereos and vacuum cleaners. How jealous the other PIs would be when they heard they'd missed out on this job.
I crossed the road and walked up the drive past the black SAAB 93 and rang the bell of number four. There was a purple-and-red wreath hanging on the doorknob and paper angels stuck on the inside of the glass. A girl of about six or seven opened the door. She had shiny new teeth that seemed too large for her Cupid-bow lips and dark hair in plaits and bright brown eyes. When she saw me she frowned in disappointment. I pulled a cross-eyed face in return, and she rolled her eyes and giggled.
"You're not Granny!" she said.
"I try to be," I said.
"You can't be. You're not an old lady."
"Well. I knew there was something," I said.
"Who are you then?" she said.
"My name is Edward Loy," I said. "What's yours?"
"Sara," she said. She pronounced it to rhyme with Tara. Just as I was about to ask her where her dad was, he appeared. Joe Leonard had sounded cross on the phone and he looked even crosser in the flesh: he had shaving rash and thinning hair ruffled up with gel to give the appearance of volume, and he wore those oblong Yves Saint-Laurent-style glasses young men in a hurry seemed to favor these days and a rugby shirt with the collar up and deck shoes and flared jeans that made his short legs look even shorter.
"Sara, I told you not to answer the front door. Go back inside please," he said.
The little girl pulled a cartoon face of appeasement at her father, which he greeted with an impatient flick of his hand. Turning to me, she drew the corners of her mouth down in mock panic, said, "Ulp!" and went back into what I guessed was the kitchen. There was room for two people in the hall, but I was still outside. Sara's father smiled at me thinly.
"Mr. Loy, Joe Leonard. Perhaps we should head over first and inspect the, ah, scene of the crime," he said.
"I've just done that."
"I've been having my battles with the council, and I can tell you, you may as well be talking to-"
"Joe."
A petite woman with short black hair and fine, almost elfin features had appeared in the hall.
"Annalise, this is Mr. Loy, the, ah-"
"Private detective. Why is he standing on the doorstep, Joe?"
Joe Leonard turned from his wife and stared past me grimly, his protruding lips pursed, as if I were a tradesman, a roofer perhaps, and he had been hoping to conclude our business without my having to cross the threshold.
"Come in, of course, Mr. Loy," he said, and retreated into the kitchen. I closed the front door behind me and looked at his wife, who raised her eyebrows at me and pulled a cartoon "Ulp!" face not unlike her daughter's, but with a leaven of irony, of malice, almost, as if her husband's moods were trivial and amusing, or as if everything was.
The kitchen was long and narrow and bright, with Velux roof windows and a pine table and chairs by the door and a pale wood floor; glass doors led to a small living room, where Sara and a small boy were grazing on bananas and watching cartoons on TV. A green tree with white lights and cards on the bookshelves above the television reminded us that Christmas was on its way.
We sat around the kitchen table and Annalise Leonard brought me a cup of black coffee; her husband went into the living room and turned the TV off; howls of protest followed him out of the door, which he closed behind him; his children pushed their wailing faces up against the glass, and his wife looked at him almost in pity, as if his stupidity was an affliction.
"They've been watching television all morning," Leonard said.
"Well, if you had got up-"
"I had a night out; you got a lie-in when you had your night out."
"And I didn't complain about the way you looked after the kids then."
"I didn't plonk them in front of the television all morning."
"You don't have them all day every day."
"And I didn't stay in bed until four in the afternoon."
"I didn't ask you to get up."
"You just said I should have."
There was a pause, and then they both turned toward me, embarrassed but strangely expectant, as if I might give them some cut-price marriage counseling. I put what I hoped was a genial expression on my face, intended to suggest that due to temporary deafness I hadn't heard any of their conversation, or that it had been conducted in a language I didn't speak, and made a show of looking at my watch. Annalise gave her husband a forced smile, went into the living room and turned the TV back on, settled the kids on the couch and came back out, pausing at the fridge. When she joined us at the table, she had a glass of white wine in her hand. Leonard flinched at the sight of this, and looked like he was going to finish what he'd started, and I decided I'd better start talking before the bell for round two sounded.
"You were saying you've tried to get the local council to sort the problem out," I said.
"They do clear it up fairly regularly," Annalise said in a tone that suggested her husband was making a fuss about not very much.
"They clean the estate every week. They clear the space between us and the estate every three months," Leonard said. "And they only take the big items away, there's always a rake of small stuff left there. And phoning the council, you may as well be talking to the wall. No one ever calls you back, they don't reply to letters. The whole system is bloody ridiculous."
"I spoke to a councillor for the Green Party. Monica Burke. She has a son in Sara's class. She was going to raise it at a council meeting," Annalise said.
"Monica with the pink jeans and the scary eyebrows? And the mustache? She's going to get a lot done."
"She doesn't have a mustache," said Annalise, trying not to giggle and failing.
"She christened her son Carson. Carson Burke. For fuck's sake. Six-year-old kid sounds like a firm of solicitors."
Annalise laughed, then made a face at her husband, and he made one back, somewhere between a grin and a grimace, and something crackled in the air between them. Their marriage seemed to thrive on tension, the spiky energy of conflict, but it seemed uneasy and sour to me. Sometimes I envied married couples. Not this morning.
"So what exactly do you want me to do?" I said. "I mean, if it's people from the estate dumping a bag of bottles after a session, or an old bike, there may not be a great deal anyone can do, even if they're caught. I can't see the Guards getting too excited. And what are the council going to do, slap a few fines on them? Kind of people who dump their rubbish in the street are the kind who don't get too fussed about being fined, they won't pay them anyway."
Annalise treated her husband to a told-you-so look and drained her glass. Joe Leonard wasn't going to be put off though.
"You know, at this stage, I don't really care, I just…I mean, one of the consequences of our great property boom is to fling people like us into close proximity with…people like that-"
"Fucking knackers, you usually call them," Annalise Leonard offered from the fridge, where she was refilling her glass. "Skangers, scobies, scumbags."
I didn't want any wine-my head was aching from the sherry Vincent Tyrrell had given me-but it would have been nice if she'd asked. Maybe she'd gotten so used to drinking alone that it didn't occur to her.
"I don't pretend to any great fellow feeling," Leonard said. "Especially not after they broke into our car and took the spare tire, stole Sara's bike and trashed it and dumped it in our garden, ripped washing off the line and dragged it through dog shit across the way, and burned a car right out in front of our house. But that's not the point. There are five or six thousand people living in the estate. Walk through there and you'll see, for every house that has garbage dumped in the front garden, there's one with fresh paint and flowers planted. How are those people to thrive if they're being dragged down by the others?"
"The deserving poor," I said, earning myself an overemphatic "exactly" smile from Annalise. Leonard shrugged, unabashed.
"Oh, I know, that's supposed to shut down the argument. But I don't have a problem with that. I mean, if you can't clean up after yourself…if someone shits in the street, there's something wrong with them, we all agree. But people from Michael Davitt Gardens dump their trash in plain sight and we have to put up with it. It isn't fair."
"So what do you do? Evict them? They're council tenants. Where will they go? Into emergency accommodation, where they can do it again? Onto the street?"
"You have to have some kind of sanction. We have a social one, you know, other people will think we're pigs if we do it. We'll think that ourselves. They don't seem to. But we've all got to get along. I wish we didn't. I wished we lived in a middle-class enclave, like the ones we grew up in. But we don't."
For once, Joe Leonard's wife looked in total agreement with her husband, her wine-flushed face wiped clean of mockery and amusement. Most local authority estates had been built far from where the middle classes lived, back in the days when a teacher or a nurse could buy a semidetached house on a private development, days when their teenage kids viewed the prospect of "ending up" in a semi-d as a fate worse than death. But those days were gone, and young couples on good salaries were now living cheek by jowl with people they used to cross the city to avoid, and they were getting a crash course in the social policies that had left many of those people disaffected and alienated, confined to bleak estates decimated by drug abuse and criminality.
Still, for all Leonard's south-county Dublin brashness, at least he was trying to do something positive about it. Many liberals who'd be appalled by his views had the luxury of simply not having to confront the problem: they lived safely in the very enclaves he and his wife came from and dreamed of returning to, semidetached paradise lost. Who knows, if Leonard made it back there, maybe he could afford to be a liberal too.
"So what do you want, photographs? Video? I can set up a pinhole camera and record the comings and goings across the way."
"What if they see it? They'll target us," Annalise said, all irony past.
"They won't see it," I said. "It's about the size of a roll of coins, and it's wireless. I can hide it in the trellis. Connect a receiver to your VCR, you can record all the comings and goings. You'd need to keep track of the tapes yourselves, unless you want me to move into your living room. But I'll review them with you, and we can isolate any incidents of dumping where we can make out faces or registration plates or whatever, then have those sections transferred to disc."
Leonard nodded, his eyes widening.
"And that would be evidence, like CCTV," he said.
"Something like," I said. "Chances are the council might recognize faces if they're council tenants; if it's kids, we can try the local schools."
"And then?" Annalise said, her tone skeptical again; already the wine that had briefly lit her up was darkening her mood; her reddening eyes were squinting, as if hurt by the light. "We match a list of names from faces and/or registration plates, we present it to the Guards and the council and then what? We sit back and wait until fuck all happens, that's what, until a rap on the knuckles is administered. And five minutes later the Butlers or whoever it is'll be tossing cider bottles out their windows. Or through ours. And we'll still be here because we can't afford to fucking move. If it wasn't for Mummy, we wouldn't even have been able to buy this house."
She didn't have to direct this at Leonard for him to take it like a slap in the face; he blinked hard and grimaced, smarting from the rebuke. When he spoke, it was in that careful, steady, neutral kind of voice people who live with alcoholics often use, the kind of voice it's difficult to infer any judgment from, however self-loathing the drinker.
"I don't know what I'll do with the list of names. Maybe I'll take an ad out in the local paper. Maybe I'll nail it to the church door. I don't know. What I can't do is nothing."
His petite wife rolled her eyes at this, and drained her glass again, and smiled in a knowing way at me, inviting me to join her in her contempt for her husband, and asking, in that pouty, lip-moistening way unhappily married women who drank often had, for something else: not sex, or even the promise of it, but sexual endorsement, the reassurance that I would if she wanted me to, even though we both knew all she really wanted was a good drink. But I didn't want to give her that or any reassurance: I didn't like the way she had humiliated Leonard in front of me, and I didn't like the way she mocked his attempts to better their situation. I didn't even like the way she drank, and I was no one to talk.
I had initially thought Joe Leonard was one of those arrogant rugby guys, born to privilege and temporarily light on dough, unable to fathom how a successful school's rugby career hadn't led to greater things. But now he seemed more like one of the also-rans, the lads who cheered the winners from the sidelines, the hangers-on who believed in the dream but couldn't quite live it themselves. I felt sorry for him, but I liked his spirit.
I nodded at Leonard, and reached my hand across to him, and he shook it. He looked anxious though, and when I went into the hall he came out after me and shut the kitchen door behind him.
"I'm worried about money," he said in a low voice.
"Aren't we all?" I said.
"I mean, I don't know how long this will take, and…well, Christmas is here, and…"
He stopped, and looked at me, his tired gray eyes enlarged by his glasses, his head bowed in exhaustion and shame. I could have pretended Leonard was what I had thought him to be in the first place and taken the money; the guy he wished he was certainly would have: you don't get to the top cutting losers a break. He wasn't that guy though, and neither was I, and even though the only reason I was working this case was for the money, Father Vincent Tyrrell's cash advance meant I didn't have to test my conscience too hard.
"Give me five hundred. You're going to be running the camera yourself. If it turns out that I need to work full-time on it, we'll figure something out."
Leonard nodded, his eyes blinking hard. He gestured toward the kitchen in a you-know-how-it-is way, and I shrugged and nodded, as if most guys I knew were married to women who were drunk by lunchtime. Most guys I knew were drunk by lunchtime themselves, which at least meant they didn't have to worry anymore about their wives, who in any case had long fled the scene.
I went out to my car and opened the trunk and got an oil-smeared canvas tool bag that belonged to my father. In it, as well as a bunch of small tools, I had a wireless covert video pinhole camera, a half-dozen nine-volt alkaline batteries, a wireless receiver, a DC adapter for the receiver and some cable to connect it to the VCR. I also took a bag of videotapes, closed the trunk and went back to the Leonard house.
The trellis was about three inches deep, a crisscross lattice with triangular holes the size of a two-euro coin. The camera was about the size of a one-euro coin, so it was easy enough to fix it into the trellis with the help of some sturdy Virginia creeper, and to wedge a battery in behind it.
When I went back in the house, Annalise Leonard was sitting at the table with her hand on her brow, shielding her eyes. The small boy was running up and down the kitchen floor around his father's outstretched legs, all the while chanting something about a super-robot monkey team, if I heard it right. Sara was sitting at the table having a jokey conversation with her mother in which she did all the parts, both telling the jokes and supplying the laughter.
I went into the living room and set up the receiver and its power adapter, connected it to the VCR after a bit of faffing about (I had to find a junction box to connect two cables together in order to make it work), powered it up, selected a channel on the VCR, broke a tape out of its packaging and put it in the machine and checked the sight lines. I went out and adjusted the angle the camera was at slightly, so it had the widest view of the dumping ground; then I went back inside and talked Leonard through the process.
"Should I start it now?" he said.
"Do they dump in broad daylight? Better leave it until night," I said. "The camera batteries last eight hours. I'll turn it off when I leave; when night falls, turn it on and mark what time it is. And they're two-hundred-and-forty-minute tapes, so…"
"I'll set the alarm for four hours after I've gone to bed," he said keenly.
"You might want to sleep on the sofa," I said.
Might want to anyway, I thought.
He walked me to the front door, smiled grimly, as if we were men setting out on a terrifying journey, and presented me with a check.
"Thank you, Mr. Loy," he said.
"Thank you," I said. "Your wife said something about the Butlers -are they people you suspect?"
"They're the most likely. There's one family in the estate, about four or five branches of them all told," Leonard said. "They're notorious around here, always up to something."
He looked around him furtively before passing a slip of paper to me, as if we were approaching the security check at the airport and the paper was a wrap of coke.
"Couple of registration numbers I think might be involved. White transit vans both. The second one of them is Vinnie Butler's."
As I was walking to my car, a blue BMW pulled up outside the house and a petite, expensive-looking woman in her sixties with short auburn hair and a fur coat got out. She looked out over the council estate with pursed lips, including me in her dismayed sweep, then clipped up the drive of the Leonards' house. When the door opened, she ignored the children who had run to greet their granny and were frolicking around her legs, instead embracing Annalise and laying her daughter's head on her shoulder as if she were a wounded bird.
The broken bicycles and trashed stereo systems were strewn around the laneways and greens of Michael Davitt Gardens, a sure sign Christmas was on its way. Some houses had gigantic inflatable Santas and Rudolphs in their tiny gardens; some had flashing lights on their roofs, or tinsel and spray snow decorations in their windows; some were boarded up with bolts on their electricity meters. The pavements were carpeted with dog shit and broken glass; pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers festooned the gates and boundary walls; old trainers and plastic bottles filled with gravel hung on cords lassoed around telephone wires. There was nothing breathing on the street save for a few sullen dogs.
The two reg plates Leonard had given me were both for white Ford Transit vans; I had already spotted half a dozen on the estate; it was the vehicle of choice for plasterers, roofers, any tradesmen who had to carry a lot of bulky materials around with them, alongside anyone who, strictly speaking, wasn't a qualified tradesman at all, but who fancied his chances quoting low for a building job, completing half or three-quarters of it badly and then doing a bunk, or robbing your house and driving away with all you own, furniture and appliances included. Their drivers cut you off on the roads, and they let their kids ride up front in the cabin without seat belts, let alone car seats; they felt invincible in their white metal crates and drove accordingly. I didn't like white Ford Transit vans and now I was parked four doors away from Vinnie Butler's, trying not to look conspicuous in a forty-two-year-old Volvo with RIP scraped on the hood. I might have been many things, but at least I wasn't the cops.
Kids were drifting onto the streets: soon they'd be all over me, or at least, my car; not for the first time, I questioned the stupidity of driving a conversation piece, particularly when I didn't have any of the lingo: if something went wrong with it, I called Tommy; his telephone number was the extent of my auto know-how. I called Tommy now to see what he knew of the Butlers. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message. Tommy was a reliable guide to the dodgier citizens in south Dublin and north Wicklow, not least because he'd invariably had dodgy business dealings with all of them at one time or another.
I waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour, reading the same headlines over and over in yesterday's Irish Times and trying to ignore the three young lads across the way from me playing street hurling with a tennis ball. That's how I almost missed Vinnie Butler: when the ball smacked off my windshield, I turned to see the lads scarpering around the corner; when I turned back, Vinnie Butler's Transit van was pulling away from the curb. I pulled out after him, drew up behind the van at the junction that led from the estate out onto the main road, and tailed it onto the N11 and south for a few miles until it turned off past Newtown and headed west toward Roundwood.
Pine and fir trees flanked the road like troops massing for battle as we drove into the low winter sun's glare. I kept my distance, and when the white van took a right up a small track with a makeshift signpost reading CHRISTMAS TREES, about a mile or so from the Vartry Reservoir, I kept going until I came to a lay-by maybe three hundred yards farther up the road but still in sight of the turn. I got out of the car, produced a notebook and a pair of Meade 10 x 25 compact binoculars and made a moderate show of casting about as if I were interested in the wildlife, although nothing wheeled across the skies but magpies and sparrows.
About twenty minutes later the van piled out of the turn and I caught a brief glimpse of Vinnie Butler: burly, weathered complexion, tiny eyes, close-cropped brown hair. He tossed a fast-food carton and a soft-drink container and the colorful bag they'd come in out the window, flicked a cigarette butt after, anointed the lot with a gob of spit and hauled the Ford Transit back in the direction it had come.
My phone bleeped: Tommy had left a voice mail. He said, "The Butlers eat their young. They're a tribe of savages, Ed: cross one and ten'll come after you. The women are worse than the men, but it's not always easy to tell them apart. Vinnie is thick as shit, but he's vicious with it. They're caught up in any number of feuds over horses, cars, you name it. They sorted the last one out by burning a young one's face with acid. No amount of money is worth messing with the Butlers. Just walk the fuck away."
After that, I had little option but to check out what Vinnie Butler had been up to in the woods. The track he had exited led up to the edge of another encampment of fir trees, their serried ranks deepening in hue with the fading winter light, and then weaved back and down toward an old corrugated barn and a set of outbuildings; I couldn't see a farmhouse, but the fields ahead were fenced and cows and sheep were grazing; I breathed a tumult of manure and aging hay and fermenting compost; in the nearest field, an old blood bay was munching steadily on damp grass. A half-dozen freshly cut fir trees were propped up by the barn. Maybe Vinnie Butler hadn't come to dump his trash; maybe he had had legitimate business with the farmer; maybe he had come to buy a Christmas tree; after all, he had waited until he got back to the road before he tossed his lunch bag.
I turned and drove slowly back around, stopping when I reached a five-bar gate that opened onto a clearing wide enough to let a van drive through the forest; it was recessed at a sharp angle from the track and concealed by a modest platoon of pines; I had missed it completely on my way up, and I spotted it now only because I was looking for it-and because a white refuse sack clung to one of the trees. I tucked the Volvo behind the pines and climbed over the gate, which was padlocked and chained.
Well-worn tire tracks sparkled bright as metal in the hard earth as I walked through the forest. Pine resin initially chased away the farmyard aroma; after about ten minutes the fresh smell receded; by the time I reached the dump, I'd've cheerfully stuck my head in a compost heap rather than breathe the rank air that surrounded it. A hole about thirty feet in diameter had been dug and the earth banked up the sides; piled high within were bags of domestic waste: rotting food, soiled nappies, detergent and bleach and paint. A halo of flies hovered above the garbage, humming, and there was the rustle and snap of foraging birds and rats; great crows hung in the nearby trees.
On the far side, I could see the gleam of the reservoir water, and was drawn toward it. The edge of the dump was no more than fifteen feet from the shore. The reservoir supplied a substantial portion of the city's water. At least I'd have something for Joe Leonard that no council official or Guard could ignore. I took a few photographs and then climbed up the bank nearest the water to see if I could find some personal traces among the trash: a utility bill or two would be enough to nail at least some of the people involved.
I put on the surgical gloves I always carry and a set of shoe covers I'd packed because I figured the job might get dirty. I waved a scum of flies away and selected the driest-looking bag I could see, which was full of old magazines, and pulled it to one side and uncovered a bag of cast-off clothes, most of them children's; mixed in were a few broken plastic toys and two empty vodka bottles. Beside that I could see the top of a bag of shoes.
I reached down and tugged on the top shoe, thinking as I did, What's the point of this? What are you going to find out from an old shoe? Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the same make I favored; I could tell from the sole, barely worn, the mark still clear: Church's English Shoes. Not the same shoe; I wore black wing tips, this had a buckle, and it was burgundy, a Blenheim, I thought, no, a Beckett, the last thought before my hand tugged on the shoe and what was in the shoe, and what was in the shoe gave against my hand. I flinched and yelled out and snapped my hand back as if I'd just tugged on a live rat, and I tumbled down the banked side of the dump and let gravity take me to the shore of the reservoir. I could hear the water lapping gently, as if that could distract me from what I'd just disturbed: not a rat, a foot, visible from where I stood, a foot attached to a man's corduroy-clad leg, protruding from the mound of garbage and then slowly collapsing, like a guttered-out candle subsiding into a ruined cake.
All I could hear now was my blood pounding out a funeral rhythm in my brain, and through the beats a calm, measured voice that said: "Call the Guards. Wait until they get here. Explain what you were doing. Tell them everything. All will be well." What the voice said made sense, but I didn't listen. It didn't sound like me.
The victim was a well-or at least, expensively-dressed man, unusually lean and wiry, about five foot three, with a weather-beaten face and blond hair, possibly dyed, aged anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. He wore a kind of gentleman-farmer costume: rust-colored corduroys, olive-green sleeveless pullover, small-check shirt, brown wool sport coat. He'd been here-or dead, at any rate-at least two days, but not much longer: rigor had departed the body, but there was no sign of the abdominal staining or distension associated with further putrefaction. And there was no sign so far that the rats or birds had got to him. He'd been strangled, possibly by a ligature and by hand: there was a clear furrow around his neck, but a mess of bruising also; his eyes had been closed and it looked as if his mouth had been cleaned: there were no bloodstains. If I had to guess, I'd've said he'd been murdered elsewhere and the body had been dumped here within the last few hours-or possibly the last few minutes, courtesy of my friend in the white Transit van. I found four further things of note. The first three were a tattoo, a shredded slip of paper that looked like a betting slip and a small leather pouch full of coins. The fourth thing gave me such a fright I found myself back at the water's edge again, gasping for breath, the air cold in my pounding chest.
I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children's clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal contact. I went down and pulled grass and weeds and offered them from my hand; the horse feasted eagerly, steam rising from her coat like breath in the cold air; I inhaled her deep, musky smell, let her old teeth gnaw my outstretched palm, relished every snort and whinny. When I withdrew from the gate, and she realized there was nothing more to come, she wheeled around and took off back to her spot at the bottom of the field, the clump of her hooves on the hard winter grass like mountain thunder, thrilling to the ear.
Still shaken, I drove fast out of the forest of pines and down to the road and back onto the N11 and stopped off at the first pub I came to. It was a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet. A rough-looking Sunday-afternoon crowd of all ages was resentfully half watching an English Premiership game that could have been of little real interest to them, Wigan and Reading, perhaps, or Bolton and Portsmouth, the adults all drunk and surly, the kids bored and restless; the remnants of seasonal turkey-and-ham lunches littered the tables amid the full and empty glasses. It wasn't a very nice place, but I was very glad to be there, among the living.
I ordered a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness and a turkey-and-ham sandwich and found a quiet corner with a view of the car park and no view of a TV screen, and while I drank the whiskey with a little water, I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I had seen. Then I rang Dave Donnelly and told him some of it, including the need to get someone onto Vinnie Butler urgently. I told him it looked like the body had been killed elsewhere, then cleaned up and moved to the scene. I didn't tell him I had moved the body and I didn't tell him I had searched it, although I knew he'd assume I had. I didn't tell him about the tattoo either-he'd find out about that when the crime scene unit examined the body. The tattoo was on the man's left forearm: two symbols recently, and amateurishly, carved; they'd barely scabbed over. One resembled a crucifix, the other looked like the ancient Greek letter omega: †?
Dave went through the motions of reefing me out of it for not staying with the body until the scene had been secured, but his heart didn't seem in it: I guess from his point of view, having me connected with the murder would be an inconvenience. I needed to be free to dig for the scraps he'd need in working the case; in return, he'd feed me what he could, and look the other way when I stepped outside the law, provided I didn't do it in too visible a way. In case I didn't understand the latter point, Dave signed off on it.
"Just don't get that O'Connor woman involved, all right Ed? Thought you had more sense than to trust a fucking journalist."
"Sure about that, Dave? Far as I can remember, the way she wrote you up on the Howard case was one of the main reasons you got your big promotion to the Bureau."
"Your memory's playing tricks with you then, Ed. Knock off the gargle and cop onto yourself, would you?"
You couldn't slam a mobile phone down, but Dave ended the call so abruptly that it felt like that's what he'd done.
The other thing I didn't tell Dave about was the shredded betting slip I'd found stuck inside the corpse's trouser pocket, as if it had been through the wash. I prised it out and bagged it and pieced it together now. It had a mobile number written on it, faded but legible. I rang the number, and a hoarse male voice answered.
"What can I do you for, friend?"
There was a hubbub of voices in the background, and the rasp of a P.A. saying, "Winner all right. Winner all right."
"Was that the last race?" I said.
"That's the last done now, friend," the man said. "All off-course accounts to be settled in the morning."
"Did Fish on Friday place?"
"Did she what?"
He barked out a loud, derisive laugh.
"Best guess is she's still out there, friend. Maybe she'll be home for Christmas. Would you like to bet on it?"
I ended the call. Fish on Friday was one of George Halligan's horses, running at Gowran Park. The dead man had the mobile number of a bookie at the same race meeting in his trouser pocket. And when I'd held his face, back in the forest, his jaw had hung open, and his mouth gaped red down his throat, and I saw the last thing I decided not to tell Detective Inspector Donnelly. His tongue had been cut out.
I had another large Jameson before I left the pub, but it didn't do a lot to get the chill out of my bones. By the time I reached Michael Davitt Gardens, there were marked and unmarked Garda cars flanking the white Ford Transit van; kids climbed on walls and shinned up lampposts and neighbors stood in their doorways and gardens and watched as the crop-haired driver with the red face was led into a squad car. I drove on and parked around the other side of the estate, across the road from the closed gates of the Leonard house. The blue BMW was still parked outside. I called Joe Leonard on his mobile and he came out and sat in my car and I gave him a potted account of what had happened, up to the arrest of Vinnie Butler. Part of me felt relieved, as if the discovery in the woods had restored pride and dignity to us both: a trivial litter problem had become, or was at least on nodding terms with, a murder case. I don't think Leonard saw it that way.
"If they charge him for murder, will they let the dumping offenses slide?" he said.
I looked to see if he was serious. He was: deadly.
"Probably," I said.
"Well, in that case, I'll keep the camera rolling, Mr. Loy. You'll keep me posted if there are any developments, won't you?"
I said I would, and he got out of the car and crossed as far as the BMW, stroked the blue hood with his hand, then came back and leaned into my window.
"I know you didn't see us at our best this morning," he said quietly, blushing and looking back quickly and furtively at the upstairs windows of his house, as if his wife and her mother might appear in one of them to spy on him, characters all in a not terribly comic opera.
"It's just that I…I had a run of bad luck a few years back…a dot-com start-up, and…and we lost our house, repossession, right when the boom was taking off…and, well, it's been hard getting started again…the kids were so young when it happened. And Annalise was pretty angry…still is, really, don't suppose you can blame her, I asked her to trust me…we lost so much. We'd be sitting on a lot of equity now, instead of…"
He gestured around at his surroundings. I made a face intended to suggest that these kinds of things happened (which they did) and that often it was no fault of the person to whom they happened (which it wasn't) and that I was sure nothing but good would come of it eventually (which it might). I caught sight of my expression in the rearview mirror. It didn't reassure me. But Leonard didn't notice, or didn't mind; he simply wanted me to hear him out. I nodded and shrugged in a what-can-you-do sort of way, and he thanked me-for what, I couldn't tell-and straightened up and shook my hand and crossed the road, stopping to stroke the hood of the BMW again as he passed.
ACCORDING TO FATHER Vincent Tyrrell, Patrick Hutton's last known address was a town house in Riverside Village, a private estate by the Dodder River in Sandymount. Before I left the pub I had tried the two Patrick Huttons I could find in the phone book. One was a plasterer; the other was the senior executive solicitor at South Dublin County Council. Neither had been a jockey; the plasterer sounded amused at the suggestion, the solicitor mysteriously outraged, as if I'd accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ. Now I was driving north toward the city, the roads clogged with traffic on the last shopping Sunday before Christmas. I crossed the railway line at the Merrion Gates and took Strand Road for about a mile, then turned off into Sandymount. There was a video store on the green that offered Internet access, so I parked by O'Reilly's pub and waited in line for the single computer terminal behind two Italian students.
When it was my turn, I entered Patrick Hutton's name in a search engine. Amid the university professors, secondary school headmasters and orthopedic surgeons, I found a few references to Patrick Hutton the jockey, chief among them the following short piece in the Irish Independent in December 2004.
REWARD OFFERED FOR MISSING JOCKEY
Trainer F. X. Tyrrell is offering ten thousand euro for information about the whereabouts of Patrick Hutton, the Wicklow-born jockey who apparently vanished seven years ago. Hutton, who rode over a dozen winners for Tyrrell during 1996, including the Arkle Chase at Cheltenham on By Your Leave, dropped out of public view days before he was due to ride for Tyrrell at the Leopardstown Christmas Festival, and hasn't been seen since. Anyone with information should contact Derek Rowan, head man at Tyrrellscourt.
There was a small black-and-white head shot, but it was difficult to pick out any distinguishing features: like models, with whom they have a lot in common, jockeys all tend to resemble one another at first or even second flush. There were a few contemporary reports of races Hutton had run; the only other item of interest was a short account of a meeting at Thurles in October 1996, where By Your Leave finished last in a field of nine in the third race, and the subsequent inquiry at the Turf Club, where the question of Hutton deliberately stopping the horse was raised, but then dismissed.
I spent some time trying to find out a bit more about F. X. Tyrrell. There was plenty on his achievements in racing and breeding, but relatively little on the man himself: one marriage, which lasted ten years; no kids; usually accompanied in public by his sister, Regina. Legendarily reluctant to speak to reporters, so little was known about his life away from the track and the stud that it was logical to assume he didn't have any. I copied down one quote from an interview, the only utterance of his that involved a subordinate clause: "It's a simple game: it's all in the breeding, all in the blood. If the bloodlines are right, the animals will be right, provided they're given the nurture they need. Blood and breed, that's the beginning and end of it."
It was dark by the time I got to Riverside Village; the Christmas decorations were more discreet and tasteful than they had been in Michael Davitt Gardens: hardly surprising, as an 800-square-feet three-bed went for nine hundred thousand here in Dublin 4; number 20 had a lighted candle in the window and a holly wreath on the doorknob and a red 1988 Porsche 928 in the drive. My phone rang as I pressed the bell; when I checked the number and saw the 310 area code, I realized it was my ex-wife again. Nine in the morning in West L.A. and she could think of nothing better to do than call me. I felt a momentary stab of panic, but that gave way to the sad knowledge that there was no longer anything between us to panic about, and then to anger at her unwillingness to leave me the fuck alone. And that gave way to genuine panic, because when the door of number 20 opened, there was the dark hair, the pale skin, the great dark eyes, the long legs, the slightly crooked, wide red lips of my ex-wife standing before me.
I WAS SITTING on the black leather couch in the living room. I had asked for a whiskey, and was told I could only have one if I drank a cup of hot sweet tea first, so that's what I was doing while the woman who looked like my ex-wife sat on the black leather chair across from me. Her name was Miranda Hart, and whether she was uneasy or excited at having a strange man in her house, or both, I couldn't tell; her way of dealing with it to was to laugh a little, and smile a lot, and chew her gum vigorously; she was doing all three now.
I hadn't exactly fainted, but I had swayed a little out there on the doorstep, unsteady on my feet, clutching the door frame as the woman I thought was my ex-wife tried to shut the door on my hand, and then my scalp had sparked with sweat, and my tongue felt too large for my mouth, and I knew I was going to be sick. And had I not managed to blurt out Patrick Hutton's name, I would never have been let past the door, let alone allowed to use the bathroom to throw up, and then wash my face, and now sit by the fire in the living room with the dark burgundy and racing-green walls and the dark wood floorboards and the paintings and framed photographs of horses and jockeys on the walls and ask my questions. Because Miranda Hart was Patrick Hutton's widow.
She sat in a pair of skinny jeans and black boots with low heels and a black wraparound top over a dark wine-colored camisole with six silver bracelets on one slender wrist and seven on the other and no wedding ring. Her nails were painted dark red, but they were bitten and the varnish was cracked; her mascara had run into smudges around her huge brown eyes; her lipstick had smeared a little around her mouth. There was mud and straw and what looked like shredded paper on her boots. She had poured herself a large gin, and she gulped it enthusiastically now and spilled some of it down her chin, which she wiped with the back of her hand. I didn't tell her she looked like my ex-wife; instead I said I'd had a sandwich that must have disagreed with me, but she didn't seem at all interested; maybe strangers threw up regularly in her bathroom.
"So you're a private detective who used to live in L.A., and you're looking for Patrick, and you can't, or won't say who hired you," she said. Her accent was an Anglo drawl; she said cawn't for "can't" and gave Patrick such a clipped reading she made it sound like a name rarely heard outside South Kensington and Chelsea.
"That's right," I said.
"The last private detective was fuck all use. Or rather, I suppose he was a great deal of use, since he turned up fuck all."
"When was that?" I said.
"About two years ago. I wanted to have Patrick declared dead. More like, needed: I ran out of cash for a while, and couldn't keep the mortgage on this little kip up. We'd bought it together, and he'd been gone longer than seven years."
"And who insisted on the detective, the insurance company?"
"That's right. Big-arsed ex-cop in an anorak, Christ, he was a gruesome old heap, watching him get out of a chair was nerve-racking. Anyway, he went through the motions, checked Patrick's bank records and credit history and so forth, and came up with what we all knew: he vanished off the face of the earth ten years ago. Ten years ago today, as a matter of fact. And now all this is mine."
She rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette, a More, and offered me one, which I refused; I didn't think my system would be up to it yet. I finished the tea and reached for the whiskey; the fumes didn't make me gag: a good sign.
"Lucky to have the place, I suppose, particularly since we bought before the boom. I got left some money in '92, not long after we were married. Girlfriends said, don't put Patrick's name on it, but it's just as well I did. 'Cause I'd still have a mortgage to pay if I hadn't."
"He disappeared ten years ago today?"
"Twenty-third of December, 1996."
"Will you tell me about it?"
"I don't know," she said. She took a hit of her drink, and a drag of her cigarette, and looked around for somewhere to tap the ash, and popped her gum out of her mouth and molded it into a bowl shape and flicked her ash in it and laid it on the arm of her chair.
"I don't know if I want Patrick back. That is, if he were alive and you found him."
"You had him declared dead. Do you think he's still alive?"
She laughed, as if she'd been caught out in some strange but endearing foible, like using her chewing gum as an ashtray.
"I wouldn't put it past the little fucker, put it that way."
"I know F. X. Tyrrell put up a reward for information about him."
"Yes. Well. That was very good of him. Very good of F.X., all right."
Hart's general tone was so brittle I couldn't tell whether she was being ironic or not.
"Did he find out anything?"
"The usual: people who thought they'd seen him on a ferry, or in Spain. Nothing concrete. That was before the detective had a go."
"Were Tyrrell and your husband close?"
"I don't know if anyone gets particularly close to F.X. They were having a good year together, and Patrick was getting a lot of rides; he had three or four big ones at Leopardstown. And then: gone."
"Money trouble?"
"It was all a bit hand-to-mouth. But that's just the life, he was making his way, he was only twenty-three, just the beginning. And he'd been gambling, but don't we all? Everyone in racing gambles. No one came to me with major debts after he'd gone, the kind of debts that would've made him do a runner. And they'd need to have been big, Patrick had a lot of nerve."
"There was talk of his stopping a horse for Tyrrell. By Your Leave? But the Turf Club found there was no case to answer."
Miranda Hart smiled mirthlessly and ran a weary hand through her dark mane of hair.
"The Turf Club are such dears."
"What does that mean?"
"It means they know what goes on and we know what goes on, and they agree to pretend it doesn't go on unless we're too careless about it. And F.X. and Patrick were bloody careless that day."
"What happened? What goes on?"
She drained her glass and looked at me through narrowed eyes. "You're not some asshole of a journalist, are you?"
"I may be an asshole, but I'm no journalist," I said.
That got a laugh; showing her my card got a wary nod. When I produced a press clipping I kept in my wallet (penned by a crime reporter who owed his career to the quality and frequency of the Garda leaks he received, and who showed his gratitude by toeing diligently whatever line the Garda Press office drew for him) featuring a quote from the Garda commissioner himself deploring the rise of "self-styled" private detectives and disparaging their "questionable personal ethics," and using a photograph of me as Exhibit A, Miranda Hart gave me a grin of what looked like kindred outlaw approval. I got up and fixed her a fresh drink, and took a hit of mine. Miranda Hart kicked off her boots and wriggled around until her long legs were splayed with one hanging over the arm of her chair.
"How much do you know about horse racing?" she said.
"Enough to lose betting on it. Not much more."
"Well. First of all, it's not an exact science," she said. "The favorite doesn't always win. If he did, you wouldn't have much of a sport, or a chance to bet. So that gives owners and trainers a certain license. If a horse with a good record is coming back after a rest, or at the beginning of the National Hunt season, no one will be too surprised if he loses a few races he was tipped to win. Maybe he's carrying an injury, maybe he's lost his edge, maybe he hasn't warmed up yet, maybe the jockey isn't giving him the best ride."
"And what's actually happening?"
"The horse is being stopped. So that the odds can drift up, and his owner or trainer or a whole bunch of interested parties can have a big punt in a month or two, when it's barely fancied and the price on the horse-and maybe the prize money-are better. Best to do with a horse that's just made a name for himself, because it could always be a flash in the pan, as far as the authorities-and the punters-are concerned. Harder with an established mount, but you can still get away with it, because there are so many legitimate excuses: one trainer will push a horse to run off an injury, another will insist on rest; if either of those horses is stopped, the trainer is covered."
"So the entire game is corrupt."
"Of course it is, darling. Not all the time-there are the glamour races everyone wants to win fair and square-but quite a lot of the time. And that's just the day-to-day; we haven't even mentioned doping, or when big gamblers or bookies bribe jockeys to throw races."
"And that's what Patrick Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell did with By Your Leave? They deliberately set out to lose the race?"
"Of course. It was evens at Thurles, and the Christmas meeting at Leopardstown was looming, so they wanted to get the price up before then. Unfortunately, By Your Leave was such a great goer, and Patrick ended up being way too obvious. So the whole thing got a little sour. And Patrick got the blame."
"Not from the Turf Club."
"No, from the punters. The footage of it was pretty clear, you could see Patrick checking his placing and holding the horse back when the two front-runners had bolted. A furlong from home and he's still at it, as if By Your Leave could have made up the ground."
"Sounds like he was deliberately drawing attention to what he was doing."
"That's what some people said. That the row was between him and F.X., that Patrick wanted to give the horse a decent ride, that he wasn't happy to be instructed otherwise. And the Turf Club would have caused too much scandal if they'd found anyone at fault. And of course, punters forgive and forget, they know this kind of thing goes on, Patrick would have lost the ride for Leopardstown, but he would have been back on winners soon enough, and everyone would have been happy."
"And how did By Your Leave fare at Leopardstown that Christmas?"
Miranda Hart shook her head and looked at me gravely.
"By Your Leave never made it out of Tipperary -fell at the last fence. The going was unseasonably firm, and the horse broke her right ankle. Which might have been okay, but having unseated her rider, she took off at the gallop she'd been straining after all day. By the time the Tyrrellscourt lads caught her up, she'd broken the leg in thirty-four places. There was nothing anyone could do."
I thought I saw tears in her eyes; the death of the horse seemed to matter more to her than the fate of her husband.
"So what happened after that? Did Tyrrell and Hutton fall out? What did Patrick tell you?"
"Do you know racing people, Mr. Loy? They're not exactly what you'd call chatty. They're certainly not introspective. I wasn't looking for a blabbermouth. I have gob enough for two. Patrick never talked about work in any detail. He'd say, 'Not a bad horse,' or 'Lucky today'-that's what he talked about most often, when he talked: luck."
"It sounds like he ran out of it at the last."
"Maybe. He walked out on F.X. before he had the chance to be sacked. Refused to talk about that either. Said there were a few trainers in England who'd made inquiries, he'd take Christmas off, talk to them in the New Year."
"Refused to talk about that. To his wife?"
She shrugged again, flicking her hair back and pouting as she did so. It was very much her habit, but it had also been a tic of my ex-wife's; I remembered now how incredibly irritating I used to find it in her; I found it weirdly alluring in Miranda Hart. She moved to stub her cigarette into her chewing gum and overturned her drink onto the crotch of her jeans. She climbed out of the chair amid a fusillade of fucks and shits, then stalked into the kitchen and returned with a few tea towels. She wiped the gin off the chair and the floor, and began to dab between her legs with a cloth, then thought better of it.
"Clumsy fucking cow. I'm sorry, Mr. Loy, I'm soaked here, I'm going to have to get changed, have a shower. And I'm going out, so…"
She looked toward the door, and I nodded and stood up.
"Well, thanks for your time," I said. I gestured at the mud and straw on her boots. "I take it you're a racing person yourself."
She grinned in a side-of-the-mouth kind of way and shook her head.
"I run a riding school for Jackie Tyrrell, up in Tibradden. It's a far cry."
"From what?"
She looked toward the door again, then smiled carefully at me.
"I used to ride, Mr. Loy. I grew up near Tyrrellscourt, I worked in the yard as a girl, I had a few amateur races. I was as good as Patrick. Better, some people thought. Then, after he took off, or disappeared, or whatever the fuck he did…I don't know, it was as if I were to blame. Like I'd been a curse of some kind. Blame the black widow, y'know? F.X. cut me off, and other trainers followed suit. I got a bit of yard work with another trainer, but I wasn't happy doing that anymore. So I kind of drifted off track, in more ways than one…rented this place out and just…let things slide, y'know? Got into a few…situations. And then F.X. and his wife split up, and Jackie called me. I needed to get myself together by then, so I jumped at the chance. Jackie helped me with the house, everything."
"F. X. Tyrrell's wife. All very cozy."
"His ex-wife. They parted amicably, there were no children. Why is it so cozy?"
"The person who hired me to find Patrick Hutton was Father Vincent Tyrrell."
It was as if someone had flicked a switch, or pulled a cord, in Miranda Hart's back: her shoulders slumped and her head dropped and something like a howl came from deep inside her. When she turned her face to me, I saw black eyes stained red and soaked with the black mess her tears had made of her makeup. She was shaking her head now, opening her mouth and trying to get the words out; I could see red lipstick stains on her teeth. Finally, she managed to coordinate palate and lips and tongue long enough to be understood.
"Get out of here," she said. "Get the fuck out of here, or I'll call the police."
I sat in the car and tried to work out what I had seen in Miranda Hart's eyes when she heard Vincent Tyrrell's name, the split second before she fell apart on me: what combination of fear, anger, shame or guilt. The tears were real, the emotion convulsive, hysterical even, but Miranda Hart looked like she was capable of putting on quite a show if she put her mind to it. At least, that was what I figured by the end of our encounter, once my entire system had gotten the message loud and clear that she was not in fact my ex-wife.
Next, I listened to the message my ex-wife had left on my phone, and then I did something I hadn't done for maybe three years: I called her, and asked how she was, and how her little boy was doing; I spoke to her like I should have a long time ago. She told me she still felt bad about Lily, our little girl, especially at Christmas, thinking how she might have turned out, and I told her so did I, and she said every year on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Christmas she went to the Third Street Mall and bought all the gifts Santa would have brought and then on the Sunday she went to seven forty-five mass at St. Clement's and donated the toys to the church's Angel Toy Drive for needy children and orphans. She started to cry then, and I sat and listened, and wondered whether remembering our dead child by giving toys to poor kids at Christmas was better than remembering her by getting drunk and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to blame other people for pain that was nobody's but your own. I decided that it was.
We sat on the phone for a long while after that, after she had stopped crying, not saying very much, until she said the call must be costing me a fortune, and I said there was no need to worry, because I was a millionaire, a line we used to use before any of this had happened, and she laughed then, and told me she missed me, and I thought that was a good time to send her my love and wish her a Merry Christmas and end the call.
I sat for another long while then, until I was able to catch my breath, and I could see straight. I wiped my face with a handkerchief and got out of the car and walked along the path by the Dodder River toward Londonbridge Road and smoked a cigarette and breathed in the cold winter air. Every so often I had the sense that I was being followed, but the only people I spotted were shoppers trudging home laden with bags. In any case, if Leo Halligan wanted to take me, he would, and there wasn't an awful lot I could do about it.
When I got back to my car, a taxi was pulling away from outside Miranda Hart's house. I hadn't spotted her getting in, but I didn't have time to think, so I followed it down into Ringsend toward the city. I kept close, reasoning that she might not be in it anyway, and even if she was, she probably wouldn't expect to be followed. In any case, the traffic was so thick that I couldn't afford to let the cab out of my sight. Town was seething with drunks and merrymakers, shoppers and gawkers, young and old spilling off the pavements and jostling in the streets. We passed Trinity College and headed up George's Street and around onto Stephen's Green and in fits and starts rolled along until I saw the cab pull in outside the Shelbourne Hotel. I passed it and looked back to see Miranda Hart, wearing something shiny and black over something shiny and silver, clip up the hotel steps and flash a smile at the doorman. A car horn honked behind me; I cut down Merrion Street and found a parking space on Merrion Square. There was a brusque voice-mail message from Dave Donnelly on my phone, and I called him immediately, ready to take my medicine: I was on bad terms with too many Guards to fall out with Dave; he probably figured out I had examined the body in the woods, and wanted to bawl me out over it.
He didn't.
"Ed, I want to talk to you."
"Sure, Dave. Harcourt Square?"
Harcourt Square was where the elite National Bureau of Criminal Investigation was based. DI Donnelly wanted to be seen with me there like he wanted to be caught drunk driving.
"That's funny, Ed. I'm still out in fucking Wicklow here. How about your place? When can you make it?"
"I'm on something now, but I don't know how long it'll last."
"It's seven now. Say eleven?"
"That should be fine. What's it about, Dave?"
"It's about those bodies."
"What bodies?"
"The one you found, and the one we found earlier."
"Are they connected?"
"I'll see you at eleven."
The Shelbourne Hotel was built in 1824 and every so often they closed it and refurbished it and put a bar where a restaurant had been, but it was pretty much the same now as always, except smarter, although there was a tendency, if you got drunk here, to forget where the toilets were. Or so I was told; having left for L.A. when I was eighteen, I had only crossed the door for the first time a few months ago, to confirm to a Southside Lady Who Lunches that her suspicions about her errant husband were well founded. She took the photographs, wrote me a check and told me she'd double it if I joined her in a suite upstairs for the afternoon. Maybe I might have if she hadn't offered to pay; she had gambler's eyes, and a sense of humor, and a good head for drink. Next thing I knew, she had taken her husband for ten million and the family home in Blackrock and she was photographed on the back page of the Sunday Independent at an MS Charity Ball with new breasts spilling out of a dress twenty years too young for her getting very friendly with a member of the Irish rugby squad. Well done everybody. Another one for the PI scrapbook. Wonder what the Garda commissioner made of that.
I didn't have to look too hard for Miranda Hart; her silver dress blazed like magnesium ribbon amid the deep red and dark wood tones of the Horseshoe Bar. She had piled her dark hair high on her head; her black eyes flickered and her lips were the color of blood. Six foot in heels, she wore her dress calf length and cut high on the thigh; one of her stockings was already laddered. I was trying to get a look at her companions before she saw me, but she was restless, laughing quickly and nodding impatiently and chewing her gum and smoking and drinking and casting her gaze about the bar as if she expected me.
When our eyes met, her face turned to stone for a second and I thought she would start to scream; instead she turned her lamps full on, mouthed "Darling" at me and beckoned me over with the hand she held her glass in, flicking some of its contents over a fat red-faced man of sixty or so with a wispy strawberry-blond comb-over who affected to find this as hilarious as he appeared to be finding everything else. A well-preserved, shrewd-looking blonde in her fifties turned around to take an appraising look at me as the barman brought me the pint of Guinness I'd ordered. I had to remind myself that none of them, and nobody else here in this opulent Christmas melee, none of the lush young women or their overweight, red-faced partners in candy-stripe shirts and blazers or the older horsey types in tweed and corduroy and their sleek beige-and-ivory women groomed within an inch of their lives, not one of them had paid a cent for me, and I owed them nothing in return.
I carried my pint across to Miranda. Her party had grabbed banquette seats around a small table. Miranda kissed me on both cheeks, and in the ear farthest from her friends, said, "Sorry about that earlier. I do want you to find Patrick. I can pay you."
"I'm already getting paid," I said. "But thank you."
We were cheek to cheek, the room a clamor of laughter and jostling voices. Her bathroom had been full of Chanel No. 5 and I could smell that on her now, but faintly; her own scent overpowered it. Deep salt with a tang like oranges, it had gotten under my skin in her house; now I almost felt like the sole reason I had trailed her here was to breathe it again. She smiled at me, and opened her mouth; she still had lipstick on her teeth and I could see her tongue shift her chewing gum to one side. I laughed, and took a drink of my beer.
"What's so funny?" she said.
"You are," I said. "Is there any situation in which you don't chew gum?"
"That would be for you to find out," she said. "Mr. Private Investigator."
The shrewd-looking blonde, who was wearing cream and gold and the slightest hint of leopardskin, said something pointed to the comb-over and he exploded in a fit of convulsive laughter, his hair slipping in a long unruly strand down his face. She looked at him pityingly, like a mother would glance at her obese child when no one else was looking, then raised an appraising gaze, and her glass, to me; I saluted her in the same fashion and we both drank.
"Jackie Tyrrell," Miranda said quietly. "It's our works do. The fatso is Seán Proby."
"The bookie?"
"The father. The son, Jack, runs the day-to-day now. Seán is the figurehead, on TV telling war stories. He was a great comrade of F. X. Tyrrell's. They made a lot of money for each other. Then they fell out."
"Over what?"
"Whatever came to hand. F.X. falls out with everyone sooner or later. You can be my date, if you like. We're going to the Octagon for supper."
"Did you not have a date?"
"Are you worried he might show up and want to fight you?"
"I only like fighting in the morning. At least then there's a chance the day might improve."
"Scaredy-cat."
"Are Proby and Jackie an item?"
They were cackling with each other on the banquette, hand in hand. Miranda did an eye-rolling silent laugh at my question and shook her head at me.
"Oh dear God no. Seán bats for the other side, darling."
"Despite being someone's father. This is all getting a bit too sophisticated for me. Why did you go to pieces when you heard Father Vincent Tyrrell's name?"
Jackie Tyrell, who had been giving a very good impression of a drunk, stood bolt upright and apparently sober.
"We can't be late," she barked in a highly polished accent with a trace of Cork in it. "Gilles will sulk. What's his name?" This last to Miranda of me.
"Ed Loy," I said, extending my hand.
"Ed's writing a book," Miranda announced. "About horse racing and the Irish."
"Oh God no," Jackie Tyrrell said. "That book gets written every year. It's always a fucking bore. You're not going to be a fucking bore, are you?"
"Compared to you?" I said.
She looked me up and down as if she had been offered me for sale.
"At least he's tall," she said to Miranda. "Not a skinny little boy. He's actually like a man, Miranda."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't get smart with me," Jackie Tyrrell said. "I'm hungry."
On his feet now, Seán Proby was pumping my hand up and down and laughing uproariously; the more I tried to retrieve my hand the tighter he held it, and the harder I struggled the louder he laughed; there we were like two clowns in hell until Jackie Tyrrell punched him sharply in the arm and he came to and beamed genially at me, now apparently sober himself.
The Octagon was a converted meeting hall around the corner in a lane off Kildare Street that had been painted white and gussied up with a lot of stained glass and indoor trees hung with fairy lights and gauze. People sat at several different levels on a succession of balconies and mezzanines. The staff were Irish and French and they made a big fuss of Jackie and Miranda; I heard Jackie speaking in immaculate French to Gilles, the maître d', and Gilles instructing a wine waiter to bring Mrs. Tyrrell "the usual." The restaurant was full of the same kind of people who had been in the Shelbourne, and I quickly discovered why: the prices were absurdly high, but the food was very straightforward: onion soup and egg mayonnaise, pork belly and Toulouse sausages, steak frîtes; none of your two-scallops-on-a-huge-white-plate nonsense. Thus Irish people could indulge their aspirational need to get all fancy and French, and sate their ferocious desire to spend as much money as possible, while getting a huge amount of meat inside them.
Jackie waved a hand at me.
"I'll order, unless you have some particular preference." She said preference in the sense of "disease."
"Go ahead," I said.
The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, "Just pour," at the wine waiter.
I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn't had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.
"You're very tall for a writer," she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.
"How far are you into your book?" she said.
"I'm nearly finished," I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn't have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you were finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn't a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.
"Well in that case, it's too late for us to tell you anything, isn't it? You must know it all by now."
"Well, actually, it's at this stage-when I think I know it all-that's when meeting the experts is really useful. Now I know what questions to ask."
Jackie drank half a glass of Sancerre in one and stared at me deadpan.
"Ask me then. The questions. Now you know it all. Go on."
A hush fell around the table, and I could see Seán Proby and Miranda Hart looking excited, as if Jackie Tyrrell were the Queen and she'd just put me on the spot.
"Do you breed, Jackie?" I said.
"Not as a rule, but with you, I'd make an exception," she said, and blew me a kiss. She sat back and poked Seán Proby in the ribs, and he dutifully exploded with laughter again. I looked at Miranda Hart, who leant in and said quickly and quietly, "They were at Gowran Park, they've been going since lunchtime."
The starters came, and we ate in silence. Jackie put her face down and shoveled onion soup and bread into it. At length she resurfaced, flush-cheeked and panting. Little beads of sweat dotted her mysteriously unlined brow, and frosted the tiny soft hairs above her upper lip.
"I don't breed anymore," she announced. "I used to look after that side of things for Frank. The Tyrrellscourt Stud. Still going strong. I've a good eye for a horse still, though. I'll go on a trip with him, when he's buying. As long as he's buying."
"No one is allowed to call F. X. Tyrrell Frank except Jackie," said Seán Proby, the first coherent utterance he had made in my hearing.
"Well, no one does, at any rate, "Jackie said. "Maybe no one wants to."
"How was Gowran today?" Miranda said to Proby.
"Not bad," Proby said. "Nothing like a small country meeting. Jack was working, of course; I was merely Mrs. Tyrrell's lunch companion. But we did all right."
"The bookies always do," snapped Jackie.
"The Tyrrell horses underperformed nicely," Miranda said.
Jackie smiled thinly at this.
"Leopardstown's the main event," she said. "The ground was too firm today anyway."
"Did Jack of Hearts place?" I said.
"Won the first by four lengths at six to one. Held up well," Proby said.
"Why the interest?" Jackie said. I had the impression she was playing with me.
"It just caught my eye."
"I thought it might be because of its owner. You know who owns it, of course."
"Do I?"
"I think you do, Edward Loy. After all, when you're not writing books about horse racing in Ireland, which I would say is all of the time, you hire yourself out as a private detective. And a while back you had a hand in putting away Podge Halligan, the drug dealer, also the brother of George Halligan, who owns Jack of Hearts. Miranda, why did you think it necessary to fabricate an absurd identity for Mr. Loy? A writer, of all things. Everyone knows writers are all badly dressed overweight cantankerous faux-humble alcoholics with a chip on each shoulder and a grudge against the world. And that's just the women."
Miranda looked like a schoolgirl hauled before the head mistress; she stared at her plate in silence, her face burning.
"It was my idea," I said.
"And gallant too. Tall and gallant. We don't see many of you round here anymore. You're not gay, are you?"
Seán Proby shook his head.
"Absolutely not," he said.
"Seán's my gaydar when it comes to men. Are you working, Ed Loy?"
"He's looking for Patrick," Miranda said, her voice thick with emotion. She choked back what might have been a sob, then muttered an apology and fled to the loo. The waiter came and took our plates. I watched Jackie Tyrrell closely, but her expression was blank; she gave nothing away. When the table had been cleared, and Seán Proby had gone outside for a smoke, she smiled keenly at me.
"You know about Patrick Hutton and the Halligans?" she said.
I shook my head.
"Patrick and Leo-" she began, and then stopped as cutlery arrived for the main course. She repeated the names when the waiter had gone, her eyes dancing, then stopped again as Miranda came back to the table, eye makeup freshly and thickly applied.
"I'll tell him about that myself, Jackie, if it's all right with you," Miranda said, quite sharply to my ears.
"But of course, my darling, of course," Jackie said, all charm.
"He was my husband, and I think I'm best placed to know what's important and what's just rumor and innuendo, don't you?"
Jackie Tyrrell gave Miranda Hart what looked to me to be a very fond, warm smile, and leant across and touched her hand.
"I do," she said softly. "And you are. Nobody but you."
Miranda blushed again, and nodded; in removing her hand from Jackie's, she managed to upset a full glass of white wine over both of us; by the time we had that cleared up, the main courses had arrived. I ate steak frîtes with béarnaise sauce, washed down with two slow glasses of red. I could drink a lot, and generally did, but I had no head for wine; in any case, I wanted to study these people at the periphery of the Tyrrell family closely: there was history between them, and I'd need my wits about me to pick up on it.
As we ate, Seán Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary's Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn't racing at all, he sniffed.
Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt's premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O'Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.
She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school's worth.
"No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their '06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding's an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing's wasted on them."
Miranda beamed at her satirically.
"There speaks Jackie Tyrrell, who went to finishing school in Geneva. Dressmaking and deportment and Italian and place setting and flower arrangement."
"Quite right too. Made a real woman of her," Seán Proby said.
"Miranda doesn't agree. About the girls," Jackie said, seemingly reveling in any exchange that approached the condition of a row.
Miranda shrugged wearily: this was evidently something they rehearsed on a regular basis.
"Girls were always interested in hair and makeup and clothes. They just didn't have the money to do anything about it back in our day. Now they do."
"Too much money," Jackie said severely. "Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?"
"I'd always be in favor of wealth redistribution," I said. "The problem is, how to dole it out, and who decides?"
"I decide," Jackie said, and then, straight-faced: "Ed, do you think teenage girls should be taught to ride?"
Miranda and Proby burst out laughing at this, and Jackie Tyrrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honor at her own table. Champagne arrived, and we drank a toast to the riding school (in which Seán Proby had some kind of interest) against her protests, and to Christmas. Then Jackie, unprovoked and with no challenger, launched into a long and involved defense of the Irish Revenue Inspectors' tax exemption for the bloodstock industry, inviting my support on the grounds that, as a creative writer, I benefited from a similar dispensation. I tried to remind her that I wasn't, in fact, a writer, but she and Proby were drinking Calvados by now, impervious to any music but their own. Occasionally she would scribble something on a napkin, briefing herself for her rhetorical assault against illusory foes. It was after ten; it felt much later. I offered Miranda a lift home. She was on her feet before I'd finished speaking.
I offered Jackie Tyrrell some money for the dinner, but she forced it back into my hand and pulled me down until we were eye to eye. Her face was fixed in a comedy leer; her breath was a yeasty cloud of alcohol; I thought she was going to kiss me, and didn't see what I could do if she did, but when I looked her in the eye, she fixed me with an unexpectedly clear gaze.
"Call me. We need to talk," she said quietly, urgently, and then pushed me from her and yelled with laughter as if she'd propositioned me. I waved good-bye to Proby from a distance, not wanting to risk giving him my hand again for fear I'd never get it back.
"See you racing!" he bellowed twice as we were leaving.
When we got out into the night, the rain was falling softly. I opened my coat and turned to Miranda Hart to see if she needed it. She snaked her arms inside it and around my neck and pulled my mouth down onto hers and kissed me; she smelled of oranges and salt; when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the shimmer of the streetlights in the rain. I thought for a second they were stars.
"What happened to your gum?" I said.
Her tongue snaked quickly out of her mouth with a little wad of chewing gum on its tip, then vanished again, to be replaced by a smile.
"Come home with me," she said. "And I'll show you how I did it."
She reached up to my mouth and wiped it with her hand. It came away red with her lipstick, and she waved it in front of me and grinned.
As we walked down Merrion Street to my car, amid weaving groups of happy and belligerent and bedraggled drunks, shiny and sodden in the damp night, I straightened the bills Jackie Tyrrell had crushed into my hand and put them in my wallet. Among them, I found her business card. On one side was printed: The Jackie Tyrrell Riding Academy for Girls, Tibradden Road, along with her phone numbers. On the back, in red ink, she had printed:
PATRICK AND LEO RODE TOGETHER
I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her arm and made to leave. She grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed me again.
"I can't stay," I said.
"I don't want you to stay all night," she said. "Just long enough."
She held on to me with one hand while she worked the key in the lock. It occurred to me that if I was going to stop sleeping with clients, or with women implicated on some level in the cases I worked, now would be the time to start. But I didn't. What's more, I didn't want to. Miranda Hart dragged me into the darkened living room and pushed me onto the couch and fell on top of me; she was wild and ardent at first; then, after a while, there were tears in her eyes, and she said,
"Maybe this is not such a good idea," and I said,
"Now she tells me," struggling to get the words out, and then,
"Do you want to stop?" and she said,
"Fuck no, do you?" and I said,
"No I don't," and she said,
"Come on then. Come on, come on."
It wasn't how I thought it would be, at once gentler and more passionate; afterward, she cried a little. When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I said, "Gin," and she said, "Good idea." I'd be late for Dave Donnelly, but I couldn't leave, not just yet. What's more, I didn't want to. We sat in the living room, both on the sofa, half dressed, the light from the kitchen bleeding into the dark, reflecting off the glass doors at the other end that gave onto a small garden. I could see her chewing, and shook my head in wonder. Where did she keep it? It was a gift that passed all understanding.
"Sorry about that," she said.
"Sorry about what?" I said.
"You know. The make-up-your-fucking-mind, the tears, the all-round crapness. Being messy. Behaving like a girl. I thought I could just…"
I took her hand and held it.
"We all think we can just…and sometimes we can, and sometimes it doesn't work out that way."
"Just the day, you know? You coming around asking about Patrick…the very day he disappeared. How weird is that?"
"Maybe Father Tyrrell planned it that way."
Something close to a shudder rippled through her body.
"You were going to tell me. What is it about Vincent Tyrrell that frightens you so?"
She took a gulp of her gin, pulled herself into a corner of the couch, and brought her knees up to her chin.
"He came around here that day. Ten years ago. It wasn't a Sunday, it was the middle of the week. Everything was a bit chaotic here, after the whole By Your Leave thing. A lot of drinking, a lot of…well, I wasn't the most…I could have been a lot more sympathetic to Patrick, put it that way."
"You thought he'd made a mess of the situation."
"I thought he'd been unprofessional. I mean, the rules of the game: jockeys do what they're told. And maybe sometimes you'll stretch that, you'll leave it a bit later than you've been told, you'll take an earlier lead, but it's all forgiven if you win. But what Patrick did, to make such a song and dance about stopping a horse, it was really stupid. I mean, what was the point? Everyone knows what racing is like. And it wasn't as if it changed anything."
"Didn't he ever try to explain himself? To you, at least?"
"No."
"Miranda, I can't help you if you're keeping something back."
"I'm not. I swear to God. Look, it wasn't as if we had a big discussion, we didn't work like that. I didn't know I wasn't going to see him again."
"Was he going to find it hard to get another trainer to take him on?"
"I was worried he might. But I was wrong; he'd been riding well that year, and once the hue and cry had died down, he'd have got another job easily. I was…I was horrible to him, really, put him through a whole guilt trip. I suppose I thought…you know, that Tyrrellscourt has such a reputation, it's been number one for so long, I thought he'd been at the very top and thrown it all away. And what were we, twenty-three or something? It was ridiculous, we were just starting out. And the last time I saw him…"
Her voice faltered and she began to tear up again.
"The last time I saw him was in the morning, I'd made him sleep in the spare room. He'd brought me up a cup of tea, and begged me to talk to him, to forgive him. He said he'd make it all right. I remember, I was lying on my side away from him, and he sounded so sad…so desperate…"
"Can you remember anything he said?"
Miranda took another long drink of gin, this time tipping the glass too far up and spilling it down both sides of her chin.
"Fuck it!" she said. "Don't laugh at me!"
"You have to be the clumsiest person I've ever met," I said.
"Patrick used to say that too. He said I'd never make it as a jockey, my body'd never cope with the injuries, I got bruises enough walking around a room."
She drained her gin and wiped her mouth and passed her glass to me. Her lipstick was smeared all over her mouth like some crazy lady from an old black-and-white movie, Joan Crawford with the sirens howling, and I laughed again, and she glared at me, and I pulled her toward me and put my arms around her, and she punched me a couple of times in the chest and then put her head on my shoulder.
"I was such a cow to him."
"You didn't know you were never going to see him again," I said. We sat for a while like that, as if we'd known each other forever, until I began to wonder whether it was Miranda Hart I was embracing, or the ghost of my ex-wife. Maybe Miranda felt the chill; she leapt up and sat by the fire, where the embers were smoldering, and tried to poke and then to blow them back into life. There was red in the turf and she coaxed it into flame and put another couple of sods on top. When she turned around, the flames danced in the silver of her dress, and her dark eyes flashed red and I found that I couldn't breathe.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said. I nodded.
"Someone who hurt you very badly. Someone I remind you of, someone who maybe looks a little like me."
I nodded again, dumbstruck.
"And now, at last, you're beginning to get over her. That's all right," she said, smiling. "I wanted you too." Then her mouth set hard.
"Now, I think you'd better ask your questions, and go."
I hadn't touched my gin, and found I needed it badly. I felt like I'd been slapped, and for no good reason, and I didn't like it. Miranda Hart was the kind of woman who could sense your weakest spot and reach straight for it. And she could see I wanted something more than what she had given.
"Jackie Tyrrell told me Patrick and Leo Halligan rode together. What did she mean by that?"
"What do you think she meant?"
"That they were both jockeys who came up together at Tyrrellscourt. That they were lovers. What's the truth?"
"Leo didn't have the talent, or the temperament, to be a jockey. Because he was a fucking lunatic, and not in a good way. But I'm sure you know that, if you know his brothers. He was at a reform school near the stables. St. Jude's. So was Patrick. F.X. made a point of taking a couple of lads from there once they'd done their time, as apprentices. They were set to work in the yard; they both graduated to working the horses in the mornings. They'd be given pieces of work. Patrick took to it; Leo didn't. Leo was too smart. In every sense: too quick, too cunning, so sharp he'd cut himself."
"Were you there at the same time?"
Miranda nodded.
"I grew up in the village, a couple of miles downriver. I was the daughter of the local publican. The Tyrrellscourt Inn. Adopted, they never made any secret of that. They tried to make a lady out of me, too, but I was up at the stables any chance I got. My mother died when I was twelve, and they thought sending me to an all-girls' boarding school in England would give me a female influence, and encourage me to show willing. Except the school was in Cheltenham. It just meant I got to the Festival every year of my teens. Finally Jackie made a deal with my father: as long as I finished school, I could come and work at the yard. They didn't say I had to pass my A Levels though, and I didn't."
"Jackie made a deal with your father? Why did she do that?"
"I guess she always looked out for me. She picked me up more than once when I fell. And her and F. X. Tyrrell couldn't have kids-or didn't, I don't know, same difference. I suppose she stood as a kind of mother to me, though it didn't seem that way back then. More like a big sister. We'd go on the tear together, all that. She was a bit trapped down there in Tyrrellscourt, working up the nerve to get out."
"And were Patrick and Leo lovers?"
She smiled, her eyes glittering, as if to say: Some people might think that an insult, but I'm not one of them. I knew then that I could fall in love with Miranda Hart, if I wasn't careful. And I wasn't, as a rule.
"Were they? I don't know. The school had a reputation that way. And there's a bit of it in every stable. Like a jail, the hours are so long, you've no money, you're confined to camp most of the time, and you don't get enough to eat. All these young boys are dieting all the time, and they're at the horniest time of their lives, and dieting, extreme dieting, can make you absolutely obsessed with sex. It always does me. So. Can't say I'd blame them."
"Did it have any effect on your marriage? I mean, do you think he was gay?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. He didn't shy away from his…marital duties, as they used to say. But maybe, in another life…put it this way, what age are you, forty, forty-two?"
"Something like that."
"I bet you had a girlfriend when you were twenty-two, twenty-three, you drank a lot together, or got high, whatever, you laughed and cried, you said you loved each other, you fucked a lot, but even at the time, you knew it probably wasn't forever. Maybe that's the way it was with Patrick and me. We should never have got married, I don't know why we did: to get away from my family, and his lack of one. Maybe that's why. We were so young. And now…you know, we could run into each other on the street, and we probably wouldn't know what to say. So for all I know, he could be anything…"
She grimaced then, and waved a hand in the air, as if conceding that she had merely given one version of many, that there was probably rather more to her marriage than youthful folly, certainly more than she was willing to tell me. She turned her dark head and looked into the fire. A glow of red flickered through her hair, which she suddenly shook forward and then swept back; the shadows and light bounced off the glass doors and played around the room.
"Get us another drink, would you Ed?"
I went through to the kitchen and fixed a gin; we'd been drinking it with lemon juice, which she had made up fresh and leavened with sugar syrup and orange juice. When I brought her the drink, her dismay that I hadn't made myself one was palpable.
"Not thirsty anymore?"
"I can't stay. I told you that."
She nodded, and turned her gaze back to the fire.
"Do you have a photograph of Patrick?"
She didn't move.
"Miranda, you said earlier you wanted me to find him. If you still mean it-"
She got to her feet and left the room. I looked around at the pictures on the walls, but they were all action or parade-ring photographs of Hutton in full livery; he looked like a jockey, all right, but so did all the others. When Miranda came back with a photo, I glanced quickly at it, long enough to see it was a full face shot, not so long that I began to compare it to the man I had found dead and mutilated on a dump earlier that day. I didn't want to be the bearer of that bad news, not yet.
"Can you remember the name of the private detective you hired to find Patrick?"
"Don…something. Kelly? Kennelly? I can find out."
"Let me know as soon as you do. Last thing. You said Vincent Tyrrell came to see you the day Patrick disappeared. What happened?"
"He told me Patrick had made a confession. To him, as a priest, the sacrament. And he couldn't, of course, disclose anything he had said. But he was very…it was as if he knew something about me, something I had done, or something about the way I lived…and that whatever it was, I should be ashamed of myself. All his insinuations…like I was, I don't know what, a whore, worse than a whore, some kind of…corrupter…I couldn't really follow it back then. I was angry, I threw him out, what right did he have-but I must have run it through in my head a thousand times since. That whatever had happened to Patrick, the reason he disappeared, it was all my fault, and it was somehow up to me to work out why."
"And have you?"
Miranda shook her head, aiming for a laugh that came off as a muted wail. She picked up her drink from the mantelpiece. I could hear the ice clinking, her hand was shaking so much.
"There was something about Father Tyrrell…the scorn for me, the contempt in his eyes…it was so belittling. As if I had…yes, he used the word betrayal… as if I had betrayed Patrick somehow. But he wouldn't say how."
She took a long, steady swallow of gin. Her use of it seemed medical, sacramental.
"The other thing was, he said something like, 'Well, he's better off now,' or 'It's probably for the best.' I thought he was just trying to placate me, because I was screaming at him, you know? I was mad at Patrick anyway, and now he'd made it even worse, setting this creepy fucking priest on me. I mean, confession? Who goes to fucking confession anymore? Old ladies. Children. Nuns. All the people who don't need to, who have no sins worthy of the name. So I really lost it with him. And I chose to remember it as, you know, well, he tried to bully me but I let him have it. And he scuttled off mouthing platitudes, you know, not to worry, all will be well. But that wasn't what happened. He knew Patrick wasn't coming back. And he was basically saying, he's well shot of you."
She drank again, emptying her glass. My phone announced the arrival of a text message: it was from Dave Donnelly, asking me where I was. I got my coat, and held Miranda Hart close, and headed for the door. Miranda stopped me in the hall.
"I did love Patrick," she said. "I wouldn't want you to think…"
"I don't," I said. She was shaking, face flushed red. I went to hold her, but she put up her hands and shook her head.
"No. Just, so you don't think…I may not have wanted to go back over any of this again, but…don't think I didn't love that man. Don't ever think that."
There were tears in her eyes. I nodded, and waited for the rest.
"There's one last thing," she said. "That morning-ten years ago today-when Patrick was leaving-when I wouldn't listen to him, or look at him-the thing he kept saying was, he wouldn't be a Judas. That was the last thing I heard Patrick say.
"'I won't play the fucking Judas for anyone.'"
The rain had turned to sleet by the time I made it back to Quarry Fields: a tricky drive in a '65 Volvo with no windshield wipers. Dave Donnelly's unmarked blue Toyota Avensis was parked outside my house, and Dave was sitting on the edge of the brown leather couch in my living room, drinking a cup of tea.
"Make yourself at home," I said.
"I'd need a Hoover."
"You're welcome."
"Or what is it these days, a Dyson?"
"It's in the press under the stairs."
I got myself a can of Guinness from the kitchen and a glass and joined him.
"How'd you get in?"
"You gave me a key."
"Why did I give a cop a key to my house?"
"The night we went out. When I got transferred to the Bureau. Remember?"
"We had a few drinks?"
"We had all the drinks. Dublin town ran out of drinks. And you said you had the last of the drinks back here."
"For some reason, it doesn't stand out in my mind."
"And I fell asleep on the sofa. Great sofa, mind."
"You can sleep on it without orthopedic consequences."
"You can what?"
"Without fucking your back up."
"This is not the sofa I have at home. This is why my back is fucked up."
"So there you were, asleep."
"And you were off first thing. I don't know, an early house. A woman. A client, even. And you gave me the key to lock up after."
"Case closed. Glad we got to the bottom of that one."
Dave half laughed, then looked at the floor, his low forehead furrowed in a scowl. He was a big-boned thickset crop-headed man who had lost two stone in weight quite suddenly, and it made him look ill. He had looked ill in a different way before, what with the high color and the bad temper and the bursting out of his ill-assembled, badly fitting suits and anoraks, like he was about to explode with exasperation and righteous anger at any moment, but it was a reassuring kind of ill. Now he looked ill as if he had a disease. But he didn't have a disease, he had a new job that seemed to be absorbing every ounce of energy he had, and then some.
Dave had been detective sergeant with the Seafield Garda for twenty years; a few months after he was promoted to inspector, the Howard case broke, and a web of murder, child abuse, sex trafficking and drug smuggling was uncovered, with DI Donnelly conveniently placed at the center of it all. That's when the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation came calling. But it wasn't plain sailing at the Bureau: the Howard case had been front-page news for days, and Dave had attracted a swath of publicity which Garda Headquarters had encouraged (in part to deflect the credit away from me, a strategy that suited me just fine); his high-profile transfer (SUPERCOP TO SHAKE UP BUREAU) had been met with perhaps understandable resentment from his new colleagues, most especially Myles Geraghty, a pugnacious blockhead with whom we'd both had our tussles in the past.
I got a bottle of Jameson and two glasses and made them up two-thirds to a third water and gave one to Dave and he drank it down as if it was a cup of milk.
"What's on your mind, Dave? You wanted to talk about the bodies?"
"Yeah," he said, his mouth set in a grimace. "Talk is about all I can do with them."
"What's up?"
"Myles Geraghty is up. Up his own hole. He wants me out, and he's going to freeze me out until I get out. I was first to the scene in Roundwood yesterday, because the desk sergeant there called me, because he knows me, and he was having trouble getting through to the Bureau, some problem with the phones in Harcourt Square, fucking amateur hour. I called Geraghty on his mobile, left a message. Rounded up some of the other lads. When he finally gets there, he bollocks me out in front of them all for trying to run the show myself, for being, yes indeed, a 'glory boy.' What is it about this fucking country? The young fellas I train at football, I've one good striker, doesn't score from every chance, but he's averaging two goals a game, unbelievable, but you want to hear the fucking cloggers on his own team, the team he's winning games for, lads who can barely kick a ball let alone pass it, they're all glory boy this and glory boy that, same as when we grew up. No lads, here's what it is: he's good at football and you're shite. Glory boy. Fuck sake."
I poured Dave another drink and passed it to him; he raised it to his lips, then shook his head and set it down.
"Ah no way, Ed, the first was enough."
"So what happened, are you working the case?"
"Just about. I'm coordinating the incident room in Bray.'"
"DI Donnelly speaking, can I help you?"
"Fuck off."
Dave subsided again, not even angry this time, just deflated. In a quiet, introspective voice I didn't know he possessed, he said, "I can't go on like this, Ed. I'm not sleeping. There are calls on my mobile at all hours. When I answer, I can hear someone breathing on the other end. Thought it was someone I sent down, I changed the number, same story again. Geraghty's behind it, I know he is. And at work one morning, there was a loaded gun on my desk with a Post-it stuck to it reading 'Can't Cope, Supercop? Give it your best shot.' Nobody knew anything, of course; everyone was shocked. But I could see people smirking, laughing behind their hands, Geraghty winking. I can't handle it, Ed."
Dave let his head sink into his hands. I looked at him in astonishment and dismay: Dave had always been so solid, so captain-of-the-school dependable, I guess I'd taken his strength for granted. It was like watching a cardboard cutout become real before my eyes. I wasn't sure I needed another real person in my life, but then, I had been surprised when he'd chosen me to celebrate his transfer with. Carmel had often told me he didn't have many friends, but I'd never really thought of myself as one, let alone his closest.
"Maybe I should just walk. I could take the pension, get out early, go into business with Carmel 's brother. He's got a car showroom in Goatstown. Awful gobshite, but he's coining it there."
"What does Carmel think?"
"About going in with her brother? She'd like the extra change. But she knows what being a cop means to me."
"No, I meant the phone calls. The weight loss. The stress."
Dave shook his head.
"We don't really work on that level," he said. "I've always been…I don't bring the job home, you know? Because Carmel doesn't want to know."
"I'm sure she'd be sympathetic-"
"No. Our deal is, she has a stressful job raising four kids. She doesn't need me coming home crying like a baby. If I want to change jobs, fine, so long as the money's still coming in. But to talk to her the way I've talked to you…she'd consider it weak."
"Sounds like the 1950s round your house, Dave."
He shrugged, and rolled his neck, and flexed his still-massive arms.
"It's how we started out. I was the one in charge, the one to make things safe, the one she could rely on. I think how you start out…it colors how you proceed, you know?"
"You sure she still feels the same way?"
"I still feel the same way. End of story. Don't ask me about Carmel, all right?"
"All right."
Dave lifted his head and, in what seemed like a determined effort, cracked a smile.
"Fuck sake, look at us, like a pair of fucking 'oul ones, commiserating. Come on to fuck. It's fine, everything's just grand. Come on."
Dave got up and drank the second whiskey and clapped me on the shoulder. It hurt.
"Where are we going?"
"To see dead people."
We drove south on the N11 as far as Loughlinstown and came off at the exit for St. Colmcille's Hospital. The hospital mortuary is at the far end, past A &E and the main entrance. Dave asked me to bring a hat and a scarf; the only hat I had was a black fedora Tommy Owens found in a secondhand store, which he insisted I have because it made me "look like a proper detective." It didn't, it made me look like a sinister old-style priest, a detail Dave lit upon when we parked the car. He found a set of rosary beads in the glove compartment, and gave them to me, along with the black leatherette-bound Toyota manual.
"You're a priest, Ed," he said.
"Thank you, Dave," I said.
The door was opened by a red-eyed, unshaven hospital porter who didn't speak English; he was joined by a young uniformed Guard who recognized Dave immediately. Dave took the Guard aside and chatted briefly to him. I held the rosary over the book and kept my eyes down.
Dave came back and said, "This way, Father."
The Guard nodded respectfully as I entered, and I acknowledged him briefly with a low priestly half wave, half blessing and a rattle of beads. We passed through a carpeted reception area with a screened-off corner for grieving families to identify their next of kin. The porter led us through double doors to a cold room with two bodies on hospital gurneys. Each body was covered with a white cloth. There was another room ahead where the autopsies were conducted, and a refrigeration room to one side. A life-size wood-and-plaster crucifix loomed above us on the wall. The porter nodded and withdrew behind the double doors.
"What are we doing here, Dave?" I said.
"The state pathologist has done the preliminary examinations at the scene. The second body meant it was too late to start the autopsies tonight. They'll begin at eight in the morning. They brought them here because they finished late, they're starting early, and it was nearer than the city morgue."
"Okay. What are we doing here?"
Dave Donnelly's mouth was set; his eyes were burning and his hands began to shake.
"The first body," he said. "The one Geraghty insisted on telling the press bore all the hallmarks of a gangland killing."
I nodded.
"I ID'd him straight off-not by the contents of his wallet, by his face. He was Don Kennedy. He was my sergeant when I was starting out, down Kildare way, twenty-five years ago. He was like a father to me. Stood godfather to Paul, my second eldest. He got out in '99 or so, did a bit of private work, missing persons, insurance claims, that sort of stuff. I didn't see much of him anymore. Godparents don't seem to matter so much when your kids get older. But he never forgot a birthday. Look at him. He was strangled. And someone cut his tongue out, Ed. What do you think of that?"
What did I think? I thought Don Kennedy was the private detective Miranda Hart had hired two years ago to find Patrick Hutton.
"Because I know your body had his tongue cut out too, Ed. The Bureau may be trying to edge me out, but the incident room is in Bray station, and I have a lot of friends there. Your man was strangled and he had his tongue cut out too. What do you think? Coincidence?"
"There's no such thing, Dave. You know that."
"And so do you."
He took the sheet partly from one of the bodies to reveal a large male head with an unruly thatch of gray hair. The strangulation marks around the neck were similar to those on what Dave had called "my body." Dave lifted the sheet now on the blond gentleman farmer with the Church's shoes I'd found upended in a dump. I looked at the face, wondered how closely I wanted to work with Dave and decided I needed him at least as much as he needed me.
I took the photograph Miranda Hart had given me from my coat pocket and showed it to him. The hair was blond, whether dyed or not I couldn't say, but the face looked very similar: same lined skin, same sunken cheeks, same tiny point of chin. I took a latex glove from my jacket and fitted it over one hand and pointed to the vivid blue of Patrick Hutton's eyes in the photo. Dave nodded. With index and middle fingers, I tugged the corpse's eyes open. They were far from vivid, but they were blue. We weren't in a position to be definitive, but as far as we could tell, the dead man was Patrick Hutton, missing for ten years, dead for forty-eight hours. Without thinking, I turned to the crucifix on the wall and blessed myself. When I looked back, I saw Dave doing the same. I don't know if Dave was thinking about the Four Last Things. I couldn't tell you if I was either. Maybe we were just two spooked Paddies in the house of the dead. But we both had faith in this much: after violent death, there must come judgment.
Dave didn't say a word on the drive back. The sleet had stopped, and when we got out of the car in Quarry Fields, the air was fresh and crisp, and a star-flecked fissure had cleft the sky. The ground was snapping underfoot as we walked up the drive.
I checked my phone. Tommy had sent me a text message, all in capitals: WATCH OUT! LEO'S AFTER YOU! I figured having a high-ranking Garda detective as my guest was a reasonable precaution against anything Leo Halligan might do.
I brewed a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. Dave started by saying that Aidan Coyne, the Guard who'd been on duty at the mortuary, had worked with him at Seafield, that he was a good lad and that he wouldn't breathe a word to anyone about our visit. It was known in Bray station that Dave had served with Don Kennedy, and nobody was very happy about how Dave had been sidelined in the investigation. And there was always resentment when the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation started throwing their weight around with the local force, especially if Myles Geraghty had anything to do with it. Dave had told Aidan a version of the truth: that he wanted to say a few quiet prayers for a fallen comrade.
When the coffee was ready I poured two mugs. I had put the heat on, but Dave was shivering, and he asked if he could have some Jameson in his. That struck me as a good idea, so I had some in mine too. We drank for a while in silence. I knew he was waiting for me to spill all I knew. I was happy enough that we had made a deal. We just needed to check the small print before we took it any further.
"Dave, I'm not looking for a partner here. I want to be free to do things the way I would do them. And if that means withholding information, or taking a risk by following a hunch-"
"Or riding the arse off one of the chief suspects, or all of them; yeah, I know how you work, Ed."
Dave guffawed in what struck me as a rather forced manner, and I pretended to, hoping my laughter would spare my blushes, or his; I'd never heard him make that kind of remark before, and he didn't seem relaxed about having made it. I wondered briefly if Dave had been the one tailing me tonight. Not that Miranda Hart was a suspect. I didn't even know what the case was yet-another reason I didn't want anyone looking over my shoulder.
"Don't worry-you won't have to answer to me. I'll feed you whatever you need, and you can go your own way."
"If I didn't trust you, Dave, I'd think I was being set up. You're not setting me up, are you?"
"Ed, this fucker Geraghty is a bad cop. He's a rotten cop. I don't want to tell you what I know about him, but let's just say anything that can publicly embarrass him, any way I can trip the cunt up, anything to help push him out the door and I'll be happy."
"I don't get it, Dave. What's in it for you? I mean, say we get to the killer, or killers, before the Garda investigation does. We've still got to hand it over. I can't arrest murderers myself. And no one's going to give you credit for conducting some kind of maverick case. Quite the opposite."
"Well, let's say that's my lookout, and leave it at that," Dave said bluntly, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. He laid a spiral bound reporter's pad on the table and looked at me expectantly.
A cat or a fox set the security light on in the back. I stared out at the two bare apple trees in the center of the garden, male and female, their branches nearly touching and never quite. I wondered briefly about Dave and Carmel, then as quickly put them from my mind: they had been rock solid since school, one of those partnerships where you could never see the join-however much Dave tried to portray the marriage as if it were something from the Dark Ages. Carmel was forever asking me around to the house, but the truth was, the warmth and energy and happiness they had built there always left me feeling desolate and bereft. No, those trees were a gloss first off on my parents' ill-fated match, and latterly on the sorry chronicle of my own romantic history.
I didn't tell Dave that Vincent Tyrrell had hired me. But I went through most everything else: the likelihood that Don Kennedy was the PI Miranda Hart had hired at the insurance company's behest to find Patrick Hutton; the fact that Hutton and Leo Halligan had been apprentices together at Tyrrellscourt after their joint stint at St. Jude's reform school (Dave lifted his head from the pad for that one, his eyes wide, especially when he heard that Leo was fresh out of jail); the death of the racehorse By Your Leave; the consequent rift between Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell and its significance in Hutton's disappearance; Hutton's emotional declaration that he wouldn't play the Judas for anyone; the bizarre and formidable force that was Jackie Tyrrell and her insinuation, barely countered by Miranda Hart, that Halligan and Hutton had a sexual relationship; the omega and crucifix tattoos on Patrick Hutton's forearm.
Dave stared at his pad in silence when I had finished. He looked up and shook his head, smiling at first. Then the smile faded from his broad face, and his mouth set, and his eyes hardened and flickered like jewels, and I had a reminder of what it felt like to sit across from him in an interrogation room. It didn't feel very comfortable.
"I went to the scene myself, Ed. I knew Geraghty wouldn't like that, so I didn't tell him. But I went there anyway, and I did what I guess you probably did: I gave the body a quick once-over and then I called it in to Bray station, along with the tip-off about Vinnie Butler. Bad enough a private cop risking the contamination of a crime scene, but a real cop? Why would he do that?"
"I don't know, Dave. Why did he do that?"
"Because he knew that the private cop wasn't really to be trusted. He knew that if the private cop found something really juicy, he'd keep it to himself. And he wanted to find out just what it was the private cop was holding back."
"And did he?"
"There had been a piece of paper-a note, I'd say-in the victim's left trouser pocket. There were still shreds of paper adhering to the pocket fibers, which suggests that it had been freshly removed; there were mild ink stains on the pocket fabric, from which, as with the paper shreds, we might infer that the note had been through the wash with the trousers."
"Do you do this for a living?"
"What was written on the note?"
"The mobile phone number for a bookie who had a pitch at Gowran Park racecourse today."
"Do you know which bookie that was?"
"Not yet. But I still have the number."
"Anything else you want to tell me?"
"I didn't want to tell you that."
"If I told Geraghty you'd interfered with the body-worse, you'd stolen evidence-what do you think he'd do?"
"I have an idea what he'd do with me. What would he do with you?"
"He'd probably blame me for knowing you."
"There you are. Not to mention what he'd do if he was told you had given the scene a surreptitious one-two first."
And there we were. He had me, but I had him. MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, they used to call it when it came to nuclear missiles. Safe as houses, unless one of us actually went mad. Dave wasn't looking completely sane to me. He topped his coffee up with Jameson, laughing gently and nodding in private agreement with himself. Then he clapped his hands and almost winked.
"So what did you make of this Miranda Hart then Ed? Is she a looker, is she?"
It suddenly occurred to me that Dave might have formed as idealized a picture of my single life as I possibly had of his married one. I threw him a look I was more used to getting from him. The look said: Cop yourself on, you tool. It landed right between his eyes and spread crimson across his face.
"All right," I said. "Each man had his tongue cut out. Do we have any other points of comparison?"
"One: they were connected in life, in that Kennedy tried to find Hutton. Must have done a certain amount of digging. Two: they were both killed and mutilated elsewhere, and then cleaned up and deposited where they lay in the past couple of days. Three: they were killed in exactly the same way, strangled by hand and/ or ligature. Four: they were mutilated in the same way, tongue cut out. Five: they each had a small leather bag or purse full of coins."
"Did Kennedy have any tattoos?" I said.
"Not in the obvious places. I didn't get time to search the whole body. Nothing else was found on him."
"What do you make of the tattoos on Hutton's forearm?" I said.
Dave shook his head. He had copied them in his notebook. He opened it to that page, and we studied them in silence for a moment.
†?
"Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet," I said. "From alpha to omega: from beginning to end."
"From life to death."
"And the crucifix represents death."
"And life everlasting."
"What do you make of it?"
"I don't know. A serial killer who's into symbols and whatdoyoucallit, tarot cards and all this? That's grand for American films, Ed. In real life, I'd say it's all my hole."
I almost laughed out loud. That sounded more like the Dave Donnelly I knew, a man who assumed everyone else needed knocking off his perch, and considered himself the man to do it. If he were a T-shirt, it would read: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? That could have accounted for some of the tension between him and Myles Geraghty: they were both cut from the same cloth. Apart from Dave's not being a complete and total prick.
"Still, when was the last time you came across a tongue cut out?" I said. "That's a lot of work, and a lot of mess."
"Not if the victim's dead first. No blood to speak of then."
"But you take my point? Two in the same day? And both strangled too?"
Dave nodded.
"It's not rock solid, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if the MO was used by two different killers. And what is there no such thing as?"
"And the fact that they were dumped within a mile or two of each other-does that not suggest the killer's trying to tell us something?"
"That's the other thing I've never got about those films and all: why the killer wants to tell the cops anything. I mean, if he's happy being a mad fucker who goes around killing people, why would he want the cops anywhere near him?"
"Because it vindicates him as a person. The artistry of his killing spree is mythologized among the community at large, thus validating his ego. He is the superman, the cops humans every whit as petty and puny as his victims."
Dave was giving me the "cop yourself on, you tool" look. I shrugged.
"Hey, this stuff isn't just in the movies. These fuckers are real, and they're out there."
"I know, and it usually goes back to something that happened in childhood. Mammy never bought me a bowwow, boo hoo hoo."
"You know who you sound like, Dave? The man who, after I'd just witnessed a murder-suicide, and been advised that counseling was available to me, told me that what I really needed was a good boot up the arse. Your friend and mine, Myles Geraghty."
Dave reacted as if I'd slapped him; he leapt to his feet and wagged a finger across the table at me, his lips quivering as he attempted to form words and failed, his face red and contorted with rage; then he stormed out of the room. When he came back in a few minutes later, he was shaking his head as if in amazement at the behavior of someone else entirely, our mutual friend with the short temper. He sat and made a show of looking through his notes.
"I'll tell you this much," Dave said. "Myles Geraghty will go a long way out of his way to avoid bringing this within a country mile of F. X. Tyrrell."
"Why so?"
"Are you kidding? The queue to be F.X.'s best friend in the tent at the Galway Races, you should see it. All the politicians and the big rich. This is the man whose horses beat the Queen's, for fuck's sake: this was one of Ireland 's heroes in the dark days when no one had an arse to his trousers: he stuffed the English every Cheltenham, an equestrian IRA man in a morning suit. No one will want Tyrrellscourt anywhere near this."
"And maybe they'll be right. We've got Leo Halligan connected to it, and he's got form in this area, doesn't he?"
"Leo's a bad lad all right. Do you remember him, Ed? He was in our school."
"I know, but he was never there, was he?"
"He was always on the hop all right."
"I remember he went away to reform school for stabbing Christine Doran."
"That was bad."
"He was funny though, wasn't he? He was a brilliant footballer."
"He was a good footballer. He was a brilliant boxer."
"Fly, wasn't he?"
"He went up to welter for a while, but he couldn't keep the weight on."
"It was weird, even though we were all scared of him, everyone kind of liked him, far as I can recall. I did at any rate," I said.
"I wouldn't say 'like.' He wasn't a fucking psycho like Podge, or a slick cunt like George, but yeah, he was…for a dangerous bollocks, he was kind of normal, wasn't he? How did he pull that off?"
"I think, because you didn't feel he was gonna take you out for looking at him."
"Yeah. Mind you, Podge would, and then he'd come after you for sorting Podge out."
"Speaking of which. Did you see the Volvo? The RIP?"
"Was that Leo? Of course, there was all this, when he got out, he was gonna get you for sending Podge down. I'd've thought it would be a relief to them to have him locked away, he was becoming a liability."
"It all comes down to blood with the Halligans."
Dave looked at his watch.
"Time I headed back to the station, see if we've had any calls."
"What's the story with Vinnie Butler?"
"He's a Butler," Dave said, as if that were explanation enough. When I shook my head, he expanded, covering pretty much the same territory Tommy Owens had in his voice mail, if in greater detail: the Butlers were a large extended family scattered around north Wicklow and the Dublin border, into all manner of burglary, extortion, fencing and low-level drug dealing. They also spent a great deal of time feuding with each other over a variety of perceived slights and betrayals, real and imagined, one branch of the family doorstepping another with machetes and shotguns and, most recently, a jar of sulfuric acid: Dave told me the young girl whose face the acid was flung in was fifteen and pregnant; she was burned so badly she lost an eye.
"Geraghty set a couple of his boys on him, but I don't think he was dumping anything more than refuse. State of the body for one thing; Vinnie Butler couldn't keep himself that clean: half an hour in the back of his Transit the corpse would have decomposed. Geraghty's probably pining for the days of the Branch and the Murder Squad, when they'd have fitted up a gouger like Vinnie for this no bother."
The National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had been formed from the ashes of the Garda Special Branch and the Murder Squad, elite outfits that, like many elite units within the Guards, had quickly become corrupt and unmanageable; they had been disbanded, and then after a decent interval, the NBCI was formed. Geraghty and many of his colleagues had been Branch or Squad men; now stewing with resentment, they were tipped into a Bureau they felt was beneath them but loftily consented to dominate. A lot of Dave's problems probably stemmed from the tension between the old elite and new officers keen to make a name for themselves.
At the doorway, Dave turned and looked me in the eye.
"All right, Ed?"
"All right, Dave. You?"
It was as if a shadow passed across his face, or rather, as if I'd been squinting in the sun's glare and was temporarily blinded when it passed behind a cloud: when I could see again, everything had changed. I'd never seen a grown man look so like an anxious, lonely child.
"We're having some people round tomorrow night, Ed. Christmas Eve. Will you come?"
I was worried Dave might cry if I said no.
There was a message on my phone from Jackie Tyrrell, very grave and businesslike and, if I hadn't known otherwise, perfectly sober, asking me to call her urgently, no matter how late. It was half one, which didn't strike me as especially late, particularly if you were an alcoholic, so I called.
"Ed Loy, about time."
She sounded irritable and impatient, as if it was half four on a Friday afternoon and she was trying to clear her desk for the weekend and I was an employee who knew well what a trial on her patience I had become.
"I want you to come up here at once. I've a few things you need to hear."
Her voice had dwindled to a shrill bark. I have the normal portion of resistance to being spoken to like that, plus an extra serving on the side. I said nothing. I could hear her sighing, and then the clink of ice in a moving glass. When she spoke again, it was in a more conciliatory tone, as if there was nothing done that couldn't be undone with some goodwill and understanding on both sides.
"All right, I've been seeing her obsessing about it all, I've probably entered the argument at a more heated level than was wise."
"What argument?"
"The whole…look, there is nothing to be gained by raking over the whole business with Patrick Hutton, believe me. It can only cause Miranda needless upset. It happened ten years ago, it's ancient history, Miranda desperately needs to get on with her life. Let the dead bury the dead."
"That's interesting. How do you know Patrick Hutton is dead?"
"I don't. I simply assume…if you vanish off the face of the earth like that, chances are you're dead. But for all I know, he could be on the Costa del Sol, or in Australia. As good as dead, one way or the other."
I heard the clink of ice in her glass again. I kept silent. She clearly wanted to talk; whether she had anything to tell me remained to be seen.
"Look, I don't want to talk on the phone. You'd better come up here. You can be trusted, of course."
The last without a glimmer of uncertainty. I could be trusted how? To lie to the cops? To keep rich people's secrets and carry their bags? To do what I was told, provided the price was right? No harm in letting Jackie Tyrrell believe I was corruptible. As long as she told me all she had to tell.
"Of course," I said.
She gave me directions, I shut up my house and stepped out into the night.
In the car, the first thing I noticed was the smell: French tobacco, Gauloises, or Gitanes, mixed with a lemony aftershave. It seemed to me that I had smelt that combination before. I could always have asked Leo Halligan, but since he held the point of a blade at the back of my neck, I decided now was neither the time nor the place. I looked in the rearview mirror. Leo Halligan, rail thin in a motorcycle jacket and black shirt with dark hair gelled into something not unlike a DA, his dark eyes glittering in a chalk-white face, silver sleeper earrings in both ears, cheekbones like polished knives, thin lips drawn in the mockery of a smile. Tommy had warned me he was coming, but I hadn't paid enough attention.
"Hello Leo," I said.
"Hello Ed," he said. "No sudden moves now."
He pressed the blade sharply against my neck until the skin broke. There was a little pain and then the unpleasant sensation of blood leaking down my collar.
"Just to show you I'm not fucking around, yeah?" he said. His voice was not exactly camp, but it had a bored, eye-rolling drawl to it, as if he was exhausted dealing with the endless supply of fools and imbeciles sent to annoy him.
"I would have taken that as read," I said.
"Smart. You were always smart, Ed Loy."
"So were you, Leo. Four years for a hit on a nineteen-year-old. That's a sentencing policy to get concerned citizens onto the streets."
"Alleged eyewitness said he was bullied into making his statement by the Guards. Alibi witness ignored. No forensic evidence."
"So we're supposed to think you're innocent?"
"Do I see you in a courtroom, Mr. Justice Loy? I couldn't give a fuck what you think. Start the car."
"Were you going to wait here all night long?"
"If the lights in the house went out, I would have come in to you."
"It'd be warmer in the house. Do you want to come in?"
"No, I want you to drive. I have a gun as well."
He showed me what looked like a Glock 17 semiautomatic, a gun his brother George favored. Whatever it was, I had to assume it worked.
"Good for you. I don't."
"Just in case you were in the mood for heroics."
"Never."
"Shut up and drive. Up towards Castlehill."
I did as he said. I hatched various heroic plans along the way, supposing he was going to kill me: I could reverse the car into a wall; I could stop at traffic lights, jerk away from the blade and roll out my door; I could smash into the rear of another vehicle and trust in the public to rescue me. I didn't act on any of them, not because I thought they wouldn't work. No, the reverse adrenaline of inevitability was working its phlegmatic spell on me. If Leo wanted to kill me, he would; if I had the chance to kill him first, I could try; as it stood, he had the stronger hand, and it seemed wiser to wait and see how he played it. Anyway, he could have done me in my driveway: there wasn't a sinner about, or a light in the neighboring houses. He had something to say, that much was certain. And I was curious enough, now I knew he had a part in the Patrick Hutton story, to hear what it was.
Leo directed me up toward the old car park near the pine forest, midway between Bayview Hill and Castlehill. It was quite a beauty spot, with views stretching out to the harbor of refuge at Seafield. The stars had spread until the sky was almost free of cloud. There were usually a few cars parked late here, lovers enjoying the seclusion. But it was too cold tonight, or too late, or too close to Christmas; there was nobody to see Leo Halligan wave a Glock 17 at me to walk ahead of him up the steps and around the edge of the quarry to the ruined church on the top of Bayview Hill, or to prod me in the back of the neck with the gun if I didn't move fast enough. The view here was even more spectacular, from the mountains to the sea, past the candy-stripe towers of the Pigeon House to Dublin Bay, and then north to the great promontory of Howth; the city lights flickered as if they were reflected stars: as above, so below, a gauze of light stretched out across the dark.
Leo stopped at an open patch of grass used for picnics, just below the ruined church, hard above the old quarry, where the granite for the harbor had been hewn. With the gun trained on me, he held the knife, a hunting blade with a gutter and a serrated edge, in front of my face and, looking me in the eye, nodded and lifted his arm. I braced myself to dodge it, knowing he could shoot me anyway, thinking I should try and argue with him but scared it would sound like pleading, wondering if I should run away but not wanting to be shot in the back. The knife flew over my shoulder and over the granite wall and out into the quarry and I thought I could hear it landing but I couldn't be sure. When I looked back, Leo was holding up the Glock. He snapped out the clip and handed it to me and brandished the gun in his right hand.
"Okay, Ed?"
"One in the chamber, Leo."
"Good point, Ed. Hope that's not the last thing you remember."
He pointed the Glock at me and grinned, and I saw he had more gold teeth than white ones, and I hoped that wasn't the last thing I'd remember, then he tipped the barrel up into the sky and pulled the trigger. For a second, on the ground where I'd fallen, I thought he had shot me, classic fashion, one behind the ear. Then I realized as he dropped the gun with his right he'd brought his left around in the mother and father of all haymakers and laid me out like a drunken girl. And there he was now, crouching above me, bobbing from foot to foot, fists up, gold teeth flashing.
"Come on," he said. "Come on."
The last person to say "Come on, come on" to me was Miranda Hart. My face was deep between her legs and my hands were slipping inside her torn stockings and stroking her firm, yielding, scented flesh. She had wanted me to stay, and if I had, I'd still be there, drinking gin and lemon juice, fucking in the fire's glow. Instead I had spent time in a morgue with two dead bodies, I had tried to deal with a friend who was apparently having a nervous breakdown and now I was getting to my feet on top of a hill in subzero temperatures at two in the fucking morning so a pawky little maniac could beat the living shit out of me with his bare fucking hands. Come on, come on. Jesus.
Leo was about five seven, and he couldn't've been more than eleven stone, which meant I had eight inches and fifty pounds on him, but none of that seemed to count because of three things. The first thing was, he was so much faster than me: he had popped my nose and cut my right eye before I had my guard up. The second thing was, he was wearing those rock-and-roll skull and serpent's-head rings that worked like brass knuckles. And the third thing was, when I finally got a rhythm going and managed to block a few blows and land a few digs of my own, he suddenly reared back and swung into this Thai kickboxing maneuver and slammed me in the jaw with the sole of a red leather cowboy boot that, had it been the heel, would have broken it.
Where the fuck was Tommy Owens? It was all very well his mother dying, but somebody needed to get my back: warning me wasn't enough. I was reeling like a skittle, finding it hard to keep my head up, and Leo was grinning now, scenting blood, and steadying himself to finish me off, and in my lack of strategy came my opportunity: it wasn't that I wasn't falling apart, or that my limbs weren't having trouble acting on instructions from my brain, but my judgment was unimpaired: I could see exactly when and where I was about to be hit. All I needed was one last great surge from the nervous system, one final synapse flash of a reaction. It came as the heel of his red boot came straight for my nose and I managed to sidestep the blow and to catch Leo's calf before he regained balance-he had overstretched himself, reasoning justifiably that I was a dead man walking-and pulled back and swung the eleven-stone man around and around by the legs, sensing the humiliation and unwilling to stop, having felt pretty humiliated myself in the past few minutes, until he suddenly shot out of my hands and crashed on the gravel near the ruined church and I was left with a red cowboy boot in my hand. Leo was up in a flash, his biker jacket in large part protection against the spill, a few lacerations down one cheek the only evidence of harm. He seemed far more concerned by the fate of his footwear. As he reached for it, I retreated to the wall above the quarry and held the boot out into the abyss.
"They're handmade, Ed. Imported from Texas."
"I don't care. One will do you. You can hop away to fuck."
"They cost three grand."
"My heart pumps piss. You could have killed me. A fistfight's one thing, but you could have killed me there, with the heel in the head."
Leo shrugged.
"You sent Podge down. What else could I do? I've always had to look out for the kid. And clean up his mess."
The kid. Podge Halligan, the steroid-swollen, heroin-dealing sadist who had raped Tommy Owens. Like George, sometimes you could mistake Leo for a human being. But the Halligans were all brothers in the blood, and however plausible an impression of enlightenment any might occasionally give, I guess each was just a version of the same savage when it came to it.
I extended the red boot to Leo, my hand low, and when he reached down for it, I sucker-punched him with a southpaw uppercut I must have been practicing in my dreams, and laid him out cold beneath the stars in the shadow of the old ruined church.
HE WASN'T OUT for long, although he didn't look too chipper when he came to: on top of the broken nose, he'd lost a couple of teeth. My nose had stopped bleeding, and I could see out of my eye; a drink would be a help. I found Leo's Glock where he'd dropped it but I wouldn't give it back to him, not yet, at any rate. We walked down to the car park, an uneasy truce between us, where lo and behold, Tommy Owens in his green snorkel coat was sitting on a wall by the Volvo, a cigarette in his hand, his ability to confound second to none.
"All friends now, I hope," he said. "Did you shake hands?"
Leaving Leo to tend his face, I walked Tommy to the edge of the pine forest.
"Did you know I was up there, Tommy?"
"I've been following you all night," Tommy said.
"Well. I'm glad to hear it. You know though, Tommy, when some boy threatens me with a knife, and then leads me up a hill at gunpoint, that's a good time to make your move. Especially when that boy is Leo Halligan."
"I knew you'd be able for him, Ed. Better to sort it out now than have it hanging over you. And I knew Leo'd play fair. Nice eye."
"Whose fucking side are you on?"
"Yours, Ed. And mine, of course."
"Tell me the truth then. How'd you know Leo was after me?"
"Father Tyrrell. Leo came to see him this morning. They had breakfast together. I reckoned it must have had something to do with whatever Tyrrell wanted to see you about."
That was what I had smelt in the presbytery: French cigarettes, not cigars, and Leo Halligan's lemon scent.
"What did Leo say to you?"
"Just, I have to straighten Loy out, Tommy. I'm not going to hurt him badly, because he'll come in useful. But I have to straighten him out."
"Why didn't you tell me that before I saw Tyrrell?"
"Because Leo didn't tell me until after, after he had scraped the RIP on the Volvo. I'll sort that out for you, by the way. So I followed Leo then, caught him staking out your place, texted you."
I said nothing. Tommy shrugged.
"You never asked for my help. You never leveled with me about the case. I mean, I'm not on salary here, am I Ed? Don't take me for granted here man, I'm looking out for you out of the goodness of my own…so don't fuckin' start, all right?"
Fair enough. Tommy still wasn't telling me everything he knew, but I couldn't expect miracles. I nodded, and walked quickly back to Leo, snapping the clip back into the Glock and sliding a round into the chamber as I went. When I got close enough, I fired in the general direction of Leo's precious red cowboy boots.
"Fuck sake, watch where you're pointing that thing!" Leo said.
"Very difficult to predict where the bullet will go at close range, as we all know," I said. "And the waiting time in A &E over Christmas is even worse than normal, might not make it home until New Year."
"So what do you want?" Leo said.
"Breakfast with Vincent Tyrrell," I said. "What was that about?"
"I got a tip-off. Last night. About Pa Hutton, Patrick Hutton. I called Tyrrell, he agreed to meet."
"Who tipped you off? And what did they say?"
"I don't know who it was, a woman, very southside, maybe even upper class, you know, Anglo type of thing. She didn't say who she was."
Miranda. Or Jackie.
"What did she say?"
"She said, 'You were there. In Tyrrellscourt. It's all going to come out now. The truth at last.'"
"Did she mention Patrick Hutton by name?"
Leo Halligan shook his head.
"She said, 'Ask Vincent Tyrrell. Vincent Tyrrell knows.'"
Leo's hand went in his jacket, and I brought the Glock up. He carefully took a pale blue pack of Gauloises and a brass Zippo from his jeans and lit a cigarette. He offered the pack around. I took one, and so did Tommy. Then Tommy found a naggin of Jameson in the depths of his snorkel coat, and we each had a drink. Silence reigned for a while, an almost contented calm. Perverse camaraderie in the middle of the night, flanked by a petty criminal and a stone killer on the top of Bayview Hill: I almost laughed at how good I suddenly felt, at the adrenaline surge that reminded me who I was, and why I did what I did, and all the while at the anger I could feel building, anger that was never very far below the surface.
"And how did you get Patrick Hutton out of that call?" I said to Leo.
"There was nothing else for me to get. Pa and me were friends, you know? We…we were good friends, yeah? So that was what Tyrrellscourt meant to me, above anything else."
"So you called Vincent Tyrrell."
"Me and Father Tyrrell go back. I told Father Tyrrell Patrick Hutton was coming back to haunt everyone who knew him."
"Why did you put it like that?"
"I thought it had a nice ring to it. I thought it might scare the cunt. Anyway, he asks me to meet him for breakfast, fuck sake, like we're a pair of suits, you know? And then he was all, oh, I can't tell you anything, the sanctity of the confessional, all this. So I said, I remember you, baby, back in St. Jude's Industrial School. I remember."
"What do you remember?"
Leo Halligan grinned.
"That's for me to know. That was it, end of."
"Do you know how he disappeared?"
"All I'll say is, you're not going to find the answers up here. To any of it. You're going to find them down in Tyrrellscourt."
He flashed his eyes at me, with the lubriciousness of someone who knows way more than he's telling.
"Anyway, coming out, I met Hopalong here, Mr. Fucking Sacristan, honest to fuck, I thought I was going to burst me shite laughing. So when he said Tyrrell had asked you down, I decided to stick around, added a little design feature to your car. I was gonna string it out awhile for you. You know, leave a dead cat on your doorstep, potshot through your living-room window. Just like a regular psycho. But it's too cold, and I couldn't be arsed, to be honest with you," Leo said.
"All because of Podge."
Leo shrugged.
"Did you know that, Tommy? Leo was after me because I helped get Podge sent away. You remember Podge, don't you Tommy?"
"No, Ed."
"Ah you do. Very well. Very very well, in fact."
"Stop, Ed."
"You know Tommy did a little work for Podge? A little courier work in the old import-export trade. And then they fell out, as fellows in that trade will. Over a gun. A Glock 17, in fact, this very model. And you know what Podge did to Tommy here?"
I could see the unease on Leo's face.
"He raped him, Leo. More than once, far as I could make out, although once would be enough for most of us. Did you know that? Or are they too scared to tell you just what kind of a maniac your kid brother is? It's not as if you don't really know."
Leo stared at the ground and shook his head. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw shame in his face. I was probably wrong. I often imagine people are ashamed when they're just a little self-conscious, or indifferent, or plain bored. I could feel the anger rising like acid in my chest, singeing the back of my throat. Leo started to say something, very quietly. Then he cleared his throat and said it out loud.
"George didn't tell me that. But even if he had. Podge is my brother."
He looked up, his face a riot of opposing emotions: there was shame there, or at least embarrassment, and what looked like compassion for Tommy, but mostly there was defiance, the mark of the loyal blood code by which he lived. I had a certain respect for that. But I remembered Tommy after Podge had raped him, remembered the weeping shell of a man he became, and the anger within me erupted. Against my own best interests, against the interests of the case, against everything but the heat of the moment. I had my own blood code too, and sometimes I had to be true to it.
"Well, in every way it counts, Tommy's my brother, Leo," I said, and my hand was on the barrel of the Glock and I brought it up and smashed the butt against the bridge of Leo Halligan's nose, once, twice and again, just to make sure it was broken.
I offered to drive Leo to the A &E in St. Anthony's. He told me to fuck off, among other things, and made his way down the hill on foot. George Halligan lived on the other side of Castlehill, ten minutes' walk away. Tommy joined me on the trip to Jackie Tyrrell's house up among the pine forests off Tibradden Road. The M50 was quiet, and we made the journey in twenty silent minutes. The house, at the top of a gravel drive about half a mile above the road, was a Victorian Gothic detached redbrick-and-stone villa with stained-glass windows and a bell tower, set among bare oaks and elms; within view was the stone farmhouse with paddock and stables that served as the center of the riding school.
I asked Tommy if he wanted to come in. He said he'd wait in the car, "and keep an eye out." When I opened the car door, he put his hand briefly on my forearm, and went to say something and either couldn't form the words or thought the better of it, and looked me in the eye, and nodded: a Tommy Owens apology, or a Tommy Owens thank-you, or a conflation of the two.
"What's the story with Leo?" I said. "History there?"
Tommy flexed his narrow jaw and winced as if his teeth ached.
"It's nothing. I'll tell you about it later man."
"You've got to start acting in your own best interest, Tommy," I said, as sternly as I could. Tommy nodded gravely, but I could see he wasn't going to let it go.
"I could say the exact same for you man," he said finally.
The ensuing silence held for about ten seconds, and then we both burst out laughing.
The hall was of double height and featured the kind of Christmas tree you'd expect to find in some corporate HQ: maybe sixteen feet tall, it blazed with light amid the dark marble-floored room. The Brazilian servant (I always ask now: the Philippines and Brazil are the biggest suppliers of staff to the rich Irish, for reasons I don't pretend to understand: perhaps because they tend to be smaller, they don't have to be given rooms, but can sleep in cupboards or on shelves instead) led me up the stairs. I asked for a bathroom first, where I looked at the damage: an eye that was red and closing, and a bunch of welts and cuts across my face. I'd seen worse in the mirror. They'd be hilarious company tomorrow. I washed them with lavender-scented liquid soap and dabbed at them with towels soaked in hot water. The maid led me into a white reception room the size of the ground floor of my house; it didn't look particularly large in the context of Jackie Tyrrell's.
Jackie Tyrrell had changed into wide black silk trousers and a fitted black top with just enough cleavage and black lace on show to ensure I would pay attention. Good for her: a healthy dose of vanity was one of the vital signs of life, particularly in a woman. I joined her on a white couch with a weathered gilt wood finish that I recognized as being French and very expensive; there was a matching occasional table where she sat; the room was full of similar pieces in assorted configurations. Late Romantic orchestral music played through speakers I couldn't see.
Jackie knelt up on her knees beside me as I sat down. Her eyes were clearer than before, her manner softer, flirtier, almost kittenish; it was as if she had drunk herself, if not quite sober, then mellow.
"Your face, my God," she said.
"You should see the other girl's," I said.
"What happened?"
I shook my head.
"Lassie slaps. Handbags at ten paces," I said.
She looked at me for a moment, an appalled expression on her face, then agreed to see the funny side.
"Their nails, was it?" she said, in an effortless Dublin accent.
"Going for my eyes, they were."
"Fucking bitches. I hate those fucking bitches so I do."
She poured me a drink from a pitcher of iced liquid the color of tea; it had the warmth of tea but more of a kick.
"Sidecar," she said.
"Brandy, lemon juice…triple sec."
"Cointreau. Same difference. Sláinte."
"Up."
I looked at Jackie as she drained the dregs of her glass and poured herself another. She couldn't drink like this every day, unless her face was a latex mask. I looked closer. No, it was the very moist, unlined skin of a woman in her early fifties: the folds around her throat showed the first signs of the next phase. Could Botox replenish your skin to such an extent if you regularly put away what she seemed capable of drinking? My face must have been an open book.
"This is a special occasion, Ed. I go for months without touching a drop. I assume that's what you're wondering? Why I don't have a face like a neon prune?"
"Forgive me."
"It's quite all right, I take the compliment whenever I can. Always take the compliment, girls. I do like to drink though, so I'm being a bit of a glutton today. Tonight. This morning."
"Good morning," I said.
"Nice morning," she said.
I drank up, and she refilled my glass. The music changed: low, brooding, ominous phrases filled the room.
"I know this," I said. "The Isle of the Dead."
"Rachmaninov. You're not supposed to like Rachmaninov, you know."
"Are you not? Who says?"
"The Musical Powers That Be."
"Yeah? Fuck them."
"How do you know this? You're not secretly an expert cellist and a gourmet chef and a published poet and all those other things detectives are supposed to be while preferring not to go on about it?"
"No. But I was a barman."
"And like cabdrivers, barmen are in possession of absolute knowledge."
"No. I worked in an Irish pub in Santa Monica called Mother Magillacuddy's."
"Jesus."
"Well, I was young. Anyway, Irish music at the weekends, the rest of the time, we could play what we wanted. And there was a music student who worked there, a violinist. And this was one of her favorites. We used to blare it on a Monday night at all the people who didn't want to admit the weekend was over."
"I thought that was Sunday night."
"Amateurs want the weekend to keep going on Sunday. Monday is pros' night, real terminal cases. Hence The Isle of the Dead…"
"And this little violin case. Did you get anywhere with her? I bet you did. Tell all."
"You first. Fun and all as this is…you didn't by any chance call Leo Halligan on Saturday night, did you?"
"I wouldn't know how to go about calling Leo Halligan. I thought he was in jail," she said, sounding indignant at the very suggestion.
"He's out of jail now. And you're not exactly a million miles removed from him. His brother was in the parade ring in Gowran Park today, you could easily have asked him for Leo's mobile.
"So don't get airs, missus."
"Something like that."
She raised her glass, as if to concede the point.
"Was F. X. Tyrrell there today?" I said.
"Of course. So everyone thinks he's taking it seriously, and not just a way of setting the odds adrift for Leopardstown. He and George Halligan were chatting. More than once, as it happens."
The music had become higher and more insistent, delirious almost, woodwinds and swirling strings. Jackie had an "ask me, go on, ask me" glint in her eye.
"What do you think that was about, Jackie?"
"Well…there was talk…a lot of talk, at the time…back when Patrick was racing for Frank-"
"You guys were still married then?"
"The wheels were coming off, but the train was still rolling. Anyway, there was talk about Patrick and Leo Halligan-"
"How they rode together. Miranda didn't really deny it either."
"Yes, but there was more to it. I mean, sexwise, you're gay, you're straight, you're somewhere in between, who cares? Miranda didn't, she was always playing games back then anyway, it wasn't as if she was a little girl whose heart was rent in twain. No, what it was about was, Leo Halligan-acting for George-bribing a whole bunch of jockeys of the day to…well, to anything from holding a horse up to doping horses and all points in between. And obviously Patrick's…special relationship with Leo put him center stage for all this."
"And what, the idea was that Leo was just fronting for George, that he was using Hutton to get the scoop on F. X. Tyrrell's horses?"
"That was one possibility. Another was that Patrick and Leo were working together, Patrick a willing and devious agent in it all."
"And then what, at Thurles, F. X. Tyrrell wanted By Your Leave held back, and Patrick was under orders to win, so he compromised by making it clear he was acting against his will?"
"That's what some people were whispering behind their fans."
"And not long after, he vanishes. Jesus!"
I involuntarily plunged my head into my hands. I had known Leo Halligan had a crucial role in this story, and all I had had to do was remain patient with him. After all, who required the most patience? Devious little sociopaths like the Halligan brothers. Now I find he could be the key to the whole thing. And how patient had I been with him? Patient enough to break his nose. Twice.
"Done something you shouldn't have?" Jackie Tyrrell grinned.
"Everything, all the time," I said. "Can you draw a line to connect F. X. Tyrrell and George Halligan?"
"Not back then. Now-I don't know. How respectable has Halligan become?"
"Very, if you go by appearances. But he's still a gangster, we think he's still moving big shipments of coke into the country. Is there any reason why F.X. would want to be involved with that business?"
"The gang business?"
"The illegal-drugs business."
"Not that I can think of. I mean, he has more money than he knows what to do with. A life in racing…if you stay in the saddle…is not without its compensations. As you can see."
"What about…Miranda said you had no children…were there any issues there? That might have led to an extortion opportunity?"
"Was Frank gay? Was I his beard? God, no. No, he…oh dear, I really would rather not talk about this. I don't think Frank was gay. I never saw any evidence of it. I suppose he just wasn't the most…demanding man. I mean, he simply didn't have much of an appetite for…'that sort of thing'…and what we did have wasn't particularly…anything…for me, at any rate…and then that dwindled to nothing much. I suppose it sounds odd…but when you work as hard as we did, dawn till dusk…no, it still sounds odd. But I wasn't terribly experienced, and I mustn't have had much of a sex drive back then…we just…did without, by and large. It wasn't a good thing, it certainly didn't help when we began to drift apart. But Frank was very good about that, he set me up here, he paid all the bills. Very amicable, isn't that what they call it? Well, it was. How could it not be, really? There was no blood, no sex, no passion. That's what causes all the trouble. Isn't that right, Ed Loy?"
"I imagine you're right," I said. "I understand that to be the case. I wouldn't know, myself. So you weren't aware of any extortion attempts? Any way in which he could have been blackmailed by a gangster keen to beat the bookies? Not to mention launder vast sums of drug money through the Tyrrellscourt coffers?"
"No."
"What about Miranda? She told me she dropped out of sight after Patrick Hutton disappeared, went through what she called a few…'situations'. You've been something of a mentor to her, haven't you, you persuaded her father to let her work at Tyrrellscourt in the early days, you offered her work up here when she resurfaced. What happened to her in between?"
Jackie shook her head.
"I don't know. I think she might have been in London. She didn't stay in touch. Her parents were dead, she had no living relatives…and I had left Tyrrellscourt, I was keeping my head down, working hard to make a go of this place…for a time, it seemed as if her disappearance and Patrick's might have been connected. And then she just reappeared, out there on that doorstep. She never really told me what had happened. I thought drugs, maybe a miscarriage, but that was all guesswork on my part. I was just happy to have her back, and if no questions asked was the deal, that's how it had to be. I've always…I love Miranda, like a daughter, you know? Like the daughter Frank and I never had. And with grown-up daughters…well, you've got to be careful. You've got to keep your distance."
"Leo Halligan…I didn't really get a lot out of him…but he said if I wanted to know what happened to Patrick Hutton, I wasn't going to find the answers up here, I'd have to go down to Tyrrellscourt," I said.
What happened then took me aback. Maybe because I had gotten to like Jackie Tyrrell, I had somehow forgotten she was involved in the case, and was therefore likely to have something to hide. Maybe it was because my judgment was skewed on account of the booze. Whatever it was, you're always waiting for the shutters to come down, but when they came down for Jackie, I couldn't quite believe it. She nodded, and inclined herself away, and did something tight with her lips that I hadn't seen before.
"I guess he meant, I'd have to talk to F. X. Tyrrell directly."
"You'll be lucky," she snapped. "Why would he talk to you? More likely to have you arrested for trespassing. Of course, there's someone there who'll be only too happy to fill your head full of whatever fairy stories pass for reality in her mind."
"Who would that be?"
" Regina Tyrrell."
"F.X.'s sister."
"That's right. She runs the hotel, and spa, and golf-course complex down there. And she runs Frank, if you're to believe her."
"Does anyone believe her? Did you?"
Jackie Tyrrell looked at me and there was smarting pain in her eyes, a vulnerability I hadn't seen before.
"Let's just say, the person who felt most amicable of all about my divorce from Frank was Regina."
Jackie stood up and brushed imaginary lint from her black clothes, all business.
"Wait here. I'll get you a photograph of Frank. And then I'll tell you a thing or two about Regina Tyrrell. You can listen to your little girlfriend's music again, if you like," she said, handing me a Bose remote control. "Point it anywhere."
I clicked the search button back until I located The Isle of the Dead, pressed Repeat to keep it coming, turned up the volume and sat back. That was how I awoke, having spilt tea-colored sidecar all over the white French couch. It took me a while to get my bearings, in fact to get my eyes open and myself upright and in focus. It was about half four, and there was no sign of Jackie Tyrrell, and no photographs. The Isle of the Dead was still playing; something I hadn't noticed before was that this recording had tolling bells on it; they added to the atmosphere. Was there a Rachmaninov piece called The Bells? I couldn't remember. I switched the music off and went out onto the landing, thinking I should check the bedrooms. Maybe Jackie'd just crashed out somewhere. She'd had more to drink than I had, which was saying something. On second thoughts, better not to creep around a strange house late at night; I didn't want to frighten anyone.
As I walked downstairs, I realized the bells I had heard on The Isle of the Dead were still tolling, even though the music had stopped. In the hall, by the left-hand corner behind the Christmas tree, I spied an open door and behind it what looked like a servants' passageway; the sound of the bells seemed to be coming from that direction. I went in and followed down a corridor of blue tiles and ocher walls to the stairwell of what was evidently the bell tower. Right on time, I saw a rope fly up like a slithering beast, and the bell toll again, and down on a rope to meet me came the body of Jackie Tyrrell, hanging by the neck, her legs frozen in a grotesque dance, her eyes bugging, her tongue cut out of her gaping mouth, blood staining her face and her chest. I tried to do something, and may have done it; what, I can't remember: cut her down, or hold her, or breathe life back into her, something that would help deny or assuage the horror of what I had just seen. I recall the impulse, but not the act, for between the two, I felt a blow, and I tumbled into shadow, and then came darkness.