Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief of priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.
And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple,
and departed, and went and hanged himself.
And the chief priests took the silver pieces,
and said, It is not lawful for them to put into
the treasury, because it is the price of blood.
– Matthew 27: 3-6
Itossed and turned on a bed of straw, and the rustle roared in my ears like the sound of the sea from a conch; I was awake but felt asleep, or asleep and dreamed of waking; a door creaked, and the bolt shot back and forth, and then a sound of doors swinging back and forth, crashing like gunfire, and then the bolt run back, the door held fast, creaking, and the rustle of straw again, rustle rustle, and then human voices soft, like straw, no, like paper, whispering, entreating, yielding, the slightest breaths rustling like paper, and the color of paper, white, a blinding white, the sound so crisp in my ears…
I was in a daze when I came to, and even by the time I got to Harcourt Square it was clear I was in no fit state to be questioned, so after a great deal of swabbing and scraping and photographing, I was shunted into a cell and left to sleep off the roil of shock and fear and drunkenness that clung to me like muck sweat to a frightened animal. I didn't think I could sleep after what I had seen, but in fact no sooner had my head hit the hard bunk than I fell into a coma that was interrupted what could have been no more than a couple of hours later by a Guard pushing in a beaker of hot liquid that might have been tea or coffee and could be still for all I know and a toasted waffle clogged with chemical-smelling jam that almost made me throw up as soon as I smelled it, and then, as I kept on smelling it, did. I was on my knees, vomiting steak frîtes and red wine and whiskey and gin and brandy and lemon juice into a metal toilet with no seat that stank of pine detergent and someone else's piss so that each time I threw up, the air I sucked into my winded lungs was so foul I immediately began to retch again. Eventually, this too passed, and I sat on my bunk, bent over and humming a tuneless drone to myself and trying to reconstruct what had happened between the time I saw the hanging body of Jackie Tyrrell and now.
I'd been out cold, that much I knew; I could feel the hot, tender egg that had been grafted onto the back of my head; the gentlest pressure on it sent my belly lurching out of my mouth. My hands were streaked with mud, or rust, and there were reddish-brown stains on my shirt and streaks on my trousers and on my shoes; it came to me that I was covered in blood, and that that blood could only be Jackie Tyrrell's. I flushed red-hot then, and tears sprang into my eyes, and I jammed my fist into my mouth to stop myself yelling. If only my head wasn't pounding so hard, I could think clearly about what had happened. The only thing I could summon up was music, The Isle of the Dead, its insistent rhythm rolling through my head, and then the bells, the tolling of a bell, and then I flashed on upsetting the sidecar over myself and Jackie Tyrrell's good white couch, and I smelt my shirt and licked my hand and tasted brandy and felt the sweetest of relief and an obscene prayer on my lips: Thanks be to fuck. I knew I was badly in need of a cure, but I didn't think I would get one so soon.
Superintendent Myles Geraghty had found someone to press his brown suit, and someone else to cut his unruly thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, but his gut was still poking out between the flaps of his yellow shirt, if perhaps not quite as far as it had, and his tie looked like he'd eaten his breakfast off it. He seemed in excellent form, which didn't fill me with reassurance. I had sat in the interview room in silence while a uniformed female Garda got the video camera ready; now Geraghty was here, and silence was no more.
"Ah, the hard! Good to see you again Edward Loy, and the compliments of the season to you, and tell us this: how's the old private dick, ha? Getting out and about, and in and out, is it? Are you winning, are you? Pulling the divil by the tail says you, ha? Pull the other one, it's got bells on!"
There was no reply needed to any of that, so I didn't make one. Geraghty took a long shrewd look at me, all faux bonhomie gone, and I met this full-on. He had a good poker face, a mask that meant he could play the fool but was very far from being one. It was impossible to tell what he had on me, but given the circumstances in which he'd found me, I'd be feeling pretty bullish if I were him.
Geraghty nodded to get the tape rolling, and sat down across the table from me and asked me my name and I said, "Solicitor."
"D'you get that changed, by deed poll? Or did you get married, and take the little woman's name?"
"Solicitor," I said again.
Geraghty made a face.
"Jasus, you could be out of here by lunchtime if you just answer the few questions."
I made a face at that, my "d'you think I cycled up the Liffey on a bicycle?" face. Geraghty nodded at the uniform, who turned off the tape while he bounded from the room, returning a few seconds later with a tabloid newspaper, which he handed to me. It was folded to the crossword, which had been half completed in a laborious hand.
"Six down, 'Clown, foolish person,' seven letters, begins with B… Buffoon?"
"Front page, please," a smiling Myles Geraghty said with the oily poise of a backbench politician at long last elevated to office.
The front page of the Irish Daily Star said, OMEGA MAN SLAYS TWO-SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE, and showed a blurred photograph of a much younger, slimmer Don Kennedy in a Garda uniform. Inside there were photographs of the two crime scenes with technical officers in protective white suits going about their work, and an inset shot of a Myles Geraghty dark of hair and hollow of cheek, as he'd maybe looked the day he made his confirmation, who was "heading up the investigation." There was talk of "the killer the Guards are calling the Omega Man because of the macabre way his victims are mutilated," but no further detail about Hutton's tattoo, and a lot more high-energy ventilating of not very much information. The severed tongues didn't get a mention, nor had Patrick Hutton been identified yet.
"Very good," I said. "Congratulations, that's quite a case you've got."
"I assume you were working a case. That's what you were doing up in Mrs. Tyrrell's house."
I nodded.
"I think we can help each other, don't you?"
"Well, I believe in helping the Guards. That would be something of a motto of mine. Of course, you don't want to blunder in and get in their way. Stand well back until invited."
Geraghty looked around at the uniform, and signaled to her. She went to put the camera back on, but he shook his head and pointed to the door. When she had gone, he turned back to me, a grin on his face.
"Well, here's your invitation. Last time you and I met, I probably went a bit hard on you. Don't know me own strength sometimes, and you'd just lost your girlfriend, and your mother, couldn't have been easy. And I know at times like that, it's not easy to forgive someone who crosses you. But fair play, you got the results that time…and we all saw what you did on the Howard case. I mean, I know you got a lot of stick about it in the papers, with the commissioner having a pop, and the Garda Representative Association advising its membership not to cooperate with private detectives in general and you in particular, but for officers who'd been around the block, I'm telling you, it was a beautiful piece of work. Not just the Howards themselves, what a fucking collection, but Brock and Moon and the Reillys, kaput! And no fucking trials to worry about-"
"I never-"
"I know you never, that was what was so beautiful, you got them to do it themselves. Last man standing, Ed Loy. Jasus, in here we talked about nothing else for weeks, we were drawing diagrams to keep it all clear: Dublin mountains, Fitzwilliam Square, Shelbourne Road, he's off again!"
Despite myself, I was a little flattered. A case usually ended with justice of a sort, but with most of the survivors' lives in tatters; very rarely was anyone in the mood to offer thanks, let alone praise. Myles Geraghty might have been a buffoon, but he was a senior policeman, and if what he had said was a quarter true, well, the respect of your peers is always something. Then, just in time, my brain came to, and I began to see where this was going, mere seconds before Geraghty leant in and spelled it out for me.
"And we all felt the credit should have gone where it was due, instead of to people who, if we're to be scrupulously fair, did not deserve it. Now I know he's a friend of yours, and fair play, loyalty is what I look for in my officers too, I don't expect you to tell tales out of school, but the least we should acknowledge is that you're the man, Ed Loy. You and Lee Harvey Oswald both: ye acted alone, ha?"
I nodded, understanding what the game was. It looked like Dave had good reason for his fears: Geraghty was clearly out to undermine him. Geraghty took my nod as an assent, and continued.
"Good man. Because here's the thing: I don't believe you had anything to do with Jackie Tyrrell's murder up above. I want to hear what you were doing there, sure I do, down to the last detail, but I know there's no reason for you to kill her. And even if there was, you wouldn't have…all the other stuff."
"What other stuff?" I said.
"You first," Geraghty said. When I stayed silent, he went on.
"Because of course, I have enough to keep you here all day, and maybe charge you and all, keep you in over Christmas, even if we drop the charges then. A lovers' tiff, a drunken spat, private detective and a rich divorcée-who do you think's going to give a shite? So if you want to get out and get back to your case, you better let me know what's going on."
"What do you mean?"
"You and Donnelly, what are ye cooking up? What's he been telling you?"
"Nothing, what?"
"He was at your house last night. He was seen leaving."
"What, are you having him followed?"
"He was just…an off-duty officer spotted him, happened to be going the same way, saw him entering your house."
I waited to see what more there was. If there'd been a tail on Dave, if they'd followed us to the mortuary…no, they'd've stepped in then and there. Wouldn't they? Maybe they'd arrested Dave last night, after he left my house the second time. Maybe they were questioning him alongside me.
And if they were? What was I going to do, grass him up?
"I'll tell you about the case I'm working. Dave Donnelly's visit was…a personal matter."
Geraghty flinched as if I'd slapped him; his tiny eyes flared up.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I mean, it was a private matter. Between two old friends. You know, there's something on your mind, you drop around a friend's house, ask his advice. Trouble with your neighbors, or your kids. Or your wife. Type of thing. And of course, to make sure I'd be at the party he's throwing tonight. He said Carmel really wanted me to be there."
Geraghty was sucking his teeth and his nostrils were flaring; when I said the word wife I thought I saw him flush; by the time I mentioned Carmel, he was nodding briskly, as if this were a file whose contents he had already read.
"Better take me through the case you're working then," he said quickly, reaching to switch the video camera back on and not meeting my eye the while.
I told him about Father Vincent Tyrrell asking me to find Patrick Hutton. There was no reaction from him to this, which I took to mean that they still hadn't identified the body. I told him about Miranda Hart and Jackie Tyrrell, about the meal at the Octagon with Seán Proby, about getting a late call from Jackie Tyrrell, about the ten-year-old controversy surrounding F. X. Tyrrell's Gold Cup-winning horse By Your Leave and the race meeting at Thurles where the horse met her death. There wasn't a single thing I said that couldn't have been discovered with an Internet connection and, possibly, five minutes' chat with a racing journalist, or failing that, with one of the standing army of punters all over the city who divided their time between pub, bookie's and social welfare office, with the exception of the late-night drink with Jackie Tyrrell. Once he had established that Jackie had called to invite me over, and I had assured him that our conversation was largely about Jackie's anxiety that Miranda not be hurt in the process of finding Patrick Hutton, he was nodding as if our business was done.
"And were Mrs. Tyrrell's anxieties really enough to get you driving into the mountains in the middle of the night?"
"Well, I hoped I'd get more from her than anxiety, hoped she had something to tell me about Hutton's disappearance, something nobody knew but her. I hoped in vain."
When I'd finished, Geraghty looked at his watch, snapped the tape player off and stood up.
"As I say, Loy, we don't think you're in the frame for Mrs. Tyrrell. I've got an important case. You're free to go. Just make sure you're available for further questioning…and watch your step, am I clear?"
"I think so," I said.
But Myles Geraghty was far from clear, and as I walked down Harcourt Street to Stephen's Green and into the thick of the last hurling wave of Christmas shoppers in the icy morning, I set to wondering why. Geraghty had hoped to flatter me into dishing the dirt on Dave, but as soon as I suggested Dave was concerned about his wife, he backed off so quickly he was practically helping my coat onto me to get me out the door. Did he have a crush on her? There couldn't be anything going on between them, that was inconceivable, Carmel 'd never have an affair, full stop. Still, Dave had not looked happy the other night, and he was a tough old bastard; maybe a few hard chaws in the Bureau were giving him a hard time, but all that "anonymous phone call, loaded gun" malarkey, it may have been happening, but I couldn't see it getting to him like that. You never really knew what went on in someone else's marriage, no matter how well you thought you knew them. And you were better off that way, as far as I was concerned.
When I got to the taxi rank on the Green, I texted Dave and asked him to call me when he could. There was a message on my phone from Tommy Owens:
Took the car before the cops arrived. Call me when you're out. T
I called him, and he told me he had ten mass in Bayview to get through, and that after that, we were taking a trip down to Tyrrellscourt. He told me why, and I told him he could drive.
But first, I needed to see a priest.
I took the Dart out to Bayview: it was as quick as a cab, and a lot cheaper, and the direction I was going, no one else was: the northbound trains were jammed with last-minute shoppers heading for the city center. The railway line hugged the coast; the bay sparkled cobalt in the bright winter light. I ran through the case in my mind. The only people who knew the man on the dump was Hutton, apart from his killer or killers, were me and Dave. But Geraghty would make the face soon enough, or someone on his team would; no more than the rest of us, Guards were desperate men for the ponies.
It was a little after ten when I got to Bayview. I bought the rest of the papers and had breakfast in a café off the main street. All the tabloids led on what they had been instructed to call the OMEGA MAN, and the broadsheets too, apart, inevitably, from the Irish Times, which preferred an EU directive on the regulation of wind farms and a Christmas Eve message of peace and goodwill from the Irish president for its leads. There was little new in any of the stories; Myles Geraghty's picture was ubiquitous in all; maybe he was employing his own publicist. When Dave's number came up on my phone, I stepped out onto the street to answer.
"Dave, what's shaking?"
Before he'd talk, I had to give him a full report on what I knew of Jackie Tyrrell's murder, and on my time with Myles Geraghty in Harcourt Square, the latter severely edited to omit any mention of Carmel, or of Geraghty's grudge against Dave.
"Makes sense Geraghty didn't waste his time with you, even for sport. The State Pathologist's reports are nearly done. Word is, Kennedy had a crucifix and an omega symbol carved into his back, at the base of his spine. And one of the boys on the scene up in Tibradden, one who's loyal to me, gave me more on Jackie Tyrrell: she was hanged, and her tongue was cut out, but she also had an amateur tattoo, the same kind as Hutton and Kennedy: a crucifix and an omega."
"So Geraghty's right, this is a serial killer."
"It looks like. Both Don Kennedy and Jackie Tyrrell had links to Patrick Hutton. Now they still haven't identified Hutton."
I thought about that. The Guards were better placed to conduct a murder investigation than I was, especially one on this scale. Keeping information from them didn't sit easily with me, particularly if that endangered people in Hutton's circle. In the end it was Dave's call.
"Strictly speaking, neither did we, Dave. We think it's Hutton, but jockeys look a lot alike. I say we keep it that way for now. We don't know what the killer wants. I'm heading down to Tyrrellscourt today. I think whatever this is about, it has its roots down there. But look, if you want to tell Geraghty who you suspect it might be…"
There was pause during which Dave digested that one. He sounded like he was chewing on a twig.
"We'll play it our way for now," Dave said gruffly. "I have enough friends at court to keep the information coming, so I'll get it to you as I hear it. You might like to let your lady friend know what's happening though. I hear they questioned all the employees up at Tibradden this morning, then let them go. They start first thing up there."
"Will do."
"And Ed, listen, about last night, in the house…you know-"
"It was very cold, wasn't it? Did you find that?"
"I made a bit of a mountain out of a molehill."
"And now you have to live on top of it. You'll need a hat. Maybe even a scarf."
"Thank you."
"Thank you."
"Leo was connected to Hutton. You don't figure him for the murders, do you? Now he's out, revenge type of thing."
"Not if one of the dead is Hutton himself. They were friends, maybe more than friends."
"But-"
"Look, Dave, I'm a private detective. I find missing persons. Solving murders, that's just not my job. What you want to do with murder, you want to get the Guards in."
MIRANDA HART WAS distraught.
"I can't believe it. Who would want to murder Jackie?"
"She said you were like a daughter to her."
"And she was like a mother to me. Oh Jesus, Ed-"
"Miranda, are you at home?"
"Yes. I'm not long here, I was up in Tibradden, but everything's canceled for the day."
"I want you to pack a bag and get out here. In fact, I'll have you collected."
"Why?"
"Because I don't think you're safe. Jackie Tyrrell is not the only one dead-"
"What, is this the Omega Man that was in the papers? Who else is dead? Patrick? Have they found Patrick? Is he one of the bodies out in Roundwood?"
"They don't know. But the deaths seem to be connected…look, I'm sending someone for you. We'll talk soon. Okay?"
"Okay."
I FOUND TOMMY in the sacristy, brought him up to date with the case, gave him Miranda Hart's address and asked him to pick her up. Before he left, I checked over some recent church history with him.
Father Vincent Tyrrell was sitting at his table with a fountain pen and a lined pad in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, exhaling two blue plumes of smoke into space, or at The Taking of Christ, which was directly ahead of him. I had knocked on the presbytery door and it gave against my fist. I announced myself and he told me to shut the door behind me. He sounded like he wished he had done that in the first place, and turned the key. He didn't look at me when I joined him at the table.
"Of course, Judas had his part to play," he said. "Had he not betrayed our Lord, who would have? And if Jesus had not been betrayed, maybe He would never have been taken. And who would have died for our sins then? Who would have been our redemption?"
"Peter did betray him. I'm sure others would have as well. Seems to me there was quite a queue. When powerful people want someone dead, they generally get their way."
"That is true. Maybe too much is made of Judas, and his blood price. Maybe we're falling for the great-man theory of history."
"I heard that was back in vogue."
"Maybe it is. I don't keep up. It's better not to. Stay where you are, and everything comes back to meet you. Provided you wait long enough."
"This all sounds to me like an Easter sermon, not a Christmas one."
"You're right, of course. Incarnation, not redemption. The beginning, not the end."
"On the other hand, we know that the last words Patrick Hutton had to say to anyone-to anyone who's prepared to talk-were something like, 'They won't make me play the Judas.'"
Tyrrell brought his steely-blue eyes around to meet me. A faintly appalled smile played around his tiny mouth, as if he had just learnt afresh what fools these mortals be.
"That would have been Miss Miranda Hart who told you that."
"Yes. But you could have told me that without violating the secrecy of the confessional. You could have told me you visited her that night-after you'd heard Patrick Hutton's confession-and insulted her, impugned her character and generally scared the living daylights out of her. You could tell me about it now."
"Could she not recall in detail what I told her?" Tyrrell said, as if astonished that his words hadn't seared themselves verbatim on Miranda's brain. "Well, I don't think I can remember either. I may have spoken abruptly-as I remember it, I may have held her responsible for…well, for some of Patrick's…misfortune. No doubt I was harsh. I believe the young lady…gave as good as she got, that night. I was sent from the house with a flea in my ear."
"Of course, you knew her before, didn't you? You knew Patrick before. And Leo Halligan, your breakfast companion of yesterday morning."
Tyrrell smiled in what almost looked like delight.
"Well, I must say I feel vindicated in my choice of sleuth; nothing seems to have slipped past you yet. Am I to take it from the marks on your face that you managed to rendezvous with the unfortunate Leo?"
"You are. And the unfortunate Leo told me to ask you about your years at St. Jude's Industrial School. See I thought he must have got that wrong. I thought you were here all along. But I checked it out with Tommy, and he said no, you'd gone down there for a few years. How did that happen? Did you run into a little trouble up here?"
"Nothing of the sort," Tyrrell said, his cheek beginning to pulse. "I went down to Tyrrellscourt, I…it was at the request of Francis…my brother…he wanted masses said in the house regularly, more often than the local priests could manage, or were willing to, and the archbishop at that time was a great racing man, he was reared not far from Tyrrellscourt, and he arranged it that I could serve there, and that if and when things changed, I would find a place again in Bayview."
My bewilderment must have been obvious.
"It's not unusual at a racing stables where there's a good number of staff for the local priest to come and say mass before big meetings, and bless the horses, and so on. Or at least, it wasn't. And Francis went through a phase of taking this very seriously indeed, and wanted…no exaggeration to say, he wanted his own priest. And for a time, he got one."
"This was before you two fell out."
"Yes, this was…this would have appealed to me. I was wearying of parish work, of the pastoral round of wayward youths and despairing women and their shiftless husbands. It had…I suppose it had another kind of pastoral appeal, that of paradise regained. The childhood we had shared, among horses, always horses. I missed the horses most of all."
"And when would this have been?"
"Much of the nineties: 1990 until '98, I'd say."
"You were there for the By Your Leave episode then, you were at Tyrrellscourt when Patrick Hutton vanished."
"Oh yes."
"But I thought Patrick Hutton came here, made his confession here."
"I never said that. I said he made his confession to me. But he made it in the chapel at Tyrrellscourt."
"All right then. Tell me about St. Jude's Industrial School."
Again the muscles in Vincent Tyrrell's face quivered, again he brought them under his control, all apart from a rogue eyebrow that continued to pulse like an insect caught on a pin.
"It was no longer an industrial school, that's the first canard to shoot down. It had been, well into the eighties, under the Christian Brothers, and a number of…incidents took place there, many of which have now been dealt with by the Residential Schools Redress Board. St. Jude's closed for a short while, and reopened in the nineties as a boys' home, under the joint auspices of the departments of education, health, and social welfare. The Church played no official role there; indeed it was no longer actually called St. Jude's, although that's how everyone in the locality referred to it; as a local priest, I paid the occasional pastoral visit, at the center's request."
Industrial schools had become part of the folklore of what might be called the secret history of Ireland, which had only in the past twenty years or so begun to be told: unruly, unmanageable children, or simply those whose parents were unable to cope, whether psychologically or financially, were effectively detained in schools controlled by a variety of religious orders who subjected their charges to a catalog of abuses, ranging from the basic contempt and casual disregard that was the lot of the poor anywhere in Ireland in those days, to physical beatings and psychological torture, all the way up to continual and brutal sexual abuse. The religious involved were not all equally culpable, and many had been raised in similarly harsh conditions, but it is impossible to find excuses even for those who claim they knew nothing of what went on; that said, it was a social and a national scandal as much it was a church affair: we were very happy to have someone else to look after the losers and misfits, the weak and the halt, happy to close our eyes and ears to the tales they told, to dismiss them as the hysterical and obscene ravings of a negligible class of people.
"Leo Halligan certainly suggested there was more to it than that."
"Leo would. Leo has an eye to the main chance. As soon as Leo saw there was money to be made in compensation from abusive clerics, Leo counted up the number of priests he had met in his life and multiplied it by a thousand."
"But you knew Patrick Hutton there too."
"I met Patrick there, and then he came across to Tyrrellscourt as an apprentice, the pair of them did."
"Miranda Hart told me F.X. made a point of taking boys from St. Jude's on as apprentices. Did he rely on you to choose them?"
"Not in every circumstance. But I recommended Patrick and Leo, yes."
"And would you have been aware of the relationship between them?"
"I was aware that they were friends. What you're suggesting-"
"That they were lovers."
"Yes. I don't believe any such…nothing like that. Really."
Vincent Tyrrell looked appalled at the very notion of homosexuality, or at least, he wanted me to believe he was. He shook his head, looked at his watch and lifted up his pad.
"Blank page, Edward Loy. If I can't have it finished, I like at least to break the back of the damn thing by lunchtime. Otherwise it's a joyless meal, and no wine either."
"I wanted to ask you about Regina. Your sister."
"I know who Regina is. What about her?"
"Are you close? Is she close to F.X.? Where does she fit in the family?"
Vincent Tyrrell's face reddened. He stood up and started to shout.
"Why on earth should I answer that? I didn't pay you to…who the hell do you think…What gives you the right to ask all these questions?"
I stood up now. The days when I sat in my seat while an angry priest shouted at me were done.
"You did. I don't know what you intended. Maybe you don't know yourself. Maybe you wanted Patrick Hutton to remain a mystery. Maybe you wanted me to throw a scare into Miranda Hart. Maybe it has something to do with Leo Halligan, something neither of you is willing to tell me, and you hoped I could somehow brush it under the carpet for you both. But it's too late now. You see, you didn't ask me to find Patrick Hutton. You didn't ask me, in the event Hutton was dead, to locate his killers. You just told me his name. And you paid me. Way too much, as it happens. And now I can't stop until I know the truth. Maybe you thought you were clever just giving me a man's name. But it looks like it's enough to build an entire world around. And I won't stop until that's what I've done."
Vincent Tyrrell had retreated behind the supercilious smile that had served him so well, the smile that didn't know whether to mock or pity the rest of humanity. I wanted to wipe that smile off his face.
"You know your former sister-in-law was murdered this morning? And nobody thought to ring you, not your brother, nor your sister, not the Guards, nobody. You charged me with having a footfall too light upon the earth for comfort. Well, it takes one to know one, Vincent Tyrrell. You have no one belonging to you who cares enough to tell you one of your family is dead. How did that happen?"
I don't know how I thought I'd feel when I succeeded in wiping the smile off his face. Not very good would have been my guess, to reduce an old man dying of cancer to a pale, twitching frame of flesh and bone. I made a gesture with my hands, something approaching an apology but not going all the way, and made for the door.
"Maybe I shouldn't have been so hard on Miranda Hart. But it would have been impossible to tell the child the truth," Tyrrell said.
I opened the door. Father Vincent Tyrrell stopped me with what he said next.
"By Your Leave was an experiment. Very unusual. Something of a freak, you know. If you get to talk to Francis face-to-face, ask him what he thought he was doing. If you don't, ask someone who knows about close breeding."
Tyrrell was standing behind me now; I felt his breath on my collar, and then he tugged my arm with his claw of a hand and spun me round to face him. He was smiling again, a gleeful, more than half-mad smile I wanted to look away from but couldn't.
"By Your Leave. That is all you know on earth, and all ye need to know," he said. And then Father Vincent Tyrrell kissed me on the mouth.
Back in Quarry Fields, I showered, shaved and changed into a fresh white shirt and a clean black suit. I had fallen into dressing like this when I arrived back in Dublin but my luggage did not; I was dressed for a funeral and, once I'd taken off my tie, I found no great reason to dress any differently afterward. Occasionally I felt a little overdressed, but that was rare in the city of suits Dublin had become; mostly it suited my purposes, whether to curry favor with a headwaiter or at a reception desk, or to impress a client, or simply to remind myself in the hours when I was flagging to keep my shoulders back and my head held high. I looked at my face in the mirror: it was drawn and sallow, but something in the eyes was different; the ghosts of the past had lifted, and there was light instead of darkness; for the first time that I could remember, as I heard the front door slam and the creak of floorboards below, I had a glimmer of a future, by which I meant a woman. The fact that the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to my ex-wife was a detail that appeared lost on me.
In the kitchen, Tommy Owens was making tea. He greeted me with a shake of the head and a look of appalled fascination, as if to say he'd seen some gobshites in his time but I could be their king. I didn't much care though, as Miranda Hart was by then in my arms, her tears wetting my cheeks, holding me as if she'd never let me go; what was Tommy next to that?
"Is Patrick dead? Is he one of the bodies they found?" she said.
Tommy looked at me keenly.
"I think so," I said. "I can't be sure."
She was shivering, in coat and scarf with her gloves still on.
"We need to talk, Ed," Tommy said.
"Let's talk then," I said. "If we're going down to Tyrrellscourt, Miranda can help us: she knows the place inside out. There's nothing to say she can't hear."
Tommy and Miranda exchanged glances, and I got the impression that Tommy had already had a go at her on the journey here.
"Ask her about Leo Halligan," Tommy said. "The phone call."
I shook my head.
"What's up, Ed?" Tommy said. "Gauze on the lens, is there?"
Miranda Hart understood immediately what was happening.
"Ask away, I've nothing to hide. I don't need kid gloves," she said to Tommy.
"Did you ring Leo Halligan on Saturday night?" he said.
"I didn't even know he was out of jail," she said.
"But you'd've had his number," Tommy said.
"I used to have his number, years ago. That was another life, as far as I was concerned, until-"
"Until what?" Tommy snapped.
"Until Ed came around yesterday asking questions about Patrick, about the Tyrrells, about the whole bloody thing. And now there are these dead bodies…"
"One of them is Don Kennedy, the private detective you hired to find Patrick two years back."
Miranda Hart shook her head.
"And Patrick, and now Jackie…good Jesus, what's happening?"
"That's what we need to find out."
"Someone-a woman with a posh accent-called Leo and told him that the story of Tyrrellscourt was about to blow, and that Vincent Tyrrell knew the full story," Tommy said.
"Do you want me to draw you a fucking map? That wasn't me," Miranda said to Tommy.
"Maybe it was Regina Tyrrell," I said.
"Regina Tyrrell doesn't have that kind of accent," she said in that crisp, faux-objective way women take care to use when slighting one another.
"What kind of accent does she have?" I said.
"Oh, you'll find out. You'll find out soon enough."
She colored after she'd said this, and looked down, and I wondered again what had passed between her and Tommy.
"Tommy followed a car that left Jackie Tyrrell's house last night," I said. "The bells had begun to toll, and the car screeched out from the stables, an old Land Rover with UK plates. Tommy followed down the N81 past Blessington and then west toward Tyrrellscourt. He lost it somewhere in the approaches to the village."
"We hadn't reached the stables," Tommy said, shamefaced still that he had lost the car. "By the time I got to the entrance, there was no sign of the Land Rover."
"Derek Rowan was head man at Tyrrellscourt ten years ago. He always used import secondhand Land Rovers from England," Miranda said. "I don't know if he's still there. If it's not him, it may be his son, Brian; Derek was training him up."
Miranda Hart's tea bag was beside her cup; she had been smoking, with her gloves still on; Tommy looked on in disgust as she doused her cigarette in the tea bag and dunked the lot in her half-empty cup.
"We'd better get moving," I said. "Christmas Eve. No one will want to talk to us if we don't get down there soon."
"No one will be in a fit state to talk to us," Tommy said.
I began to talk Miranda through the eccentricities of my heating system when Tommy interrupted me.
"Ed, if your one is really under threat, your gaff is not the place to be. The killer knows you're on the case, knocked you unconscious last night; if he's looking for her, your house is going to be the first place he comes."
"You're right. We'll find a hotel-"
"She can stay at my place," Tommy said. "Plenty of room, nobody there, quiet road."
And with instructions not to answer the door to anyone, and an unconcerned look around at what a not very apologetic Tommy accurately described as "the state of the place," she stayed there.
Before we hit the road, Tommy retreated to the car to let us say good-bye. And after we'd kissed, Miranda Hart said, "Please, Ed, promise me, you'll try and understand…no matter what you hear."
And I promised to try.
WE TOOK THE Tallaght exit off the M50 and kept on the bypass until it became the Blessington Road; the hills were white on all sides while the low December sun scorched our eyes; skeletons of forests changed places with ser vice stations and new building developments until we cut off west toward Tyrrellscourt through the open plains of Kildare.
Tyrrellscourt had long been associated with F. X. Tyrrell and his prodigious stable of prizewinning racehorses, and with the Tyrrellscourt stud, the jewel in the crown of the Irish bloodstock industry. More recently, the Tyrrellscourt Country Club, a luxury hotel with golf course, leisure center, gymnasium and spa, had opened, with elaborate fanfare in the press; apartments with life membership of the club were made available at prices in excess of seven figures; all had been snapped up the day they were released. Celebrities flocked to celebrate their weddings there, and an EU gathering of some description had reached its climax with the assorted heads of state stomping around the Tyrrellscourt fairways in a variety of garish leisure wear.
The third thing Tyrrellscourt had become famous for, quite at odds with the first two, was the number of people who went there to disappear. The guitarist of an obscure late sixties English rock band, part of the Canterbury scene, hadn't been seen since, following the breakup of the group, he got on a train at Victoria Station, headed for Brighton; thirty-five years later, following sightings all over the globe and a persistent rumor that he was now an obscure novelist nobody knew anything about either, an English music magazine tracked him down to Tyrrellscourt, where he had been living with his Dutch wife running a candle-making business. The group subsequently re-formed and made quite a lot of money before breaking up for roughly the same reason they had in the first place: because they couldn't stand one another. But this aspect of Tyrrellscourt, its ability to give shelter and succor to a variety of misfits and n'er-do-wells of one kind or another who couldn't cut it in the new thrusting entrepreneurial Ireland, or simply refused to play by the new rules of the game, was particularly vivid given that the shiny happy face of the country club was so often used as a brochure to advertise the extent of the Irish success story. It was a script that could have been designed with Tommy Owens in mind; in fact, it turned out he'd been disappearing down here for years. Maybe they'd been running a bus from Hennessy's bar.
"I won't go on about the country club, except to say they got the fuckin' name right, and the stables is what it is, yeah, but if you want to know what Tyrrellscourt's about, then McGoldrick's is the place to go," Tommy said. "There are others places, Sheehy's and the Big Tree, but McGoldrick's has the best mix. And that's the point, the mix, know I mean? Up in the country club they're all prancing around in their Pringle and Lacoste like the cunts they are, a fucking kindergarten for the nouveau riche whose mammies won't let them play outdoors. And the horsey fuckers have work to do, fair enough, they're at the gallops and so on, and they have a couple of older restaurants they go to, salmon en croûte and Black Forest gateau they're serving, like a fucking geezer theme park, sixties cuisine for the hundred Irish cunts who've been rich since then. But everyone passes through McGoldrick's, not just the people I know: all the jockeys come there, and they're fucking mental bastards. And even middle-class people want some action after a week of golf and spa treatments and Chardonnay. Because everyone knows if you need something extracurricular, McGoldrick's the place to go."
"When you say all the jockeys go there-"
"When they can, when they're not in training, or wasting; they get a night out, they go mad."
"So there'd be boys who knew Patrick Hutton?"
"Chances are. Boys who'd say they knew him. Anyone riding in Leopardstown probably won't be there. But you never know, they do what they please, jockeys."
"Tommy, what happened between you and Miranda?"
"What do you mean, Ed?"
"I'm saying, fair enough to ask her about the call to Leo, but there was a real edge between you two. Why?"
Tommy grimaced.
"I'll tell you over a drink."
"Why can't you tell me now?"
"Because you're not going to like it. And when you don't like something, you do better with a drink in your hand."
I pressed him a little further, and when we reached a set of traffic lights, he turned to me and said pretty much the worst thing Tommy could say about anyone.
"Ed, I know her."
THE VILLAGE IS on a slope, and at its top, you can see the Tyrrellscourt gallops stretching out below in two lazy figure-of-eights for the horses' round and straight work. Driving down along the main street was like one of those posed features in a color supplement about "The Subcultures of Our Time": there were new-age crusties and tree huggers with multicolored sweaters and tights and those strange cropped-pate and pigtail haircuts with dogs on strings and petitions to save the whale, and the world; there were older hippies in saris and denim and leather, with mustaches and ponytails and nature shoes and raddled complexions; there were horsey, country types in Barbours and yellow and crimson and lime cords; there were obese white-faced teenage Goths in long leatherette coats and vast black T-shirts and six-inch steel-inlaid wedges; there were the usual complements of cheerful or surly layabouts, faces weather-beaten from standing smoking outside the pub or the betting shop all day; there were clutches of stripe-shirted men with mobile phones and oblong glasses thrusting their entrepreneurial way into the future; there were spiked-fin rugby boys and primped and groomed OMIGOD girls; there were slender, fine-boned blond women from Poland and Lithuania with their crop-headed sinewy men; there were 'oul ones with walking frames and tartan shopping trollies getting the last of the Christmas messages, and 'oul fellas with papers rolled tight beneath their arms, transporting their custom from one pub to another.
It was Christmas Eve in Tyrrellscourt, and everywhere there was tinsel and holly and flashing neon and twinkling fairy lights; last-minute bargains were being bruited from shop doorways, and the queues from the two butchers for turkeys and hams together ran the length of the town. At the bottom of the main drag the road forked in two, and there was a central meeting place with benches and flower beds and a great Christmas tree, and throngs of folk were gathered to gossip and idle and pass the compliments of the season back and forth. An accordion-playing trio from Central Europe was providing musical backing to the festive hordes; as we passed, they finished "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and kicked into "Carolan's Welcome," a traditional tune from the seventheenth-century blind Irish harper. I began to laugh at this point, and Tommy turned to me.
"You know when Yanks say to you, 'Oh, you're so lucky to live in Ireland,' like it's some fucking Celtic theme park full of characters and crack and gargle? And we're like, no, it's just like anywhere else, except with rain? Well, sometimes that's what Tyrrellscourt is like. It's like visiting Ireland for an Irish person."
We braked suddenly as a BMW Estate pulled out of its parking spot, and then Tommy smartly rolled the Volvo into its place and killed the engine. He flipped a half-smoked roll up from his shirt pocket to his mouth, lit it and exhaled with a grin.
"Of course, by half three, the light will be dying, and the freeze will be kicking in, and half the town will be pissed, and the other half will be getting there, and the blood will be up and the knives will be out, and all of this fucking…Brigadoon will just…"
Tommy held his hand out to the color and bustle of the town, and raised it in a parting wave.
"See ya…"
EVERYONE PASSES THROUGH McGoldrick's, Tommy said, so it only seemed right that we did too. It had a traditional frontage and an old mahogany bar with snugs on either side; double doors led through to a larger lounge and restaurant area; at the end of this another set of doors gave onto a vast room that looked like an old warehouse: girders had been painted pillar-box green and floorboards had been waxed and tossed with sawdust and old suitcases and books and vintage bicycles and typewriters were stacked on shelves and in alcoves; lunch was being served from an open kitchen that ran the length of one wall by young staff with the striking looks and excellent manners of Eastern Europeans to tables filled with Christmas Eve revelers, mainly families with supernaturally excited kids. We retreated to the lounge, which seemed to have a more upscale buzz to it, judging by the high-maintenance sheen of its predominantly female clientele. Without even having to look at each other, we found ourselves back in the bar, perched on two bar stools and ordering pints of Guinness and bowls of Irish stew. The graying ponytailed barman, whose name was Steno, gave Tommy a high five and made fun of his short hair and close-shaven face; evidently Tommy had established a minor reputation down here for himself. I wondered if I should tell Steno about Tommy's recent career move to the Church. Better to keep that in reserve, I decided. The bar's customers were on the horsey Barbour side, chomping brown bread and pâté and drinking hot ports and yelping about Leopardstown.
"Later in the day, it all gets a bit…looser," Tommy said.
The foaming half-poured pints sat by the taps to settle, and I nodded to Tommy to get on with it, and he nodded at the pints, so we waited until Steno had topped them up and gave them another couple of minutes and at last set them down in front of us, the swirling brown now solid black, the heads creamy and firm. We tipped them back. I don't know about Tommy's, but mine tasted like the first pint God made.
"All right then, Tommy, I have the drink; now, tell me what you know about Miranda Hart."
Tommy grimaced, then raised his eyebrows to heaven resignedly.
"All right, Ed, but don't go blaming the messenger."
"Just get on with it, will you?"
"Right, I used to come down here a fair bit, '98, '99, things weren't going so well with Paula, better than before they started to go really badly but still, anyway, I was down here, doing, I never told you this, a bit of work for Leo Halligan. Don't get the wrong idea, Ed, only Leo wasn't the maniac everyone thought he was, and no one thought he done that young fella, he was covering up for someone else, or something else, and there was a lot of talk that he was happy to do the time, get himself out of the way. Anyway, I was doing a bit of work for Leo-"
"What kind of work was this, Tommy? For a Halligan brother? Painting and decorating, were you?"
"You were away, Ed, so you missed a lot of…when George and Podge Halligan were getting going back in the nineties, Leo was down here, trying and failing as a jockey. Not as if he was morally opposed to his brothers, he just had a different plan. After that plan didn't work, he hung on down here, and he became a kind of…I don't know, he was like, at the center of a whole bunch of guys, jockeys, a bookie or two, even a few racing journalists."
"At the center of them how?"
"He'd be buying them dinner, drinks, comping them to events, you know, gigs in Dublin. Lining up women. And a little dope, a little blow, a few E's."
"And you were his distribution network for the drugs, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And so what was it all about? Was it some kind of charitable work maybe? These horse-racing professionals were all-work-and-no-play merchants and Leo stepped in to modify their work-life balance? Or, having given all their lives, they decided it was time they got something back."
"You may laugh."
"Some days, I do little else."
"Leo may be a Halligan, but being gay is like a passport across the classes. And racing has a fair bit of that as well. So you'd be surprised who you'd've seen down here. And Leo was always setting up the jockeys to go to these charity balls for MS and the Hospice Foundation and whatever, photographs of them in the Sunday Independent with a bunch of orange-faced models. He knew all these guys who trot around after the ladies who lunch and, you know, go with them to all these events their husbands can't be bothered going to anymore. And they're all hoovering up blow any chance they get, so it worked out nicely, all very respectable."
"Meanwhile."
"Well, I don't know, I mean, I have no evidence, no proof. But the story was, it was all about race fixing. Leo was working with George at this stage-George has a place in the Algarve, and a lot of the jockeys were flown out there on golfing holidays, they were given presents, sometimes cash, sometimes cars or whatever. George has been running a book for ages for people who can't bet legally, usually because their money isn't clean. So the jockeys were holding up horses mostly, in some cases maybe doping them."
The Irish stew arrived, and for once, it actually was Irish stew-mutton, potato and onion in a white sauce-and not the brown beef concoction that often masqueraded in its place. I fell on mine in a spasm of lunchtime-after hunger; Tommy peered at his disapprovingly, pushed it to one side and ordered two more pints.
"I need to be back for midnight mass; plenty of time to let these metabolize," he said.
"What was in it for the journalists and the other bookies? The same?"
"Sure. They knew when to bet, when to lay off. And the journalists could mount a defense of any jockey that made it look too blatant. Every trainer keeps a tame journo or two."
"Any bookies we know?"
"There was only really the one: Jack Proby. Well, and his old man, Seán, of course. But Jack was the main man, Jack was into everything, Jack-"
Tommy stopped suddenly, and then stared across the gantry at a bottle of Irish Mist, as if it had asked him a question. His face flushed.
"Is this how the girl gets into the picture?"
He nodded, grimacing.
"Spit it out."
"She was with Proby, but…well, she was doing a lot of coke, and then she got into smack, and…"
"And what?"
"She turned into a total skank, you know? She'd go with anyone. And I think the idea was to pimp her out, because she was a gorgeous-looking woman, but she got too messy for anyone to deal with. Too messy for anyone to pay money for. She got barred out of here, and pretty much everywhere else. And it was really humiliating for her because she was known in the town, you know? Her old man used to run the Tyrrellscourt Arms and all. It was almost as if that was why, you know, because she was known that she was doing it. I mean, she didn't have to. Even on smack, blokes'd queue down the street for a woman like that."
"What happened to her father?"
"He died not long after Miranda left school, I think. And the Tyrrells bought the pub, it's now a kind of gate lodge to the country club."
"When you say you think the idea was to pimp her out…whose idea was that? Leo's?"
"Actually might have been Jack Proby's. He was a piece of work, that guy…it was like, he was doing these drugs and taking these holidays and all against his will, you know, he was always beefing about it, the coke was cut with bleach, the champagne wasn't vintage, know I mean? Like he was being held hostage somehow. And I think he took it out a lot on Miranda. Mind you, I couldn't swear to this, Ed, I mean, I was doing a lot of drugs at the time."
"Could you swear to any of it?"
"I don't know whether Miranda Hart was being forced, or whether she was using her own free will, but I know people paid her money for sex down here. I know that for a fact."
Fair play to Tommy, he lifted his face to mine so I could see the shame in his squinting eyes and the fear whipping around his mouth. Tommy Owens never lacked guts, even if sometimes it took him quite a while to remember where they were. I took a long drink of my second pint.
"When you say you know for a fact that people paid Miranda Hart for sex, Tommy…just how do you know that?"
"Because I was one of them."
I didn't want to listen to Tommy's explanations or excuses, and in truth, he didn't seem in much of a hurry to offer any. We drank in silence for a while, and then I told him I'd see him later and left. I wasn't sure exactly how I felt about what he had told me, but I wanted a break from having to look at his face while I worked it out. Everyone's allowed a past, and if we weren't able to forgive and forget much of what went on there, our lives would run aground on banks of grievance and resentment. That's what I told myself, not what I felt in my chest or in my gut.
The crowds were dwindling with the fading of the light, and a north wind dug deep into the bone. I pulled my overcoat tight around my throat and walked back out of town until I came to the gates of the Tyrrellscourt Hotel, Health Spa and Country Club, and what must have been the Tyrrellscourt Arms, a double-fronted stone bungalow maybe a hundred and fifty years old. It now functioned as a dedicated tourist office for the club and also for the stables and the stud, with brochures and a range of merchandise.
A uniformed security guard came out at my approach and asked me if I was a resident. I said no, but I had business with Regina Tyrrell. When the guard found out I didn't have an appointment, he wouldn't even lift the phone. He said Ms. Tyrrell was seeing nobody that day, and I said she'd see me, on account of how my business had to do with her brother Vincent. He was still reluctant, but when I said Ms. Tyrrell hadn't heard from her brother the priest for a long time but would obviously be anxious to on a day of such pain and distress for the family, he went back inside and made the call; when he came out and gave me the go-ahead, I wondered what she had said to him; he looked like he certainly didn't envy me my errand.
Hardy souls were still playing on the golf course I could see; the brochure assured me there was another course somewhere to the rear of the hotel, which loomed up ahead, white and sprawling, like a château that couldn't stop growing, with its multiple bow windows and its Italianate campanile. Landscaped gardens and a three-tiered lawn led up to the grand main entrance; signposts pointed the way to the wings and annexes that housed the tennis and squash courts, the spa, the swimming pools and the gymnasium; as I stood on the threshold, I heard the competing roars of a car and a river; the car was a steel-gray Bentley Continental Flying Spur, and it swept its cargo of laughing blondes past the main entrance as if it could spot the checkered flag; the river was the Liffey, which sprang from here and flowed on into Dublin and out to the sea.
The lobby was the usual nightmare mismatch of expensive styles and fittings common to every luxury Irish hotel: We Can Buy What We Like, And We Will, it screamed. Expensively tanned and scented guests wandered about exuding the relaxed ease of the rich; they seemed absurdly vivid and I an impostor, a monochrome man in their Technicolor world. The cute Scottish redhead at reception directed me to a function room jammed with highly excited children and their parents; in the middle, a red-suited Santa Claus was doing his thing. Regina Tyrrell spotted me immediately; I guess since I was the only man in the room not wearing deck shoes or a cardigan, that wasn't too hard.
The first thing I thought when I saw Regina Tyrrell was how much she looked like Miranda Hart, which is to say, how much she resembled my ex-wife: the same coal-black eyes and hair, the same long legs and rangy frame, the same imperious bearing. She was older, of course, but she didn't look it, or rather, age to her didn't look like any kind of burden; she was carrying maybe ten pounds, which showed on her body in a series of pleasant curves and helped to keep her face supple and smooth; she wore a black trouser suit and a square-cut black top. Her hair was cut short rather than piled high; her expression grim and resourceful, as if she'd taken all that life had thrown so far, but didn't expect it to stop anytime soon. Without a word, she indicated that I should follow her up a flight of stairs to a pale pink office that looked out over the rear of the complex. Before I had a chance to take in the fading view, she sat behind a white desk and began to talk.
"I haven't spoken to Vincent in thirty years, out of choice. What makes you think I'd want to talk to anyone who'd have anything to do with him?"
Her accent was melodious Dublin in its Sunday best, not lazy or glottal-stopped, not affected; unusual to hear it these days spoken by anyone of status, especially a woman; it sounded intoxicating to my ears.
"I don't know. Why would you? And yet, here we are."
She turned on a pink-shaded desk lamp and looked past it at me and shook her head.
"She said you'd be cheeky, all right."
"Who did?"
"Miranda."
"I got the impression you two didn't speak either."
"We don't. But given the night that was in it…"
She blessed herself, and I noticed the silver cross at her throat.
"Miranda said you were there."
"I found her. And the murderer-at least, I assume it was the murderer-hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out."
"Francis is in shock," she said. "He went up to Dublin this morning to identify the body."
"What else did Miranda tell you?"
"What are you doing for Vincent?"
"He asked me to find…no, that's not right, he didn't ask me anything. He gave me a name. Patrick Hutton."
I looked closely at Regina, but there wasn't any visible reaction. There should at least have been a flicker. I looked around the room. The walls were pale pink, the furniture pink and white, the strawberries-and-cream drapes ruched and tasseled; two gold chandeliers hung from the ceiling; the carpet was white. It was a room decorated by a twelve-year-old girl: all that was missing was the stuffed toys. I looked again at the impressive woman before me. Sometimes I felt I could spend a lifetime trying to work people out until they added up, and at the end they'd still be the strangers they began as.
"Did Miranda not tell you that?" I said.
Regina Tyrrell set her lips in a wry smile.
"Miranda said there were things she couldn't tell me. She said it might be harmful to the work you were doing. She said any of us could be next. I asked her was the second body that had been found Patrick's. She said that I should ask you. And she said it all in this hushed voice, as if she was in a crowded bar and the bad guys were listening. As if she was in a movie. Such a drama queen, our Miranda, always was. I think the bit she liked most was ringing me up and then not telling me anything. Her knowing something I didn't know. She liked that all right. Was it Patrick?"
"They haven't identified the body," I said. "But it sounds like it could be."
"It makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the rest of it."
"That's why I'm here," I said.
"To ask me questions? To poke your nose into our family affairs? What makes you think we should welcome you with open arms?"
"I'm not used to that kind of welcome. But what Miranda said was true: there seems to be a pattern to the killings, and any of you could be the next victim."
"And what about the Guards? Why aren't they here?"
"They're conducting their own investigation. A lot of it would depend on forensics, on what they can deduce from the crime scene. And since they've got three to examine, that is probably where the bulk of their focus lies at the moment. They'll get here presently."
"And how do you know Vincent?"
Every time she spoke his name, it sounded like the twist of a knife in her guts. I explained about growing up in Bayview with Tyrrell as the parish priest, and about Tommy's unlikely job as sacristan providing the connection between us. At this, she visibly relaxed, as if reassured that I wasn't acting in some sinister manner on Vincent Tyrrell's behalf. She got up from her desk and walked to the window.
"It never looks the same, does it, twilight?" she said. "Or maybe it's that your eyes never quite get used to it. You look, and everything seems unfamiliar, and by the time you've adjusted, the light has changed, and what you saw is past, or the moon is down, and everything is equally visible in its glare, and none of it makes sense."
As I joined her, I could see a half-moon popping out like a cymbal crash and shedding its silver everywhere. There was another golf course out there, with dramatic bunkers and water features; below it ran the river; in the distance I could see high walls and bare trees ranged around a neo-Gothic mansion; beyond lay the gallops of Tyrrellscourt stables.
"Maybe that's what trying to really look at your life is like, look at your own family," she said. "That moment between twilight, when everything is strange and mysterious, and moonlight, when you see everything plain, and nothing stands out: everything is clear and nothing has any meaning."
Maybe I was so struck by her image that I forgot what we were doing, or maybe I had spotted something by the walled house that distracted me; when she next spoke, it was as if to a man who had made his own way to the dining table without waiting for her to lead.
"What I'm saying is, maybe an outsider's eye is just what we need, Mr. Loy."
She went back to her desk and sat down and turned the light off. Her face in the shadows immediately looked older, gray and tired, her great dark eyes pools, inviting strangers at their own risk.
"Tell me about the family, then. Tell me about the Tyrrells," I said.
"I don't know about the Tyrrells. But I can tell you about myself," she said. "My mother died giving birth to me. I think that was hard on the boys. I never knew any different, but boys need a mother if they're to avoid…a certain kind of coldness. Anyway, I grew up here, went to the local school, boarding school in Dublin."
"Is that where you got the accent?"
She grinned.
"I got the accent in Dublin, but not at boarding school. Everyone told me to get rid of it. Maybe that's why I hung on to it. Too late now."
"I like it a lot."
"Listen to you. Say anything so you would. Say mass if you were let."
She laughed, an uneasy laugh, and it struck me that, beneath the brittle sheen, she was an uneasy woman. Maybe when you sat opposite a detective, only fools and knaves weren't. Or maybe she had a lot to be uneasy about.
"So this would have been sixties, seventies?"
"Left school in '74."
"F.X. would have been running the show here by then?"
"For ten years. Francis trained his first winner at nineteen. Won the Gold Cup the following year, '65. And on and on."
"And what about you? University? London?"
"Nah. I came back here. I missed it like mad. And the horses. I was one of those pony girls. In boarding school up in the Dublin mountains…Jasus, Mother Borgia, that was the mother superior's name, Mother Borgia, you wouldn't believe it now, but back then…anyway, I hated the place, all these snobby southside bitches, but there was a riding school nearby, and a couple of local lads who'd sneak me in and sneak horses out…oh, we had such a time of it. I think that's where I got the accent. And of course, it gave the nuns conniptions, it went against everything they stood for, which wasn't education at all, it was how to arrange flowers and give a dinner party and get into a sports car without showing your knickers so you could nab some young businessman and make him a fragrant wife. And certainly not be letting him down in front of his boss talking like some common-as-muck Dublin Chrissie. We've got over that now, at least. Anyone in this country with a few bob in his pocket's as good as anyone else."
"And anyone without a few bob?"
"Let them go out and work for it. That's what the Poles and Latvians and all are doing, and fair play to them. If there's a generation of Irish too lazy to work, that's a shame for them, but what are we supposed to do about it? Sponsor them to drink all day and go to the shops in their pajamas?"
"So you came back to Tyrrellscourt, and trained?"
"Not really. You have to be…touched by God to be able for that."
"Touched by God?"
"Laugh if you like," she said. "But it is a kind of vocation. I've often watched Francis during the day, inspecting the horses and the lads in the morning before work begins, checking the earth and watching the sky, supervising the feeds, right the way to patrolling the yard at night, listening for a restless horse, the wrong kind of cough, and all in silence: there's a kind of devotion to it, it's…I used to think he was like a monk. Only the horses had called him, not God."
"Your brother Vincent said much the same: the horses knew F.X., they didn't like Vincent at all."
"Good sense they had," she said, the wistful look she had had in talking about F.X. curdling when it came to her other brother.
"What caused the falling-out between you and Vincent?" I said.
Regina simply shook her head. Whatever it was, I wasn't going to hear it from her. She looked quickly at her watch, and I pressed ahead before I was cut off.
"So you didn't have a similar vocation?"
"No. The only thing I can compare it to is a musician. The kind who, they make the records, they give the concerts, they have the career, but the only time they're truly alive is when they're playing, is in the music. And F.X. was like that, at race meetings, he'd be hiding behind the horses, and when they won, there were no fists in the air, no big shite talk to the crowd like some of the knackers you see masquerading as trainers these days, it was just a quiet nod, the sense that this was as it should be. And I loved to play piano, classical, my favorite thing now, but if you think you can play the piano, and then you hear a Barenboim, a Rubinstein, well if you're not a total idiot, you understand immediately what you don't have. And to try would be futile, really. But you want to do something, you believe in what's being done. So I did what I could. I ran the house for him. I took night courses in bookkeeping so I could keep an eye on the money. I took cookery courses so when owners came to visit, they could bring their wives and children. I made sure the gardens were kept up. And I dressed up and went with him to Cheltenham and Ain-tree and Leopardstown and all, chatting to the Queen Mother and so forth."
"Like a wife."
"It wasn't unusual where we came from. Eldest son inherits the farm-"
"Youngest becomes a priest, unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for the brother-"
"Not unusual at all."
"She never married."
"Nothing like that," Regina said sharply. "There was more than one fella, over the years. But none of them…I don't know, unless you're going to settle for less. And I had all this, I didn't need any man's money."
She gestured toward the window, and then around the room.
"This house was in ruins, some 'oul dacency sisters were hanging on for dear life, until they gave up the ghost. We got it for a song in 1970. Francis put the whole thing in my name, I had the idea for all this."
"Well done," I said, and meant it.
"And so that was another thing, you're a successful woman, you attract gorgeous-looking fellas with expensive tastes and no funds, and you scare off the me-Tarzan types. So what can you do?"
"What did you do when Jackie Tyrrell appeared on the scene?"
Regina sighed and shook her head at that.
"What did I do? I invited her down here, you know. Jackie Lamb. She was in school with me. And she'd been writing to me, all this very flattering stuff, she was working for one of those Irish women's magazines, wanted to do a feature, sisters are doing it for themselves, all very exciting. So down she comes, and it's soon very clear she has F.X. in her sights."
"And were you hurt by that?"
"Hurt? What do you mean, hurt? I told you, there was nothing like that. Do you think I was after her?"
"I didn't mean about her. I meant, hurt that your brother…there must have been a very strong bond between you both. It can't have been easy to bring another woman into that."
Regina Tyrrell looked at her watch again, and lifted her hands up and almost clapped them.
"Four-thirty. Sun over the yardarm. Miranda said you drank."
"I do."
"Don't we all?"
"Does F.X.?"
"Of course he doesn't."
Light spilled from the far end of the room as Regina opened a white wood door that concealed a fridge freezer and produced a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Schweppes tonic. She found glasses and brought the drinks to the desk and we drank in near darkness. I thought of asking her to put the light on, but then found I didn't want to.
"I wouldn't say I was hurt," Regina said. "But it was hard not to feel excluded. I mean, she was at the races instead of me. Literally. And of course, she had the finishing school thing going on, and the magazine and all, these lady writers who were friends of hers up in Dublin, gossip columnists and what have you, giving her great write-ups for the frocks. So yeah. But like I mean, I just moved in down here and let her get on with it. There was a time she was up and down to me three times a day, how does this work, when does Francis like his dinner, all that. Felt like his ma so I did."
"You said F.X. doesn't drink. Jackie Tyrrell said there were a lot of things F.X. didn't do."
"Really. I wouldn't know."
"Because it seems odd on the face of it that they never had children. She said-"
"Yeah. She said that to me too. And says I to her, there are things a sister shouldn't really have to know about her brother, and that's one of them."
"No curiosity?"
"No thank you. Did she tell you all this the night she died?"
"She did. I was the last person who saw her alive. Apart from her killer."
"What did she say about me?"
"She said you run all this, and you run your brother too."
Regina laughed mirthlessly.
"That's the way Jackie saw everything. It was all about control."
"And what is it all about for you?"
The question seemed to catch her unawares. In the pale light I thought I saw something like vulnerability, even fear, cross her face.
"The future. It's all about the future."
I forbore from asking the obvious question-what kind of future could the Tyrrells have when the current generation was too old to provide another?-but I felt it lay heavy in the air between us.
"She also said you were glad when she and Francis got divorced. And that she was going to tell me a thing or two about you," I said.
"And did she?"
"That was the last thing she said to me. The next time I saw her, she was dead."
Regina 's hand went automatically to her throat, and she shuddered, whether in sympathy or out of relief, I couldn't tell.
"What kind of relationship did you have with Miranda Hart?" I said.
Regina shrugged.
"I didn't really get a look-in. Jackie was hugger-mugger there. I liked her as a teenager, she used to haunt the yard, drive the lads wild. In every way. Reminded me a bit of myself at that age. When her mother died, her father sent her off to boarding school in England, and she came back talking like Lady Diana, Jasus, that was something to hear. Jackie kind of adopted her then, bought her clothes and all. Had her show-ponying around the place. I never thought Miranda had what it took to carry that off. Her name is Mary, you know."
"Mary?"
"Yeah. I think she took some stick from the gels in Cheltenham over that, about being a little Irish colleen, holy Mary, all this, so when she got back here for good, she was Miranda, with the yah accent. Jackie bought into the whole thing, and it stuck. 'Course everyone knew she was Paddy Hart the publican's daughter Mary, but if she says that's not who she is anymore, who's to say different?"
Regina 's tone was jaunty and high, as if discussing the amusing caprices of a neighbor's daughter. My next question not only put a stop to that, it retrospectively undermined any gaiety she had supposedly felt at Miranda's adventures.
"And what happened with Patrick Hutton?"
"That was just an unsuitable, a wrong marriage, I told Jackie from the very beginning, she should and could have stopped it, but no, I was being petit bourgeois and lower middle class apparently, the snotty Cork bitch, she thought it was wonderfully brave. I honestly think she pushed it out of spite, because I got Francis to try and intervene. If he's good enough to ride for F. X. Tyrrell, she said, he's good enough to marry a publican's daughter. As if all the Miranda stuff, the airs and graces she'd taught her, was for nothing, or worse, a game to keep herself amused, like the girl was a doll, a toy to be played with. I felt sorry for the child…"
She stopped, and raised her glass, and sighed, as if she'd said too much.
"She was adopted, wasn't she?" I said, in as pointed a manner as I could manage.
"Are you asking me what I think you're asking me?" Regina said.
"She's the image of you," I said.
"No, is the answer," she said. "Fuck's sake, I see the black eye, I'm not surprised, questions like that."
"She had a rough time of it after Hutton disappeared."
"A lot of which she brought on herself," Regina said. "Ah, she lost the place altogether, I don't know what happened to her. Drink, drugs…I suppose you heard she was little better than a prostitute there for a while. It wasn't as if she needed money."
"Did she not? She was renting out her house, I know."
"She inherited the Tyrrellscourt Arms when her father died sure. Ninety-two, was it? And she made a lot of money out of that."
"She sold it to you, didn't she?"
"For a quarter of a million pounds. That was before the boom, when two hundred and fifty thousand would have got you pretty much anything you wanted in Dublin. That little place in Riverside wouldn't have been more than sixty then, if that. I never knew what got into Miranda. She got over it, at least. Jackie gave her work, helped undo some of the harm she'd done."
Regina looked at her watch again.
"Now. Christmas Eve. I have family commitments."
"Just one last thing," I said. "Patrick Hutton. Didn't you ever wonder over the years what had happened?"
She stood up and shook her head.
"No," she said. "But I always hoped he was dead, to be honest with you. I hoped and prayed he was dead."
I couldn't hold her gaze, and looked out the window, to see that the Range Rover that had been parked near the walls of Tyrrells court House when we came up here had gone.
Regina Tyrrell walked me down to the lobby. At reception, a tall slim girl of about nine or ten with long dark hair and dark eyes was waiting. When she saw Regina she ran to her and kissed her.
"Karen, meet Edward Loy. Ed Loy, Karen Tyrrell. My daughter."
I shook the girl's hand, trying to fix a smile on my face. Her daughter? Behind the girl stood a slim male figure in his sixties, immaculate in tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, polished tan brogues, Tattersall shirt and cravat; only a small swollen belly betrayed F. X. Tyrrell's age. His weathered face had the same prominent cheekbones his brother's had; his eyes were smaller, but the same deep brown as his sister's; his lips were fleshy and loose. He had the quiet, watchful, half-sad, half-amused air of a man well used to having people report and defer to him; Regina, while not exactly going that far, seemed to genuflect an apology in his direction, which he dispelled with a half smile.
"I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Tyrrell," I said.
He nodded to acknowledge my sympathy, and again to deflect it, gesturing toward the child. Everywhere in the lobby people were trying not to stare at F. X. Tyrrell and failing; they probably would have done so anyway, but with shy smiles on their faces; a glance at the pile of Evening Heralds at reception explained why they weren't smiling today: OMEGA MAN KILLS TRAINER'S EX-WIFE, screamed the headline. I quickly scanned the story. They still hadn't ID'd Hutton. When I turned back, it was to Karen Tyrrell alone; Regina had drawn F.X. off down the steps to one side, and they were locked in conversation. Karen smiled at me, and I smiled back.
"Do you have any children?" she said.
I couldn't really explain, not to a child.
"Yes," I said. "A little girl. She'd be about your age now."
"I'm nine," Karen said. "What's her name?"
"Lily," I said, and then heard myself saying: "She lives with her mother. In America."
"I live with my mother too," Karen said. "And Uncle Francis, but he's never there, and even when he is, he isn't. If that makes sense. Sometimes I don't make too much sense, Mum says."
"It sounds sensible to me," I said. "A lot of men are like that."
"I wouldn't know. My dad's dead," she said gravely.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I suppose. I never knew him. I don't think Mum knew him very well either. She doesn't even have a photograph of him."
Karen had been surveying the come-and-go around the room while we talked; now she looked up at me through eyes widened to express her bemusement at the scant trail her father had left. Her gaze left me reeling, and I felt as if it was setting me a challenge which, if met, could solve the mystery of the Tyrrells and of the killer who could be on their trail. For Karen Tyrrell's eyes were not identical: one was brown, and one was dark blue.
Regina joined us and told me her brother was waiting to speak to me outside the hotel. I found him by the far end of the building, looking back toward his stables. He didn't turn as I stood alongside him, barely moved a muscle.
"Did Jackie say anything about me?" he said quickly.
His voice was quiet but perfectly pitched, the kind of voice you listened closely to for fear of missing a beat. A king's voice.
"She said several things."
"What were they?"
"Why do you want to know? It was a private conversation." F. X. Tyrrell made a sound in his throat, a sound like a dry branch snapping.
"Just answer my question."
"No, I don't think I will."
Tyrrell still hadn't moved, but I could hear his breath coming quickly through his nose. He started to say something that sounded like a threat, then stopped himself and changed course.
"She was my wife, Mr. Loy."
From another man it might have been a plea; F. X. Tyrrell made it sound like a command.
"I know that. But you weren't the subject of our meeting. Jackie spoke mainly about Miranda Hart, and Patrick Hutton. You know your brother has hired me to find Hutton?"
F. X. Tyrrell turned around and faced me, his small eyes blazing.
"A brother is loyal or he is nothing. I have no brother."
"Father Vincent suggested I should ask you about close breeding."
I don't know what reaction I was expecting; what I got was a weary shake of the head.
"Father Vincent should stick with his discipline, and let me stick with mine," he said. "Tell my sister I'll be waiting for her."
I found Regina Tyrrell in reception. She whispered to Karen to wait with Uncle Francis, and Karen gave me a little salute somewhere between a nod and a curtsy and made to go; then came back and reached up and kissed my cheek and whispered something in my ear, and half skipped, half danced across to join her uncle, who was standing by the door.
"Great kid," I said. Regina Tyrrell nodded as if that was beyond dispute, and looked at me impatiently, and I gave her my full attention.
"I have a proposition to put to you, Mr. Loy," she said.
"I already have a client," I said. "Your brother Vincent."
"We could pay more."
"He's paying plenty. Besides, I don't know that F. X. Tyrrell took to me."
"F.X. will do as I ask. We have our own security people, of course, but there are so many staff, here, and at the stables, and it would be good to have someone who's on top of the case. Not that I believe our lives are in danger, but…"
"I'm sure the Guards will offer some people."
"That would be good for business. Guards clumping around."
"I can't do it. There is someone…he's a little unorthodox…but I'd trust him with my life. Indeed, on several occasions, I have."
"He'd be under your control," she said.
I nearly laughed at the notion that Tommy could ever come fully under anyone's control.
"That's the general idea," I said. "I'll try and get him to you this evening."
We discussed money, and when she didn't haggle, I got suspicious. I was suspicious anyway.
"Ms. Tyrrell, do you drive a Range Rover?"
"I do, as a matter of fact."
"Could I see it?"
"It's right outside. Francis drove Karen over in it."
"So you don't use it exclusively?"
"I usually do. Francis borrowed it today. His has something up with it."
"He drives one as well?"
Regina nodded, already looking bewildered and a little bored by the questions. She nodded at me to follow her, conferred briefly with a trim blonde in a black trouser suit not unlike Regina 's who was presumably the duty manager and joined F.X. and Karen at the door. The Range Rover was outside and they climbed into it. I copied the number of the UK registration plate into my notebook. When I looked up again, Regina Tyrrell was standing before me, her face uncertain, her eyes wary.
"If you see Miranda…"
"Yes?"
"You will see her, I expect?"
"I expect so."
"And she's safe?"
"I hope so."
"Tell her…tell her…"
The engine of the Range Rover started, and Regina shook her head, and a wave of what could have been irritation at her inability to find the right words, but looked darker than that, looked like pain, rippled across her face. She turned and almost fell into the car, which took off immediately. I followed on foot down the drive.
On the way, I checked my messages. Tommy had left a voice mail saying that he'd met someone who knew Leo and Hutton in St. Jude's, that he was still in McGoldrick's and would I be okay to drive back to Dublin. And I got a message from Joe Leonard, he of the uneasy marriage and the garbage dump on his doorstep: a picture of him and Annalise and the kids with Santa hats on and the legend: Merry Christmas from the Leonards! So maybe I had a satisfied customer somewhere.
I walked back into town thinking about Karen Tyrrell. Ten years ago Regina would have been forty-two or forty-three, reaching the end of her fertility; many single women who get pregnant by accident at that age keep a child they would have aborted ten years previously: some go out with the intention of getting pregnant by an anonymous one-night stand. But nine years ago would also bring us back to the aftermath of Patrick Hutton's disappearance; nine years would be long enough for someone who'd been made pregnant by Patrick Hutton to have his baby, almost a year after his disappearance. That would help to explain Miranda Hart's less than fond tone when she mentioned Regina. It might also go a long way toward accounting for Miranda's self-destructive trawl through Tyrrellscourt in the period after Hutton's disappearance: hard enough for your husband to disappear, but knowing (assuming she did know) that he had impregnated another woman, an older, richer woman whose family had in a sense informally adopted Miranda and Hutton both: that must have felt like betrayal. I won't play the Judas for anyone, Hutton said; perhaps he already had, with Regina Tyrrell, and when Miranda found out, she made sure the Tyrrells got to see the ugly consequences on the streets of their own town. Maybe that accounted for Regina 's dismissive attitude to the marriage: not because she considered Patrick Hutton unworthy of Miranda, but because she had been in love with him herself. I called Dave Donnelly, and a couple of minutes later he called me back.
"Dave, I want you to see if you can get hold of Don Kennedy's case files. He looked into Patrick Hutton's disappearance a couple of years ago, so that Miranda Hart could have him declared dead."
"What am I looking for?"
I thought for a minute.
"Birth cert, baptismal cert, anything official. Hutton seems to have been a man without a past. And anything else that Kennedy turned up…I mean, he cleared the way for the insurance company to sign the house over to Miranda, but any time you do a trawl like that, you always uncover other stuff. Anything, even if it feels like gossip to you."
"Want to explain?"
"Not sure if I can. Just feeling my way."
Dave ended the call, and I kept along the road.
My thoughts turned to my own little girl, and the lie I had told, and how I felt about telling it. It hadn't been about me: it was to spare Karen Tyrrell's feelings. Not that she needed me to. Kids don't live in quite such dread of death as adults do. But it reminded me of the relief I had felt when my daughter was born, that I was no longer the center of my own world, she was. I had moved contentedly away from center stage in my own life. I remember the initial vertigo, and then the thrill, the rush to embrace the natural feeling that a new generation is more important than your own. And the grief of her death was accentuated and prolonged by my revulsion at having to deal with myself and my own feelings: it felt like indulgence, or worse: I made myself sick. A month ago, I wouldn't have told a lie about Lily, even to say she would have been nine, instead of five, let alone that she was alive when her ashes lay scattered in the ocean at Santa Monica under an indifferent sky. But I told it, and I was glad I had, and Karen Tyrrell's kiss on my cheek had made me feel closer to Lily than three years of drinking and fucking and fighting had. I said a prayer, or something like a prayer, offering it up to the clear, starry sky, then slipped and nearly fell on an early frost outside McGoldrick's pub. I righted myself, hand on cold railings, my breath pluming in the freezing air, relieved to be upright with blood in my veins, the living voices from the pub swirling around my head; relieved to be among the living, with the memory of what Karen Tyrrell had whispered still fresh in my ears: Don't look so sad.
Before I went inside I played a hunch. I called the bookie whose mobile number I had found in Hutton's pocket.
"Yes, friend?" came the reply.
"Jack Proby?" I said.
"Who wants to know?"
"Edward Loy. I'm a friend of Miranda Hart's. I'd like to talk to you about a horse called By Your Leave."
"Yeah? What are you, friend, some kind of journalist?"
"No, I'm some kind of detective. Friend."
"Well, I'm kind of busy at the moment, friend. How did you get this number anyway?"
"If I told you, you'd have to kill me."
"That's very funny, friend, but I'm here at home with my family and I really don't appreciate-"
"I hear you, friend. That's what I'm calling about actually, the unappreciated. The jockeys who disappear because they won't carry out orders. The women who sell their bodies because the men they love are scumbags who'd rather pimp them out than care for them. The men whose fathers are gay and vulnerable to blackmail, who end up working for gangsters to keep the family secrets. Unappreciated, every one. We really should do something for them, don't you think? In this season of goodwill."
"What do you want?"
Proby's voice had lost the hail-fellow-well-met tone; now he sounded edgy and dangerous, like a rat in a trap.
"Where do you live?" I said.
"Foxrock," he said.
"Foxrock? Nice up there."
"I worked for every penny," he said.
"So do most people. They just don't seem to end up with as many pennies. A shame, isn't it?"
"Keeps me awake at nights."
"I'm sure it does. I'll see you at midday tomorrow down in Seafield. The West Pier."
"Tomorrow's Christmas Day, friend-"
"So it is. Where are my manners? Merry Christmas. Friend."
It was called pushing the boat out. The cops would be all over this case soon, if they weren't already. But what lay beneath it might never come out in their investigation. It would in mine. Call it justice. Call it curiosity. Whatever it was, it came down to this: I needed to know that nine-year-old girl had a future, one in which she would not be betrayed. And I wasn't convinced that, without my help, she would.
TOMMY OWENS WAS sitting on the same stool he'd been on when I left the pub, but it was as if a carnival had erected itself around him: face painters and street performers in clown costumes; folk musicians wearing bad hats; bearded bikers in leathers and their women in lace and feathers; three Santa Clauses and several drunken helpers in green-and-red elf costumes and, holding the line at the bar, a phalanx of little old men in jumpers of all ages, drinking seriously and devotedly and steadfastly resisting the temptations of excessive gaiety, even if one or two couldn't resist a stray look in the direction of the drunken elves, particularly the one who kept threatening to get her tits out unless one of the Santas promised to "do" her in his costume. Steno the barman, who had a reassuring aura of calm authority, finally brought this seasonal tableau to a close by ejecting the offending elf, but she was accompanied off the premises by one of the Santas, although possibly not the one she favored.
The lounge was calmer and tonier, with a crowd that looked bored by their money and keen to get rid of it; you could sell a lot of blow here tonight, and someone no doubt was. In the warehouse, it was as if everyone we had seen on the street earlier today was crammed inside; indeed, when I pulled open the double doors, three people stumbled back into the lounge; Noddy Holder was shrieking "It's Chriss-miss" on a jukebox as I made my way back to Tommy. I assumed he had been drinking all this time, but in fact he was stone-cold sober, or as stone cold as Tommy ever got; he nodded at me and introduced me to the short, slightly built guy on the stool next to him, who wore an olive-green flight suit and looked like a shaven-headed heroin addict: his taut flesh was mottled and pocked; his drawn cheeks had tight vertical folds like stiletto scars; his tiny eyes were recessed deep beneath heavy brows: dark blue and bloodshot, they glowed like hot coals.
"Ed, Bomber Folan. Bomber, Ed."
Bomber promptly stood up and left the bar. Tommy got to his feet to follow.
"Come on, Ed, we've a trip to make. Bomber's driving."
I followed reluctantly. If I had learned anything over the years, it was not to do business with anyone called "Bomber," and especially not to get into a vehicle with him. Besides, I wanted a drink. I needed a drink.
Outside, Tommy grinned.
"The expression on your face man."
He started to laugh. I didn't like being laughed at, especially not by Tommy Owens. Coming on top of what he had told me earlier this afternoon about Miranda Hart, I liked it even less. Without pausing for thought, I hit Tommy a dig in the mouth that send him skidding on the frosted ground. The smokers in McGoldrick's porch stiffened and a murmur of interest ran through them. Bomber drove up in a Jeep that looked like it had been fashioned from a corrugated iron shed and some old scaffolding. He jumped out and came at me, his hands up.
"No, Bomber, it's all right."
Tommy was on his feet, wiping blood from his mouth. He brought his face close to mine, close enough that I could see the anger in his eyes.
"Fair enough, Ed. I probably would have done the same. But you left before I could explain. Earlier."
"Explain what?" I said, knowing already I was in the wrong, and fearing it was only going to get worse. Tommy looked around at Bomber and nodded him back to the Jeep.
"I paid Miranda money. But I didn't get my money's worth. I didn't…she was so out of it that it wouldn't have been right. And anyway, I…I was never into that, into paying for it…I was kind of goaded into it…"
"You don't have to tell me this, Tommy," I said.
"I do, actually. Because you're the only one who…who even half believes I'm…you know…and the look on your face today when I told you about your one…I didn't want you thinking I'm some kind of fuckin'-"
"I don't, Tommy. All right? I don't."
Tommy nodded, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked me in the eyes, and I thought I saw tears in his. And then he hit me, a smack to the left cheek that dropped me to my knees and left my head jangling. I laid my palms on the cold ground to steady myself, and then I got slowly to my feet. The smokers were all beaming at the prospect of what this pair of out-of-town clowns might do next.
"Gonna have that drink now," I said.
"We'll wait for you."
I went back inside and Steno poured me a double Jameson and I added a third of water and he nodded approvingly at me as I drank it down like breakfast juice. The adage about being able to choose your friends but not your family ran through my mind. It wasn't true though, or at least, not as you got older. Unless you were the choosy type, or you went on a lot of cruises. No, you were stuck with your family and you were stuck with your friends, and you'd better just make the best of it. I thanked Steno, who had the solemn confessional gravity I prized in a barman, or at least the appearance of it, and went out to join Tommy in the back of a Jeep driven by a man called Bomber.
Bomber was a good driver, given the vehicle, and he had been a promising jockey until the heroin whose ravages still showed in his face had worked its way mercilessly through body and soul, calling a halt to his burgeoning career. Now he "did something with scrap," Tommy assured me. As we crossed a humpbacked bridge across the river at the far end of town and the suspension rattled and clanked like a mechanical press, I concluded that one of the somethings with scrap he did had become the Jeep we were sitting in. We turned in along the river and pulled up briefly outside a set of high iron gates. Bomber unlocked the padlock and uncoiled the chain and opened them and we drove up the short gravel drive to a large granite building with a slate roof that looked like a cross between a church and an asylum. The windows were all boarded up, with the exception of one stained-glass pane high on the rectangular bell tower; the grounds were overgrown; broken glass and beer cans and the dead embers of fires lay strewn about.
"St. Jude's," Tommy said.
Bomber, who hadn't spoken and didn't look like starting anytime soon, produced flashlights from a toolbox in the Jeep and gave us one each. He set off up the steps and unlocked a further three padlocks and set aside three iron bands and pushed the door open, and we followed him inside.
We found ourselves in a blue-tiled entrance hall. Bomber used his flashlight to guide our eyes. On the turn of the stairs, the Blessed Virgin Mary stood in matching blue; facing us, Christ hung from the cross, minus a hand but otherwise intact. Bomber set off down a corridor to the left, flashing the light from side to side to illuminate classrooms still filled with desks and blackboards. Cobwebs hung like lace curtains and dust clung to every surface, but the classrooms were intact, as if their occupants had stepped out in a hurry, expecting to return at their leisure. At the end of the corridor Bomber flung open a heavy oak door and waited for us to pass through. We were in a small chapel, with rows of plain wooden pews and, near the altar, individual mahogany chairs with padded seats and matching kneelers. Bomber hoisted one of the kneelers on his shoulder, wheeled around and headed out of the chapel again, turning at the door to indicate that we should follow. I looked to Tommy for some explanation, but he wasn't talking either.
We followed Bomber upstairs past the Blessed Virgin Mary and onto the first floor, where we filed through a spartan dormitory; the beds were separated into small cells by means of wooden partitions; a small locker stood adjacent to each bed, with a chamber pot beneath. Bomber had paused by one of the cells; he shined his flashlight on the side of the locker nearest the bed, where the occupant had carved some hieroglyphics; I crouched down close to see what they were. Bomber stared at me until I nodded to confirm that I had understood what I had seen; then he was up and off, through a communal bathroom and down a carpeted passageway paneled in dark wood. He stopped outside a door, nodded to us and went in.
The first thing I saw was the reproduction of Poussin's Last Supper, one of the paintings Father Vincent Tyrrell had hanging in his Bayview presbytery. Then I took in the thick-pile red carpet, the burgundy-and-gold-flock wallpaper, the luxurious eiderdown on the queen-size bed, the red velvet seat on the mahogany carver chair, the gilt-framed mirror above the marble fireplace, and the image of the Sacred Heart watching it all, although His light had been extinguished. Bomber's light was burning bright: he waved his flashlight and fixed his eyes on us as if to check he had our full attention. We nodded, and then he presented what amounted to a kind of grotesque pantomime. He took a black scarf from his pocket and wrapped it around his eyes, then he took the kneeler and set it down so that it faced the Sacred Heart; this left him with his back to us. He knelt down and rested his elbows on the arm rail of the kneeler and brought his hands together ready for prayer; he raised his flashlight toward the Sacred Heart and brought forth the first sound I had heard him make. I thought he was cawing like a crow, but soon it was clear he was making a sheep's baa. After a bit of this, he clapped his hands together and blessed himself, then bent down until he was on all fours, with his head beneath the kneeler; he brought his hands up to hang from the kneeler's rail, and with his rear end extended toward us, proceeded to squeal and roar and scream, like an animal in pain. He rocked back and forth on the kneeler until it tumbled over and brought his head crashing down on the floor, where he stayed, whimpering now, like a dog that's been beaten too much.
After a while, he picked himself up and turned to us, his face wet with tears and snot and smeared with dust and blood where he'd torn his forehead. He came toward us then, the beam of the flashlight pointing up from beneath his chin; in its glow, amid the falling dust, he looked like his skull was smoldering; when he took his blindfold off, his tiny blue-black eyes burned like red Christmas berries. He came up close and opened his mouth wide, and showed us exactly why we hadn't had a word out of him. Like Patrick Hutton, like Don Kennedy, like Jackie Tyrrell, Bomber's tongue had been cut out. His work done, Bomber smiled, and almost bowed.
As it had begun, so it ended: Bomber picked up his wooden kneeler and put it on his back and made his way down the stairs and out into the night. While he replaced the bars and padlock on the doors, Tommy Owens and I lit cigarettes and smoked them as if they were the eighth sacrament. The moon was down, and you could see across the road to the riverbank. From the upstairs windows too, from the dormitory cells, you would have seen the river flowing, keeping its secrets all the way to Dublin and out into the sea.
"Monasteries, convents, fuckers always arranged it so they'd have themselves a nice view, didn't they?" Tommy said.
I nodded, hearing Bomber moaning to himself as he fumbled with the locks, and suddenly found myself shaking with rage, my head hot and pounding; I walked down the drive and crossed the road, shouting something at the sky, I don't know what, nothing like a prayer, and stood by the river until Tommy came out and Bomber locked the gates and gave us a lift back into town. He dropped us off at the Volvo and nodded solemnly to me, as if we had made a deal; I felt like we had too, but the difference was, he seemed to trust me, whereas I was far from sure I could say the same. I held his gaze though, and he gripped my hand and used it to roll up his sleeve, and show me the tattoo he had on his forearm. The runes were familiar to me now; I had already seen them carved on the nightstand in the dormitory cubicle Bomber had singled out; they had been tattooed or carved into each of the murder victims; now here they were on Bomber's arm: †?
"Your tongue," I said. "Who did it to you?"
He grinned, and threw his hands in the air, and pointed at me, as if I should know.
"What does the tattoo stand for?"
He grinned again, and this time flung his arms wide as if to embrace the world around. Then he got back in his rickety vehicle and drove away.
Tommy wanted to set off for Dublin, but I didn't want to leave before I had more information on Bomber, so we sat in the car and Tommy told me what he knew.
"His name is Terry Folan. Bomber Folan, they called him. I got to know him slightly down here, he used hang around at the fringes of that crowd Leo and Jack Proby ran with. There was smack going around, not through me, I don't know who was dealing it, Miranda Hart would know. Folan had come through St. Jude's in the nineties, just after Leo and Hutton, and then he'd been given a start as an apprentice in Tyrrellscourt stables, too. He was given a few rides, he moved up, he was still around when Pa Hutton vanished, the odd ride here and there, and then it all started to fall apart for him, he was drinking, he couldn't keep the weight off, he was just doing yard work and then not even that. He used to be one of the drunks in McGoldrick's and then he was barred from there. You'd see him stumbling along the main street, you know, half ten in the morning with a can of Dutch Gold and a rough sleeper's tan? That was as much as I knew, '98, '99 that would have been, I dropped out of sight here then. Paula wanted me home. Those were the days, right Ed?"
Paula was Tommy's ex-wife, and the divorce had been far from amicable; the marriage hadn't been very amicable in the first place. After years of Paula's utter disdain at his uselessness, Tommy cheated on her at a party with a drunk woman who Tommy thought was in love with him; he then made the mistake of telling Paula, whereupon she promptly threw him out, and then proceeded to sleep with everyone either of them had ever met, and to make sure everyone else knew about it. When the drunk woman sobered up, she told Tommy that it hadn't been love, not even lust, just drink.
"Steno filled me in on what happened then, insofar as he knew. Apparently Folan befriended this old scrap-merchant character, Iggy Staples, who lived out of town a couple of miles, he…lived on a dump, was how Steno described it. It's actually Staples collected scrap but he never really did anything with it, he lived off his pension in a cottage that was falling in on top of him. Anyway, Bomber used to go up there and sleep, there was enough shelter, he'd pull together some kind of shed for himself. And Staples got used to the company, enjoyed it, and when he died, hadn't he left the place to Bomber."
"And what about the keys to St. Jude's? Is he the caretaker?"
"It's not a good question to ask around here," Tommy said. "Even Steno, the first time I asked, he just walks off, didn't see him for an hour, piano-stops-playing type of thing. There's a lull in the afternoon, he asks me through to the warehouse, you know the restaurant there, they're changing over from lunch to dinner. The way he put it, St. Jude's is a scar on the town? Like, everyone knew what was going on there, but nobody did anything. And there wasn't just one Bomber Folan, every year there'd be casualties, a lot of them'd go to England, but a lot stayed, and those that went away usually came back, because they weren't fit for anything, and there they'd be, Tyrrellscourt's standing army of drunks and drug addicts, of misfits and losers, getting barred from the pubs and shambling round the streets, a living reproach every one to the town's puffed-up image of itself. Eventually they got St. Jude's closed down, there was one more scandal…no, I know what it was, your friend did a documentary on it. Your woman, the dykey one."
"Martha O'Connor?"
"That's right. And all these stories came out, even into the nineties, some of the lay people were abusers-"
"Vincent Tyrrell? He was there in the nineties for a while, when Leo and Hutton were there."
"It wasn't in the program. I don't think Father Tyrrell…I mean, he's a bollocks, but I'd never have put him down for that."
"'The dykey one.'"
"What?"
"Is that how we talk?"
"It's how I talk. I've nothing against them. Which is more than they can say for me."
"Tommy."
"All right Ed, Jasus, you're very fucking Californian sometimes, do you know that?"
"How'd Folan get to be the caretaker, if that's what he is?"
"Nobody knows. Steno said no application has been made for the property, so nobody even knows who owns it, the Church or the state or what. But that Folan has the keys to the locks, whether he appointed himself to put them on, or whether he's carrying out duties for the owner, nobody knows."
"And what about the tongue?"
"No one had really seen Folan since Staples died, about five years ago. He'd come down to the town for groceries, and for his dole, but that was it. Then, about two years ago, he kind of presents himself, the head shaved, in the bar in McGoldrick's, drinking the few pints, not saying a word. At the end of the night, he opens his mouth and shows the whole pub why he's so quiet. Pleased by the reaction he gets, and away with him. After that, he's in regularly. I got talking to Steno tonight, told him why you were in town, he said Bomber's our man. When he came in, he remembered me. He actually can speak, he has enough of his tongue left for that, and to eat with. Anyway, I talked him through the whole thing, Pa Hutton, Leo, immediately he's nodding, he's got something to show us."
"And what a show," I said.
"Poor fucker."
"What do people think happened? To the tongue, I mean."
"They think he did it himself."
"I want to see where he lives, Tommy."
Tommy started up the engine.
"It's on the way back," he said.
Maybe half a mile after the turnoff for the country club, there was a narrow mud boreen indented with car tracks. It curved back toward the town for maybe half a mile, climbing as it went, then dropped suddenly toward the river. Tommy stopped the car before the drop, and we got out. To one side, you could see the golf course sweeping down from the rear of the country club; on the other, there was a steady incline; nestled in the valley between the base of the hill and the river, I saw a couple of mobile homes, old cars and car parts, a mound of assorted scrap metal and wood, a stone cottage with a light burning and the Jeep Terry "Bomber" Folan had been driving. The light from the cottage spilled onto a small fenced-in paddock around which a horse was steadily pacing.
On the journey back, I checked the plates of Regina Tyrrell's Range Rover with those on the one Tommy had seen leaving Tibradden the night Jackie Tyrrell was murdered. They weren't a match. I told Tommy that Regina Tyrrell had tried to hire me as her inside man, and that I had offered her him in my place; among other things, that'd give him a chance to check out F. X. Tyrrell's Range Rover, and see if Miranda Hart was right about Derek Rowan or his son driving the car. Tommy looked taken aback, then flattered, then got all serious and businesslike about it.
Then he said, "I'll still have to do the four masses tomorrow morning, Ed."
"Maybe the Omega Man will suspend hostilities for Christmas Day," I replied.
Tommy didn't know whether I was being serious or not. Neither did I. My mind was still reeling at the dumb show Bomber Folan had presented to us. A shrink I went to for a while after my daughter died, until he refused to see me unless I could at least be sober once a week for the hour-long session and I decided that that was not going to be possible, told me that in London during Jacobean times, people used to go to Bedlam to look at the lunatics in the way rich socialites used to swing by Harlem during the jazz age: it was what the smart set did. Eventually playwrights caught on to this, and inserted scenes with lunatics into their plays, in much the same way blackface sequences found their way into Broadway musicals, I suppose. I'd never seen one of those plays, but I thought of them tonight when the man with no tongue simulated anal rape in a red room beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I kept coming back to the fact that Bomber Folan had resurfaced two years ago, around the same time Miranda Hart had Don Kennedy investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, in order to have him declared dead. And now there were three dead bodies, all with close connections to Miranda Hart, all with the same tattoos, all with their tongues cut out: Folan had the tattoo, Folan had no tongue, Folan must at the very least have been known to Miranda Hart, even if it was just a case of sharing the same smack dealer.
Folan had put on a show tonight for my benefit. His parting gesture was to intimate that I should know who was behind all of this. The tattoo, the abuse, the tongue, they all seemed to be connected. If I were Myles Geraghty, I'd put Folan in a cell and beat the shit out of him until he confessed. When I saw his house, I was tempted to go down there and try that tack myself. I had too much information and not enough, the ideal time to take it out on someone weaker than you.
I called Martha O'Connor. She might have brought me too much publicity in the past, but if anyone could be relied upon to know what had happened to whom in which industrial school, she could. Martha was somewhere noisy, getting pissed and having a nice time. I was happy for her, and I said so. Not convincingly enough, however; soon she was giving out to me for being a killjoy and a scold.
"It's not as if I go out every night, you know," she said. "Or any night, come to think of it."
"I know. I'm sorry. Are you with Fiona Reed?"
"Mind your own business YES and I think she's really into me," Martha said, or yelled. Fiona Reed was Garda Superintendent in Seafield, and she didn't like me, but I was convinced if she and Martha made a go of things, it couldn't do me any harm. "Are you the last man working, Ed Loy? Take a break."
"You're one to talk."
"If I can do it, you can. Even in the trenches, they stopped shooting for a day or two."
"Yeah, that just occurred to me. About someone else, though."
"The Omega Man?" Martha said, sharp as a tack, and abruptly the party noises faded.
"Jesus, Martha, what did you do, kill everyone?"
"I stepped out of the room. Is it the Omega Man? What do you need?"
"I don't know what you're drinking, but I'd ask for my money back, it's obviously not working."
"That's funny, Ed. I'll make a note in my diary to laugh when I've time. What can I do?"
"I need to see a documentary you made about St. Jude's, or that St. Jude's featured in. The industrial school."
"Yeah, when? Now? Now is not great, but-"
"Martha, you're on a date."
"We don't all think with our dicks, Ed Loy."
"I'll give you that one, for Christmas. Tomorrow sometime. I know it's Christmas Day-"
"Big swing. St. Jude's, Tyrrellscourt, Jackie Tyrrell, F. X. Tyrrell, Father Vincent, how does it stack up so far?"
"Is a highly ranked police officer leaking you her best stuff?"
"Not as often as I'd like. What time? She's going to her mammy's for dinner, I'm home alone all day."
"Maybe two, two-thirty?"
"The turkey twizzlers are on me."
IN TOMMY'S KITCHEN there was a turkey and a ham, vegetables and fruit and a Christmas pudding, sauces and mustards, pickles and cold meats, cheese and wine, a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Jameson. Tommy looked at them and shrugged his I've-already-said-what-I-had-to-say shrug.
I went upstairs. She was asleep in the box room. More than ever, she reminded me of my wife: how vulnerable a woman was when she slept, how it was then that you saw the little girl in her. I thought of everything Tommy had told me about Miranda Hart tonight, and all I felt was pity, and sadness, and an urgent sense that I could help her, and that she needed me to. I shut the door behind me and made my way out into the night.
I dropped Tommy off at the church for midnight mass, and headed back up toward Castlehill. Dave lived on a quiet road down from the Castlehill Hotel in a semi-d he bought back when he first graduated from Templemore with the help of some money an aunt of his in America had left him; he couldn't have afforded to buy a third of it on his current salary. I didn't want to go to Dave's party for any number of reasons, chief among them that it would be full of cops who wouldn't want me there, a feeling one or two of them would relish making plain. Another of the reasons I didn't want to go opened the door to me: Myles Geraghty, making himself at home. He clapped me on the shoulder as if we were the best of buddies and let out a loud roar.
"It's Sherlock fuckin' Holmes, lads, as we live and breathe."
"Language please, Detective Geraghty," snapped Carmel, snaking an arm around my waist and tugging me into the house. They continued on their exchange in mime over my head, which Carmel had tucked into her cleavage, which was on full merry-widow duty tonight and stoked with some musky aroma. When she let me up for air, something in her eyes was reckless, almost delusional; maybe she was just another party hostess flying high, but I wondered: Carmel had always had a sexy, flirtatious look that said you'd missed your chance with her, but only just; tonight, it looked like the "only just" had been set aside. She still had a great body, long-legged and rangy, but the dress she wore would have been cut too low and hemmed too high for a twenty-eight-year-old, and her heels put her maybe half a head below me, and I'm six two when I don't slouch. I certainly didn't object to the view, but it's not one I'd have relished in a wife; I saw Dave eyeing her as she danced me toward the kitchen and poured me a glass of lethal-looking punch; he had the fixed, glassy smile of a man whose car has just rolled back off the viewing platform and tumbled into a quarry while he waits for it to explode. Carmel told me I'd missed the prospect she had lined up for me, but that we had to have a good long talk; this having been established, she clipped off to more urgent business: swaying about drawing hungry looks from every man in the place, or so it seemed.
The party had wound down, but the dwindlers were determined to stay until the bitter end, despite the unwritten rule that if you're in another man's house after midnight on Christmas Eve, you'd better have a red suit and a big sack. The Guards had neither; indeed, a Guard I recognized from Seafield with no lips and no manners seemed hell-bent on proving he had no wits either: ranting lachrymosely and aggressively about how Christmas wasn't what it used to be, and of course it never had been, he had to be physically restrained from breaking to Sadie, Dave's angelic five-year-old, who was skipping about in a turquoise-and-lavender tutu with a magic wand, the news that Santa Claus didn't exist. Dave did the physical restraining himself, and he looked to me like he'd have enjoyed doing a lot more of it. The lipless Guard resumed after a brief pause with an ill-tempered, sanity-taxing tirade about how contemporary Christmas songs weren't fit to shine the shoes of the immortal classics of the genre, by titans such as Mud, Wizzard and Gary Glitter.
In the living room, the source of the inferior contemporary sounds, Dave's three boys, who were between ten and fourteen but looked like they'd been fed on beef three times a day since birth, were trying out their rucking and mauling techniques on a couple of Guards who wanted to show what good sports they were to three young female Gardaí who had drunk themselves to the land where the only response to any event is to shriek with laughter. The shrieks only got louder when Dave's eldest lad tried a handoff that was more like a punch, causing a Guard's nose to flow and his temper to fly a long way from where the good sports play.
In the back room, a few older hands were putting on a different kind of show for their juniors, and after sinking the punch and finding some whiskey and hearing the Butler family being discussed, I felt emboldened enough to insinuate myself onto the edge of it.
"They're a blot, a fucking plague all over north Wicklow, and there's nothing you can fucking do with them," a thickset ginger-haired comb-over said.
"Are they all one family?" a spotty young fella said.
Comb-over led the older hands in a burst of hollow laughter.
"You could say that," he said. "Put it this way: Old Man Butler wasn't fussy about where he dipped his wick. He didn't mind if you were his cousin. He didn't mind if you were his sister. He didn't mind if you were his daughter."
"He didn't mind that at all at all," said a skinny cop with a hook nose and floppy gray hair in a side parting.
"Oh, he liked his daughters very much," said Comb-over.
"He liked his granddaughters too," added Hook Nose. The young Guards were appalled and delighted by what was obviously a practiced routine.
"He was an equal-opportunities shagger," Comb-over said.
"'Twas the granddaughters that did for him though," said a crinkle-haired Galway man with a big mustache.
"What, his granddaughters killed him?" a round-faced young smiler said.
"In a manner of speaking," said Comb-over, who smoked a pipe, and would have strung this one out until New Year's if he'd been let.
"One of the daughters caught him with the granddaughter," Hook Nose said. "Not in the act, but in the bedroom, very cozy. She reefed him out of it, sent him home with a flea in his ear. Then the young one, she's what, twelve, thirteen, doesn't she tell her ma her elder sister's been going in the bedroom with Granda for years now. The sister gets home, the ma gets it out of her, she hasn't been riding him, she's just been sucking him off, as if that wasn't as bad. And Ma goes fucking mental."
"There was three Butler sisters in the Michael Davitt," said Mustache.
"And Vinnie," said Hook Nose.
"Well they were hardly gonna get Vinnie involved, sure wasn't Vinnie as bad as the old man?" said Comb-over.
"So the daughters took the old man down the seafront there in Bray, in and out of any pub or hotel he wasn't barred from, started at the harbor, ended up by the amusements, in full daylight this was, the wintertime, and they filled him full of drink and bullshit, bygones be bygones, nothing to forgive, sure nothing happened anyway. And the women were watching what they drank. And then they set off up the hill a little way and around the cliff path, work up a thirst for more, Da, they said, night falling fast. And when they got to the sheerest drop, little pick of a man at this stage, and two of the women twenty stone each, didn't they pick him up and fuck him down onto the railway tracks."
"And what happened?" said Spotty.
"Into the station with them," said Hook Nose. "They told me Old Man Butler had committed suicide. I asked them why he'd done that, he didn't seem the type, and they said that he'd finally seen the error of his ways, and then they each produced a statement detailing what he had done to them over the years. And what he'd begun to do to their children."
Hook Nose stopped talking, and drained his drink, and Comb-over passed him a bottle of Paddy.
"It didn't make pleasant fucking reading, I can tell you that for nothing," he said.
"You took leave, didn't you?" Mustache said.
"Ah, I needed a holiday anyway."
"But…how do you know they murdered him?" Smiler said.
"Because they were fucking boasting about it all over Bray that night. 'We killed our da, and we'll kill you if you fuck with us.' And Vinnie comes in three days later, the last to fucking know as usual, and he wants to press charges," said Comb-over. "They've told him they did it, they've told half of Wicklow they did it, and the other half know they did it anyway. So we prepare a file, and we send it to the DPP to see if they'll take it to trial, and he comes back with his decision: Not In A Million Years."
"It'd be a grand 'oul story," Hook Nose said, "like in a film or something, only for the fact that the daughters are fucking savages too, and they've raised broods of savages: junkies and dealers and whores. Every night there's joyriding or robbing or fire-setting or some fucking shenanigans up there and it's always the Butlers."
"What do you do though?" Smiler said. "I mean, there's always gonna be families like that on a council estate, families that drag the rest down. And the only sanction you have is to evict them. And then what do you do with all the evicted families?"
"They used to go to England," Mustache said. "That's where Old Man Butler came back from. With three brothers, you know what they were called? Seán, John, and John Junior. And Old Man Butler was called Jack. Fuck's sake like. They all had the same fucking name. Making a show of us in front of the Brits, thick fucking Paddy can't even think to give his kids different names like."
"Seed and breed, seed and breed," Comb-over said.
"When the blood goes bad, it's a hard job to put it right," Mustache said.
"It's the job of generations," Hook Nose said.
"It's not our job lads," Comb-over said.
"But seriously, what do you do?" Smiler had drunk himself earnest. "I mean, if it's one or two families, and you get them out, what do you do with them then?"
"Is this a social ser vices or a waste management problem?" Comb-over said.
"Burn them," said Hook Nose.
"Bury them," said Mustache.
"Recycle them," Spotty chirped, staying up late with the big boys.
They all looked at Smiler.
"I mean, it's just such a tragic set of circumstances," he said, sticking nervously to his guns. "There must be some way make an intervention, to break the cycle, to rehabilitate…some of them, at least," he said. "The children?"
Hook Nose and Mustache looked up at the ceiling and piously intoned the word intervention. Comb-over exhaled a cloud of smoke from his pipe, then leant through it and jerked his chin at Smiler.
"In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one."
EVERYONE WAS TALKING about the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave appeared at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down them. He raised a finger to his lips, then went around the rooms, turned the music off in one and brought the noise level down in the others, then reappeared at the kitchen end of the hall and unlocked the door that led to the converted garage. Dave had wanted this space to be a den, or a home office; Carmel had argued for a family room, or somewhere she could start one of the business ideas she had had but never pursued; eventually it had become a garage with plasterwork: old computers, a canoe, a cutting machine for dressmaking, a swingball set, a turntable, two VCRs, the kids' old schoolbooks, Dave and Carmel's old schoolbooks, you name it. Dave locked the door behind him and found a chair without turning on the light; I sat on a railway trunk in the dark.
"Thanks for coming, Ed," he said in a low, anxious voice.
"I wouldn't have missed it. What's up?"
"Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger, it's just-"
"Sure, I understand. What have you got, Dave?"
"The latest from the postmortem. Hutton's body was frozen. It still hadn't completely thawed out. It means establishing a time of death is much more difficult, maybe impossible. They probably have to mess with entomology, what bugs were frozen when. But that'd take days in normal time: over Christmas in Ireland, it could be March. Both Hutton and Kennedy were killed elsewhere and moved to the scene. Each was strangled by hand: there are scars consistent with fingers digging into the neck; there's some matter that may be fingernail debris, from which DNA might possibly be extracted, in the event that we ever get ourselves a suspect."
"And all of this applies to Jackie Tyrrell as well?"
"Except it seems as if the killer was wearing gloves this time: there are fewer finger tears at the neck. And one more thing. The bags of coins found on Kennedy and Hutton. There was another on Jackie Tyrrell's body. Same kind of bag each time, leather pouch with a drawstring. And there were thirty coins in each, thirty single euro coins. Remember your gospel?"
"Judas. Thirty pieces of silver. That's the last thing anyone remembers Patrick Hutton saying: 'I won't play the Judas for anyone.' And the tongues cut out: Does that mean the betrayal lay in telling someone something? In confessing? Or in not speaking up?"
"Either way, some kind of betrayal."
"And now someone is making people pay for that betrayal."
I thought of Father Vincent Tyrrell kissing me on the mouth this morning. After I'd gotten over the shock, I had thought it seemed at once deliberate and cryptic, a statement I was to interpret-a Judas Kiss?
"We still have no ID on the body, Ed."
"What do they make of the tattoos?"
"They've got hold of a few people from Trinity College, a professor of art history and someone who works in heraldry-they're both writing up reports. But I don't see it that way."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, a serial killer works at random, right? And then he does something to tie it all together, he only kills young women, or gay men, or whatever. And if he uses symbols or leaves tags, it's a kind of taunt to the cops: I'm smarter than you. Come and get me if you think you're good enough."
"Yeah?"
"But in this case, the victims are linked: they're all connected to a horse race in 1997, to a stable, to a town and to a family. So there's a different kind of logic going on. It's like the killer is saying, understand why I'm doing this. I have a plan, and it has a logic, and you better work it out before…"
Before Miranda Hart is murdered, I thought. But the face I summoned up was not Miranda's, but Regina Tyrrell's daughter, Karen: I could see her eyes, one blue, one brown, shimmering in the dark.
"I laid it out for Geraghty, Dave. I gave him enough to connect Kennedy and Jackie Tyrrell, which gives him Hutton-not an ID, but at least the lead."
"He doesn't want to see it that way, Ed. He wants his own serial killer, with biblical quotes and runic symbols. And he has enough evidence tending in that direction to ignore anything that doesn't."
"And he lacks a wise senior colleague he trusts who'd be better able to advise him."
"Something like that."
"What about Vinnie Butler?"
"They're running forensics on his van. He denies everything, including even being at the dump, but you'd expect that. My gut tells me no, but you never can tell with the Butlers."
"Anything on Don Kennedy?"
"There was a team trawling through his home office today. They've sealed it over Christmas, but I've got the key. I'll slip out tomorrow."
"Okay. There's an industrial school in Tyrrellscourt, St. Jude's, I think it figures in this, too. I'm seeing someone tomorrow about it."
"Not your one off the telly? Fuck's sake, Ed-"
"What do you want? She's the expert. And fuck it, you might need the publicity badly this time, when you get the killer and Myles Geraghty insists on taking all the credit."
There was a long silence, and I could hear Dave breathing deeply, as if trying to keep a lid on something. When he spoke, it was in a tremulous, quavering voice, as if he was trying to sound happy about something and not making out too well with it.
"Sadie pegged out in my arms, she's the only one in the house who still believes in Santa. I made a doll's house for her, I was up nights most of November building the fucking thing. I always do November off the booze. Good to have something to do then. Otherwise you start noticing all sorts of stuff you wish you hadn't. But you should have seen her little face tonight, Ed, I swear, looking at them when they sleep…you'd swear there wasn't a thing astray, not a single thing in the world."
Dave did the breathing thing again, then got up and unlocked the door.
"Better leave it awhile before you go."
"Sure," I said. "Thanks, Dave."
I sat in the dark for five or ten minutes, and then I looked out, and saw no one in the hall, and made it to the front door again. I could hear low murmurs from the living room, and I thought I'd make a quick escape, but then I remembered Carmel had taken my coat and put it upstairs, so I went up to get it. As I climbed the stairs, I thought I could hear a noise from the master bedroom. I figured the boys were in there watching TV. I found my coat in one of the boys' bedrooms. I stepped out onto the landing and the door to the master bedroom flew open and Carmel stood there, panting, her hair all mussed up and her lipstick smeared, and I had an intense flash of my mother in a doorway just like this one, in the house in Quarry Fields that was more like this than not; in the room behind my mother was a man putting on his clothes: the man who killed my father. In the room behind Carmel, who was smiling desperately, even though we both knew there were tears in her eyes, was a man adjusting his shirt: Myles Geraghty.
I'd parked around the corner near the hotel, and that's where Carmel caught me up; I could hear her shoes clipping up the road after me; she must have kept her heels on, was the lurid thought, and image, that came unbidden and unwanted into my head. I didn't want to look at her, but she tugged on my shoulder and spun me around. Her eye makeup had melted into two black smears across eyes prickling with what looked like desperation.
"Ed, please don't…it wasn't what you thought…" she said, the words fading in and out of range on the ebb and flow of her emotion.
"Don't dem…all right, Carmel, what was it, then? Are we gonna agree to pretend it wasn't what we know it was? Don't-"
"Don't demean myself? Is that what you started to say? Having demeaned myself already, I shouldn't demean myself by lying about it?"
It was as if I'd hit her; the desperation flared into anger and defiance.
"That's about right," I said.
She hit me then; she was shaking with rage and unhappiness and she hit me a few times across the cheek, but her heart wasn't in it, and I grabbed her wrist and hoped she'd subside, but she didn't; she wrenched it off me as if I had assaulted her.
"Don't you judge me. You're no one to judge me, you fucking…you've the morals of a beast in the fields, Ed Loy, you'd fuck your own shadow."
"I'm not judging you."
"You fucking are. The look on your face-"
"What do you expect? Dave's my friend, and you betray him, fine, you're right, I'm no one to judge, but you could pick your moment, Carmel, and you could pick your man: Jesus, of all people, Myles fucking Geraghty, talk about rubbing a man's face in it, do you not know what a nightmare he's made Dave's life since he joined the Bureau?"
"No, I don't know, how would I know? Do you think he talks to me about it? Any of it? Of course he tells you, men only, noble beasts grunt out your pain to each other, then down the next whiskey and get on with things, don't tell the little woman, she'd only get upset, or worse, think you were human."
"He said if he brought his troubles home, you'd think he was weak."
Carmel 's face nearly gave, she looked so hurt; she twisted it into a snarl and a harsh laugh.
"Weak? Christ, he thinks that of me? And he said it to you? Who's betraying who, Ed? Who do you think I am, Lady Mac-fuckingbeth? Let me tell you about Dave's mother's funeral: after the removal, I found him in the garage, crying his eyes out. I went to him, arms out, you know. He backed away from me. He left the house, he drove around, I don't know where, he came back when I was asleep, that was the last tear he let me see. I'd think he was weak? I'd think he was a human being. It's got worse since you came back. He thinks you're…I don't know what, he's always sniggering like a teenager about what you get up to…it's as if he thinks you're cool, that's what it is."
"I'm not cool."
"Do you think I don't know that? Misery knows misery. I see you, Ed Loy. The same fucked-up woman in one guise after another. The booze, the fights. You're so in love with your own fucking pain, you need to keep the wound fresh and flowing to feel half alive. Don't take Dave down with you. He's got like that: the job is everything, but he can't talk about it, what he goes through, what he suffers, he removes himself from my life, from our lives. Absent. And then he shows up, expecting us to be like a family in a movie, he wants me to fuck him, the kids to adore him. Frolic along the beach with a big furry dog. We don't even know him."
Carmel was shivering, maybe crying. I took off my coat and tried to put it on her shoulders, but she wouldn't let me. She pushed me away, and then hung on my lapel, her hand on my shoulder. I knew that nothing like this happened for no reason, that making a family wasn't easy, that Carmel and Dave were very far from the couple I'd idealized. But I'd seen her with Myles Geraghty, and I felt it in my gut, and I couldn't let it go.
"I hear all that, Carmel, and fair enough, I don't really know what it's like…I was only married a short while, and I didn't make a great go of it. But…sorry, I can't get away from this, in front of all his colleagues, and if they didn't see, you can be fucking sure they'll be told, Myles Geraghty. I think Dave knows something is going on-"
"Of course he knows. There's not much point to it unless he knows. Do you think I like Myles Geraghty? Do you think I want to do this? Turns out it's all I have, after fifteen years of kids, these legs, these tits, and I won't have them for long, not in this shape anyway. Getting old, Ed, and I don't want to wait around to die. I've tried talking to him, tried warning him. Nothing. Calls for desperate measures. Rub his face in it? Yes. Demean myself? Yes. What next? I know what you'd do. Walk away. School of Ed Loy says, just walk away. But you don't put twenty years into what I've built up to walk away. You can't."
A breath at the corner, a foot snap on frost, and there was Dave. Carmel turned to him, and nodded, and turned back to me.
"I'm sorry if what I said hurt you," she said.
"That's 'Happy Christmas' in Irish, is it?"
"Some things are more important than who fucked who. You know that."
I thought of my daughter, how she hadn't been mine, not in blood, yet I called her mine and always would and knew it to be true. I nodded, and Carmel gave me a kiss, and walked up to Dave and put an arm around his waist and put her head on his shoulder. Dave raised his hand in the air, and I returned his salute, and they walked back down to their house, and their family, and their life, about which, it turned out, I knew next to nothing.
The roads had frosted up, powder bright in the moonlight; I drove back slowly, wondering how this would affect the Leopardstown Festival: Irish racing did not like firm ground, and would cancel a meeting rather than risk the horses.
When I got back to Quarry Fields, I found Tommy Owens's key on my kitchen table and Miranda Hart in my bed. Better than the other way round, I remember thinking as I got in beside her, trying not to wake her, but not trying too hard. She awoke, and her breath smelled of oranges, and the rest of her smelt just as good.
"Merry Christmas, Edward Loy," she said, and for a while, it was.
The door creak again, and the rustle of straw, of paper, and the bolt run with a crack, and her dark head turning, Miranda Hart, and then the bolt again, or the sound of it, like a pistol shot, like the slam of a door, my Spanish girl, my ex-wife, now the rustle of straw, the pistol crack, the turning head, my mother, dark-headed, too, as she was when I was a boy, rustle, crack, door, turning head, Regina Tyrrell, fear in her eyes, and another, someone else, I can't make out his face, rustle, crack, door, head turn: Karen Tyrrell, one eye blue, one eye brown, and the hand closing on her, the hand about to touch her, I can't see his face, Karen, Miranda, Regina, my wife, my mother, rustle, crack, door, the turning head, the reaching hand…
I woke up alone, bathed in sweat, with Carmel Donnelly's words burning in my ears. You're so in love with your own pain. The same fucked-up woman over and over again. It didn't have to be that way. I wouldn't let it be that way. I went out on the landing, and smelt breakfast being cooked downstairs, bacon and eggs, or something that good. I remembered how I'd felt yesterday, before the trip to Tyrrellscourt, when I heard Miranda's footfall and felt the promise of a future. But as I showered, it all came back to me: not just what Tommy had told me about her operating as a prostitute, not just the drugs, not just Bomber Folan or Jack Proby, but what it all amounted to: that she knew so much more than she had told me. What I saw in the bathroom mirror as I shaved was not promise; it was resignation, and something worse than that: betrayal, and the fear of betrayal. The Judas Kiss.
I didn't think I owned as many pots and pans, plates and cooking utensils, as Miranda Hart had used to make a breakfast fry; she emerged from the debris with two plates as I sat down; I wanted to greet her smile with something more than the polite nod I managed, but found that I couldn't. We ate in silence. Miranda broke it.
"I suppose Tommy told you, did he?"
I nodded.
"Well, he probably remembers it all better than I do. I was pretty far gone, most of the time. What did he say?"
"That you took money for sex. That you were available to a whole circle of men that formed itself around Leo Halligan and Jack Proby. He said he didn't know whether you were doing it of your own free will or not. That you were doing so much heroin you maybe didn't even know yourself."
I found myself trying to make it easy for her. To her credit, she didn't want that. She popped some gum in her mouth, lit a cigarette and exhaled.
"No, I wasn't forced. The opposite. I was with Jack Proby at the time, nothing serious, just for laughs-funny how relationships that are just for laughs quickly run out of them-and we were doing a lot of drugs, too much coke, and then I got into smack to take me down, I couldn't sleep, and then I needed the coke to get me back up, and that became a cycle. And that became expensive. And it had gotten so I didn't much care what I did-I can't quite explain how that happens, but when it does, it seems so simple and so realistic, you know: there's a rich golfer, or a trainer, or a jockey, why don't I just fuck him for five hundred quid, or spend the night for a grand. I won't feel anything anyway, the smack guaranteed that, so why not make a profit, you know?"
"And what was this about? This was all after Patrick disappeared: Was it a kind of grief, a distorted mourning for him?"
She bowed her head, and I thought she was crying. When she looked up at me, there was laughter in her eyes.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, it's just…I didn't really give you the full picture before, Ed. Not sure that I should have, worried I'd scare you off. 'I really like you, come in for coffee, but first listen to my life as a smackhead and a hooker.' Above and beyond on a first date, don't you think? But…I don't know, is the answer. I don't know what happened then. What I can tell you about is what happened with Patrick. What happened to By Your Leave."
"I thought you already had."
"That was a version."
"Let me try my version," I said. "Patrick Hutton was getting paid by Leo Halligan, possibly fronting for George, possibly acting on his own, to hold various horses back, dope them or otherwise interfere with them. At Thurles that day, Leo wanted a winner; F.X. wanted to lengthen the odds for Leopardstown; Hutton was caught between them, so he made it obvious he was holding the horse up to throw the blame onto F.X., but also to show Leo he couldn't be bossed around."
"Sort of, but not quite. In a way, Patrick did exactly what he was told to that day; he just did it too well, too publicly, he brought down too much attention on the sport. And on the fix. In truth, at this stage, F.X. and Leo were pretty much in league. F.X. didn't feel you could hold a horse like By Your Leave back, it was better to use her as a flagship for the other Tyrrell rides, you know, let her win, to hell with the odds, and let the glory drip through to the other horses in the stable. And Leo agreed. But this particular race, George had a lot of money laid against By Your Leave. So the word came down to hold the horse back."
"And Hutton rebelled?"
"Patrick was a hothead. He was a bit of a fucking eejit. In fairness to him, it was never going to be easy, unless you out and out doped the horse, and they'd heard she was going to be drug-tested. But Patrick didn't even try."
"Why would F. X. Tyrrell put up with this? What did George Halligan have on F.X.?"
Miranda grinned, and stubbed her cigarette out in some bacon rind. I stared at this picture, trying to remember where I had seen it before.
"Leo was a busy boy in those days. F. X. Tyrrell picked him and Patrick from St. Jude's to be apprentices. And then he wanted extra ser vices. Well, Patrick wasn't into that. But Leo was."
"And F.X. was, you're saying."
"Oh yeah. Did Jackie not tell you?"
"She just said it never really happened for them."
"And that's the reason. She was probably being loyal. She knew what was going on. Leo and F.X., Leo and Seán Proby, too. And Leo got it all on film. Photographs of F.X. and Leo in some position or other. Shots that wouldn't look well on pages three to ten of the Sun during Cheltenham week. So F. X. Tyrrell belonged to the Halligans. Still does, I imagine."
"And so what do you think? Did the Halligans get rid of Hutton for rocking the boat?"
"I don't know. They could have. Not because Leo wanted it, but George might have decided to cut him out. Either way, he had become a liability. So the Halligans gave the word that F.X. could cut him loose."
"So George Halligan controls F. X. Tyrrell?"
"To a certain extent. I mean, the thing about George is, he's not stupid. It's like, if you have a restaurant and you can eat free there. Well, if you go every night, if you bring all your friends, if you take the piss, there's not going to be any restaurant. So George played it cute, a few scores here and there but nothing that's going to make the headlines, or push F. X. Tyrrell over the edge."
"And do you have anything to add to how you parted, you and Hutton?"
"It was…more emphatic than I told you. On my side, I was so fucking pissed off, we could have had it both ways: we knew what Leo had on F.X., and we knew which races were crooked; plus, we had the Halligans offering to make side deals with us. We had an insurance policy, all we had to do was play it smart."
Miranda seemed to wake up in the middle of saying this, wake to the realization that it made her sound like a cheap chivvying little piece of work. Again, to her credit, she held her hands up.
"I imagine this makes me sound pretty bad," she said.
"I imagine you wouldn't make yourself sound like that if it wasn't true."
"It's just, it was hard to draw the line. If a jockey pulls a ride for his own trainer, why is that better than pulling it for a gangster? It's the same thing, just a question of degree. And if you get more money from the gangster, and if your trainer is already in league with him…"
She shrugged, and flicked her hair, and pouted the way she did, and I could feel my heart breaking. I'd built her into a princess, and she was just a tramp on the make. Merry Christmas, Edward Loy.
"Ask me anything else, please. I really want to…to set the record straight, Ed."
She looked at me, unblinking, as if nothing had changed. And maybe nothing had. Maybe Carmel Donnelly was right, and I had fallen for another fucked-up woman I couldn't possibly have, or didn't want in the first place. I still didn't want to believe that. And I tried not to, right up until she heard me ask the next question.
"Did you ever come across a guy called Terry Folan? Bomber, most people call him."
"No," she lied, so quickly I almost didn't hear her. "No, I don't…I don't think so, I…or maybe…Bomber Folan, that rings a bell…"
She said a lot more in that vein, until she arrived at the lie she was happy with: that she vaguely remembered him riding for F.X., and that he could have been around afterward, hanging out with Leo in McGoldrick's. At that stage, I was on my feet. I told her I had to go, I had to meet someone, and she asked me if I'd make it up to Tommy's for the Christmas dinner she was going to cook today, and I said I wouldn't miss it, and she kissed me and held me in the way you would if you loved him, or if you wanted him to love you, and again I tried to believe in her, and got my coat, and just when we were at the door she asked me if I still had the photograph of Patrick Hutton she gave me. It was the only one she had. No, it wasn't that, it was quite special to her, in a way she didn't want to tell me. Or wouldn't. Or hadn't made up yet. I said I didn't have it anymore. I don't know if she believed me, or pretended to believe me. I pretended I didn't care anymore. I left her at Tommy's, looking so beautiful and so forlorn I couldn't bear the sight of her. I think she knew what had happened; she couldn't figure out how. I wasn't sure I could either. I just knew that the next time we met, we'd be on opposite sides. You think you're never going to fall in love with anyone again, and sometimes the only way you know you did is because she's just broken your heart.
At Tommy's doorstep, after I'd said I wouldn't come in, and she said it was a sin to waste all that food, that she'd been looking forward to spending the day with me, and I looked at the ground as if that was any kind of answer, and she nodded, and suddenly there was fear in her eyes, real terror, and she looked as if she was about to howl with it.
"I can't tell you any more," she said.
"You know more than you're telling me."
Her eyes welled up with tears, her beautiful eyes.
"I can't…it's not my fault…I'm sorry, but I just can't…"
I shook my stupid head.
"Well, I'm sorry too, but neither can I."
I waited down the road from Tommy's until the taxi arrived to pick her up, and I tailed it until I was sure she was on her way back to Riverside Village. Then I drove to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, and found Tommy in the sacristy and took him through what I thought had happened.
"Who's going to cook our Christmas dinner then?" he said, which was better than "I told you so," but not much.
I called Regina Tyrrell and apologized for not having been in touch, and checked that she still wanted an extra man.
"Do you think we need one?"
"I think you do, yes."
I quoted her a price for Tommy and Regina agreed to it while he looked goggle-eyed at me.
"Time you took yourself seriously," I told him.
"You first," he said.
I gave Tommy the key to my house and asked him to pack some surveillance equipment in the boot of his mother's car before he left for Tyrrellscourt. Then I gave him Leo Halligan's Glock 17. He flashed a look toward the door to the church, then stowed the gun beneath his cassock and nodded gravely to me, as if to say he appreciated the trust I was showing in him. I didn't tell him I had no other option.
When I left the sacristy I saw Vincent Tyrrell watching me from the altar; he seemed insubstantial to me, like a wraith; I wondered if I'd see him alive again.
WHILE I WAITED on the pier for Proby, I called Jim Morgan, a cardiologist I'd worked with on the Howard case. Once he'd gotten over his dismay at being phoned on Christmas Day, and once we'd established that eyes were not his area, he listened to my description of Karen Tyrrell's eyes, and suggested that it was possibly a condition known as heterochromia, that it was possibly genetic, and that if I wanted to move beyond the possible, I should find an opthalmologist and spoil his Christmas lunch.
Jack Proby was about my age, skinny and tall with boyish floppy hair in a seventies center parting and a seventies mustache to match and a mouth full of teeth that wouldn't've shamed a pony and acne scars on his long face. He stood at the start of the West Pier in a fawn cashmere coat over a navy suit and tan Italian shoes, looking like a hotel lobby was his idea of out in the open. The wind off the sea was cold enough to give me second thoughts too.
"The Royal Seafield know me," Proby said. "We can get in out of this."
The Royal Seafield was a Victorian seafront hotel of indifferent quality, but they did know Jack Proby, and admitted him even though the hotel was open only to residents, which is how I found myself drinking a large Jameson in a bar on Christmas Day, apart from Good Friday the only day of the year you cannot get served a drink in Ireland. Proby drank the same.
"How's it looking for you at Leopardstown tomorrow?" I said.
"What the fuck do you care?" Proby said. "Business, friend." His accent was educated northside, lazy and drawling; his voice was hoarse as a rule: it sounded like someone had cut him. I looked for a scar, but he wore his collar high.
"All right: Are you still tied to the Halligans because of what they've got on your old man?"
"What have they got?"
"Photos of him and Leo Halligan. Photos his family wouldn't like to see. Let alone the great Irish public."
Jack Proby suddenly looked like his collar was a size too small for him; he worked his neck around and blinked his eyes and sniffed.
"What is this? Is this blackmail, friend? 'Cause I tell you, if it is-"
"It isn't. It's tell me what I want to know and don't be a fucking prick."
"Because I know some important people in this town-"
"See, you've won already. The only important people I get to meet hire me to clean up the mess they make because they spent too much time with corrupt moneygrubbing scumbags like you. And afterward, they don't want to know me. The feeling's mutual, mind. Believe me, I've places I'd rather be today and all. Anywhere tops the list."
Proby, calculating I'd got the market in aggressiveness tied up for the moment, nodded his consent, as if to a waiter.
"All right," I said. "To be honest, I don't much care if you're feeding the Halligans tips or if they're feeding you the inside on Tyrrellscourt horses-"
"George Halligan is a legitimate player now, friend, he has horses in half a dozen stables, not just F. X. Tyrrell's."
"That's what makes our system so great, isn't it? Any murdering drug-dealing scum-sucking savage can call himself an entrepreneur and be forgiven. Business washes us all clean. But I'm not one of the ruthless boys in a hurry, impatient to get on with making and building and storing up wealth for the winter months. I'm one of the laggards, the stick-in-the-muds who are always looking back, endlessly worrying about some sticky little detail everyone else is too busy going forward to be bothered with."
Proby looked at me as if the whiskey had gone to my head. Maybe it had. Get a refund if it hadn't. Proby signaled to the waiter for more. I shook my head, but he pointed to himself. He leant forward, all confidential.
"Look, I'm not proud of the life I led for a stretch there, in the late nineties…I ran with a pretty wild crowd…did a bit of this and that…but I swear, I was never a pimp."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Miranda told me. Mind you, she tends to lie."
The waiter brought Proby his second whiskey and he drank half of it back in one, and within seconds, seemed to turn into himself. He was that kind of drinker.
"She's not lying about that. We were both strung out for a while…I came out of a failed marriage, and she, well, there was the whole Patrick Hutton thing, you know? She was still freaking out about all that. But it was, it started off as, just a great time down there, party town, coke, champagne, all this bread, and I was doing some work for the old man, but it was so easy to keep George Halligan sweet. We had enough of the jockeys to spread the fixes to lay it so the betting patterns were never noticed. It was a fucking operation. Coining it. Beautiful, so it was. And then came heroin."
"Whose idea was that?"
"I don't remember. Because I asked myself that, like with some mad fucking bird you wake up with, you know, retrace your steps, locate the fatal moment, don't do this at home, kids. But I can't…eventually it was that ponytail guy who ended up barman in McGoldrick's, unbelievable, only in Tyrrellscourt would a smack dealer be taken on as head barman, what's this his name was?"
"Steno?"
"Steno, the very fellow. Anyway, we got into it, and after a while, you start running low on readies, no matter who you are, drugs cost a lot of bread, so Miranda decides to sell her stuff. I didn't like it, I argued against it, I was supposed to be her boyfriend, for fuck's sake, but…I was out of it anyway. What was I gonna do?"
Proby shrugged and finished his whiskey and immediately waved up two more.
"And why do you think, was there any other reason for her to get into heroin? Apart from it being there?"
"I think…well, I think after the whole thing with the baby, she found it hard to get back on track."
"What baby?"
"She had a kid…I can't really remember the order of events back then…but she had a kid and gave it up for adoption…would it have been before Hutton took off? Or afterward? I think afterward, yeah, that's why she gave it up, because he took off."
Proby nodded stupidly, already drunk. He beamed as the fresh drinks arrived. I still had half of my first.
"Weird to do something like that in 1997, '98," I said. "Lots of women raising kids on their own then."
"Not Miranda. Not her scene at all," Proby said.
"And you don't know who were the adoptive parents?"
He shook his head, then held a finger up.
"Tell you what I do remember. Who introduced smack to the Tyrrellscourt scene."
"Who?" I said.
"Patrick Hutton!" he said delightedly.
"Patrick Hutton vanished after By Your Leave was put down at Thurles. Before Christmas 1996."
"Oh no. No he didn't. No, he was around, because he was around when the kid was born, except he was smacked out of it then. Wasn't racing, wasn't anything, just…hanging around town for it. And after that he disappeared. Kaput! I don't know if they were still happy families, but I remember the three of them being around. And then it was just Miranda."
Proby nodded, seemingly relieved to have sorted that out. I took out the photograph Miranda had given me and showed it to Proby.
"Patrick Hutton," I said.
"Patrick Hutton," he said. Then he peered at the photograph again.
"Except, that isn't Patrick Hutton."
"I'm sorry."
"That isn't Patrick Hutton. That's the other guy."
"What other guy?" I said, but his name was on my lips, had been from the moment Miranda asked for the photograph back.
"The jockey F.X. got in to replace Hutton. Only he didn't last long. He lost it completely, became a kind of wino. Bomber, they called him."
I could have prompted him, but I waited. He was the kind of drunk whose wits accumulate as the spirit level rises. He studied the photograph again, then lifted his weak face in triumph.
"Terry Folan," he said. "Terry 'Bomber' Folan. One for the road? Come on, it's Christmas."
IN MY CAR, I called Miranda Hart on her mobile and landline and left remorseful messages on each; the trip to Martha O'Connor's place took me past Riverside Village but there was no one home and the Porsche was gone. I stood by my car and swore quietly. If the body I had thought was Patrick Hutton was Bomber Folan-and I had been led to believe that by the photograph Miranda Hart gave me-then there was a good chance Bomber Folan was really Hutton, and either Miranda Hart was in league with him, or she was in his power. Bomber/Hutton was obviously a disturbed individual; if he was responsible for the killings so far, it was clear he had some kind of plan; it was entirely possible Miranda had been drawn into this plan out of fear, either for her own safety, or the safety of someone she prized. Jack Proby had told me Miranda had had a baby, with or without Hutton: that child would be about nine or ten now, and might well look like the girl Regina Tyrrell was raising as her own; I had thought Regina was Miranda's mother, they looked so alike; equally Karen Tyrrell could be Miranda Hart's daughter. Was Bomber/Hutton threatening Miranda's child in order to make her an accomplice to the murders? It was all guesswork at this stage. I called Tommy and left a message on his voice mail asking him to set up surveillance on Bomber Folan/Patrick Hutton when he got established at Tyrrellscourt. Then I got back on the road.
Martha O'Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house on Bachelor's Walk on the North Quays, within sight of O'Connell Bridge. There was an antiques store on the ground floor, and a hotel named after an American military cemetery next door, and African immigrants pushing children in buggies on the streets and on the riverside boardwalk; I wondered if the rare pleasure of having the streets to themselves on Christmas Day compensated for the harsh winds whipping in off the Liffey. An Internet café with cheap dialing rates for Africa and Eastern Europe was open down toward the Ha'penny Bridge. When I left Dublin in the early eighties, this stretch of the quays looked like a disused set from a Hollywood studio, the false fronts of a western ghost town; now it was peopled and dressed and animated; even on Christmas Day, it exuded the kinetic energy of a living city. It was bloody freezing though, and I leant on the bell for far too long until I heard Martha O'Connor's voice.
"Sorry, Messiah on full," she trilled in her Oxford-inflected tones.
Martha O'Connor had silky short hair like an English public schoolboy; her long fringe hung in her eyes, which were free of makeup, as was the rest of her pretty, youthful face; she typically wore what she was wearing today: jeans and a baggy jumper or sweatshirt which covered up as much as it possibly could; big-boned and wide-hipped, she carried more weight than she looked happy with; to my eyes she always carried it off well. I had never been in her apartment before, and admired it as she brought me into the front room whose three great sash windows looked out over the Liffey and south across the city to the snowcapped Dublin mountains; the wall to the rear had been knocked through, as had the kitchen partition, so that the entire floor made one great open-plan living space. The period plasterwork on the high ceilings was intact, but the furniture and decor was spare and modern.
"Good digs," I said. "Can I be your boyfriend?"
"You come with the wrong bits. Have you been drinking already? Jesus Ed Loy, you're falling apart."
"Business. Seriously, how'd a pointy-headed journo like you afford a place like this?"
"I didn't. My mum and dad bought it for a song in the eighties, when it was a total shambles; thinking ahead, I'd just been born; it was left to me when Daddy died in '99, by which time it was already worth ten times more; now…"
Handel's Messiah blared in the background, a melodramatic underscoring of the unspoken truth between us: that both Martha's parents had been murdered, and that I had helped solve the case.
"Just lucky, I suppose," I said, and Martha laughed.
"Well, yes, and it's vitally important for pointy-heads like me to have a nice place to begin with, preferably one you bought before the boom, or even better, with the mortgage paid off. That way, we can bemoan the dreadful property bubble and sneer at everyone's obsession with house prices and cheerlead for a bust in the market so that ordinary people can afford houses in the areas they grew up in and be impeccably liberal and PC about it all at absolutely no cost or risk whatever to ourselves."
"Not just a pointy-head, a self-loathing pointy-head. Is that cooking I smell?"
"It is cooking. I figure the kind of woman who falls for you, or on you, only knows her way to one room in the house, so I thought you might like your lunch."
"I did have a dinner offer, you know. She'd bought the turkey and everything."
"And what happened?"
I shook my head. I couldn't quite keep the brittle ball in the air; it was too soon, and I was too disturbed by what I thought I'd discovered about Miranda and Patrick Hutton. Martha vanished and reappeared with a tumbler of whiskey and a smile.
"Fiona Reed spoke warmly of you when I told her you were coming here."
"I'm sure she did. Was she here?"
"She's just gone. She's here most nights now."
"Listen to you, Anaïs Nin. How warmly did Superintendent Reed speak of me?"
"She said you were a total fucking bollocks who needed to have his legs broken. But I could tell she meant it with affection."
"Is that a diesel thing?"
"We'll do our own jokes, thank you. Me kitchen, you TV. It's all lined up."
St. Jude's was one of three industrial schools Martha looked at in the documentary, which was called Say Nothing. It was the least severe case, in that nobody had actually been killed and anonymously buried there, say, but it wasn't easy viewing. The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves, as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial; harrowing testimony from a man in his midforties who looked about sixty, red-faced and swollen, about the serial abuse he had suffered from the age of five, by religious brothers he named and others he said he never saw; a caption ran underneath his interview saying he had hanged himself before the program was shown; a bland nonapology apology from the archbishop of the diocese with a semolina face and a prissy, sibilant voice, who barely conceded that any abuse had been committed by priests or religious at all, in such a hurry was he to condemn "the wider decline in standards among society as a whole, particularly in the area of chastity"; a wheedling excursion in self-justification and evasion from the minister for something or other, keeping the shit from sticking to the government of the day, probably, that kept insisting, eventually in a rather menacing fashion, that what we had to remember was that these events, terrible though they were, all took place in a different time. The St. Jude's section ended with a bunch of apparently happy boys swarming around the front lawn with the river view, and the announcement that St. Jude's was now being run as a boys' home under the joint control of the departments of education, health, and social welfare.
I finished my drink by the window, looking out at the same river and wondering how many tales of ruined lives and broken hearts it carried from its source through the hard-knock city of Dublin to the sea. Martha joined me with a refill, which by now I badly needed, and a drink for herself, and I toasted her achievement in silence.
We ate mostly in silence, too. Martha had cooked pretty much everything you could: turkey, ham, roast potatoes, sprouts, bread and cranberry sauces, the lot; there was plenty of wine, and Christmas pudding to finish. It all tasted good, and I was glad to have it. But I didn't feel like celebrating, and Martha, usually relentlessly upbeat, didn't either. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe it was the case, maybe it was just that, when you're alone, you eat your Christmas dinner at a table full of empty chairs.
Afterward, Martha made some coffee and took out a red-and-black bound A4 notebook.
"Right, that's Christmas done," she said.
"Thanks for me dinner," I said.
"Easy for you, only have to eat it once. I'll have leftovers until February. Okay, Say Nothing covered the first incarnation of the school, ending in the late eighties. Subsequent to that, it reopened staffed by lay people, supervised by social workers, but there were two abusers among them, one from a care center in Wales where there had been systematic abuse."
"This would have been through the nineties."
"It finally closed in '98. That was to have been the second part of the film: how, when the Church's influence declined or was removed, the conditions in residential homes did not improve; in fact, in certain cases, they got worse."
"And why didn't you make that film?"
"Because people involved-doctors, civil servants, care workers and others-refused to cooperate, and in several cases threatened us with legal action. And there was a marked reluctance on the part of the national broadcaster, all of a sudden, to tangle with so many different forces. So what you get at the end of Say Nothing is basically this complete fucking lie, these happy boys gamboling about on a front lawn they were still forbidden to walk across. I could tell you three of those boys at least whose lives were ruined by the abuse they suffered during that time, after the Church had withdrawn from St. Jude's."
"Not completely though. I mean, there was still a chapel, it was still basically a Catholic institution. It had its own chaplain pretty much. Didn't it?"
Martha sat back and smiled.
"You tell me," she said.
"Father Vincent Tyrrell," I said. "But he says he had nothing to do with anything."
Martha poured herself another glass of red and looked through her notes.
"All right. The way it happened, the abusers in the nineties, they found a couple of older boys happy to serve as willing helpers. And they got to join in, too. But most importantly, they helped to conceal the identities of the chief perpetrators."
"Including people from outside the school."
Martha sat forward and looked at me keenly. "What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. Did you find people in the town would talk to you about it all?"
"No way. All they want to talk about is horses, or that fucking country club for rich Americans and golfers. It's like it never existed."
"Despite the fact that the casualties were wandering around Tyrrellscourt for years afterward, doped or smacked out of it, the walking wounded of the town."
"I know. They turn that into almost a badge of pride, you know, oh yeah, it's not just the Celtic Tiger down here, we have our share of Characters. And because a couple of burnt-out musicians from the sixties decamped there, they try and sell the whole package like, you know, Haight-Ashbury on the Liffey. A few of the people in McGoldrick's will talk, but more in general, and it always goes back to the Church, you know, it has to be some priest to blame. I mean, fair enough, the Church did its share, but it's a fraction of what went on."
"Was your film instrumental in getting St. Jude's closed down?"
"No, it was already shut. It might have thwarted any possibility of it ever opening again, but I don't know. What did you mean by the chief abusers being people outside the school?"
"Can I have a look at that last scene again, all the boys by the river?"
"I have an image of it here," Martha said, and showed me a scanned photograph of the boys of St. Jude's by the river.
"This would be about '92," she said. "And here's the legend-sorry, you have to keep turning over." On the next page, there was a pencil tracing of the photo with each face numbered, and a list of the names to match the numbers beneath it. I flicked back and forth, and quickly spotted Leo Halligan, who was fully grown then. Patrick Hutton's name was there, but his head was almost completely hidden behind another boy's: that boy had vivid eyes and blond hair, and his name was Terence Folan. And there was a fourth boy, whose face I had difficulty matching with the one I knew, but whose name rang a bell: Gerald Stenson.
"Did you come across this guy?" I said. "Steno?"
Martha nodded.
"The barman in McGoldrick's. He reminded me of a hippie from the first time 'round, actually, someone who you think must be really sweet and love and peace because he's got the hair, then you find out he deals bad acid, or he's a rapist."
"Anything concrete to base that on?"
"Nah. Except for extreme prejudice against guys with ponytails."
"Extreme prejudice means you kill them."
"What jury's gonna convict? What did you mean by abusers coming from outside the school that's the third time I've asked and I gave you your dinner so if you don't answer you can fuck away off with yourself."
"If you give me any more publicity, I won't be able to do my job."
"So I won't give you any more publicity."
"Promise. Swear."
"I swear, if I get anything I can use that won't land me with a libel action, I'll take full credit and cut you out totally. If you had a lawyer, he'd fire you."
"I do have a lawyer."
"Where is he?"
"He fired me. It was the practice, apparently stretching back I don't know how long, but an earnest little researcher like yourself should be able to find out, for a couple of likely lads a year from St. Jude's to be taken on as apprentices at Tyrrellscourt stables."
"By whom? F. X. Tyrrell?"
"That's what I was told. But the lady who told me-"
"Wouldn't stick around to cook your dinner."
"It may have been the head man who picked them out, I don't know. But F.X. still takes credit for horses from his stables, he's still hands-on there, so there's no reason to suppose he wouldn't handpick potential jockeys."
"Nobody said anything to me directly about this. But when it emerged that there was no interest in making a follow-up film, the decision came wrapped up in a ribbon that said Bloodstock-Industry-Tyrrellscourt-Stud-National-Good-News-Story-Irish-Win-At-Cheltenham-Shut-The-Fuck-Up-You-Fat-Troublemaking-Shit-Stirrer."
"You're just big-boned."
"I have a horrible personality, though."
"F. X. Tyrrell's late ex-wife, Jackie, told me that they hadn't had much of a sex life of any kind. She put it down to a kind of neutered quality in him, an absence of a sex drive, rather than anything else. F. X. Tyrrell personally requested that his brother, Vincent, come down from Bayview, where he had been parish priest for twenty years, to serve as his own personal prelate in Tyrrellscourt: say private masses, bless the horses and the jockeys before races, take care of all that. The archbishop of the time-"
"The one who looks like a nun's granny-"
"Apparently was happy to facilitate this request, so down Vincent went to perform these arduous duties. And also to pay pastoral visits to St. Jude's."
"Is there more? You say Vincent claimed he wasn't involved in anything."
"This is a family that seems to specialize in looking the other way. It was Father Vincent Tyrrell who hired me. I didn't think he was…in the front line, so to speak. Now I'm not so sure."
"Is there more?"
"I was in St. Jude's last night. There was a guy who let me in. One of Tyrrellscourt's walking wounded. He brought me up to a room-a room I think belonged to, or at least was furnished by, Vincent Tyrrell, and basically simulated being raped. It was pretty grotesque."
"Who was the guy?"
"That's a very good question."
"Ed, don't fuck me around."
"I'm not. He's a strange-looking guy, I was given one name for him, I suspect he might be someone else. I don't know which is the truth, and until I do, I don't even want to tell myself, let alone you. Do you understand? Because that's how I work, I feel my way through the dark until there's a ray of light. And no light yet."
Martha took that. By her smile, she even seemed to like it.
"The impression he gave though was that he hadn't seen who had done it to him. Or that he had, but he couldn't tell any one."
"So what, F. X. Tyrrell, facilitated by his brother, plus one or two of the older lads, was coming in to rape selected boys, grooming them or training them in or assessing them and then selecting them as apprentices for his stables."
"Is one possible version."
"Or Vincent Tyrrell himself doing it all, with the promise to F.X. that he'll pass the best ones on when he's done."
"Is another."
My phone rang. It was Dave Donnelly. At first, I thought I wouldn't answer it; I figured I deserved a day off from the Donnelly maritals; then I remembered he'd promised to check out Don Kennedy's place for case files.
"Dave?"
"Ed. You're going to want to see this yourself."
"Where are you?"
Dave gave me an address in Ringsend, and I said I'd see him there.
"There's one other thing, Martha," I said. "Tyrrellscourt. I assume that's some Anglo family from the eighteenth century or before. Is it just a coincidence that F.X. has the same surname?"
"And this would rank in priority where?" Martha asked.
"Low, I guess. But it would be nice to know."
"I'll see what I can dig up, Ed."
I thanked Martha O'Connor for the dinner, and she thanked me for the company. Part of me regretted leaving her alone for the evening, but it was overwhelmed by the part that was relieved I didn't have to stay; I suspect she felt the same way: when I left, she was clutching a box set of Barbara Stanwyck movies. Loneliness is sometimes easier solved alone than in company, and especially on Christmas Day.
I told Martha O'Connor I needed to see Dave Donnelly urgently, but I didn't want to see him yet; I was haunted by the spectral memory of Vincent Tyrrell on the altar that morning, afraid he would die before the light I was searching for would come. It would have been quicker to stop off in Ringsend before heading out to Bayview, but at this stage in the case, in any case, I needed the time that driving brought, the sense that as I watched the dark road, the case was smoldering at the back of my mind: when I reached my destination, with luck, another spark would be lit.
On the coast road into Seafield, I reached for the radio, and came in on a Bothy Band tune as it was starting, "Martin Wynne's/The Longford Tinker," from the first album. I'd never been much for trad growing up in Dublin, seeing it as the preserve of beardy blokes in jumpers and the women who looked like them, but a Donegal barman at Mother McGillicuddy's gave me an education that showed me the error of my ways. (He'd got the job because he used to come in every Monday night, one of the terminal cases, and demand we play "Coinleach Ghlas An Fhomhair," a beautiful, melancholic song from Clannad's second album, before they turned into a kind of musical backdrop to aromatherapy; he'd sit and drink and pretend he wasn't crying until the owner took pity on him and offered him a job on condition he didn't cry behind the bar. He was still desperately homesick, and left at the first opportunity, but not before he had he taught us all a thing or two about Irish music.)
The Bothy Band played like a runaway horse you'd just about clung on to; the delirium of pipes and fiddle on "The Longford Tinker" was euphoric and tortured, swaggering and mournful all at once; it felt like the sound track to the case, where the exhilaration of progress told an increasingly tragic tale; like any case, it was absorbing and relentless; by the end of the tune, I was thirty kilometers over the limit and had to brake hard just to get my bearings.
The church car park was locked, so I parked up near the new houses on the other side and hopped over the hedge into the church grounds. I don't know what I expected Father Vincent Tyrrell to be doing on Christmas night. At best I thought he'd be drunk on Manzanilla and full of bile. But there he was, alive and possessed with energy, darting around his table, blue eyes flashing. The table was covered with a chart made out in different colored inks. At the top was the legend:
Leopardstown Festival-
St. Stephen's Day, December 26th
Below, there were seven columns, one for each race, each with a title and a time:
FIRST RACE: 12:25-Maiden Hurdle for Five years old and upward
SECOND RACE: 12:55-Maiden Hurdle for Four years old only
THIRD RACE: 1:30-Juvenile Hurdle for Three years old only
FOURTH RACE: 2:00-Handicap Hurdle for Four years old and upward
FIFTH RACE: 2:35-Novice Steeplechase for Four years old
SIXTH RACE: 3:10-Handicap Steeplechase for Four years old and upward
SEVENTH RACE: 3:40-Flat Race for Four-year-old colts and geldings only
Each column had a list of the runners and riders drawn up like a race card, with owner, trainer and form recorded; even the jockeys' silks had been drawn in a variety of inks. Tyrrell had a series of colored pencils with which he was making what I assumed were preliminary selections; he'd compare this with a form book he had compiled himself, a black hardback journal filled with figures and swollen with clippings from newspapers and racing journals. It was the first time I'd really understood what an exile he felt himself to be: this was more than a hobby or a passion, this was the liturgy of a lifetime calling, a vocation, as Regina had seen it in F. X. Tyrrell. F.X. had been chosen, but Vincent, the younger, had felt the call too.
"Any tips for tomorrow?" I said.
"The big trainers have good selections running," Tyrrell said coldly, like a cartoon Englishman talking to a foreigner. "Noel Meade, Dessie Hughes, Eoin Griffin."
"F. X. Tyrrell."
"Indeed. And I think the worst we'll get is sleet, so the form book will be a reliable guide," he said, caressing the black-bound volume like it was holy writ.
"Did you ever…I wonder, when you were back in Tyrrellscourt in the nineties, did you ever get the urge to train yourself? Did you get out among the horses? Watch the morning work? Or did F.X. not want you interfering?"
Vincent Tyrrell stared hard at me through icy blue eyes and I had to stand firm not to be reduced to a shivering ten-year-old in line for a thrashing.
"It seems to me, Edward Loy, that since I hired you, I should be able to fire you. You've been paid more than generously, and I don't want any of the money back. I think it would be best for all concerned if you'd kindly just fuck off."
I had often wondered if the word fuck would ever acquire force again; Father Vincent Tyrrell had just imbued it with some. Not that I was going to let him know that.
"But I've come to report," I said. "You're my client, yet you don't seem remotely interested in how the case is going. You had affairs to set in order, and the main one was Patrick Hutton. Well, the good news is, I think I've found him."
Vincent Tyrrell almost smiled. That was usual with him, the almost: his smile always looked as much like it was congratulating himself on his superior intelligence or his steely detachment from the little people or his conviction that whatever you were going to say, it couldn't possibly surprise him, as it did like a smile. Once again, I wanted to wipe that smile off his face.
"He was on a dump near Roundwood, and I had identified him to my satisfaction, and it was only a matter of time before the Guards ID'd him too. At least, that was what I thought. But of course, I turned out to be completely wrong: that wasn't Patrick Hutton at all. It was someone called Terence Folan, who was a jockey at Tyrrellscourt, too; indeed he took over when Hutton was sacked by your brother. He was at St. Jude's as well: who knows, perhaps you picked him out for F.X. I'm not really sure how that side of it was handled, but it must have been very difficult to turn a blind eye. Patrick Hutton, alive. Have you known all along?"
"She said-" he started to say, and then stopped. His eyes flickered across the table, and my mind went back to the first time I saw it, with the remnants of three breakfast plates. One of them had had two cigarette butts stubbed out in bacon rind. I flashed on Miranda Hart in my kitchen this morning, stubbing her cigarette out in her half-eaten breakfast, and in that instant, I knew she had been the other breakfast guest, along with Leo Halligan. Her elaborate fear of Vincent Tyrrell must have been, in part at least, a charade.
"She said what? That Hutton was dead? Or gone? That it would be safe? You knew people were being slain. Two men. Your brother's ex-wife? Did it not matter to you? What did Miranda Hart tell you?"
He shook his head.
"Tell me about St. Jude's, Father Tyrrell. You must have known what was going on there. I think I was in your room. The red one, with the Sacred Heart, and the Poussin Last Supper. That's a tasteful atmosphere in which to rape a teenager. Did you do it yourself, or did you let F.X. come in and sample the wares?"
"I'm not going to rise to this."
"What did you think you were going to achieve by digging all this up? What did Miranda Hart promise you? That everything could be buried? Or was it not her idea? Maybe she didn't have any choice in the matter. Yes, that's more like it: Patrick Hutton was back, and he had a plan. I don't know what that plan is. Maybe none of us does. We've seen what the first three installments are, but the rest of it? Who can say?"
"Have you seen him?" Tyrrell asked quietly.
"Yes, I think I have."
"How…how does he look?"
"He looks…like he's suffered a lot. He looks quite mad."
"Mary…Miranda…God help the poor child…she feels loyal to the creature…"
I didn't expect Vincent Tyrrell to astonish me, but spontaneous compassion for a fellow human being was enough to do it.
"There are a lot of questions you could answer," I said. "Is Regina Miranda's mother? Is Karen Tyrrell Miranda's child? Was Patrick Hutton the father of that child?"
"Why is any of that any of your business?"
"I think you know why. And to know and do nothing makes you just as guilty."
Tyrrell ran his fingers over his Leopardstown chart.
"See here, the third race. Francis has Bottle of Red running, she's a fine filly, but her rider will be lucky to make it. Fillies are allowed an extra five pounds over the ten-stone-nine, but Barry Dorgan is a greedy little boy, I remember him from St. Jude's distinctly, round face full of sweets, a smiler and a crybaby. Francis has persisted with Dorgan, but to my mind it's a sentimental attachment that has no place in the game: it's unfair to the punters, it's unfair to the horse and it's unfair to the sport."
"A sentimental attachment."
"Dorgan has a plump wife and two plump babies. I think Francis is simply fond of the boy."
"Like a son."
"Well, perhaps. I wouldn't know about that."
"Neither would he. You don't deny that F. X. Tyrrell had sexual relationships with boys from St. Jude's?"
"I wouldn't deny that he had an unfortunate relationship with young Halligan, which has brought nothing but complications upon his shoulders. I wouldn't deny that. As to the others: I really couldn't say."
"Couldn't or wouldn't?"
"It all amounts to the same thing. It will come out eventually, I have no doubt. Bottle of Red, that would be my strongest tip for St. Stephen's Day. The uncertainty about the rider has seen the odds drift satisfactorily; I'd say you could get it for nine to two, even five to one if you were up early. I imagine you get up early, Edward Loy."
"Patrick Hutton-the man I believe to be Patrick Hutton-gave the strong impression that he had been raped, in that room at St. Jude's-it was your room, wasn't it?"
Tyrrell shrugged and nodded.
"He made it clear he had been blindfolded, that he hadn't seen his rapist."
"Perhaps it wasn't rape. Perhaps it was consensual, and now he's decided to cavort as if it wasn't."
"Cavort?"
"Hutton and young Halligan were…well, they were about to be expelled for indecent conduct. I thought Hutton would fare well in the stables, I thought he had the makings of a jockey. I knew F.X. liked the look of him. And Leo…Leo was part of the deal. For Hutton and, eventually, for Francis. To the ultimate cost of each."
"Two of the care staff at St. Jude's were known abusers."
"Have you been talking to your burly lesbian friend again? No charges were ever laid, no case was ever brought. I've always found it curious, these liberals, they have a very illiberal concept of justice: they seem ready to destroy a person's life on the basis of one accusation."
All of this came from the side of his mouth as he pored over his chart. I had rattled him, but not nearly enough. I put my coat on and joined him at the table.
"When we spoke last, you talked about By Your Leave. Said it was something of a freak. What did you mean by that?"
"I told you to ask someone who knew."
"I did. I asked your brother. He said he'd stick to his discipline and you should stick to yours."
Tyrrell didn't flinch.
"Martha O'Connor-you know, the burly lesbian you're so fond of-her documentary about St. Jude's was halted because nobody wanted to speak ill of F. X. Tyrrell. I don't think anyone has the same sensitivity when it comes to his estranged brother, the Catholic priest. Maybe you are dying of cancer. You're not dead yet. I could make your last days here a misery. Given the degree to which, as far as I'm concerned, you've obstructed this case-Jackie Tyrrell might be alive were it not for you-all because of your bullshit about what you know being told to you in confession."
"But it was," Tyrrell said. "It's not bullshit at all. That part of it is God's truth."
He leant his hands on the chart.
"Very well. See here."
He pointed to Bottle of Red.
"Below the name of every horse, there's a list with the year of foaling, color, sex, and then the name of sire and dam. That's the horse's father and mother. Bottle of Red is by Dark Star out of No Regrets. Now, Francis went through a phase of experimenting with extremely close breeding. That means mating between parents and offspring, or siblings. Siblings are the most volatile in any pedigree breeding, and you have to use the very finest mares and stallions, but even then, it's discounted for everything except genetic research purposes: to breed out abnormalities, say, or uncover hidden gene types."
"And are Dark Star and No Regrets brother and sister?"
"Oh Lord, no. No, Francis has stopped all that. Or it was stopped for him."
"With By Your Leave. A thing of beauty, like a Grecian urn."
"What?"
"You said By Your Leave was all we know on earth, and all we need to know. Keats. 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'"
"I didn't think you'd get that reference."
"Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being."
"That's right, and that's where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it."
"The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?"
"Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination."
CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy's house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.
In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn't have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.
"Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin," I said.
Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.
"You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They're fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail."
"Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?"
"The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail."
Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had BARRINGTON INVESTIGATIONS as its heading.
I began to read.
POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.
1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99
Inteviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner's Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.
SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD'S REPORT
(DOCUMENT I (a)).
I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.
"Did anyone see him?" I said.
"No," he said. "But that doesn't undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too."
"Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?"
"No, actually."
"You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn't get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?"
"In a way."
Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I'd been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn't felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.
"See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it's from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement."
Dave rustled through the paper.
"The payments begin about two years back."
"When he searched for Hutton."
"So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out."
Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn't contain himself; he looked like a children's entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.
"I don't know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn't spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise," Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother's name I expected, Tyrrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not F for female, not Mary, later to be known as Miranda, but M for male: the child was a boy, born on the second of November, 1976, and his Christian names were Patrick Francis.