FERDINAND: Strangling is a very quiet death.
DUCHESS: I'll tell thee a miracle;
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:
Th' heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery,
As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar;
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy.
– John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi
I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.
"I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…"
"I'm not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you're welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?"
Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.
"They think I'm working. Emergency shift. It's not unusual."
"And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?"
"No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me."
I couldn't see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn't have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?
"Maybe you should go back there," I said. "You don't want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her."
" Carmel doesn't need me," Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.
"Oh yes she does," I said. "She…she told me she did."
"Last night? And what else did she tell you?"
Some things are more important than who fucked who.
"Dave, whatever's happened between you…you have a woman who wants you. And like any woman, she needs you to pay her some attention. To behave as if you know she's there, and you're as glad of it today as you were twenty years ago."
Dave looked skeptically at me.
"You almost sound as if you'd like to be in my shoes," he said. "Football practice and sleepovers and Friday-night pizza and mass on Sundays and nodding off in front of the TV and watching each other get old."
I looked out the back window at my apple trees, close but never touching; the bare limbs looked like bones in the hard wind. I looked out into the hall, where a pine stood bare and unadorned in a coal scuttle; I had forgotten, or hadn't bothered, to decorate it.
"It would have its compensations," I said.
Dave looked at me in disbelief.
"Anyway, you can't stay. No one with a woman who wants him sleeps here."
He thought about that for a while.
"You don't know what she did…"
I took a chance.
"Do you? Really? Maybe she needed to get your attention so badly…she tried before and failed…maybe it was your last chance…"
"Is that what she said?"
There was fear in his eyes. I shook my head.
"I don't know. She was upset. She wants you. I know what I'd do."
Dave was doing his best to look wounded and noble, but I think he was relieved. We talked about the case for a while, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere; on the doorstep, he looked at me as if, in some crucial way, I'd let him down. If I'd told him to leave his family, would that have suited his image of me better? Now I'd let him believe I envied him, he felt happier about himself. Just to make sure, I asked him to keep his mobile on: I told him I might need him, and I could see he liked the idea that I might. After he drove away, I rang Carmel and told her he was coming home. She started to say a lot of stuff about being sorry and ashamed, but I told her nobody wanted to hear any of that, now or ever, wished her a happy Christmas, hung up and left the house.
THE THREE MEN who took me were under orders not to hurt me; that's why each of them carried a gun. None of them wore sportswear either: with their dark leather jackets and jeans and boots, they could have been construction workers on a stag night; they certainly didn't draw the eye the way Burberry hoodies did. They put me in the back of a Mercedes Estate with blacked-out windows, one on either side, one to drive. When we got to Redlands, which is where I assumed we were going-they could have shot me on the doorstep if they'd wished-I was led to a small bungalow George Halligan had built in the grounds, a three-room den with a pool table, a home cinema system, a bar and an en suite bedroom. What more could a man want? A head butt from Leo Halligan would not have been top of my list; nor would the kicks to the head and body that followed; a cowboy boot to the liver wouldn't have made the backup list; it felt like a week before I could breathe again. Leo was breathing heavily when George called a halt; he was almost out of breath when he stopped. The off-duty construction workers got me upright and propped me in a chair; George presented me with a tumbler of whiskey and sat opposite me; Leo hovered to one side, an elaborate dressing with some kind of metal frame over his nose.
"Compliments of the season," George said in his fifty-a-day rasp. "Sorry about that, Ed, but it sounds like you were asking for it."
"I'm sure I was," I said. "Still, I didn't think Leo was such a girl he'd have to get his brother to hold me down."
Leo came at me so fast he forgot to bring his brain along; he was drawing a blade from his jacket, but before he pulled it free, I smashed my tumbler hard against the metal-framed dressing on his nose and jammed the shattered glass against his throat; the metal jarred the bone out of its setting and blood was flowing from his nose and he was screaming and gurgling, and I was on my feet now, a red mist swirling around my head.
"You see what can happen? You see?" I heard myself shouting. I had lost any sense of where or who I was. I dug the broken glass into Leo's throat. I could see George waving at his henchmen to drop the guns they had pulled. George's mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear what he was saying; it took me a while to realize that that was because I was still shouting.
"You see? When we all live like savages? Blood! You see? You see?"
I could see the panic in George's eyes as he pointed at Leo; the sudden sight of Leo's face covered in blood, of the punctures the glass had made in his throat, of the choking quivering mess of him beneath me brought me to my senses. I signaled George to kick the guns across the floor to me; when he hesitated, I jammed the glass back into Leo's throat until I heard the skitter of metal across the floor; then I let him have Leo, whose injuries looked worse than they were; it was only because I had him lying on his back that he was choking; George sat him forward and gave him a bar cloth to stanch the flow, and one of the construction workers got some ice from the bar and wrapped it in another cloth and passed it to him.
My head was throbbing and there was blood on my face where Leo had opened the eye he had blackened on Bayview Hill and the pain on my right side where he'd caught my liver hurt so bad I felt like crying, and possibly did. But I watched Leo with his face in his hands, whimpering, and George, his prematurely white head bowed over his brother, and the three construction workers, their faces registering as much shock as you could discern through their folds of beer and steroid fat, and I thought: They won't forget this in a fucking hurry. And fool that I was, I felt stupid blood pride in my victory, suppressing the ache that, worse than any physical pain, warned me that maybe the only way the Halligans could properly settle this was to kill me.
I gathered up the guns: two Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer compact. I didn't know what was waiting for me down in Tyrrellscourt, but I figured it wouldn't do any harm to be prepared for it. I popped the Glocks in my coat pockets and kept the Sig trained around the room. George Halligan gave me two looks: one included a nod to Leo and an arched eyebrow, meaning all friends now; that was George's way, but I knew I'd have to watch my back with Leo, and resolved to help put him back behind bars as soon as possible, a resolution that I suspected would find favor with his brother. The second look followed the guns into my pockets.
"I'm going to need them," I said. "I'm going down to Tyrrellscourt."
"That was the main reason we wanted to talk to you, Ed," George said, as if we'd spent the last five minutes chatting about football before getting down to business.
Leo lifted his head, and dabbed his nose: the flow of blood had diminished to a trickle. George leant in and conferred with him in a low voice. Then he looked around and directed the largest of the construction workers, who had a goatee and no neck, to fix three drinks and pass them around. George had caught me like this in the past, so I watched closely to see that the liquid, which turned out to be brandy, was all coming from the one decanter. It was, and when I had a tumbler of it, I waited for George and Leo to drink, and then I did likewise, and we got down to business, Halligan-style.
"We heard you were asking questions," George said.
"Who told you? Jack Proby, I suppose."
Leo and George looked quickly at each other.
"Yeah, Jack called me," George said unconvincingly. "You see, the festival starts tomorrow, and we don't want anything to get the way of…a good day's racing."
"Well, let me put your minds at rest," I said. "I don't give a damn about what deals you have with F. X. Tyrrell or Jack Proby. I don't give a damn which horse wins or doesn't, although I am always in the market for a sure thing. All I care about is that since I started looking for Patrick Hutton, the bodies have been piling up. Far as I'm concerned, if F.X. is shy about who he sleeps with, that's his lookout. And allowing for the fact that I don't like blackmailing, extorting, scum-sucking sociopaths like yourselves on any level you care to mention, you're not my problem. My problem is finding out what happened to Patrick Hutton. Allied to that, I've inherited the problem of who killed Don Kennedy, Jackie Tyrrell and Terry Folan."
"Terry Folan?" Leo said, looking up at me. "Bomber Folan?"
"That's right," I said. "Who'd you think that body on the dump was? Patrick Hutton? Or did you not think anyone else'd find out?"
Leo began to say something, then stopped himself. George looked from his brother to me and back, a Cohiba chafing against his still-dark mustache.
"Anything here I should know about, lads?" he said. We both ignored him.
"It wasn't just you at breakfast with Vincent Tyrrell, was it Leo? Miranda Hart was there too."
Again Leo went to speak, but stopped himself.
"That's why I'm here, is it? In case the inconvenient deaths of three people get in the way of a fucking horse race?"
"And if you go blundering about down there, you could fuck up quite a few fucking horse races, Ed Loy: the last thing we need is the Tyrrell horses being withdrawn because their trainer is up on a charge, Bottle of Red in particular," George barked from a blue cloud of cigar smoke. A descant of coughing followed; Leo winced and flapped a hand in front of his face.
"Fair enough," I said. "Is that what you're telling me, that F. X. Tyrrell is the killer?"
"That's just a for instance," George spluttered.
"Well, here's another: the killer takes F. X. Tyrrell out. Maybe he already has. Same result to you: no Tyrrell horse at the races."
George sat still, his black eyes vanishing into his clenched fist of a face.
"I don't think it was Jack Proby you were talking to at all," I said. "I think it was either Miranda Hart, or Gerald Stenson."
George's face didn't flicker. Leo on the other hand, finally spoke.
"I thought I knew what was going on there, but I don't. Your woman's a lying cunt, every disrespect, she's a whore and a pig and she always will be, right?"
He knew I had to take that, and I did.
"I think her and Steno are into the fucking Tyrrells for some fucking score, I don't know what it is."
"How do you know?"
"Good question. Because she told me: which almost guarantees it isn't true. Steno always was a sly cunt, mind you."
"Did she know about the bodies?"
"She knew about Kennedy. And she said she thought the other body was Pa Hutton. She said it was nothing to do with her, but she couldn't stop it. Wouldn't explain that. Father Vincent said she needed to call the cops and tell them. She said there was no way she could get out of it. All this, and of course she's crying and wailing and looking up out of her big eyes like a fucking panda, oh poor her."
"What do you think?"
"That's what I'm telling you. I don't know."
"What about Steno? He's beginning to sound like an interesting character."
Leo drew his narrow lips farther into his mouth.
"Steno was a nasty piece of work. People talked about St. Jude's, you know, the abusers on the staff. The one I remember, going around, you had to watch your back, was one of the boys: Steno. And later, when he was dealing smack, he'd take his pick of the junkies. When Miranda Hart was at her worst, that was Steno she was running around with. Pair of them suited each other."
I thought of Hutton's dumb show of rape and abuse.
"Did Steno ever attack Hutton?"
Leo looked astonished at the question.
"How the fuck d'you know that? Did Father Vincent tell you? Fuck, I don't think even he knew."
"He raped him, didn't he?"
"I always blamed him. Pa never knew for sure, said he had a blindfold on. I don't think Pa ever really got over it. Seriously, how do you know? Is Pa Hutton alive? Have you seen him?"
George cleared his throat in aggressive distaste.
Leo flung a look at George, and I thought for a moment he was going to show him what aggressive meant; then he turned back to me, his dark eyes suddenly desperate for a word from beyond the grave.
"I think he may be, yes. The more you can tell me, the closer I'll get to him. What about back in the day, you and F. X. Tyrrell?" I said. "Was F.X. interested in Hutton too?"
"Pa was never into that."
"Vincent Tyrrell said the pair of you were about to be expelled from St. Jude's for indecent conduct. He said at first, F. X. Tyrrell had his eye on Patrick Hutton."
"Father Tyrrell is a devious cunt. Father Tyrrell wants you to find things out, but he doesn't want to help you. Father Tyrrell must think you're going to get divine inspiration."
"How could he have helped me?"
"He could have told you that I was the one F.X. wanted. Sure he had a notion of Pa as a jockey, but I was the one he wanted all along."
One of the construction workers drove me back to Quarry Fields, and Leo sat in the backseat beside me. For some reason, the physical threat seemed to have receded, or at least that was what my gut told me. My gut had been wrong before, but this late in a case, it was almost all I had. When we got to the house, he put a hand on my arm.
"As long as Bottle of Red loses tomorrow, George'll be happy. Don't fuck that up, all right?"
I said I wouldn't.
"It might all sound very seedy and fucked up at this distance, you know, industrial schools, abuse, all this. And then F. X. Tyrrell…as if he came in and said, I'll have him over there, that one. But it wasn't like that, you know?"
I looked at Leo, and by reflex at the driver.
"He's Ukrainian. Fuck-all English. Apart from beer, isn't that right man, beer, beer, voddy vodka and beer?"
The driver nodded dutifully, a grim smile on his wide mouth. Leo turned his dark eyes back to me.
"It was…he'd chosen me, but I was willing. He was a serious guy, F. X. Tyrrell, he was a fucking legend. I mean, say you were sixteen and I don't know who asked for you, some older one, Michelle Pfeiffer, or Ellen Barkin, or fuckin'…your one…who would you have liked?"
I shrugged.
"Your one," I said, and Leo giggled.
"I can't remember her name, the English one who's always in the nip. But I mean, you would have said, fucking sure, wouldn't you? And that's what it was like, he was a charismatic guy, a suave fucker, and we were always into the ponies so he was like a fucking hero: I said, which way do you want me? I'm not sayin' there was no shit at St. Jude's, there fucking was, and it was always the weaker kids that got fucked, in every way. But I wasn't one of them. I was older anyway. And I was looking out for Pa, too, I…I loved the guy, you know? Mates. Not that there was anything between us, I mean, he was never that way, though I gave it a decent go…but we were like brothers…only, not like my fucking brothers…no need to mention Podge, I should pay someone in Mountjoy to shank the fat fuck…and as for fucking George, since I got out, I don't know who the fuck he thinks he is, always shitein' on about fuckin' business lunches and helipads and fucking interest rates, I've a pain in me hole listening to the cunt, I'm not coddin' you…I knew Pa needed a helping hand, you know, but he was a class jockey…so anyway, we were both getting what we wanted, that's how it was."
Leo lit a Gauloise and exhaled and sat in wistful reverie for a while.
"That was the time of my life, know I mean? The time of my life."
"And then when Miranda Hart came back from school…"
"Mary Hart as was. That was Jackie as well, claiming her, using her as a pawn against Regina. The politics of the house."
"And she made her play for Patrick Hutton."
"Yeah, they just, they got together, they got married, we were all working at the stables, getting our first rides, so forth. Then three things really: Patrick's career took off, and mine didn't, and F. X. lost interest in me."
"This would be coming up to the By Your Leave incident?"
"This would. Because Pa rode By Your Leave. And because…I was gonna lie about this even now, I was gonna say it was George's idea, but it wasn't, it was mine."
"To blackmail F. X. Tyrrell."
"Yeah. I suppose I felt a bit excluded, know I mean? There they were, on the gallops, in fucking Cheltenham, and where was I? Back up in fucking Seafield sorting out Podge's mess. Dealing to skin-popping scobies. George looking at me like I'm some kind of fucking burden. So I decided to cash in."
"You had photographs."
"I had videotape. I took it without F.X. knowing."
"Planning ahead."
"I don't know. Maybe I was. Maybe deep down I'm a double-dealing scumbag. I thought I wanted a record of it, to believe it myself, to get off on it all. So I'd never forget. Maybe I'm lying to myself. You look back on what you were like, and you can't swear to anything, can you? Anyway, I took the tape to George. I made him watch it first. That was funny, seeing him sit through it, watching him squirm. And then he got his hooks into the Tyrrells."
"A lot of money over the years?"
"I wouldn't let him take it too far. I mean, Podge never knew about it, can you imagine? Podge and his crew swarming around the country club, the whole thing would have collapsed. Nah, George took it steady. A race here and there, and the opportunity to get all the money laundered."
"That was Seán Proby, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. Well, once I had F.X. on board, I figured, may as well get stuck into Proby. I knew he was up for it, he was always panting around Tyrrellscourt hoping for action, too shy to do anything about it, so it wasn't too hard to set him up with a couple of nice-looking young fellas and record the results. And bingo, Proby was the route for clean cash."
"And after By Your Leave, after Thurles, you went back down to Tyrrellscourt, dealing. What happened to Patrick Hutton then?"
Leo grabbed my arm.
"That's what I want you to find out. Steno…I kept in touch with Steno, but I never trusted the cunt. You bring smack in, say good-bye to business, it's a fucking fire sale. I mean, Pa Hutton and me, we weren't really close anymore, not with your woman around…the guy had lost it anyway, he was on heroin. And the baby could have been anyone's, Miranda's baby, Jack Proby's, Steno's, anyone's."
"Bomber Folan's?"
"Bomber didn't last long with F.X., fuck sake. Out on his ear, he had no discipline, the stupid cunt. I told Steno, I said the fucking smack was more trouble than it was worth. I got out, and he wound it down and reefed them all to fuck. And that was the last I heard until I got the phone call on Saturday night."
Leo still held my arm; it reminded me of Vincent Tyrrell's grip the morning I took the case. He brought his other hand around and clasped my hand and locked eyes with me; his breath came through his mouth in sodden gusts.
"You want to get that seen to," I said.
"Where d'you think Boris is taking me after this? Christmas night at the A &E in St. Anthony's, fuck sake, I should have you killed."
"Don't start that again."
"You could do with a checkup yourself."
"In the New Year."
"You think you've seen him. How does he look?"
"If it's who I think it is, he looked fit, but he didn't look well. Not in his head. I'm sorry."
Leo gripped me harder, and tears brimmed in his eyes.
"Try and keep him alive," he said.
"I can't promise anything. He already looked pretty out of control. If he's the killer…"
I didn't have to spell it out. Leo nodded, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me his forearm. The tattoo there was a familiar one, a crucifix and an omega symbol: †?
"I know there's all this, the Omega Man going on in the papers, like he's some Mister Evil fucker, yeah? And I read how the crucifix represents whatever, Christmas, or it's the killer pleading for forgiveness. But that's all bullshit man, it's not an omega, it isn't even a crucifix. It's, we all got them done in McGoldrick's that time, there was all raggle-taggle tradheads and eco cunts with dogs on strings and this cornrow chick used to do tattoos and we all got them, or I can remember everyone getting them anyway."
"And what does it mean?"
"No big mystery. Just T and C, a fancy way of doing a T and a C."
"T and C standing for-"
"Tyrrellscourt."
THERE WEREN'T MANY people on the road, but those that were out were mostly drunk, so I had to take it easy on the drive, which I would have anyway, since my right eye had almost closed now, and it was past midnight when I arrived in Tyrrellscourt. I had showered before I left, and cleaned my wounds, and gobbled some Nurofen Plus, and resisted the call of my bed, although not without difficulty: What could eight hours change? I asked myself, and answer came there: Absolutely everything.
An unshaven security guard in a black uniform was on duty at the gates to Tyrrellscourt House, which was surrounded from the roadside by high granite walls; I gave the guard my name and he went back into his booth and opened the gates. I drove up the long gravel drive and came to a crunching halt in front of the imposing house, whose stained-glass windows and glittering granite stonework and Victorian Gothic features gave it the look of a haunted house in a child's storybook. I could hear the whinny and snort of horses in the yard beyond. Snow was falling lightly in the moonlight as I climbed the steps of the house. Before I had time to knock, the great black front door with the stained-glass panels depicting horses in full flight opened, and the fairy tale was interrupted by Tommy Owens, standing there in tan brogues, red cord trousers, a check shirt and a sleeveless pullover, his face flushed and his hair wet. He looked at the new map Leo had kicked onto my face and shook his head, as if my brawling ways would someday drag his squeaky-clean twenty-first-century operation down. I heard piano music, and the wow and flutter of a television or computer game. Tommy looked at his watch and shook his head again. I always liked it when Tommy began to think the case was slipping away from me, and he had to pick up the slack.
"Come on," he said, his voice prim and impatient, and led me briskly across a flagstoned hall, along a corridor and down a flight of stairs. We walked through a passage stuffed with riding hats and boots and Wellington boots and red coats and Barbour jackets and dog baskets and into a darkened conservatory with walls of glass on three sides. Once your eyes adjusted, you could see right across the valley in the moonlight: to the right, the lazy S and straight green band of the gallops; center bearing left, the river and the golf course to the rear of the country club, and at the extreme left, the tip of a mobile home that was part of the old Staples property.
Tommy had a MacBook laptop set up on a low table by a cane sofa; a videotape was recording the signal from a wireless receiver not unlike the one I had set up for the Leonard family to trap their neighborhood dumpers; on a side table there was turkey and ham and lettuce and tomatoes and French bread and mayonnaise and mustard and chutney and pint bottles of Guinness and a bottle of Jameson and a flask of coffee. If this was an all-nighter, we were traveling first class.
"Miss Tyrrell said if you came in at a reasonable hour, you should go up and see her," Tommy said. "She's a class act, that one."
"Miss Tyrrell?"
" Regina. Miss Tyrrell, I call her."
"What's with the young-country-squire outfit?"
"I needed a change of clothes. Miss Tyrrell kindly-"
"Sounds good. So take me through what you've been up to."
"Go up and see her first. She's playing the piano up there, I think."
"Tommy, you know conventional wisdom? It's always incomplete. Never keep a lady waiting-provided you know what you're going to say or do to her when you meet her. I don't, and I'm relying on you to help me."
I made myself a turkey salad roll, poured Guinness into a glass and sat back on the sofa. Tommy looked at me in dismay.
"What do you think this is, a fucking picnic? That lady up there is at the end of her tether."
"Really? How did that happen? She struck me as a pretty cool customer when I met her. What's happened to get her so panicked?"
"There's no one she can turn to. And the situation is sinking in, you know? And I think someone's been talking to her."
"Who?"
"Your one."
"Miranda? Say her name at least, Tommy."
"Yeah. So…I mean, some of us have been…while you…"
Tommy waved dismissively at me, as if I'd arrived in white tie and tails with two strippers and a big bag of coke. The pain around my right eye suddenly shot out of the gates, neck and neck with the pain in my liver. It was hard to call the odds on which would romp home first: a joint favorite photo finish was my conservative forecast. I popped a few more Nurofen, tipped some Jameson into a glass and threw the lot back. When that didn't immediately help, I turned on Tommy.
"This face came from Leo Halligan, one of your little drug-dealing friends, Tommy. Whose attack was a result of Podge Halligan, who again was a business associate of yours, just like the fucking Reillys or any other number of thugs and scumbags whose affairs you get embroiled in and I end up dealing with, usually with my fucking chin, because you can't cope and come crying to me like the fucking…so I really don't fucking need-"
I stopped then, because Tommy didn't have the heart to take what I would have said, or because I didn't have the heart to say it. I put a hand in the air, and he matched it, and he pointed at the red-and-green Jameson bottle, and I poured us both whiskeys and we knocked them back and that was that. So while I ate my sandwich and drank my beer, Tommy took me through what some of us had been doing.
First off, they've no servants here since Christmas Eve until after Stephen's Day, they give them Christmas off, Miss Tyrrell said it was so Karen can see how Christmas should be in a proper family, without being waited on hand and foot like," Tommy said. "So security-wise, all there is is that fat fuck at the gates. I suppose if they wanted anything, they could send over to the hotel for it, but they haven't, or at least, not since I've been here; there's a big kitchen with an Aga and all in it and Miss Tyrrell was going at it there since eight this morning. I got down here just as they were about to eat and they made me join them, insisted on it. F.X. wasn't around then, I didn't see him until later. Miss Tyrrell just said Christmas Day was always a working day for him, on account of Leopardstown, and horses had gone to Chester as well: he does be out and about all day, checking up on the work, the horses, the boxes, so on. And then it's an early start, he has a lodge over near the stables so he sleeps there.
"Anyway, it was a beautiful dinner, and little Karen said grace and all, and I was dreading it, on account of it's the first time I ever ate Christmas dinner without me ma, know what I mean, and Regina-Miss Tyrrell, I told her about it and she was very…she understood. Wine and pudding and hats and crackers and everything. They were both giddy then, playing games and so forth, but I said I needed to get some work done. I don't know if Miss Tyrrell took me entirely seriously, but that didn't matter, I'm used to that. Anyway, she was kind, and she's a real lady. No question.
"I had the Range Rover in my sights, first off. I counted three around the stables alone. Two of them had UK plates; neither of the registration numbers matched. I had a run-in with Brian Rowan, he's head man here, getting the horses settled for the night. Big curly top, thought I was some skanger on the loose, or a bookie's spy, but he called the house and Miss Tyrrell set him straight. I went through, there's a couple of garages with horse boxes and transporters and so on, but I didn't see any more Range Rovers.
"Next thing was to set up the pinhole camera on Bomber's place. I reckoned the only way was to approach by the river; he's bound to have some way of scoping whoever comes head-on. I packed a little bag and walked the track down from here, there's a path above the river by the trees that runs the length of the golf course. Now, when you meet the lane we drove down, that leads to a bridge across the river; the Staples property lies to the other side, and there's a mesh of chicken wire and barbed wire on that side. I thought about placing the camera there, but it wouldn't really have caught anything except the coming and going of vehicles, and not even them in any great detail. But it was bleedin' freezin' out there, and the one thing I didn't pack was gloves, I did have a pair of bolt cutters though, so I used them to snip the wire, just enough to squeeze through, reminded me of robbin' orchards, don't let the gardener see how you got in and you'll always be able to go back."
Just listening to Tommy was making me feel cold. I poured a couple more Jamesons. Tommy took a hit of his whiskey, then picked up his story.
"Other side of the wire, I can't get enough purchase on the ridge to take me around to the Staples place, there's a dirty big bank sloping down to the riverbed, it's got, you wouldn't call it a waterfall, a bit of a gusher, there's a stream up on the property, anyway, I can't get around it so I've got to climb down, there's a bank of brambles and nettles, then there's elder and sycamore a bit further on, I cling to some ivy and get as far as a sycamore that's trunk is swathed in the stuff and I can scale down the ivy to the riverbed no bother.
"Getting up to the house is a bit more of a problem, because the moon has gone behind a cloud and I don't want to use a torch. I'm also in difficulties because my shoes are soaked and freezing and there's marsh stretching on as far as I go, until I find another sycamore on the Staples side. The ivy only climbs about fifteen feet, and there's a fork in the tree another ten feet up and nothing but the odd whorl and nub to get me there and the bark is all frosted now, slippier than a whore's knickers but I make it, and from the fork there's enough branches to get ten feet above the backyard, which I now see in the moonlight has a fucking fence of palings, so I'm there, sodden, shivering, crackling with the fucking cold, thinking, if this fucker has searchlights, or dogs, or both, I am finished, because I don't see where the extra yard of whatever is coming from. And then I think, fuck it, we're mates, he was gonna step in for me with Ed outside McGoldrick's. And then I'm, yeah, but how friendly is he gonna be, you just dropped out of a fucking tree into his backyard on Christmas night, chances are he's gonna revise his opinion of you downward.
"But to be honest with you, there's only so long you can stay up a fucking tree, by its nature it's a temporary location, so I'm ready to jump, I'm watching the yard, there's a couple of mobile homes, an avalanche of scrap, I can see lights in the stone cottage, Bomber's homemade Jeep and another vehicle, a Range Rover looks like. And I'm watching, and I hear an engine, and lights approaching, and I've leant so far forward I feel I'm slipping, and Bomber comes out of his house and stands in his doorway and I'm jamming myself back against the bough that's above my head and sliding my arse in tight against the trunk as another fucking Range Rover bounces up into view. Out get Miranda Hart and some bloke, can't make him out, expected, it looks like, and they all go into the cottage, five minutes, ten minutes, half a fuckin' hour, great, I'm like, if I fell on the palings, maybe they'd bring me to hospital, where the heat would be on. And then I'm like, maybe they wouldn't."
Tommy stopped then because I was laughing so much; he did his best to look indignant, poured himself a fresh drink and waited until I'd composed myself before continuing.
"Anyway, if good things don't come to all who wait, something does: the three of them pile out, all business, and into one Range Rover, at this stage I'm fucked if I can remember which one is which, and off they go. I give it a minute or two before I jump, and all I'm thinking is, if I've actually frozen solid and I shatter into, you know, blocks, fragments, whatever, then that's it, much relief, I Can Do No More man, know I mean?
"I don't shatter, but I go on me ear, literally because one arm is so cramped and numb I can't bring it up to break my fall, but it's just mud and sand I fall on, so I'm grand. And I'm on my feet and moving to keep warm and moving to get the fuck out of there. First thing is, I go through what I can, the house is locked and bolted but the mobile homes just slide open. And what's important for us, there's one that half of it's like a big cold room, I mean a freezer, and there's all, there's rabbits, chickens, salmon, there's a fucking larder. And room to spare. It's the size, a side of beef or whatever you fucking call it, both sides of the fucking thing, you could keep something that size-like a body-in there, long as you liked.
"All right, that's the first finding. The second is, in the other big mobile home, there's a rake of racing cards and clippings, scrapbooks, and videos and DVDs of races, some of Terry Folan, some of Patrick Hutton, some of both. So I picked up a few to have a look at.
"Third thing, a red Porsche '88 is around the front, tucked in behind an old milk float that's marooned up in front of the house, the car that was outside Miranda Hart's house when I went to pick her up on Christmas Eve.
"Fourth thing, I checked the reg on the Range Rover left behind: it doesn't match the one I saw leaving Jackie Tyrrell's after the murder.
"Fifth thing, I better get this camera fitted and get out of there. There's no way I can get into the cottage short of forcing the door or breaking a window, but I figure if I get it set in, the stonework's crumbling all over, it's a tumbledown, get it wedged in a crevice above the door and we should be good.
"And then I'm, what if the camera's out of range? I didn't check it, and I didn't check the distance I've come, and maybe it's grand, but I don't know, and I haven't gone through all that to end up with four hours of white noise on a videotape. Or worse, they come back before I have the chance to set the thing up and running. Because there's one thing more I want to know, big number six, and I'm not taking the chance.
"There's a corrugated iron lean-to near the front of the property, there's aluminum beer barrels and car doors surrounding it, it's like a hide, maybe that's what he uses it for, to catch the geese and whatever. Anyway, it's cold in there man, and I'm not looking forward to it, but in I slide, trying me best to think about whatever, something good, turkey with cranberry sauce, Miss Tyrrell's roast potatoes, very nice by the way, and I still have Leo's Glock, I slide one into the chamber and wait.
"Long story short, my luck is in; five minutes later they're back to drop Bomber off again, and Miranda gets out with him, they're talking at the door, she looks like she's reassuring him, or stoking him, or whatever shit she's pulling; anyway, she's done and he goes inside; she makes off in the Porsche and then the Range Rover turns and follows. When it turns, I see the driver is the bould Steno, and when it takes off, I clock the plates: we have the UK, and we have the numbers: this is the vehicle that tore out of Tibradden like Michael Schumacher the night Jackie Tyrrell was murdered.
"After all that, I'm too cold and too wrecked for strategy, I give it a few minutes and then I bolt out from under me house of scrap and just leg it down to the road man, Bomber may be after me, but if I don't move I'm gonna be dead. And Bomber isn't after me, and I'm not dead, and I make it to the house, no, first I make it to the gate lodge, where fat fucko doesn't want to let me in, he's giving it No I Cannot Ring Miss Tyrrell At This Hour and No I Do Not Remember You and Please Walk Away Or I'll Call The Gardaí. So I lean into the booth and I shove the barrel of the Glock right up underneath his chin, shove it so hard it's scratching his forehead from the inside. And then he makes the call.
"And Miss Tyrrell very kindly lets me have a shower, and finds me clean clothes-I know, I know, I look like the Brit on holidays who walks into the wrong pub and ends up buried in a ditch, but it's the thought that counts. Like I said, a real lady.
"Another detail from Bomber's place. The paddock that we spied from the road, it has hurdles set out, and there's a small stable yard with a horse in it. So Bomber, or Patrick Hutton, whichever he is, is training.
"So I come down here and check the receiver and yes, we're in business. Nothing happening down there since I got back, but if anything does, we'll see it."
Tommy nodded and picked up his drink and I nodded back and toasted him: job well done. He hadn't finished yet, however. He had a DVD in the MacBook. It was a collection of races Patrick Hutton had run. He fast-forwarded through the action, freeze-framed on two moments from a postrace interview, and pointed out the salient point to me and its relevance. The man who had taken us to St. Jude's, who we thought to be Patrick Hutton, had blue eyes. That was relevant because in his interview, the salient point about Patrick Hutton's eyes was that one of them was blue and the other one was brown-"just like little Karen has," as Tommy put it. Just like little Karen Tyrrell.
The piano tones were still wafting from above as I retraced my steps to the entrance hall and climbed the wide wood-paneled stairway to a landing the size of the average house, with couches and easy chairs and occasional tables laid out beneath exposed beams; I could see two corridors, and chose the one I thought the music was drifting from: the acoustics in the house were sound, and I was soon knocking on a dark wood-paneled door.
"Come in," said a woman's voice, and I did, my eyes drawn instantly toward an upright piano from where I assumed the music to be coming, assumed it so strongly that I stared in disbelief at the vacant stool and the covered keyboard, as if I'd been the victim of some devious trompe l'oeil effect. When I came to, I saw Regina Tyrrell on a couch at the foot of her bed; the music came from speakers I couldn't see; I flashed on Jackie Tyrrell's house the night of her murder.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said, her Dublin accent adding to my sense of the incongruous: how had she clung on to it after all these years of the Queen's horses, in this old Anglo setup? Maybe it helped her to recall a time when she was young, and her life spread out before her full of nothing but promise and adventure, a time when dressing in pink and listening to the "Moonlight" Sonata were the motifs of an overture, not an elegy.
There were three matching chairs set in a ring around the couch, which was white and gold and enough like Jackie's to maintain the sense of haunted unease I felt. I sat on one of the chairs, and looked tentatively around the rest of the room, as if fearful of other phantoms lurking there. My fears on that score were in vain. On the evidence of this and her office in the hotel, Regina's visual sense had been set in stone, and brightly colored stone at that, when she was a teenager: pink and white, ruched curtains, satins and silks; she wore pale pink satin pajamas and a matching gown; I wouldn't have been surprised to see stuffed animals on the bed. The music was in a similar vein: the "Moonlight" Sonata had given way to the slow movement from Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto in all its glutinous glory. I think I was with the Musical Powers That Be on that one. In contrast, Regina herself looked hard and shrewd and sanguine; her bloodred lips stained the tips of the cigarettes she smoked, and the glass of gin she drank; if she was at the end of her tether, I wondered how Tommy had noticed.
I sat for a long while without speaking. Regina didn't appear unduly bothered; indeed, she seemed grateful for the company. I looked up at one point to see that the music had brought tears to her eyes, or something had; she dabbed at them with a tissue and sat back as if hoping for more. I could think of nothing to ask except the darkest questions, nothing to consider except the most horrific possibilities. Finally, I just produced the copy of the birth certificate of Patrick Francis, born to Regina Tyrrell on November 2, 1976, and passed it to her. She looked at it, and nodded wearily and sadly, and shrugged.
"Patrick Hutton?" I said, and it was as if a wind had blown through the room, leaving everything apparently still and settled and yet altered irrevocably.
"How did you find out?"
"I didn't. Another detective, Don Kennedy, did. And somebody murdered him, either for that, or for whatever else he discovered."
Regina tipped her head back and looked in the direction of the gold chandelier at the center of the ceiling rose.
"I suppose it explains a lot. Why you mightn't have wanted him as a match for Miranda. On the other hand, it explains nothing. Why you haven't tried to find him. Why you didn't help him more when you could."
"I offered the reward. When Miranda was looking for him. It was in Francis's name, but it was my offer. And what more should I have done? He was taken on as an apprentice, his career was growing fast, if he hadn't been so bloody headstrong-"
"He was raised in an orphanage, worse, a boys' home where there had been serious allegations of abuse-worse than allegations, it had been closed down once already. A home just down the road from here, from your country house, your country club, your exclusive country life."
"I couldn't raise that child. I couldn't raise that child. His father…I couldn't've raised that child."
"Why not? His father…explain."
Nothing from Regina but the ability to meet my eye.
"So you couldn't raise that child. You could have afforded better than St. Jude's, where the kids nobody wanted were dumped."
"It wasn't as bad as it was painted, that place. The boys who came through to the yard, they were good lads, they seemed to have survived all right. I thought it would give the child a spine."
She nodded, as if she had somehow been vindicated by events, then blinked hard and turned away.
"You could have fostered him-"
"And lost him."
"Did you not lose him anyway? What did you gain?"
Regina hugged herself as if the wind was still blowing chill, and shivered.
"What is it, Edward Loy? What do you want, to tear the Tyrrells asunder? If I told you now that we've suffered enough for everything we've done, and it's not over yet, every sin I've committed has been paid for ten times over and will be until the end of time. Would that be enough? Would that make you leave, drop this and go?"
"It's not up to me anymore," I said. "There are people out there…some of them your children…they're angry. They want you to pay more, and to go on paying."
Regina shook her head, scorn in her eyes and in the curl of her lips.
"Children of mine? Who?"
"Patrick Hutton. Miranda Hart."
"She's not my child," Regina said.
"I couldn't help noticing your daughter Karen's eyes. Very unusual. Unless of course she was Patrick Hutton's daughter by Miranda Hart. He had that feature, too, didn't he? Heterochromia, is that what it's called? I suppose it's genetic. Can it be inherited?"
Regina Tyrrell's head was in her hands. I thought she was weeping, and I hoped she was too; if she was, maybe I could stop torturing her like this, and maybe she could think of something that would satisfy me, and bring the whole hateful saga to a close, make it vanish into thin air. She wasn't weeping though. When she sat up, she had something filmy glistening between finger and thumb, and one of her brown eyes was now blue. A tinted lens could give a blue eye the look of a brown. And if it could do it for the mother…
"Yes it can be inherited. Karen Tyrrell is my daughter," she said. "She is my daughter."
"I don't believe you, Regina. I think Karen is Miranda Hart's daughter by Patrick Hutton. And because she was incapable of looking after the child, she gave her to you. And you've brought Karen up as your own, protected her from the truth. But now it's too late, and the truth is crowding in like wind."
Regina got to her feet. Shaking one hand at me, she stretched the other out toward the door and began slowly to gravitate toward it, as if being tugged gently by an invisible cord.
"I think you better leave now, Edward Loy, or I'm going to call the Guards-"
"That's increasingly looking like our safest bet," I said. "You see, Patrick Hutton isn't dead. He's out there, living like a wild man on the old Staples place-"
"That's Bomber Folan."
"That's not Bomber Folan, Bomber Folan was murdered years ago and Patrick Hutton took his place, he kept Folan's body on ice and then made it appear on a dump in Roundwood two days ago. Alone, or with Miranda Hart, and a fellow called Gerald Stenson, Steno, another former inmate of St. Jude's. Between them, they murdered Folan, and the detective Don Kennedy, because whatever he found out when he searched for Hutton two or three years back was not something they wanted revealed. Kennedy was blackmailing someone-maybe Miranda, maybe you, maybe Francis. I don't know. All I do know is, he's not blackmailing anyone anymore. And then they killed Jackie Tyrrell; Tommy saw the car they drove from Jackie's house the night of her murder up at the old Staples place tonight, and all three of them in it: Steno, and your son, Patrick. And your daughter, Miranda."
"She's not my daughter."
"I'll take your word for it. She does look awfully like you."
"She's not my daughter. She can't be."
Rachmaninov gave way to Schubert now, a piano impromptu, the yearning, plaintive one, regret for the life not lived. Regina moved toward me, as if fixing her gaze and holding mine could insulate her from what she feared most.
"She can't be your daughter?"
"Francis promised."
"Francis promised? What had he to do with it?"
"He…I wouldn't stop working…but I couldn't…not have the child…"
"There was another child? A girl? And you wouldn't have an abortion?"
"It was unthinkable. To me. I don't condemn others, but for me…so Francis…when the time came, he arranged the adoption. I went away, you see, there was a place outside Inverness, in Scotland, to avoid the scandal, you could go there, a convent…they would have taken the child, too, but Francis insisted…said he knew the right family…then later on, when Miranda came in here, people used to say, you could be sisters, you could be mother and daughter, Jackie Tyrrell was never done worrying away at it, giggling away at it, all very sophisticated, as if we were some kind of small-town inbreds, and I asked Francis, was there any possibility…No, he said. Emphatic about it. I had to believe him, I had to. I mean…why would he lie?"
"Who was the child's father? The child that…you don't believe was Miranda?"
Regina stared at me, but wouldn't answer.
"Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"
She stared harder, but stayed silent. I felt like she was willing me to understand, imploring me to guess it. Her eyes not matching heightened her beauty and gave her a vulnerability that made me think of Karen Tyrrell; I told myself I had to keep going, for the child's sake, though every word I spoke was like a thorn in Regina Tyrrell's flesh.
"Vincent Tyrrell told me something about close breeding. He said your brother used to be very interested in it. That it was quite controversial, even with horses. He said By Your Leave, the horse that caused all the trouble for the Tyrrell family, was the offspring of two generations of brother and sister pairings."
Regina Tyrrell stared at me, her eyes glistening.
"Vincent Tyrrell met Miranda Hart before he hired me. And then he gave me one man's name-Patrick Hutton-and I've found a whole history of secrets to go with it. Who was Miranda Hart's father? Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"
Still holding my gaze, she began to shake her head.
"Was F.X. the father, Regina? Was Vincent? You were raped, you were abused by your older brother, no wonder you were ashamed, wanted to keep it a secret, it wasn't your fault, no one would ever hold it against you-"
"You cannot say such things. You cannot know such things. Think of the children, what nightmares they'll have if they find out."
I thought of the title of Martha O'Connor's documentary: Say Nothing.
"Think of the nightmares they'll have if they don't. Think of the nightmares some of them are living, or are destined to live. If Patrick and Miranda are brother and sister…and if Karen is their child…"
Regina Tyrrell was beginning to shake, the start of what appeared to be a convulsive tide of grief. She reached for my hand and fell to her knees.
"Maybe the others know the worst already. But Karen's only nine years old, for pity's sake."
"Yes," I said. "Young enough to survive it. If we're lucky."
She bent her head over my hands, as if in prayer, as if I had the power to change the past. But all I had, all we both had in common, was the desperate need to hear the truth, and to understand it. I think Regina had felt that need for a long time. And in that moment, maybe she finally chose to act on it. She stopped herself shaking, and breathed hard and deep, and looked up at me.
"All right," she said. "All right then. I dreaded this day. But I think I prayed for it too. It was always too much for one soul to bear."
And then, before she could say another word, the doorknob clicked and the door swung open and the cold relentless wind blew through the room again.
Steno didn't really give a fuck about anyone but Steno. When it came down to it, that was all there was: Number One. The rest was bullshit, and he didn't mind saying that, although in truth he had learned over the years to never actually say it to anyone but himself, even if it was what everyone believed, deep down. People couldn't bear the truth, but the truth had never bothered Steno. You didn't have to be brutal about it, and if you weren't a fucking savage, you'd avoid that side of things as much as you could: it was messy, and there was a lot of cleaning up afterward, and broken bones and blood and dead bodies; the whole thing was a bit of a fucking downer. It could get you down-especially if that was all there was to it. Some of the rows he had seen in the bar, over fuck-all, if you broke it up, and Steno always had to, and asked them what it was all about, neither of them could tell you. Waking up the next day with a broken face and for what? That was short term, that was amateur hour, that was no better than a beast in the fields. Because you could brood about the blood, how it would linger in your eye line like the red sparks you see when you close your eyes at night. And sometimes, the eyes of the dead, they'd pin you so they would, you'd wake before dawn with the memory of that last look, the last hope. And to go through that for no reason, for "The fuck are you looking at?"; for "Are you calling me a liar?" No way. Not in this life man.
That's why, if you were going to get involved on that level, you needed the long view. Fair enough, there'd been times when accidents happened, and you just had to get someone from location A to location B where B was a ditch or a dump or a riverbank: that's just day-to-day, that's just business, you can't shirk when that comes around. But if you were ambitious, and Steno was, the long term made the grief worthwhile.
Not to make too much of himself-Steno hated when people did that, you had to put up with it behind the bar day in day out, stable lads who had "really" trained Gold Cup winners, salesmen who "really" ran the companies they worked for, all the drunks and losers who were going to run marathons and write books and get record deals and act in movies and be models and comedians and every fucking thing, and there they fucking were ten, twenty, thirty years later, fatter and redder and still in the fucking pub.
The usual? The usual.
Steno was happy to admit it had all been a happy accident. It was when the Halligans had got their claws into F. X. Tyrrell, and Leo was running his happy band of jockeys and golfers and tooting them up big-time, and young Proby and Miranda Hart were hanging out. Twenty of them in the back room-it was before the Warehouse refurbishment, just a lounge at the back-no one else got in: Private party sir, sorry sir. Aw, again? Private party every night sir.
Steno could see there was something happening there, the cars, the money, the action. There was a whole bunch of women hanging around that time, skinny, expensive-looking women, the kind of women who appear like thin air when there's coke around, kind of like models but not as attractive, kind of like whores but not really into the money. Steno had just started working in McGoldrick's then, and he couldn't remember how many times he had his cock sucked to let some flooze in leopardskin and lace into the back room. Not that a woman knew how to blow you. How would she? Like knows what like likes, it's only common sense. Steno had no great interest in women. No, he had no use for them, that was more like it. Although if he had to, he'd find a use, just like he had with Miranda Hart.
She was up in the shower now, but she was still here, wasn't she? And maybe she had screamed when he'd done her the way he wanted, maybe she'd screamed at first, but she'd stopped screaming. She'd stopped screaming, and she was still here. Because it was worth her while. Because she was using him, too. Just like those coke whores, when he'd got tired of their sloppy fucking lips and he told them what he wanted, the ones who really wanted to make the scene, the ones who really wanted to score, they'd deliver like pros, they'd shut the fuck up and take it. As for the others, crying and blubbering and he hadn't even touched them, amateur fucking hour. He had nothing but contempt for that kind of carry-on. One thing Steno had never done was take what wasn't on offer. Of course, you always had to work the angles to maximize what was offered, or even to make it available at all, but who didn't do that? Or at very least, who didn't want to? And maybe there were people going to their graves crying over not getting what they wanted because they didn't go after it hard enough, but Steno was not one of those people, never had been.
In fairness, it wasn't true to say Steno didn't have a use for women. There was no percentage in being the way Steno was, not in Tyrrellscourt; it was dangerous most places now, not to mention pathetic and embarrassing. What you did was (and Steno couldn't understand how people couldn't get this through their heads, now that air travel had come down in price, and not be going around playgrounds and schools making shows of themselves, or acting the bollocks on the Internet, those days were done) you went to Thailand, or the Philippines-parts of Africa were good, too, or so he'd been told, but Steno thought Africa might be a bit of a fucking downer-and there you were, whatever you wanted, as many, as often, as young. Twice or three times a year-last year, Steno took four trips-and that was you set up for a few months. And if you couldn't be happy with that, what kind of a sick fuck were you anyway? The odd weekend in Amsterdam didn't do any harm either, you could always get what you wanted in Amsterdam.
But you needed a wife, or a girlfriend, or-you could be "gay," but Steno had never liked any of that either, well, he liked some of it, but not the fucking public side, and they were very fucking pushy about it now, everything out in the open. What was the point of that? Steno didn't like anything out in the open. Anyway, in a town like Tyrrellscourt, you needed a wife or a girlfriend so that everyone would just shut the fuck up, and once Steno got his feet under the table at McGoldrick's-it was a skill he had, he had always been able to make people feel comfortable, and relaxed, not just like him, that was no great accomplishment, but want to impress him. Even that cunt Loy the other day, he'd said something about Leopardstown to Steno. Steno could see Loy didn't know one end of a horse from the other, but he was a man, and men always wanted to say something to Steno about Leopardstown, or Croke Park, or Stamford Bridge. That was how he'd got the job, when McGoldrick Senior saw him behind the bar. He could empty the place at closing time without having to raise his voice: people just knew. He didn't know what it was; it was like, some people were good with children.
Sometimes Steno wished he had been into women, because there were nights when he could take his pick. The women would see their men edging up to him and they'd draw their own conclusions. It was like a nature program Steno had seen shot at night, or in a cave, all you could see was the animals' body heat, represented by color; the shade indicated who would mate with whom: the hotter you were, the redder you were, and the redder you were, the bigger the stream of rapidly reddening females piling over to you. Steno broke his shite laughing when he saw that program. Christine asked him what he was laughing at.
Nothing, he'd said.
Well, he couldn't say, you, you red bitches in heat you, could he?
Christine had come in trying out for the back room. Steno could see immediately she didn't have what it took. But she wasn't the kind you done in the backyard by the bins either. He took her out and he took her home and they became boyfriend and girlfriend. He had to fuck her quite a lot to begin with, and she wasn't into anything "like that," and there was a point when he didn't think he was going to make it, but that point was around the same point that Steno saw there was a market for smack around the place. He had mates in Amsterdam, and they'd send a mule, or sometimes he'd pick it up himself; no one at customs ever stopped Steno. He smoked it with Christine until she got into it, and then he'd kept it coming. Then he didn't have to fuck her so much, or at all, and if he did, he'd do what he liked and she'd put up with it, long as the smack showed up. And long as you had regular bread coming in, a smack habit was as easy to handle as a bottle of wine a night; Christine had a regular job as a secretary in a solicitor's office in Blessington and she kept herself looking smart and they lived in a bungalow on the Dublin road, although Steno had a "manager's flat" McGoldrick built for him when the Warehouse refurb was taking place, an inducement to persuade him to stay. They couldn't run McGoldrick's without Steno.
Well, maybe one day soon, they were going to have to.
The happy accident occurred, as so many have, on account of smack.
After Pa Hutton blew it with By Your Leave at Thurles, he was hanging around a lot, hitting the booze hard, and Leo Halligan stopped slipping him freebies because Hutton wasn't at the races anymore, at first literally, and then majorly. Soon after, Bomber Folan was rolling around in pretty much the same condition after he'd been dumped in short order by F. X. Tyrrell. Folan and Hutton soon found smack was a perfect way of taking the edge off life's little disappointments. Leo Halligan wasn't happy at first that Steno was dealing, but it worked out all right in the end: George was keen that Podge Halligan came nowhere near Tyrrells court because he was a headbanger and a madman, he'd scare all the jockeys away and the Halligans' betting deal with the Tyrrells would collapse. With Steno there, George could tell Podge there was no room for him in the market. George even saw to it that Steno took a weapons delivery or two, just in case a bout of competition erupted.
McGoldrick Senior didn't much like the way superannuated jockeys from Tyrrellscourt seemed to end up haunting the pub, but Steno took a strong line there: quite apart from their being his clients in more ways than one, the town had a loyalty to those who hadn't kept up with the race-not to mention the lads who came up through St. Jude's. That's what Steno said anyway: he didn't know whether he believed it or not, and he didn't really give a fuck: he liked the way it sounded, and the effect it had on the people who heard it, and why else would you say anything? It made him feel like he was a good man, at least some of the time, and sometimes you seemed to need that. Steno didn't know why, but there it was.
Folan fell asunder very quickly. He began kipping up at the old Staples place, helping Iggy Staples out in the scrap trade, trekking down the town for his smack. Meanwhile, Miranda Hart had reappeared-there was talk she'd gone away and had a baby and given it up for adoption, or had an abortion, or some fucking thing: Steno didn't really give a fuck; at least, not back then he didn't. She was hanging out in the back room, hoovering up coke with Jack Proby, spreading herself around, and soon she needed a little taste to bring her down at nights. Steno steered clear of any shenanigans with Miranda Hart though: even if she wasn't in the loop at Tyrrellscourt anymore, she had been once, and there'd always been talk about whose daughter she might have been. He'd supply her with smack, but rarely directly; he preferred to deal with Proby: it kept the lines clear, in case there was any grief from on high.
Pa Hutton was miserable, of course: he'd lost his job, and now his woman, his wife, and possibly his child, and what did he have? A spike in his arm, end of story. Leo Halligan tried to straighten him out more than once, but there was nothing you could do with a junkie: if they want to go all the way down to hell, you can either take the trip with them, or let them fall and hope they get such a land they'll try and climb back up. Leo had the fucking nerve to have a pop at Steno once for feeding Pa the smack; Steno reefed Leo out on that one, told him if he didn't want to find himself and his playmates another powder room, he could lose the fucking career guidance counselor routine. For a poxy little faggot, he'd always been a self-righteous cunt, right back to St. Jude's days. Fucker was never done riding some young fella or other, keeping the lads awake at night grunting and fucking whooping, yet he had the fucking gall to object to the way Steno conducted himself.
Steno had no regrets or qualms about the manner in which he had stewarded the younger lads through the hazards of St. Jude's, and he could have taught Leo and any number of other whores in that school the meaning of self-control: he'd internalized the crucial lesson, which was that you exercise caution and self-discipline at all times. Steno had never played favorites, he'd never had anyone more than once, and he'd always insisted on anonymity: a blindfold properly applied, a willing assistant or two. It wasn't always pleasant; in fact, there had been times when Steno had wondered whether it was worth the grief. But fuck it: you done one, you done them all; easier that way, from a logic point of view. Easier in your own mind. And what was Leo gonna do about it? Go to the cops? (Steno knew what it stemmed from: Leo had always had a thing for Hutton back in St. Jude's, and Hutton just didn't go that way. Well, Steno didn't take no for an answer at the time: he'd used Father Vincent Tyrrell's room in the school when it was Hutton's turn, took him on a kneeler. Hutton didn't like it, and Steno hadn't much enjoyed it himself, it had felt like a duty. Anyway, he knew Leo always blamed him for that. But Hutton never suspected him, and Leo had no proof, never had. If there was one thing Steno couldn't abide, it was any kind of false accusation, no matter what the context.) And Pa Hutton and Bomber Folan didn't have to come to McGoldrick's, did they? He knew Leo had been pouring poison in people's ears about him, but there he was in the bar too. Hypocrisy, some people would call it: Steno said it was just The Way Things Are. Don't bear a grudge unless it works to your advantage.
So Miranda Hart had run out of bread, and Steno wasn't gonna give her any more shit for free, and he didn't find anything else she had to offer appealing; she'd always been a dirtbird, but she'd turned into a total skank on H; the golfers weren't interested anymore, and she was reduced to blowing drunks for twenty quid in the back lane. That's what she was doing, in the rain, when someone told Pa Hutton about it and he walked out and caught her sucking off Bomber Folan and went straight for Bomber's neck. The whole thing was over in seconds. Bomber's system was trashed by the smack anyway, so he was too weak to fight back; the worst thing about it all was, Miranda Hart kept working away down below while Hutton was strangling Bomber, as if she had lost any lingering sense of reality, and the rain teeming down on it all: that's the sight that greeted Steno, like some nightmare act from the circus in hell.
Steno had a choice to make, and he made it quickly, with the usual calculation in mind: How will this work best for Steno? Simple answer: clean it up and hold it in reserve; the alternative-the Guards, and charges, and a court case, with all the damage that would be caused to the reputations of McGoldrick's and the stables, not to mention Steno probably getting caught in the cross fire-was simply out of the question. You didn't know what caliber of man you were until tested in extreme circumstances. Steno still felt pride at how he had comported himself on that evening. He had instinctively taken leadership positions because he was hardwired to do so.
It had been the work of seconds to gather Folan up-he remembered thinking it was like handling an oversize umbrella-and bundle him in to the walk-in cold room and lock him in one of the individual compartments; they were all padlocked in case the staff got the notion that no one'd miss the odd loin of pork. Steno got hold of that particular key, and insisted on taking full charge of the stocking and maintenance of the cold room thereafter.
Steno realized that this was one of those moments that changed everything, and that if you didn't want to be led by that moment, you had to be a leader of the change. He got hold of Leo Halligan and Jack Proby and explained that there'd been an accident; he wouldn't say what had happened, just that the days of the back room were done. Proby was scared enough to do what he was told, which was to get Miranda up to Dublin and make sure she kept her fucking mouth shut. Leo took a little more convincing; eventually Steno just went into the back room and had a quiet word with each of the respectable golfers and married jockeys about what the Guards (and/or their wives and families) would be told if they didn't clear out right now and never come back. Steno could always clear a bar without raising his voice. That was Leo's back room business finished.
Pa Hutton was the one who seemed to present the biggest challenge, but as it turned out, he lit on the solution to the problem himself. Himself and Folan hadn't looked too dissimilar: same blond hair, same whippet build. The eyes were a problem, but tinted lenses would sort that out. And in any case, Iggy Staples was legally blind; he had a bit of vision, but not enough to make out eye color. Hutton, who had always been a dapper dresser, exchanged clothes with the dead man, and went forth to assume the identity of Bomber Folan, and live up on the Staples property, and the word would go out that Hutton had disappeared, and that would lay the whole thing to rest.
Hutton was eager to do it: he was half mad with guilt over Folan's death in any case, and saw the whole thing as a way to atone for his sins. To each his own, Steno reckoned, at least it meant Hutton was close at hand.
And there it lay for a lot longer than Steno expected. Steno kept in touch with everyone-isolation breeds discontent, and if there was even the slightest danger that anyone was getting the urge to confess, Steno needed to know before they knew it themselves. He tracked how Proby got himself and Miranda into clinics and off drugs, encouraged Proby to get Jackie Tyrrell to employ Miranda Hart, visited Hutton after Staples died to see that all was well, and generally monitored the level of stability surrounding the principals in the incident. And gradually they grew to trust him, he thought, or at least, to rely upon him. And all the time, Steno waited for his opening.
It came when Miranda Hart hired Don Kennedy to investigate Hutton's disappearance. The first thing Steno knew was when this fucking heap of an ex-cop lolloped into the bar, heaved his fat arse up onto a stool and started asking questions. Steno felt hurt that he hadn't been consulted, but he knew that his feelings were useful only if he could transform them into something productive. He called Miranda and assured her that all would be well, thereby reminding her that it didn't have to be. Soon Miranda was ringing him five times a day freaking out about all manner of things Kennedy was digging up. Steno wasn't sure what those things were, not at first anyway, but they resulted in Kennedy blackmailing Miranda for a couple of years, until they'd hit on the new plan.
He still wasn't sure he knew all of it-the part about Hutton being Regina 's son wasn't all of it, he knew that much-but on one level, it didn't matter: the dead couldn't blackmail you. But he knew whatever it was had something to do with Hutton and Miranda. Kennedy had gone up to the Staples place and…well, it wasn't known what was said, but the next thing, Patrick had gone and cut out his own tongue. Steno assessed that one and came up blank, unless you just called him a fucking mental bastard like everyone else: What kind of analysis could you make of a fucker who'd do something like that? But Miranda assured him later that Hutton was sound, and sane enough up there, clean and fit and back in training she said, and Steno had seen the horse, and fair enough, Hutton had his weight down and looked capable enough, and then gradually Miranda presented him with a revised appraisal of Hutton's and her ambitions: the new plan.
The new plan. Steno had to laugh sometimes at the plan: the symbols, the tongues, the thirty pieces of silver, like one of those movies you watched on DVD, drunk with a pizza. He didn't know whether it had all been Miranda's idea, or whether it came from Hutton; the idea had been partly to throw everyone off the scent of what was really happening, but everything they used meant something too, and that appealed to Steno. Miranda had timed it to kick off when Leo got out of jail-she'd been communicating with him when he was inside, Steno believed, playing on his past loyalty to Pa Hutton-in the hope that Leo would join their enterprise. Steno had advised against this, but he was reminded yet again that working with a woman was a hazardous fucking endeavor: she'd sometimes agree completely with what you said and then go out and do the complete fucking opposite, like a monkey or a child. Leo had always been a volatile little fuck, and Steno had had no confidence that Leo would act in concert with them. That shrewd evaluation of the situation turned out to be more than vindicated by subsequent events, not that Miranda Hart had thanked him. But Leo was never gonna be a tout, not even to your man Loy.
Steno still wondered whether he shouldn't have taken Loy out of the picture that night up in Jackie Tyrrell's. He conceded privately that he'd been troubled by the idea of killing them both in one go, especially since Loy did not appear to present a clear and present danger-although Steno believed he was, and that he should go down. Steno suspected that he had succumbed to the worst kind of initiative deficit; he had weakly allowed himself to be defined as a hired hand, simply carrying out orders. Steno didn't need reminders from history to understand just what a cop-out that defense was.
He hadn't particularly enjoyed cutting out the tongues; at least with Folan's, and even Kennedy's, there'd been time, and so the blood wasn't an issue: dead bodies don't bleed in any significant way. With Jackie Tyrrell, Loy was on the premises and there were servants around and he'd had to work fast; he'd started on the tongue when she was still warm, and there was a certain amount of mess. It was a bit of a fucking downer, truth be told. He wouldn't say it had rattled him, but it took all his concentration to set the body up on the ropes and ring the bells, and lay in wait for Loy and not kill him, and maybe that was how Steno glossed over what deep down he considered a failure on his part: despite everything, he had stuck firm to his purpose, and acquitted himself with distinction. Spilled milk under the bygone bridge, whatever: he was ready now for what was about to ensue. The beauty-and-the-beast malarkey Miranda had been running with Hutton was nearly done. Brian Rowan, the head man up at Tyrrellscourt, was bought and paid for: he'd soon be assuming a lot more responsibility at the Tyrrellscourt yard.
Jackie Tyrrell's murder hadn't been part of Miranda and Hutton's original plan, but Steno demanded it as the only adequate recompense for his ser vices: Jackie's riding school and lands were all bequeathed to Miranda; Steno had made sure the papers had been drawn up in advance with Miranda transferring the same bequest to a company he controlled. All that remained was the final spectacular. It was that aspect once again that appealed to Steno: the art of it. Provided Beauty and the Beast played their parts correctly, and they would, he'd make sure of that. No, it would be spectacular, it would be public, it would bring Tyrrellscourt to its knees at last-Steno just wished he could sign his name to it. Maybe that was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Not that Steno expected anyone else to understand that.
He looked at Miranda Hart before they got in the Range Rover, and mentally shook his head in despair: her lipstick was crooked, her hair was askew and her eye makeup was asymmetrical. What a fucking downer. It was the problem with democracy, as Steno saw it: some fucking people, no matter what you gave them or did with them, they were never going to get their act together. She smiled at him, and he could see she'd been crying. Was he supposed to feel guilty about that? Well he didn't. She looked scared. At least that showed judgment on her part. She had good reason to be scared. They all had. If there was an enterprise worth the hazard that didn't strike fear into your heart, Steno wondered what it might possibly be.
The door swung open and the cold relentless wind brought, first Tommy Owens, his hands on his head and his right eye bruised, then Miranda Hart, wearing riding boots and a long Barbour jacket and carrying a black Adidas sports grip, and finally Steno, who wore a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat like an Australian and had a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun in one hand. I didn't check to see what he had in the other. Steno pointed the SMG at me, and I held my hands up and out to be searched. Just as the doorknob had creaked, just before the door opened, I had hidden the Glock 17 I was carrying among the cushions on the sofa. Miranda Hart appeared terrified, her hands shaking as she fumblingly unzipped the grip, her lips trembling as she produced hanks of nylon cord and bags of nylon grip ties and rolls of silver duct tape. Regina Tyrrell stared at what was unfolding before her eyes in astonishment and fear, then made a rush for the door, only to be brought up short by Steno waving the MP5 at her.
"Karen," she cried. "Karen! What have you done with her?"
"Calm, calm, she's all right, she's fine," Steno said.
"Where is she?" Regina said.
"She's locked in her room. Miranda has the key. We've left food and drink there for her. It's just for a short while, until Leopardstown is done. Miranda, why don't you get things tied up with our friends here?" Steno said. "Take Mr. Loy first, if you would."
I had quickly calculated that there was no percentage in trying to make a grab for the Glock: it wouldn't make much of a show against an SMG. But it might come into its own later on. Miranda looked as if she wanted to say several things, but she didn't say any of them; instead, she got her sports grip and Steno pointed me into a chair with the SMG, and without a word, Miranda tied me up with plastic grip ties around my wrists and ankles and nylon cord around my waist, and then frisked me. When her hand passed over my mobile phone in my jacket pocket, she tensed and looked me in the eye, and I waited for her to come to a decision. It was a moment in which time seemed to slow to a crawl, in which I sensed both her power over me and her powerlessness, now that she was in Steno's thrall. And the strange thing is, in that instant, I felt so much toward her, such a mix of feelings: compassion, and sympathy, and fear for her welfare, and, despite all I knew then and all I suspected and was subsequently to discover, the hope that she and her daughter could somehow escape together, and put all the bad history behind them. And even as I tried to hold the thought in my mind, it turned to dust, like all dreams that involve fighting the past again and winning this time do, turned to dust and was scattered on the relentless wind. She passed over my phone and leant into my ear.
"Please try and think kindly of me," she said, and turned to Steno.
"He's clean," she said, wafting past me, and I breathed her incense of oranges and salt, and the two things combined, the smell of love departed and the chirping of a tramp on the make, filled me with melancholy.
Miranda moved toward Tommy, but he waved her off and approached Steno.
"Steno, you remember me man," he said. "The back room of McGoldrick's, with Leo an' all. And then I was in with you the other day."
Steno looked at Tommy's ruined foot and nodded.
"Sure. Tommy Owens? What's on your mind?"
Tommy looked at me, then approached Steno and spoke in a hushed, confidential voice, as if he'd been living a lie for a long time and was relieved finally to be able to come clean.
"I'm just a hired hand here man," he said. "I mean, I don't have any loyalty to your man Loy, know I mean? And frankly, I put him together with Leo, he beat the shite out of him for no reason, I think he's losing it man. So if you're putting something together you need an extra pair of hands, all I'm saying is, I'm here if you want me man, to drive, whatever."
Steno stared at me, and I stared at Tommy. I knew Steno was trying to work out if Tommy was on the level. I was almost sure he wasn't. Almost was as good as it got with Tommy, but from where I was sitting, bound if not yet gagged, almost didn't feel like a lot. I let this curdle naturally into a glare of disgust at his betrayal; Tommy returned this with a shrug of indifferent scorn. We looked like thieves without honor. I prayed that's not what we were.
"You can drive?" Steno said.
"Sure," Tommy said.
"All right. Good to have an extra pair of hands along."
Then he poked the barrel of the SMG hard in Tommy's face, hard enough to bruise.
"I get so much as a glimmer you're not down the line with me, you're sneaking to Loy, or to the cops, you're gone, understand, and a day, an hour later, I won't even remember the hole you're buried in, let alone your name."
I had to give it to him, Steno was a scary piece of work. He threatened to kill Tommy like he was warning a lounge boy about skimming from the till, and you felt it was of as great, or as little, consequence to him.
"All right Miranda, it's Regina 's turn," Steno said.
Regina sat in a chair opposite me, and Miranda fastened her to it in the same way she had fastened me, ties to wrists and ankles, cord around her waist. Both women were trembling, and Miranda kept apologizing for being too rough. Or at any rate, she kept apologizing. When Regina was secured, Steno made a call on his mobile.
"All right," he said. "We're ready up here."
Steno went to the windows and opened the curtains. Gray dawn light trickled quickly in, borne by showers of sleet that pelted against the panes.
Steno stood over me and spoke calmly to my face.
"Whatever happens next, know this: if you contradict anything I say, I'll take you out immediately. Plan A is the plan we're working, for Miranda's sake, for old times' sake: I don't claim to understand it myself, but that's the route we're taking. But if I think you're putting that in jeopardy, even for an instant: Plan B, baby."
"And what's Plan B?"
Steno almost smiled, his fleshy face heavy and still, his eyes genial and dead.
"Kill every fucker standing, and get out of here fast. And don't think I won't."
I didn't. Steno gave Miranda a Sig Sauer compact, looked like one of the Halligan cache I'd brought down. There was a knock at the door, and then Francis Xavier Tyrrell was led in by a red-faced, straw-haired man I didn't recognize, but whom I soon found out was Brian Rowan, the Tyrrells' head man. Tyrrell looked around the room, his cheeks aflame, his sharp, intelligent features quivering with quiet anger and indignation. He wore a sleeveless padded green jacket over tweeds and a brown fedora. No one spoke. It felt as if a bunch of teenagers had been having a party and the father who had expressly forbidden them such an event had arrived home.
"What the devil is all this?" he said.
Regina 's emotion overflowed into tears; she spoke through them now in a rush.
"Francis, they have Karen, they're holding her."
"They have Karen? What do you mean, they're 'holding' her? What do they want?"
"They've kidnapped her, they want…"
Regina faltered under F. X. Tyrrell's glare. Steno looked to Miranda Hart, who beckoned F. X. Tyrrell to the open window.
"Can you see the gallops? See the rider there? How's he doing, do you think? Do you need binoculars?"
"My sight is perfect," Tyrrell said.
The room fell silent as he watched.
"Good seat. Nice action. Who is that, one of the apprentices? Brian?"
"His name is Patrick, boss."
"We want Patrick to ride today," Miranda said. "The third race, the juvenile hurdle for three year olds. Barry Dorgan hasn't made the weight for Bottle of Red. We want Patrick to start in Dorgan's place."
Miranda's voice was shaky but firm; it also, for the first time, expressed for Patrick Hutton an emotion she hadn't betrayed before, at least, not in my hearing: love. As Miranda spoke, dawn light from the window shifted slowly across her face. F. X. Tyrrell transferred his gaze to her as if seeing her for the first time.
"You're…you're Mary Hart, aren't you?"
"Miranda."
"Yes. Yes. Look at you child. All grown up."
There was a silence, punctuated by Regina Tyrrell's quiet sobbing; Miranda Hart looked quickly from Regina to F. X. Tyrrell and shuddered; F. X. Tyrrell shook his head suddenly, as if a ghost from his past had asked him for help and he found he had nothing left to give. Tyrrell looked out toward the gallops again, then he pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose.
"You want Patrick to ride one of my horses? Patrick? Who the devil is Patrick?"
"Patrick Hutton, remember?" Miranda said. "You remember Thurles? By Your Leave?"
Tyrrell looked out again at Hutton, and the blood drained from his face.
"I remember, yes; I remember what he did to my beautiful By Your Leave."
His face was creased with sudden pain, and then his small dark eyes blazed.
"Get out of my sight, the lot of you! How dare you!" he cried.
Nobody moved. Now there was silence, and the relentless wind, and the insistent sleet on the windowpanes. F. X. Tyrrell looked from face to face, and for the first time, uncertainty appeared on his. It was like an old play when the conspirators confront the king, and the king commands them to desist, failing to grasp that at the instant of their challenge, he has ceased to rule. He turned to Brian Rowan with his big plump farm-boy head, his shock of fair hair, his shrewd, watery blue eyes.
"Brian," he said. "Brian, for God's sake."
Brian looked at the floor, then briefly at Steno, before fixing on Regina.
"It's like Miss Tyrrell said, boss," he said. "Think of Miss Karen. Better to go along with it. It's…it's just one race."
The last idea was the one Rowan evidently found the most difficult to express, and it was clearly one of the major difficulties for F. X. Tyrrell as well.
"Just one race?" he said, as if the very notion of looking at the sport in that light was so bizarre he'd never contemplated it before. "This is Bottle of Red."
Regina spoke then, her tone suddenly hard and cold.
"Francis. They know…everything." F. X. Tyrrell flashed her a look that mixed anger with real fear.
Steno yawned and looked at his watch.
"Want to get moving," he said quietly, waving his MP5K submachine gun gently back and forth, like a wand.
Tyrrell peered at Steno as if he hadn't noticed him before.
"That's Stenson, isn't it?" F. X. Tyrrell said. "From McGoldrick's? I'll have you dismissed from your post for this."
"I already quit," Steno said. Then he took Tyrrell's right arm and bent it behind his back until his wrist was at his neck. The old man gasped in agony.
"Now you go along with this, and behave yourself, and you do your thing in the parade ring, and you talk nice to the TV people with Patrick afterward if he wins, do you understand?"
Tyrrell nodded, whimpering in pain.
"And you don't call for help, and you don't tell anyone, especially not the Guards?"
"No!"
Steno let Tyrrell's arm go, and the old man dropped to his knees. I don't know if the hoarse sound he made was breathing or weeping, but I know that all the other men in the room turned away. When I looked at Regina Tyrrell and Miranda Hart, however, I saw that they could not take their eyes off his suffering. Brian Rowan helped Tyrrell to his feet and began to talk to him in a low, quiet voice as he led him out. Tyrrell's face was haggard with pain and confusion.
Steno summoned Tommy and gave him what looked like another warning. Then Steno nodded at Miranda, waved the SMG at us all and followed Tommy out.
Miranda Hart trailed after Steno. While she was gone, I thought about various ways of getting free of my bonds, but the chair was too solid to be wrenched apart, and I didn't carry a blade as a matter of course, and short of launching myself out the window, nothing else occurred to me. If I could maneuver my way to the couch, I could maybe get hold of the Glock, although how I'd aim it at anything worth shooting was another matter. Just as this thought was forming, Miranda came back. She brought a tray with a pot of coffee, cups and milk with her and offered it round.
"That'd be nice if we had our hands free," Regina said.
Miranda looked at the grips tying our wrists to the arms of the chairs and nodded and apologized, then poured a coffee for herself.
In the silence, I heard a muffled voice coming from down the hall. It was the voice of a child.
"Mummy? Mummy? Mother? I can't open the door!"
"Karen…oh my God, let me go to her," Regina said.
Miranda looked anxious and shook her head.
"Just reassure her, all right? Shout from here."
"Mummy? I'm locked in!"
Regina took a deep breath to compose herself, then raised her voice to a yell.
"It's all right, sweetheart. The lock's broken."
"Just find the key."
"The key won't work. We have to find a locksmith."
"Mummy!"
The child was wailing. Miranda held her face in her hands.
"It's all right, sweetheart. Just…find a book and get back into bed. Or do some drawing. We'll get you out soon. Okay?"
There was silence then. Miranda looked shamefaced, and shook her head at me, as if to say that she wasn't in fact responsible for this. I shook my head right back and looked her in the eye.
"One thing I don't understand, Miranda," I said. "Well, that's not true, actually, there are many things I don't understand about this case, but best to take them one at a time. What's in it for Steno?"
"You have to understand," Miranda began. "You have to try and track this from the beginning. It's all because of Patrick. And Patrick will have what he's dreamed of today, after all this time. He's been training, he's in good condition. It's the least he deserves."
"And what? Are the other horses just going to sit back and let him win?"
"You'll just have to wait and see. Live on television."
"And what then? He takes the fall? He has his Tyrrellscourt tattoo, he has no tongue, he's perfect for a clogger like Myles Geraghty. Best of all, you probably have him so he wants to confess. He's the Omega Man, he acted alone, and you all walk away scot-free? But what about Steno, what does he get? I mean, Regina here is in the way, isn't she? Maybe the Omega Man needs to claim a fourth victim. Get rid of Regina and Miranda hits the jackpot. Karen Tyrrell is the heiress, Miranda is reunited with her daughter, and Gerald Stenson gets paid off until his dying day."
Miranda shook her head.
"You're looking at everything the wrong way round. Start with Patrick, living half-wild up on the Staples place, a bunch of scrap and a fistful of memories, some sweet, many bitter. The private detective Don Kennedy found his birth certificate. It wasn't in Lombard Street, it was at the registration office in Naas, I remember that much. Maybe because I was trying to remember anything but what he was telling me. See, Kennedy didn't come to me first, like he was supposed to. From the word go he had wanted to go and see Folan, he kept saying since Folan and Patrick were contemporaries, and in many ways had a shared history, he was a crucial witness. I kept making excuses not to go-I don't think I could have handled it. Anyway, I think he suspected Folan was Patrick, and now he had a foolproof way of finding out. He went up to the Staples place and showed Patrick the birth certificate, right there in black and white: Mother: Regina Mary Immaculate. And I can't remember what Patrick was working on at the time, I think he might have been putting up some fencing. Anyway, he had a pair of metal snips in his flight suit pocket. I don't know why, he took to dressing in flight suits when he went to live up there. Kennedy confronted him with the birth cert, and asked him what he thought. And Patrick took snips and pulled his tongue out and snipped a good half of it off."
Regina screamed at this, and began to shake her head, wailing. While I listened to that sound, and to Miranda talking, I was aware again of Karen calling for her mother, over and over again, sometimes through tears, sometimes angrily, rattling the door or banging on it. I hoped the sash windows in her room were too stiff for her to open, and if they weren't, that she didn't do anything foolish. Regina was still wailing, keening like a banshee. Miranda leant across and slapped her hard across the face, and she stopped.
"Listen to me," she said. "This is the beginning. This is just the beginning. Don't forget what you did to him, Regina. Don't forget you dumped your son into an orphanage, no, a torture chamber, then took him into your house while never acknowledging him. Do you know what that did to him when he found out? That you were his mother, but you had never treated him like a son?"
It couldn't have been much after nine in the morning then, but that was the point where I thought: I could really do with a drink.
"Kennedy got Patrick a doctor he knew, avoided a hospital situation where the police would have been involved. Setting me and Patrick up, getting us to trust him, so he could blackmail the fuck out of us. But you know what Patrick told me? He wrote it down, he couldn't speak at all back then. Because I kept asking, in the days and weeks after, pleading with him to tell me why he had done it. And eventually he took a piece of paper and he wrote two things on it. The two things were: 'Tell No One,' and 'Say Nothing.'
"I knew what that meant. When Patrick had been in St. Jude's, he'd been raped twice. He didn't know who the rapists were. He wasn't even sure there were two, but he thought there were, he said they smelled different. He said sometimes he thought it might have been Vincent Tyrrell, sometimes Leo, sometimes even Steno. I asked Steno and he swore he hadn't touched Patrick."
I intervened at that point.
"You didn't believe him, did you? I know you didn't believe him. Leo Halligan always thought it was Steno who raped Hutton."
Miranda looked at me and swallowed, and continued from where she left off.
"And Patrick said, they'd each said that. Each of the perpetrators-and the other boys who were victims were told the same thing too. Tell no one. Say nothing."
Tell no one. Say nothing. The secret history of Irish life.
"I asked you what was in it for Steno. Looks like you won't answer. Explain something else to me, Miranda," I said. "I can understand Folan-a row, or a brawl, or some messy accident that got covered up. I can understand Kennedy, the blackmailer. What I don't get is Jackie Tyrrell. She was your friend, in many ways your champion. You clearly revered her. Why did she have to die?"
Miranda began to nod her head very quickly, as if someone was disagreeing with her but she had right on her side, and if only they'd stop talking, she'd set them straight.
"It's the same answer to both questions. Patrick wanted to return. He wanted one last race, that was all. And I felt…because of how I'd treated him, the way I'd abandoned him, given up our child…I felt I had a lot to make up for. I felt I'd betrayed him, and I needed to atone. Patrick killed Bomber Folan years ago, and I was there. It was an accident, but Steno knew we were both involved. He cleaned up afterward, and then we were both in Steno's power. When Kennedy started the blackmail, we both wanted him to die. I don't feel guilty about Kennedy, he was a piece of filth, extorting money out of our unhappiness and shame. But I couldn't do it myself, and neither could Patrick, as it happened. So Steno did it for us."
"And Steno's price was Jackie Tyrrell. Why?"
Miranda stared at the floor.
"I said no harm could come to Regina. And…as you said, Steno wanted to know what was in it for him. I was…I am Jackie Tyrrell's heir. Her estate: the riding school, the house, everything, it all goes to me."
"And now it all goes to Steno."
"I couldn't argue him out of it," she said. "I begged him, I said I could get her to advance me enough to keep him going…it wasn't enough. Steno went his own way. It frightened me."
Miranda looked at me with tears in her eyes, and everything I had felt for her brimmed to the surface again. Complicity in Jackie's murder had pushed her beyond the pale; now I knew she was not directly responsible, my flexible moral code longed to find some clause that would welcome her back to the fold. Regina Tyrrell looked between us, her face closed to everything but her own pain. The sleet had picked up to hail now; it pounded needle sharp against the windowpanes; I had to raise my voice to compete.
"What else had Kennedy on you, Miranda? I mean, it couldn't've just been Regina as Patrick's mother, there must have been more to it. Otherwise he would have been blackmailing Regina, or F.X., not you."
Miranda took a page from her coat and unfolded it. It was a long-form birth certificate.
"Kennedy was a predator. He was real scum. He wanted more money. He threatened to go to Regina, to tell her what he had found out. I didn't think she knew…I reasoned that no one but me knew, that Regina had a better chance of…of bringing up my little girl properly if she didn't know either."
"I think Regina suspected, at the very least," I said.
"You can suspect, and go on living. You can suspect, and keep lying to yourself, and survive. That's what people do every day. But you might not make it past knowing. Anyway, this pig wanted more to keep the secret. I couldn't afford it. That kicked the whole thing off, really. Steno helped us then. Helped us to scare the daylights out of Kennedy until he gave us the key to a safe in his house where this was kept. Helped us to kill him. And good riddance."
"What's the secret?" Regina asked.
And Miranda Hart said: "That you are my mother. That Patrick and I are brother and sister. That our daughter, Karen…"
She didn't need to continue. Regina nodded her head wearily. She had said to me earlier that she had dreaded this day, but prayed for it, too. I think dread was the dominant emotion in the room, especially because of what Miranda Hart said next.
"Maybe we could have gotten past that," she said. "Maybe…I don't know…but when Patrick…when Patrick went to confession with Vincent Tyrrell…it was after By Your Leave, and all the shenanigans with the Halligans and so forth, and Patrick was sick to his stomach, he didn't like the cheating, that side of the game, he was straight as a die, really. And he went to confess his sins. And he told Vincent Tyrrell he was worried about getting another job, with a bad reputation, because his wife was pregnant. Tyrrell got very angry, and Patrick was confused: he knew he'd been in the wrong, but surely these things happened to everyone at one time or another. Surely even a Catholic priest could be more understanding than that.
"And Vincent Tyrrell told him that this child would be an abomination. It would be against nature. Patrick asked why. And Vincent Tyrrell said, because its mother and father shared the same mother, and their fathers were brothers."
All you could hear when Miranda stopped speaking was the hail against the windowpanes and the slow, steady wailing of Karen Tyrrell.
Tommy witnessed what happened in Leopardstown that day at first hand, and this is the way he told it to me:
"I was the driver, Steno in the back with Hutton. Hutton kept drizening this tune to himself, over and over, driving me mad so it was. Steno seemed as ever, you know, Mr. Chill. I was trying to get something out of him on the whole operation, find out what the plan was: giving him a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, not laying it on too thick 'cause he's obviously not a fucking plank. Telling him I'd had it up to here with fucking Ed Loy taking me for granted and paying me shit and expecting me to watch his back all the fucking time. But Steno played it cool and steady: is that right, no really, Tommy, all this. Pretty soon I gave it up. The driving was taking up all my attention anyway, the hail and the sleet, our number one weather choice, and cunts in Mercs and boy racers still pissed from the night before cutting me up in a poxy dribble of muddy water morning light, you wished you were in your bed with nothing more taxing than a trip to the pub ahead. Stephen's Day, a few bets, a few jars, and home to see what's on the box. Turkey sandwich, bottle of beer. Not this year.
"We're on the M50, heading south, Steno says to keep going on past Leopardstown, and then to cut down toward the sea, onto the N11 and down into Bayview. Father Vincent Tyrrell, I'm thinking, and sure enough, we get to the church car park and Steno nods me out. He leaves Hutton in the backseat, still singing away to himself, sounds like a Christmas carol to me, but I've heard so fucking many the past few weeks I can't remember which is which. We head into the back porch, there's a mass on, I look at Steno and he shrugs, and I'm thinking, this cunt would strafe the fucking church now not a bother on him, and then I'm like, calm the fuck down, this is a barman from Tyrrellscourt, not a fucking suicide bomber for al-Qaeda. I open the door and it's Father Lyons, home from the missions, and the beady-eyed cunt clocks me instantly, caught rapid, where the fuck were you? I can see he spots me, well, pity about him. Twenty women and three men over seventy in the church, you have to feel sorry for them, sorry for Lyons too, I mean, six masses between them yesterday, and Stephen's morning these 'oul ones and 'oul fellas are back for more. I know they're probably lonely and they've fuck-all else to be doing, but come on, Jesus knows you love Him by now, He got the message big-time on His birthday, relax there or He might start to think yiz are all laying it on a bit thick.
"We go around to the presbytery, knock away, nothing doing. Steno looks at me like I have the inside story.
"'Maybe he's gone to Leopardstown,' I say.
"'Maybe he has. Two birds,' he says.
"I don't like the sound of that.
"And we're back in the Range Rover, back up and onto the M50, heading for Leopardstown. The hail and sleet have dwindled to a scuttery rain now, and the air is warming a little, and there's a crack in the sky that, if it's not exactly blue, it's at the silver end of gray, and I can see Steno nodding out the window.
"'The day is coming together,' he says. 'The day is going to happen.'
"F. X. Tyrrell has gone ahead with the head man, Brian Rowan, in the last horse box. Always goes with the horses, Rowan says, still in awe, and Steno checks him, is he sure he's with the program, and Rowan reassures Steno he's onside, well in there, bought and paid for. Horses'll be up in the stables with all the lads looking after them, and Tyrrell too. We turn off for the course and the Garda checkpoints are already in place, waving punters into the car parks about half a mile from the track. Steno's given me some kind of official pass he's got from Rowan and they nod us through. And part of me is, why didn't I just call a halt, tell the Guards I've a madman with a submachine gun in the back, not to mention a madman with no tongue who thinks he's Lester Piggott? Why don't I tell them about you, tied to a chair in Tyrrellscourt? I could pretend I think nothing bad is gonna happen here, like it's just a sentimental old debt being paid: Hutton gets to run a prestige race, ten years after everyone thought he disappeared. What a story! But I know that's not all there is. Maybe it's that I want to know what happens next. Like it's their story, and I want to see how they play it out. And maybe it's because I still don't like talking to the fucking cops. And maybe there's a second, just a glimmer, when I roll down the window and show the Guard the pass, and he sees it's Tyrrellscourt stables, and he looks in the back and sees Hutton, and you know what he says?
"'Is that him? Is that Hutton?'
"Fuck sake, it's out already. And of course, I know Tyrrell has to tell them Barry Dorgan is being replaced by Hutton. Maybe I just don't expect everyone to remember who he was. But why not? Fuck, I do. There's lads in Paddy Power's who talk about By Your Leave and Hutton vanishing still. So it's out there, the return of the prodigal: they're building the fucking myth already. And maybe there's a glimmer: tell him. Tell him. And then he's beaming at us, his eyes twinkling with excitement, in such a fucking hurry to wave us on it would've seemed like bad manners to disappoint the cunt. In for a penny. And I thought, what would Ed do? He'd follow it to the end. Follow it to the end, Tommy, and see where it takes you.
"We park close enough to the entrance, and Steno goes off to the stables; he's got to get passes for us all. While we're sitting there waiting, I finally pick up on what it is Hutton is humming.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel,
Shall come to thee, O Israel…
"I join in on the chorus, and he gives me a big smile when I've done, and nods his head, like, at last, here's someone who understands me.
"Mental, totally fucking mental.
"When Steno comes back, he tells us Hutton needs to go to the weigh room, and then we can hang on in the jockeys' changing room-but not to go yet, or we'll be in there too long, and the other jockeys'll be hassling us.
"'We?' I say.
"'Yeah, you can be his valet, all right?' Steno says to me.
"Not as if I have a great deal of choice in the matter.
"Steno rolls his eyes then.
"'You'll never guess who's up there with the animals.'
"'Dr. Doolittle,' I say, before I can stop myself. Then, 'Rex Harrison, not Eddie Murphy,' as if that's gonna help. It doesn't: he gives me the base of his hand smack in the jaw and sets my teeth scraping and my head clanging like an anvil, the fucker.
"'Don't get smart with me, you mangy fuck,' Steno says, side of the mouth, all smiles, like he's chatting to a friend. 'You're still on probation. And Rex Harrison is dead.'
"I nod, trying to look sorry, which is no great stretch, 'cause after the clatter he's given me, believe me, I am.
"'Vincent Tyrrell. He knows all the stable lads of course, half of them were in St. Jude's, so he's at home up there. Him and the brother pretending they don't see each other. Said he's particularly keen to see how Bottle of Red gets on.'
"Steno seems to be directing this as much at Hutton as at me, and when I look round, there's Hutton all fired up, glaring, eyes boiling, like a bull at a gate.
"Steno fucks off then, but before he does, he takes my phone, and gives me a little warning about what he'll do if I double-cross him. I can remember it, but I'm not going to repeat it, 'cause there's a chance I might forget it one day, but not if it lodges in my head.
"We hang on for a while, then twelve-twenty, just before the first race, that's our cue. We go in and present our passes and head for the changing rooms and grab a spot. Hutton has a bag with his silks and riding hat and his whip and some street clothes. There's a bit of muttering from the other lads. But Hutton doesn't care, he just changes into his colors, cool as you like. And then a couple of lads come up and give it a bit of remember me, I was a boy in Tyrrellscourt when you were riding. Hutton smiles at them, and nods away big-time, and maybe they're a bit disappointed he's not chatting to them but they're not really surprised, and they seem to go away happy. Any jockeys I ever met, either they wouldn't fucking shut up or you couldn't get a word out of them, so maybe he's coming across as normal. I can see all eyes are on him though-the fucking head on him man, even without knowing about his tongue: he has that complexion street drinkers have, like he's been boiled. Not to mention he's the comeback kid to beat the band, a fucking legend in the making.
"We go around to the weigh room, which is on the lower deck of the grandstand just across from the parade ring. Same story here, everyone having a squint. Hutton's not bothered, the opposite actually, like he's missed it, the attention, and I have to say, it is pretty class now, all the riders in their silks, the colors, the shine of the boots, the roar of the crowd for the first race, I'm getting into it man. While he's queuing for the scales, I grab a race card, maybe I'll get a chance to slap a bet on. No time like the present. And the first thing, looking at the card for the third race, what jumps out is Bottle of Red's owner: Mr. G. Halligan. Looks like it's going to be quite a circus out there in the parade ring this afternoon.
"The weight's ten-stone-nine, and Hutton makes it with three pounds to spare, fair play, and he is in good shape, and we're off to hang in the changing room again. The boys are in from the first race, winners and losers, and Hutton gets a bit more attention and handles it the same, and then the second race is called, and we're out to saddle up. While we're on our way around the parade ring to the saddling stalls, Steno falls into line with us and tells me to get lost. I linger though, long enough to see him draw Hutton aside and slip something to him, something Hutton slips inside his silk top, something that glitters in the faint sunlight that's still trying to break through.
"The parade ring's where it's happening now. I can see Vincent Tyrrell in his dog collar and his long black overcoat and his black fedora, looking like a priest in a Jimmy Cagney movie, and there's George Halligan in his Barbour jacket and his tweed cap, looking like a cunt, basically, giving F. X. Tyrrell an earful, and there's Brian Rowan in the middle of them with one of those women George collects from Russia or Brazil who all look like they're waiting for the operation. She's a foot taller than Rowan, snow-blond hair, wearing a white fur coat, a lynx it must be, Rowan's talking into her fake tits and she's looking out across the crowd pretending she hasn't noticed every eye is glued to her.
"Mind you, there's a lot of money here today, a lot of new tits and teeth and holiday flesh and fur being waved; it's been a while since I was racing and the biggest change is, fair enough, there's the usual crowd, the old boys in their trilbies and wool coats, the country farmers, the Barbour jacket crowd, all the middle classes in their Christmas best, then there's the betting-shop boys giving themselves a day out from the bookies, scruffy lads in jumpers and jeans like, like me, to be honest, but then there's also a lot of young people, young fellas with estate-agent hair and cheap suits and young ones in skimpy dresses and high heels, like it's a nightclub they thought they were going to, working-class kids out for a big day. And some politician getting his photo taken with your one off You're a Star on the telly. And Bono and Ali here too, someone said, up in one of the boxes, I suppose. Even a few Butlers are here, picking pockets and rolling drunks. Everyone's here, relieved the big freeze never came. Everyone's here!
"And here comes Patrick Hutton on Bottle of Red being led by her groom into the ring, and such a roar goes up you'd swear it was one of the Carberrys or A. P. McCoy, one of the crowd's favorites anyway, and you can see George Halligan is still bulling but F. X. Tyrrell has moved away from him, and George has tugged on his shoulder to turn him back, and suddenly Steno is at his side, looking as if he has every right to be there in his long coat and his big hat, looking like an Australian. George is still looking gnarly and aggravated, and then Steno prods him in the side, and George looks at him straight on, and Steno nods, and George nods back. Deal for now.
"Patrick Hutton is leaning down to listen to whatever F.X. has to say to him, taking instructions, fair play to F.X., he looks like he's making the best of it. Hutton is beaming, and there's a chant going up:
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
"The chant builds and builds, and he's taking the horse around the ring now, and as it hits a big crescendo Hutton touches the peak of his riding hat, and the crowd erupt in cheers.
"Now I'm watching Vincent Tyrrell, who's staring at Hutton, never at the horse, always at Hutton, like he's trying to hex him or something, and Hutton looks across every now and again, and looks away as quickly. And then I get a dig in the ribs and a hand on my collar and I'm pulled out of the crowd by Leo Halligan.
"'What the fuck is going on?' he says, and I look around, and see that Steno is still in there, and I tell Leo Halligan as much as I know of what the fuck is going on. He nods at me, and then he vanishes into the crowd. The next thing, Steno is at my side.
"'We'll go down onto the turf to watch the race,' he says.
"Fair enough. Down we go, through the tunnel beneath the private boxes, and Madigan's bar is heaving with half-dressed young ones, it's like one of those Club 18-30 holidays. Out we come and it's good to feel grass beneath your feet, even if it is sopping wet. The grandstand is behind us, with the Dublin mountains towering above, but we head down past the line of bookies' pitches, and Steno salutes Jack Proby of Proby and Son, who doesn't look very pleased to see Steno.
"It's not the best place to watch a race if you want to get the whole picture, but it's the business if you want the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is only brilliant. Bottle of Red was favorite anyway, and the Hutton thing has added a whole other level, the chant's going around in waves:
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
"Rocking back and forth from the grandstand down to the barrier and back, impossible not to get caught up in the motion of it, absolutely classic.
"There's a field of thirteen, and Hutton keeps the horse back all the way around the first time, buried in a pack. Contrariwise and Vico Fancy lead from the off, and you just know they're not going to have the legs to make it, and when they're on the road side for the second time, they fall away, and Hendre takes up the lead and holds it until they hit the last jump and turn into the final furlong and here comes Bottle of Red, Hutton has to use the elbows a bit, he's boxed himself in, but he breaks out and he breaks clear and now he's coming, past Columbine, past Kelly's Hero, past Dodger, and as they turn he's neck and neck with Hendre, Hendre and Bottle of Red, and then Hutton lets her go and it looks like he was holding her back all along, and Hendre has nothing left and Bottle of Red, Bottle of Red, Bottle of Red by a mile, and the chant would raise the hairs on your neck:
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
Pa-trick HUTTON, back from the DEAD!
"'Beautiful!' Steno yells in my ear, and I'd swear there were tears in the fucker's eyes.
"'Parade Ring, come on,' he says, and we boot up there. Some courses have a separate winners' enclosure; at Leopardstown, the horses go back round to the parade ring they started in.
"There's a huge crowd gathering, and Steno brings me into the parade ring, maybe to keep me close, maybe to use as a shield. Means I get a perfect view of all that happens. There's TV reporters going around with those huge microphones and cameras and everything, and Hutton rides the horse in to great applause, and someone is talking to F.X., asking him about Hutton's return, and Hutton tips the hat to even greater cheers, and F.X. mutters something about there being much rejoicing for the one who was lost, and Hutton dismounts as the groom rushes to hold the horse, and as Hutton approaches F.X. a blond female reporter spots Father Vincent Tyrrell and draws him into the group of three for the camera and asks him about the parable of the prodigal son and Vincent Tyrrell says yes indeed, Luke chapter fifteen, but of course there are all manner of prodigals, why he and his brother, Francis, haven't spoken in ten years, not since the day Patrick Hutton disappeared.
"I can see Steno edging closer because Hutton is freaking out now, looking wildly around him, like a robot malfunctioning, whatever the plan was, this wasn't it, and Vincent Tyrrell is still talking, and someone to one side of the camera is signaling to the reporter to cut the interview dead, but the reporter won't, she seems mesmerized, so does everyone, and no wonder: while Hutton is shaking his head and blinking and F.X. is standing stock-still like he died ten years ago and forgot to tell anyone, Vincent Tyrrell is saying that the prodigal son is of course at root a story about the father, not the son, and he should know: Patrick Hutton is Father Vincent Tyrrell's son.
"Patrick Hutton is shaking his head, and suddenly he has a long knife in his hand, and the crowd in the ring turns to flee, and Hutton steps up to F. X. Tyrrell and the knife flashes in the light, but before he can use it, Vincent Tyrrell is in front of F.X., protecting him, and Hutton steps back and stares at them both for a moment, shaking his head some more, then Hutton brings the blade up and slashes a gulley deep across his own throat. Blood shoots from it, and there are screams everywhere, and Hutton topples to his knees and then to the ground, and Father Vincent Tyrrell goes down to him, and as the cries go out for doctors and ambulances, the priest who was his father whispers a last confession in his son's ear, and above them, like he's been turned to stone, in the parade ring at Leopardstown Racecourse in the shadow of the Dublin mountains on St. Stephen's Day stands Francis Xavier Tyrrell, the trainer of the winning horse."
The screen went black after Vincent Tyrrell's admission on live television that he was the father of the winning jockey of the 1:30 at Leopardstown. In their confusion, which they no doubt shared with the viewing public, RTE replaced the racing altogether with a concert of Christmas music from Vienna.
"Why did Vincent Tyrrell say that? What was he thinking of?" Miranda cried.
"What were you expecting Hutton to do? Kill F. X. Tyrrell live on air?" I said.
No sooner had I formed the words than I realized that yes, that was exactly what had been planned for Tyrrell. Miranda's phone rang, and she took the call out in the hall. When she came back in she was crying, but through her tears her words were hard with rage.
"That was Leo. Patrick is dead," she said. "He wanted to die. He killed himself. But for nothing. F.X. is still alive. Patrick went for F.X. and Vincent saved his life. No one can put an end to the Tyrrells. Oh God, poor Patrick."
She shook her tears away, apparently uncertain what to do next.
"The Guards will be coming, then," I said. "By now, F.X. will have told them Regina and Karen are being held hostage."
"Yes," Miranda said. "They'll be coming for me. There's not a lot of time left."
"You can say you were forced into it by Hutton and Steno," I said. "That's certainly how Vincent Tyrrell must see it. The victim. That's what you were. A tragic set of circumstances, the child of incest, an incestuous marriage, a child of your own who…nobody could have anything but sympathy for your plight, Miranda."
"You know that's not exactly how it happened. Real life kept intruding, getting in the way. I've never looked for anyone's sympathy. I've never been anybody's victim. And I'm not going to play the part now."
Miranda suddenly burrowed in the sports grip she had brought and produced a Stanley knife. With it, she cut the ties binding Regina to her chair and then cut mine. There had been no sound from Karen's room for a while. I assumed Regina would go to the child instantly. Instead, as if set free by the silence, Regina suddenly spoke in a voice that she had kept silent for a long time, a voice that seemed to come from a younger place within her, and what she said carried the intensity of a dream.
"It was in the stables," she said. "The last one, you could see the river from there. And the paddock with the trees, and the two ponies sometimes. There was always the rustle, but not of straw. Francis was an innovator there, straw could carry all manner of bugs and ticks and rot, parasites and spores that would cause the horses illness. Francis pioneered the use of shredded paper. It was so white there, the bright white that fills up a room, like when you wake up and it's been snowing, and everywhere there's soft bright light, like the first day. That's what it was like in all the stables, but most especially this one. There was a ledge above the door, and you could see the river from there. That winter, it snowed. A thick blanket. Makes the sound different in the air, as if you don't have to speak so clearly. As if everything was understood.
"I was always in love with Francis. He was my daddy and my brother, my protector and my friend. I would have done anything he wanted."
"Did he force you?" Miranda said, seemingly unable to bear Regina 's fond, elegiac tone applied to an event that was to have such devastating consequences for her.
Regina smiled, a sad smile that chilled me to the bone. She shook her head.
"No. No, he didn't force me. I'd like to say he did, because it would give you comfort, and me at least an excuse, and maybe a shred of dignity. Later, the other one did, or more accurately, they both did, but that's to jump ahead. No, Francis didn't force me. The reverse. It wasn't in his nature, I know, he wasn't disposed that way. But I kept after him. I had decided that he would be the first."
Miranda groaned in anguish and disgust.
"That's how I thought. And I kept it going, hints and caresses and invitations, I'd give him rubdowns after the day's work with the horses, so he'd see how well I could run things here, how I'd be a credit to him. And one day, in the snow, in the white of the stable, in the white of the snow…the rustle of the paper now, so soft in your ears…like music it was…"
It was Miranda's turn to retreat now; I could hear her trying to control her breath.
"A few months, that's all it was. A few days within a few months. He brought it to a close. We both knew it was wrong, but I didn't care. And then…and then I was pregnant. I never knew…the nuns in Scotland said they'd look after the child, but Francis insisted he knew the right family. I never dreamed for a second it would be the Harts at the Tyrrellscourt Arms. It was almost…it was almost like it amused him. Like it was a game for him. And of course, I suspected, everyone assumed it, for heaven's sake, are you two sisters, are you mother and daughter? But I didn't want to believe…couldn't let myself believe…"
"Why did he do that, Regina? Why did he place her so close to you?"
"To punish me. Just as I had punished him."
She said the words blankly, without affect.
"What about Hutton? What about Vincent Tyrrell?" I said.
Regina 's face clouded over.
"That's where it got…I never…oh God forgive me…it was Christmas, Vincent was staying here…I was drunk, and a bit…maybe I was talking loose…flirting with Francis, who wasn't responding, and with Vincent, who was…I got angry with them both, and stormed off…and Francis came, and said, why didn't I…if I slept with Vincent, I could be with him again…so I did. It wasn't even…I'm trying to make it better now on myself, saying I was drunk, I knew what I was doing…I knew damn well what I was doing. I don't know why I wanted it…still don't…Francis was all I ever wanted…"
"But you went with Vincent just the one time. How did you know Hutton was his child, and not Francis's?" I said.
"Francis had an operation, after Mary…after Miranda was born, a vasectomy. So nothing like that could happen again."
"And then when the boy was born, you said you couldn't raise him."
"The child of a priest? I couldn't. I wouldn't. I let him go. Francis persuaded me it was the best thing. I was young, starting out, I didn't need that. Didn't need it."
"But you stayed here all those years, and let them both come back into the house, and saw them come together-"
"I did everything I could to block that match. Everything. I…and don't forget, I didn't know Miranda was my daughter-"
"But you suspected. Why didn't you act on those suspicions?"
"I don't know."
"And then there was a child."
"There's nothing wrong with the child," Regina said. "She's had every test, every…they found no disability, nothing. And Francis…I don't think he enjoyed a day of peace after those children were born. Neither of us did, really. It was a kind of torture to him, knowing what he had done, never quite being able to forgive himself. I think…I think what we made was a kind of sacrifice, to live through it together. And I was blessed that Karen was given to me. Unworthy as I was."
"Why?" I said. "What possessed him? To experiment with human lives that way?"
Regina shook her head, all tears spent for now.
"He once told me, out in the stable, he said he thought the purest blood might make the finest offspring. That if it could work for horses…"
"But it doesn't work for horses."
Regina nodded.
"And you went along with him," I said. "Why?"
Regina looked at me with what almost looked like pity in her extraordinary eyes and shook her head. Again, when she spoke, it was in a voice that seemed to come from the very depths of her soul.
"You don't understand. No one could understand who wasn't there."
"Who wasn't where?"
Regina turned her gaze on Miranda as she spoke.
"My mother died when I was born, I told you that. But I didn't grow up here. I was taken into care, placed in a home. It was just the two boys and Da, in a small tenant cottage out the road a few miles from Tyrrellscourt, two rooms, that's all they had. Francis was fourteen, Vincent twelve. Da was a farm laborer, drinking a lot, and…well, other things. With both of them. Until Francis stood up to him. Francis put an end to that. Francis turned him out. And our da was never seen again. And Francis worked every hour God sent on farms in the area, his eye for a horse quickly noticed, training for this owner, then that one, and the winners began to come, and then the Derby in '65. Sure he became a hero in the town, more. He found this place, it was in a tumbledown condition, the family had left for England during the war and never come back, and he set us up here. Came and got me, told me my place was with him, was here, at the heart of the Tyrrells. Made sure I went to school. Sent Vincent for the priesthood."
"And was your name Tyrrell to begin with?"
Regina almost smiled, a rueful flicker, as if still bewitched by the family mythology.
"We…we became the Tyrrells," Regina said. "Francis called himself that after he got rid of Da. And then he had his name legally changed. The town had been on its knees until Francis came. So anyone who tried to call us something else was quickly silenced. And soon, no one even wanted to. It was as if we had been expected. As if F. X. Tyrrell was a king in exile, come home at last to regain his throne. Without him, what would anyone around here have been? And what would I have become, a charity girl scrubbing floors and scalding laundry in an orphanage?"
She looked at me as if there was any answer I could give her, other than: What have you become now? Her story had explained everything and nothing. I turned to Miranda, who was staring at Regina with tears in her reddened eyes, the Sig Sauer Compact suddenly flashing in her hand, a droning, humming sound coming from the back of her throat. She looked like she was ready to do something rash. I edged forward to the sofa to get the Glock 17 I'd hidden there, much use it had done me.
"Miranda?" I said.
"What?"
"Let me get this straight: Patrick was supposed to kill F. X. Tyrrell first, is that right?"
"That's right. First F.X. Then himself. He had a confession. That he was the Omega Man. He takes all the blame."
"He'd never killed anyone before, had he? Not intentionally, not in cold blood. How was he supposed to do it this time?"
"Because it was F. X. Tyrrell."
"And why should that have made a difference?"
"Because Vincent Tyrrell told us that F.X. had raped Patrick in St. Jude's. He said F.X. had been a frequent visitor there. He said that's largely why he was asked back to Tyrrellscourt in the nineties: to facilitate F.X.'s visits again."
"That can't be right," Regina said. "Francis always told me…that after you were born…and after Patrick…never again. That would be his way of atoning."
"His way of atoning," Miranda said, her scorn like a whip. "What about F.X. and Leo Halligan? You must have known about that."
Regina shook her head.
"I…since Karen came here, I suppose I…I've kept my head down. I've see as little of Francis as possible. I haven't wanted to know…about anything."
Regina was shaking, her face like a mask; she looked helpless and old, her last illusions carried away on the relentless wind.
"His way of atoning," Miranda said, rolling the words around in her mouth like sour fruit. "His way of atoning. What could that be? What could that possibly be?"
I had the gun now, and came up with it loose in my hand, not pointing it at her, just ensuring she could see it. Miranda saw it, and looked at me, and smiled.
"I'm sorry, Ed. I'm so very sorry. It was hard to know what to do. I know I've done wrong. I thought I could survive. But not everyone can be a survivor."
She turned to Regina.
"Please, just one thing. Don't tell Karen the truth. In this instance, it's better if she never knows. Do the right thing. Tell no one. Say nothing."
Miranda Hart put the barrel of the Sig Sauer compact in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
Regina ran to Miranda and fell to her knees and howled, and pulled Miranda's body to her and clung to it as she never had, as she never would, the daughter she had found and lost in a day. I located the key I was looking for in Miranda's sports grip. I tried to tell Regina I was going to check on Karen, but she couldn't see or hear for grief. I shut the door behind me and went down the corridor to the child's room. I checked my appearance in the window opposite to make sure that I wouldn't scare her, and I saw that the snow had finally come. I knocked, and identified myself, and turned the key in the lock and opened the door.
THEY NEVER FOUND Steno. They had a witness (Tommy) who saw his Range Rover leaving Jackie Tyrrell's house the night of her murder, and they reckoned they had enough forensic evidence from that messy night to make a case. They had Vincent Tyrrell as well, to testify to all manner of things he had been told by Miranda Hart, but they didn't think Vincent Tyrrell would stand up in court. But they had no Steno: he never returned to his house, or to Tyrrellscourt. No one has seen him since.
When I say they, I mean DI Dave Donnelly; Myles Geraghty had taken two days' Christmas leave to go to a race meeting at Kempton Park, where his brother-in-law had a horse running in the George VI Steeplechase. Tommy had called Dave as soon as Steno had fled from Leopardstown. Dave was the man on the spot, and thanks to Tommy, and eventually, to me, he had enough inside information and witness testimony to close the case. I made sure Martha O'Connor got a blow-by-blow account, and suggested to her that if anyone wanted to run a story ridiculing the "Omega Man" theory, that would be no bad thing. Martha's paper ran it front page every day for a week, until I almost felt a little sorry for Geraghty. And the brother-in-law's horse came home eighth in a field of nine.
Dave and Carmel are still sharing a home, and to the best of my knowledge, a bed, although I'm happy to say my knowledge of that is strictly limited to Dave having grunted, "Everything's grand thanks," as a way to close the subject down. He's taking the family to Disneyland at Easter, the news of which was certainly enough to cure me of any residual envy of family life.
Nobody told the truth about F. X. Tyrrell, out of respect and solicitude for Karen Tyrrell, but that doesn't mean that people didn't know, in the way news like that always spreads to those it needs to and to some it doesn't, in Ireland at any rate. Tyrrell did not hang himself for shame, but he was found dead within six months anyway; nobody at the stables or the stud farm would work with him; no one in racing wanted to know him; his life's achievement as a trainer and a breeder had been irrevocably disgraced; the very thing that had kept him alive, the only thing he had ever really loved, was the thing he could no longer work with: horses. His doctors said it was a burst aortic aneurysm. But, insofar as I have any insight into the opaque character of the man, I believe he died of a broken heart.
Vincent Tyrrell did not have to be quietly retired from his parish; his cancer did that work for him. I visited him in hospital not long before he died because I had so many questions that only he could answer: what kind of hold had his brother possessed over him that Vincent should sire a child with his sister, or enable F.X. to abuse boys in Vincent's care? What had happened in that cottage after their mother died, the two boys alone with their father? Did Vincent save his brother's life to make him suffer more? Or did he hope his son would kill him first? Had he been leading me by the nose all along? I didn't get any answers. I don't know if I expected any. Maybe there were none to be had. In the end, it was a not-at-all sacred mystery. It was the last breath of a dying breed. It was the price of blood. I left Father Vincent Tyrrell dreaming over the day's racing in The Irish Field, working the race cards with his fingers like rosary beads.
Regina Tyrrell, fearing that Karen would be taken away from her, left the country with the child. I don't know where they are. Every time I think of them, I recall F. X. Tyrrell's belief in the bloodline, his creed that blood and breed are the beginning and the end. I hope his granddaughter can find a future that will prove him wrong.
After a lot of digging, Martha O'Connor discovered that the Tyrrell family name had originally been Butler. And after some digging of my own in registration offices in Wicklow and Kildare, I established that John Butler, F. X. Tyrrell's father, was a distant cousin of the Butlers that settled in North Wicklow. The Butlers that eat their young, that settle disputes with sulfuric acid, the Butlers Tommy Owens called "a tribe of savages."
The Butlers had an eventful Christmas also, as did the Leonards. On Christmas night, Joe Leonard came out of his house to chase off two young men in sportswear and hooded tops who were messing around with his mother-in-law's blue BMW, the car he had seemed so in awe of. The men were joined by two others, and they refused to stop. Instead, they picked up their attack, kicking the vehicle and scraping the bodywork with keys and knives. When Joe Leonard put himself between them and the car, they kicked him and stabbed him and left him bleeding in the street. Joe Leonard died later that night in Loughlinstown Hospital. The whole incident was recorded on one of the tapes Leonard had hired me to set running to find out who was trashing his neighborhood. The tapes were admitted as evidence, and the Guards were able to get a case brought against the men, who weren't men at all: three of them were fifteen and one sixteen. They were too young to be named, but three of them were from the extended Butler family. None showed any remorse; they all felt Leonard was reckless and foolhardy for trying to defend his property. Dave told me what the sixteen-year-old said.
"What the fuck did he have to get in our way for? I mean, he should have known. Family man, he shouldn't've been taking risks like that."
He said that over and over again, each time with mounting rage.
I went up to see the Leonards. I went to the removal, and to the funeral. All I can remember are the weeping children clinging to their mother, and their mother not being able to walk very well, and my wondering was it from grief, or from the fact that the kids were clinging to her, and wondering why I was wondering. I still have the picture on my phone of the Leonards wishing me a Merry Christmas. I find I look at it almost every day.
KAREN TYRRELL STOOD at the far end of the room with her back to me. She faced a big sash window that looked out across a paddock to the river. She was working at something, and when I got closer I saw that it was a painting. She had a table by the window, and around it on the wall, sketches and oils of the same view: the paddock, always with two horses, and two trees just far enough apart that they never touched, and the river. The river was altered in the paintings so that its flow caught the eye: it seemed as if the horses, and the viewer, yearned to be taken by the river, to be caught up in its current, to escape, while the trees stood upright, implacable, season in, season out, shedding and sprouting and never touching. I watched for a while as she worked, very deliberate, very careful, incorporating snow into the scene as it fell in real life. I set my face to try to feel as little as possible, to think of nothing but the picture she worked on and the scene it represented. There were no horses in the paddock today, but there were two in Karen Tyrrell's painting, of course. I stood and watched that little girl work, oblivious to the horrors that had taken place in her house that day, to the legacy of horror she had inherited, stood and prayed that the Guards would get here before she asked me what had happened, and if not, that I would find the heart to know what to say.
She turned around, and I almost gasped at her tear-stained face, at the dark hair, her mother's hair, at the startling eyes, one blue, one brown, her father's eyes, at her clear, confident gaze, as if we were at the very beginning of things.
"Where's my mother?" she said.