The Dying Breed Read online

  The Dying Breed

  An Irish Novel of Suspense

  Declan Hughes

  To Alan Glynn

  Contents

  Part I

  Advent

  One

  Three weeks before Christmas, Father Vincent Tyrell asked Tommy Owens…

  Two

  I wanted to ask Tommy some more about Vincent Tyrell,…

  Three

  The broken bicycles and trashed stereo systems were strewn around…

  Four

  I had another large Jameson before I left the pub,…

  Five

  I sat in the car and tried to work out…

  Six

  I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her…

  Seven

  The rain had turned to sleet by the time I…

  Eight

  Dave didn’t say a word on the drive back. The…

  Nine

  There was a message on my phone from Jackie Tyrell,…

  Ten

  I offered to drive Leo to the A&E in St. Anthony’s.

  Part II

  Christmas

  Eleven

  I tossed and turned on a bed of straw, and…

  Twelve

  I took the Dart out to Bayview: it was as…

  Thirteen

  Back in Quarry Fields, I showered, shaved and changed into…

  Fourteen

  I didn’t want to listen to Tommy’s explanations or excuses,…

  Fifteen

  Regina Tyrell walked me down to the lobby. At reception,…

  Sixteen

  Bomber was a good driver, given the vehicle, and he…

  Seventeen

  I dropped Tommy off at the church for midnight mass,…

  Eighteen

  The door creak again, and the rustle of straw, of…

  Nineteen

  Martha O’Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house…

  Twenty

  I told Martha O’Connor I needed to see Dave Donnelly…

  Part III

  St. Stephen’s Day

  Twenty-One

  I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He…

  Twenty-Two

  One of the construction workers drove me back to Quarry…

  Twenty-Three

  First off, they’ve no servants here since Christmas Eve until…

  Twenty-Four

  The piano tones were still wafting from above as I…

  Twenty-Five

  Steno didn’t really give a fuck about anyone but Steno.

  Twenty-Six

  The door swung open and the cold relentless wind brought,…

  Twenty-Seven

  Miranda Hart trailed after Steno. While she was gone, I…

  Twenty-Eight

  Tommy witnessed what happened in Leopardstown that day at first…

  Twenty-Nine

  The screen went black after Vincent Tyrell’s admission on live…

  Thirty

  Regina ran to Miranda and fell to her knees and…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Declan Hughes

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  ADVENT

  Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you like,

  but remember, it didn’t work for the rabbit.

  —R. E. Shay

  The Turf, and long may we be above it.

  —Jorrocks’ Toast

  ONE

  Three weeks before Christmas, Father Vincent Tyrell asked Tommy Owens to fill in for George Costello, who had been the sacristan at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview for thirty years until he was rushed to the hospital with inoperable stomach cancer. A lot of Father Tyrell’s parishioners were outraged, to put it mildly, since Tommy was known as a dopehead and a malingerer and a small-time drug dealer, one of the die-hard crew who still drank in Hennessy’s bar, and not a retired Holy Joe shuffling about the church in desert boots and an acrylic zip-up cardigan like George Costello, God have mercy on him. And fair enough, the first time I saw Tommy on the altar in cassock and surplice, it was a bit like something out of a Buñuel film.

  But what a lot of his parishioners didn’t know was that Tommy had been one of Father Tyrell’s most devout altar boys until he was eleven, when the sacrament of confirmation had the unintended reverse effect of enfeebling his faith entirely, or that since Tommy’s mother had dropped dead of a stroke a month ago, Tommy had been haunting the church, the only soul under seventy at ten mass every morning. Now he was standing by to clear the altar after eleven-thirty mass on the last Sunday in Advent as I stood and made the best fist I could of rejoicing with the rest of the congregation about Emmanuel’s imminent arrival.

  O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer

  Our spirits by thine advent here;

  Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

  And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

  The altar cloths and hangings were purple; the tree was decorated and the great crib was installed in a side altar; the fourth candle on the wreath had been lit. Christmas hadn’t meant much to me in a long while, never mind Emmanuel, but I had always liked Advent, the way the anticipation was so intense it could make you clean forget the inevitable letdown in store, just like a bottle, or a woman. Although when a priest sends for a private detective the day before Christmas Eve, the distinction between anticipation and letdown tends to blur; the only thing you can properly be prepared for is the worst.

  Looking at Tommy, now he had stowed his vestments in the sacristy, I wondered if those greying parishioners streaming past me with their damp winter coats and their filmy eyes and their scent of lavender and pan stick and dust had revised their opinion of him; certainly he was a far cry from the goateed, straggle-haired ne’er-do-well of just a few months ago. The haircut and beardless chin came from the Howard case he had worked with me (a case he was in no small way the cause of; a case in which, not incidentally, he saved my life), but the rest of it—the multicoloured acrylic jumper that was not a zip-up cardigan but may as well have been, the relaxed-fit cords, the soft-soled shoes—was close enough to George Costello to reassure even the most doctrinaire old biddy of the strength of his devotion. And of course, Tommy dragging his ruined foot—the result of a stomping from George Halligan for stealing his brother Leo’s bike back when we were kids—surely completed the picture of harmless piety. To my eyes, it looked like nothing but the antic shades of mourning, the haphazard motley of confusion and grief.

  Tommy came down the aisle toward me; I stood out from the pew and genuflected; he turned and I trailed after him to the altar, where there was another genuflection from us both, old enough to have had it bred into our bones. For all the Godless years I worked in L.A., people found it strange that I could never break the habit of crossing myself when I passed a hearse, or heard the tolling of a church bell. I still can’t. I stepped up onto the altar to make for the sacristy, but Tommy turned left and exited through the side door. I followed out into the bright, cold morning and Tommy led me down a path to the rear of the churchyard. We stopped at a low metal gate beneath a row of bare sycamore and horse chestnut trees glistening with frost and Tommy, still determinedly avoiding my eyes, pointed over it to a redbrick Victorian villa fifty yards away.

  “I know where the presbytery is, Tommy,” I said. “Sure didn’t we once have thirty sacks of pony nuts and four dozen bales of hay sent there, for the crack?”

  “And Father Tyrell knew it was us,” Tommy said. “Down to the school the next day with him.”

  “He knew it was you,” I said. “You know why? Because you gave the deliveryman your real name.”
/>   “I didn’t,” Tommy said. “I said Timmy Owens, not Tommy.”

  “Yeah. A mystery how he caught on to us, really.”

  “I never gave you up, Ed.”

  “You didn’t need to, sure everyone knew we hunted as a pair. Jaysus, the clatter he gave us.”

  “He went easy on you. They always did. They knew deep down you were a good boy. You were just easily led, that’s all, by tramps the like of me.”

  I laughed at that, my breath pluming in the crisp air, and Tommy’s face creased into something like a grin. It was the longest conversation we’d had since the funeral.

  “How’re you making out with this sacristan thing, Tommy?” I said, half fearing he’d say something like “’Tis a great comfort,” or “Sure ’tis the will of God,” in reply.

  Tommy grimaced, looked over his shoulder at the last of the ’oul ones straggling out of the church, shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  “It’s not exactly me, is it?” he said. We both laughed at that, furtive, back-of-the-class laughter in the chill noon sunlight.

  “But yeah, it’s keeping me out of trouble. Out of the house. I can’t face the whole, all her clothes, her paintings, the whole gaff just reminds me of her. Feels like it’s haunted. You know what I mean, Ed.”

  I nodded. I had come back from L.A. to bury my mother, and stayed to find out what had happened to my father, who had disappeared twenty years earlier. Now I was living in the house I grew up in; living and partly living. There were days it seemed more like all I was doing was dying there: the souls of the dead hovered in the rooms like smoke, until I thought I might suffocate. I spent the time I wasn’t working in one pub or another, stumbling home when I could be sure I would fall asleep straightaway, and then leaving the house first thing the next morning and starting all over again. If I wasn’t thirsty, I spent time in churches, too: they were warm and quiet, and no one thought you were unwelcome there, or at least no one made you feel as if you were. I knew what Tommy meant all right.

  “And Father Tyrell’s a bollocks, this we know, but he’s on the level, he doesn’t expect you to pray with him or pretend to be a Holy Joe or anything. And he has the inside on the ponies, of course. I’m making a mint on the tips he’s giving me, and Leopardstown comin’ up.”

  I had three beaten dockets in the pockets of my coat, and more on the floor of my car, and the opposite of a mint in the bank, but before I could ask Tommy to share a few of those tips, or to explain why a Catholic priest should “of course” know so much about horse racing, the dark-clad figure of Father Vincent Tyrell appeared in the doorway of the presbytery, a cigarette in his hand, the smoke coiling in a wreath above his head. Tommy held a hand up to the priest and bowed his head and stood aside as if he was presenting me at court, and I thought I saw a flicker in his face and something cross his eyes: not fear, nor hatred; maybe just the lingering ghost of both. Whatever it was, he dispelled it with a wink in my direction and a grin that didn’t reach his eyes and hauled himself back toward the church.

  Father Vincent Tyrell was in his sixties now but still straight-backed at five five, with a white crew cut above a flushed drinker’s face whose protruding cheekbones looked like they’d been inserted artificially: they overshadowed his narrow sliver of a mouth and tiny chin; above them popped saucer eyes of the deepest blue, completing the impression of a vivid, cunning animal. He greeted me with a thin smile and showed me into a study paneled in dark wood. The mahogany table had worn dull in patches: half of it was covered with books and paperwork; the other half had three place settings, silver candlesticks and condiments, an overflowing ashtray and the remnants of three breakfast plates, one with two cigarette butts stubbed out in bacon rind. A murk of fried food, cigar smoke and aftershave clung to the air.

  “My apologies for the mess. I have a lady who does—it’s just, on Sunday, she doesn’t,” Tyrell said. He tidied the dirty dishes together with the ashtray and took them away. I stood and looked around the room: the bookshelves of philosophy, theology, poetry and art history, the wooden crucifix on one wall, the woven Bridget’s cross above the door, the reproductions of Mantegna’s Crucifixion and Poussin’s Last Supper and Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, the lost masterpiece that had shot to fame since its discovery on the disused parlor wall of a Jesuit retreat house in Dublin, where it had been living anonymously for years. I looked at the Caravaggio: the ever-approaching darkness, the soldiers clasping Jesus; the stricken face of the bearded Judas, already paid, and now paying, for his betrayal. When he hanged himself, having cast away the thirty silver pieces he was paid for his betrayal, the priests and elders wouldn’t take back the coins, calling it the price of blood.

  Tyrell came back into the room with a bottle and two crystal goblets on a tray.

  “Now Ed,” he said, sitting down. “At a guess, I’d say you’re not much of a sherry man. But most men who think they don’t like sherry have a memory of some terrifyingly sweet liquid being forced on them by their granny. Many good reasons why they mightn’t want to revisit such a traumatic primal scene. This is not cream sherry, it’s Manzanilla, a salty fino, very refreshing.”

  He poured the yellow liquid and offered me a glass. I sat down opposite him and took a drink of the bone-dry wine, and the drink took me back to a dark-haired girl I knew in Los Angeles, a girl with Spanish blood who knew her Manzanilla from her Palo Cortado, and wanted to teach me the difference, until one day she stopped wanting to, although she didn’t tell me that until it was too late. We had a child, a daughter with blond curls and the wrong kind of blood, who died before she was two, and my Spanish girl and me couldn’t get past that, and maybe didn’t want to, didn’t really try. Now she was married again to a man she had never stopped seeing while she was married to me, and they had their own child, a son, and she had rung me last night to wish me a happy Christmas, perhaps, or to tell me about how the kid was getting on, maybe, or to taunt me with her happy life and her happy home and with how she had never really been mine and now never would be, possibly. I don’t know; I saw the number come up on the caller-ID display and the answering machine wasn’t on, so I waited until the phone rang off the hook and then I waited until it did it twice more, and then I waited for another while, a long while, before I got to sleep. The Manzanilla was the first I’d tasted since my marriage, and it brought it all swirling back in a storm of memory and desire, of grief and regret and yearning. That’s only the beginning of what a good drink can do.

  I took another swallow and lifted my eyes and said, “Very good, Father Tyrell. Nice bite.”

  “How are you, Ed? Are you all right?”

  Was I all right? I’d received a lot of publicity on the Howard case: a journalist called Martha O’Connor cooperated with me in return for my story. She did her best to make me look good, but I could have done without the exposure: Dublin was a hard enough city to be a private citizen in, let alone a private investigator; people wanted their secrets kept, not sprayed all over the front pages. As a result, I was having trouble finding clients. I had fallen behind on repaying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn’t live long enough to enjoy; I was cashing checks I didn’t have the money to back up in any pub that would let me; the bank had run out of patience and was getting ready to cut me loose. The local Guards were taking pleasure in my plight, happy at DI Fiona Reed’s bidding to feed pet journalists embellished sagas about my misdeeds. I was drinking too much because I had no reason not to, or because I was stressed out over my debts, or at any rate, I was drinking too much, and I was betting on the horses with the money I didn’t have because every day around drink four I became momentarily possessed by the evident delusion that my luck was in. I looked at Father Vincent Tyrell and felt a sudden urge to confess, to throw myself on the mercy of a God in Whom I didn’t believe, to be embraced by a church I had rejected long since. How was I?

  “Very well, thank you,” I said.

  “Only I gather things haven’t been
going so well for you recently. In the detective business.”

  “Tommy been talking, has he? You should know better by now than to listen to half of what Tommy says.”

  “Tommy hasn’t said a word. I just hear things. And read the papers. Of course, the fact that the O’Connor woman was involved didn’t help.”

  Tyrell twinkled beadily at me with the nice combination of sympathy and malice that had kept his parish on edge for over thirty years. Martha O’Connor was known above all for her investigative work on clerical sex abuse and medical malpractice in Catholic hospitals, and it would not have been atypical of Tyrell’s sense of humour to classify me with culpably incompetent doctors and pedophile priests. I wasn’t going to rise to his bait, if that was what it amounted to, although it was probably nothing more than habit. I shrugged and finished my drink.