The Price of Blood Read online

  "I imagine you’re right," I said. "I understand that to be the case. I wouldn’t know, myself. So you weren’t aware of any extortion attempts? Any way in which he could have been blackmailed by a gangster keen to beat the bookies? Not to mention launder vast sums of drug money through the Tyrrellscourt coffers?"

  "No."

  "What about Miranda? She told me she dropped out of sight after Patrick Hutton disappeared, went through what she called a few…’situations’. You’ve been something of a mentor to her, haven’t you, you persuaded her father to let her work at Tyrrellscourt in the early days, you offered her work up here when she resurfaced. What happened to her in between?"

  Jackie shook her head.

  "I don’t know. I think she might have been in London. She didn’t stay in touch. Her parents were dead, she had no living relatives…and I had left Tyrrellscourt, I was keeping my head down, working hard to make a go of this place…for a time, it seemed as if her disappearance and Patrick’s might have been connected. And then she just reappeared, out there on that doorstep. She never really told me what had happened. I thought drugs, maybe a miscarriage, but that was all guesswork on my part. I was just happy to have her back, and if no questions asked was the deal, that’s how it had to be. I’ve always…I love Miranda, like a daughter, you know? Like the daughter Frank and I never had. And with grown-up daughters…well, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to keep your distance."

  "Leo Halligan…I didn’t really get a lot out of him…but he said if I wanted to know what happened to Patrick Hutton, I wasn’t going to find the answers up here, I’d have to go down to Tyrrellscourt," I said.

  What happened then took me aback. Maybe because I had gotten to like Jackie Tyrrell, I had somehow forgotten she was involved in the case, and was therefore likely to have something to hide. Maybe it was because my judgment was skewed on account of the booze. Whatever it was, you’re always waiting for the shutters to come down, but when they came down for Jackie, I couldn’t quite believe it. She nodded, and inclined herself away, and did something tight with her lips that I hadn’t seen before.

  "I guess he meant, I’d have to talk to F. X. Tyrrell directly."

  "You’ll be lucky," she snapped. "Why would he talk to you? More likely to have you arrested for trespassing. Of course, there’s someone there who’ll be only too happy to fill your head full of whatever fairy stories pass for reality in her mind."

  "Who would that be?"

  "Regina Tyrrell."

  "F.X.’s sister."

  "That’s right. She runs the hotel, and spa, and golf-course complex down there. And she runs Frank, if you’re to believe her."

  "Does anyone believe her? Did you?"

  Jackie Tyrrell looked at me and there was smarting pain in her eyes, a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before.

  "Let’s just say, the person who felt most amicable of all about my divorce from Frank was Regina."

  Jackie stood up and brushed imaginary lint from her black clothes, all business.

  "Wait here. I’ll get you a photograph of Frank. And then I’ll tell you a thing or two about Regina Tyrrell. You can listen to your little girlfriend’s music again, if you like," she said, handing me a Bose remote control. "Point it anywhere."

  I clicked the search button back until I located The Isle of the Dead, pressed Repeat to keep it coming, turned up the volume and sat back. That was how I awoke, having spilt tea-colored sidecar all over the white French couch. It took me a while to get my bearings, in fact to get my eyes open and myself upright and in focus. It was about half four, and there was no sign of Jackie Tyrrell, and no photographs. The Isle of the Dead was still playing; something I hadn’t noticed before was that this recording had tolling bells on it; they added to the atmosphere. Was there a Rachmaninov piece called The Bells? I couldn’t remember. I switched the music off and went out onto the landing, thinking I should check the bedrooms. Maybe Jackie’d just crashed out somewhere. She’d had more to drink than I had, which was saying something. On second thoughts, better not to creep around a strange house late at night; I didn’t want to frighten anyone.

  As I walked downstairs, I realized the bells I had heard on The Isle of the Dead were still tolling, even though the music had stopped. In the hall, by the left-hand corner behind the Christmas tree, I spied an open door and behind it what looked like a servants’ passageway; the sound of the bells seemed to be coming from that direction. I went in and followed down a corridor of blue tiles and ocher walls to the stairwell of what was evidently the bell tower. Right on time, I saw a rope fly up like a slithering beast, and the bell toll again, and down on a rope to meet me came the body of Jackie Tyrrell, hanging by the neck, her legs frozen in a grotesque dance, her eyes bugging, her tongue cut out of her gaping mouth, blood staining her face and her chest. I tried to do something, and may have done it; what, I can’t remember: cut her down, or hold her, or breathe life back into her, something that would help deny or assuage the horror of what I had just seen. I recall the impulse, but not the act, for between the two, I felt a blow, and I tumbled into shadow, and then came darkness.

  PART II

  CHRISTMAS

  Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief of priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.

  And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.

  And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple,

  and departed, and went and hanged himself.

  And the chief priests took the silver pieces,

  and said, It is not lawful for them to put into

  the treasury, because it is the price of blood.

  —Matthew 27: 3–6

  ELEVEN

  I tossed and turned on a bed of straw, and the rustle roared in my ears like the sound of the sea from a conch; I was awake but felt asleep, or asleep and dreamed of waking; a door creaked, and the bolt shot back and forth, and then a sound of doors swinging back and forth, crashing like gunfire, and then the bolt run back, the door held fast, creaking, and the rustle of straw again, rustle rustle, and then human voices soft, like straw, no, like paper, whispering, entreating, yielding, the slightest breaths rustling like paper, and the color of paper, white, a blinding white, the sound so crisp in my ears…

  I was in a daze when I came to, and even by the time I got to Harcourt Square it was clear I was in no fit state to be questioned, so after a great deal of swabbing and scraping and photographing, I was shunted into a cell and left to sleep off the roil of shock and fear and drunkenness that clung to me like muck sweat to a frightened animal. I didn’t think I could sleep after what I had seen, but in fact no sooner had my head hit the hard bunk than I fell into a coma that was interrupted what could have been no more than a couple of hours later by a Guard pushing in a beaker of hot liquid that might have been tea or coffee and could be still for all I know and a toasted waffle clogged with chemical-smelling jam that almost made me throw up as soon as I smelled it, and then, as I kept on smelling it, did. I was on my knees, vomiting steak frîtes and red wine and whiskey and gin and brandy and lemon juice into a metal toilet with no seat that stank of pine detergent and someone else’s piss so that each time I threw up, the air I sucked into my winded lungs was so foul I immediately began to retch again. Eventually, this too passed, and I sat on my bunk, bent over and humming a tuneless drone to myself and trying to reconstruct what had happened between the time I saw the hanging body of Jackie Tyrrell and now.

  I’d been out cold, that much I knew; I could feel the hot, tender egg that had been grafted onto the back of my head; the gentlest pressure on it sent my belly lurching out of my mouth. My hands were streaked with mud, or rust, and there were reddish-brown stains on my shirt and streaks on my trousers and on my shoes; it came to me that I was covered in blood, and that that blood could only be Jackie Tyrrell’s. I flushed red-h
ot then, and tears sprang into my eyes, and I jammed my fist into my mouth to stop myself yelling. If only my head wasn’t pounding so hard, I could think clearly about what had happened. The only thing I could summon up was music, The Isle of the Dead, its insistent rhythm rolling through my head, and then the bells, the tolling of a bell, and then I flashed on upsetting the sidecar over myself and Jackie Tyrrell’s good white couch, and I smelt my shirt and licked my hand and tasted brandy and felt the sweetest of relief and an obscene prayer on my lips: Thanks be to fuck. I knew I was badly in need of a cure, but I didn’t think I would get one so soon.

  Superintendent Myles Geraghty had found someone to press his brown suit, and someone else to cut his unruly thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, but his gut was still poking out between the flaps of his yellow shirt, if perhaps not quite as far as it had, and his tie looked like he’d eaten his breakfast off it. He seemed in excellent form, which didn’t fill me with reassurance. I had sat in the interview room in silence while a uniformed female Garda got the video camera ready; now Geraghty was here, and silence was no more.

  "Ah, the hard! Good to see you again Edward Loy, and the compliments of the season to you, and tell us this: how’s the old private dick, ha? Getting out and about, and in and out, is it? Are you winning, are you? Pulling the divil by the tail says you, ha? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!"

  There was no reply needed to any of that, so I didn’t make one. Geraghty took a long shrewd look at me, all faux bonhomie gone, and I met this full-on. He had a good poker face, a mask that meant he could play the fool but was very far from being one. It was impossible to tell what he had on me, but given the circumstances in which he’d found me, I’d be feeling pretty bullish if I were him.

  Geraghty nodded to get the tape rolling, and sat down across the table from me and asked me my name and I said, "Solicitor."

  "D’you get that changed, by deed poll? Or did you get married, and take the little woman’s name?"

  "Solicitor," I said again.

  Geraghty made a face.

  "Jasus, you could be out of here by lunchtime if you just answer the few questions."

  I made a face at that, my "d’you think I cycled up the Liffey on a bicycle?" face. Geraghty nodded at the uniform, who turned off the tape while he bounded from the room, returning a few seconds later with a tabloid newspaper, which he handed to me. It was folded to the crossword, which had been half completed in a laborious hand.

  "Six down, ’Clown, foolish person,’ seven letters, begins with B… Buffoon?"

  "Front page, please," a smiling Myles Geraghty said with the oily poise of a backbench politician at long last elevated to office.

  The front page of the Irish Daily Star said, OMEGA MAN SLAYS TWO—SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE, and showed a blurred photograph of a much younger, slimmer Don Kennedy in a Garda uniform. Inside there were photographs of the two crime scenes with technical officers in protective white suits going about their work, and an inset shot of a Myles Geraghty dark of hair and hollow of cheek, as he’d maybe looked the day he made his confirmation, who was "heading up the investigation." There was talk of "the killer the Guards are calling the Omega Man because of the macabre way his victims are mutilated," but no further detail about Hutton’s tattoo, and a lot more high-energy ventilating of not very much information. The severed tongues didn’t get a mention, nor had Patrick Hutton been identified yet.

  "Very good," I said. "Congratulations, that’s quite a case you’ve got."

  "I assume you were working a case. That’s what you were doing up in Mrs. Tyrrell’s house."

  I nodded.

  "I think we can help each other, don’t you?"

  "Well, I believe in helping the Guards. That would be something of a motto of mine. Of course, you don’t want to blunder in and get in their way. Stand well back until invited."

  Geraghty looked around at the uniform, and signaled to her. She went to put the camera back on, but he shook his head and pointed to the door. When she had gone, he turned back to me, a grin on his face.

  "Well, here’s your invitation. Last time you and I met, I probably went a bit hard on you. Don’t know me own strength sometimes, and you’d just lost your girlfriend, and your mother, couldn’t have been easy. And I know at times like that, it’s not easy to forgive someone who crosses you. But fair play, you got the results that time…and we all saw what you did on the Howard case. I mean, I know you got a lot of stick about it in the papers, with the commissioner having a pop, and the Garda Representative Association advising its membership not to cooperate with private detectives in general and you in particular, but for officers who’d been around the block, I’m telling you, it was a beautiful piece of work. Not just the Howards themselves, what a fucking collection, but Brock and Moon and the Reillys, kaput! And no fucking trials to worry about—"

  "I never—"

  "I know you never, that was what was so beautiful, you got them to do it themselves. Last man standing, Ed Loy. Jasus, in here we talked about nothing else for weeks, we were drawing diagrams to keep it all clear: Dublin mountains, Fitzwilliam Square, Shelbourne Road, he’s off again!"

  Despite myself, I was a little flattered. A case usually ended with justice of a sort, but with most of the survivors’ lives in tatters; very rarely was anyone in the mood to offer thanks, let alone praise. Myles Geraghty might have been a buffoon, but he was a senior policeman, and if what he had said was a quarter true, well, the respect of your peers is always something. Then, just in time, my brain came to, and I began to see where this was going, mere seconds before Geraghty leant in and spelled it out for me.

  "And we all felt the credit should have gone where it was due, instead of to people who, if we’re to be scrupulously fair, did not deserve it. Now I know he’s a friend of yours, and fair play, loyalty is what I look for in my officers too, I don’t expect you to tell tales out of school, but the least we should acknowledge is that you’re the man, Ed Loy. You and Lee Harvey Oswald both: ye acted alone, ha?"

  I nodded, understanding what the game was. It looked like Dave had good reason for his fears: Geraghty was clearly out to undermine him. Geraghty took my nod as an assent, and continued.

  "Good man. Because here’s the thing: I don’t believe you had anything to do with Jackie Tyrrell’s murder up above. I want to hear what you were doing there, sure I do, down to the last detail, but I know there’s no reason for you to kill her. And even if there was, you wouldn’t have…all the other stuff."

  "What other stuff?" I said.

  "You first," Geraghty said. When I stayed silent, he went on.

  "Because of course, I have enough to keep you here all day, and maybe charge you and all, keep you in over Christmas, even if we drop the charges then. A lovers’ tiff, a drunken spat, private detective and a rich divorcée—who do you think’s going to give a shite? So if you want to get out and get back to your case, you better let me know what’s going on."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You and Donnelly, what are ye cooking up? What’s he been telling you?"

  "Nothing, what?"

  "He was at your house last night. He was seen leaving."

  "What, are you having him followed?"

  "He was just…an off-duty officer spotted him, happened to be going the same way, saw him entering your house."

  I waited to see what more there was. If there’d been a tail on Dave, if they’d followed us to the mortuary…no, they’d’ve stepped in then and there. Wouldn’t they? Maybe they’d arrested Dave last night, after he left my house the second time. Maybe they were questioning him alongside me.

  And if they were? What was I going to do, grass him up?

  "I’ll tell you about the case I’m working. Dave Donnelly’s visit was…a personal matter."

  Geraghty flinched as if I’d slapped him; his tiny eyes flared up.

  "What’s that supposed to mean?"

  "I mean, it was a private matter. Between two old friends
. You know, there’s something on your mind, you drop around a friend’s house, ask his advice. Trouble with your neighbors, or your kids. Or your wife. Type of thing. And of course, to make sure I’d be at the party he’s throwing tonight. He said Carmel really wanted me to be there."

  Geraghty was sucking his teeth and his nostrils were flaring; when I said the word wife I thought I saw him flush; by the time I mentioned Carmel, he was nodding briskly, as if this were a file whose contents he had already read.

  "Better take me through the case you’re working then," he said quickly, reaching to switch the video camera back on and not meeting my eye the while.

  I told him about Father Vincent Tyrrell asking me to find Patrick Hutton. There was no reaction from him to this, which I took to mean that they still hadn’t identified the body. I told him about Miranda Hart and Jackie Tyrrell, about the meal at the Octagon with Seán Proby, about getting a late call from Jackie Tyrrell, about the ten-year-old controversy surrounding F. X. Tyrrell’s Gold Cup–winning horse By Your Leave and the race meeting at Thurles where the horse met her death. There wasn’t a single thing I said that couldn’t have been discovered with an Internet connection and, possibly, five minutes’ chat with a racing journalist, or failing that, with one of the standing army of punters all over the city who divided their time between pub, bookie’s and social welfare office, with the exception of the late-night drink with Jackie Tyrrell. Once he had established that Jackie had called to invite me over, and I had assured him that our conversation was largely about Jackie’s anxiety that Miranda not be hurt in the process of finding Patrick Hutton, he was nodding as if our business was done.