The Dying Breed Read online

  Industrial schools had become part of the folklore of what might be called the secret history of Ireland, which had only in the past twenty years or so begun to be told: unruly, unmanageable children, or simply those whose parents were unable to cope, whether psychologically or financially, were effectively detained in schools controlled by a variety of religious orders who subjected their charges to a catalogue of abuses, ranging from the basic contempt and casual disregard that was the lot of the poor anywhere in Ireland in those days, to physical beatings and psychological torture, all the way up to continual and brutal sexual abuse. The religious involved were not all equally culpable, and many had been raised in similarly harsh conditions, but it is impossible to find excuses even for those who claim they knew nothing of what went on; that said, it was a social and a national scandal as much it was a church affair: we were very happy to have someone else to look after the losers and misfits, the weak and the halt, happy to close our eyes and ears to the tales they told, to dismiss them as the hysterical and obscene ravings of a negligible class of people.

  “Leo Halligan certainly suggested there was more to it than that.”

  “Leo would. Leo has an eye to the main chance. As soon as Leo saw there was money to be made in compensation from abusive clerics, Leo counted up the number of priests he had met in his life and multiplied it by a thousand.”

  “But you knew Patrick Hutton there too.”

  “I met Patrick there, and then he came across to Tyrellscourt as an apprentice, the pair of them did.”

  “Miranda Hart told me F.X. made a point of taking boys from St. Jude’s on as apprentices. Did he rely on you to choose them?”

  “Not in every circumstance. But I recommended Patrick and Leo, yes.”

  “And would you have been aware of the relationship between them?”

  “I was aware that they were friends. What you’re suggesting—”

  “That they were lovers.”

  “Yes. I don’t believe any such…nothing like that. Really.”

  Vincent Tyrell looked appalled at the very notion of homosexuality, or at least, he wanted me to believe he was. He shook his head, looked at his watch and lifted up his pad.

  “Blank page, Edward Loy. If I can’t have it finished, I like at least to break the back of the damn thing by lunchtime. Otherwise it’s a joyless meal, and no wine either.”

  “I wanted to ask you about Regina. Your sister.”

  “I know who Regina is. What about her?”

  “Are you close? Is she close to F.X.? Where does she fit in the family?”

  Vincent Tyrell’s face reddened. He stood up and started to shout.

  “Why on earth should I answer that? I didn’t pay you to…who the hell do you think…What gives you the right to ask all these questions?”

  I stood up now. The days when I sat in my seat while an angry priest shouted at me were done.

  “You did. I don’t know what you intended. Maybe you don’t know yourself. Maybe you wanted Patrick Hutton to remain a mystery. Maybe you wanted me to throw a scare into Miranda Hart. Maybe it has something to do with Leo Halligan, something neither of you is willing to tell me, and you hoped I could somehow brush it under the carpet for you both. But it’s too late now. You see, you didn’t ask me to find Patrick Hutton. You didn’t ask me, in the event Hutton was dead, to locate his killers. You just told me his name. And you paid me. Way too much, as it happens. And now I can’t stop until I know the truth. Maybe you thought you were clever just giving me a man’s name. But it looks like it’s enough to build an entire world around. And I won’t stop until that’s what I’ve done.”

  Vincent Tyrell had retreated behind the supercilious smile that had served him so well, the smile that didn’t know whether to mock or pity the rest of humanity. I wanted to wipe that smile off his face.

  “You know your former sister-in-law was murdered this morning? And nobody thought to ring you, not your brother, nor your sister, not the Guards, nobody. You charged me with having a footfall too light upon the earth for comfort. Well, it takes one to know one, Vincent Tyrell. You have no one belonging to you who cares enough to tell you one of your family is dead. How did that happen?”

  I don’t know how I thought I’d feel when I succeeded in wiping the smile off his face. Not very good would have been my guess, to reduce an old man dying of cancer to a pale, twitching frame of flesh and bone. I made a gesture with my hands, something approaching an apology but not going all the way, and made for the door.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on Miranda Hart. But it would have been impossible to tell the child the truth,” Tyrell said.

  I opened the door. Father Vincent Tyrell stopped me with what he said next.

  “By Your Leave was an experiment. Very unusual. Something of a freak, you know. If you get to talk to Francis face-to-face, ask him what he thought he was doing. If you don’t, ask someone who knows about close breeding.”

  Tyrell was standing behind me now; I felt his breath on my collar, and then he tugged my arm with his claw of a hand and spun me round to face him. He was smiling again, a gleeful, more than half-mad smile I wanted to look away from but couldn’t.

  “By Your Leave. That is all you know on earth, and all ye need to know,” he said. And then Father Vincent Tyrell kissed me on the mouth.

  THIRTEEN

  Back in Quarry Fields, I showered, shaved and changed into a fresh white shirt and a clean black suit. I had fallen into dressing like this when I arrived back in Dublin but my luggage did not; I was dressed for a funeral and, once I’d taken off my tie, I found no great reason to dress any differently afterwards. Occasionally I felt a little overdressed, but that was rare in the city of suits Dublin had become; mostly it suited my purposes, whether to curry favour with a headwaiter or at a reception desk, or to impress a client, or simply to remind myself in the hours when I was flagging to keep my shoulders back and my head held high. I looked at my face in the mirror: it was drawn and sallow, but something in the eyes was different; the ghosts of the past had lifted, and there was light instead of darkness; for the first time that I could remember, as I heard the front door slam and the creak of floorboards below, I had a glimmer of a future, by which I meant a woman. The fact that the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to my ex-wife was a detail that appeared lost on me.

  In the kitchen, Tommy Owens was making tea. He greeted me with a shake of the head and a look of appalled fascination, as if to say he’d seen some gobshites in his time but I could be their king. I didn’t much care though, as Miranda Hart was by then in my arms, her tears wetting my cheeks, holding me as if she’d never let me go; what was Tommy next to that?

  “Is Patrick dead? Is he one of the bodies they found?” she said.

  Tommy looked at me keenly.

  “I think so,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

  She was shivering, in coat and scarf with her gloves still on.

  “We need to talk, Ed,” Tommy said.

  “Let’s talk then,” I said. “If we’re going down to Tyrellscourt, Miranda can help us: she knows the place inside out. There’s nothing to say she can’t hear.”

  Tommy and Miranda exchanged glances, and I got the impression that Tommy had already had a go at her on the journey here.

  “Ask her about Leo Halligan,” Tommy said. “The phone call.”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s up, Ed?” Tommy said. “Gauze on the lens, is there?”

  Miranda Hart understood immediately what was happening.

  “Ask away, I’ve nothing to hide. I don’t need kid gloves,” she said to Tommy.

  “Did you ring Leo Halligan on Saturday night?” he said.

  “I didn’t even know he was out of jail,” she said.

  “But you’d’ve had his number,” Tommy said.

  “I used to have his number, years ago. That was another life, as far as I was concerned, until—”

  “Until what?” Tommy snap
ped.

  “Until Ed came around yesterday asking questions about Patrick, about the Tyrells, about the whole bloody thing. And now there are these dead bodies…”

  “One of them is Don Kennedy, the private detective you hired to find Patrick two years back.”

  Miranda Hart shook her head.

  “And Patrick, and now Jackie…good Jesus, what’s happening?”

  “That’s what we need to find out.”

  “Someone—a woman with a posh accent—called Leo and told him that the story of Tyrellscourt was about to blow, and that Vincent Tyrell knew the full story,” Tommy said.

  “Do you want me to draw you a fucking map? That wasn’t me,” Miranda said to Tommy.

  “Maybe it was Regina Tyrell,” I said.

  “Regina Tyrell doesn’t have that kind of accent,” she said in that crisp, faux-objective way women take care to use when slighting one another.

  “What kind of accent does she have?” I said.

  “Oh, you’ll find out. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  She coloured after she’d said this, and looked down, and I wondered again what had passed between her and Tommy.

  “Tommy followed a car that left Jackie Tyrell’s house last night,” I said. “The bells had begun to toll, and the car screeched out from the stables, an old Land Rover with UK plates. Tommy followed down the N81 past Blessington and then west toward Tyrellscourt. He lost it somewhere in the approaches to the village.”

  “We hadn’t reached the stables,” Tommy said, shamefaced still that he had lost the car. “By the time I got to the entrance, there was no sign of the Land Rover.”

  “Derek Rowan was head man at Tyrellscourt ten years ago. He always used import secondhand Land Rovers from England,” Miranda said. “I don’t know if he’s still there. If it’s not him, it may be his son, Brian; Derek was training him up.”

  Miranda Hart’s tea bag was beside her cup; she had been smoking, with her gloves still on; Tommy looked on in disgust as she doused her cigarette in the tea bag and dunked the lot in her half-empty cup.

  “We’d better get moving,” I said. “Christmas Eve. No one will want to talk to us if we don’t get down there soon.”

  “No one will be in a fit state to talk to us,” Tommy said.

  I began to talk Miranda through the eccentricities of my heating system when Tommy interrupted me.

  “Ed, if your one is really under threat, your gaff is not the place to be. The killer knows you’re on the case, knocked you unconscious last night; if he’s looking for her, your house is going to be the first place he comes.”

  “You’re right. We’ll find a hotel—”

  “She can stay at my place,” Tommy said. “Plenty of room, nobody there, quiet road.”

  And with instructions not to answer the door to anyone, and an unconcerned look around at what a not very apologetic Tommy accurately described as “the state of the place,” she stayed there.

  Before we hit the road, Tommy retreated to the car to let us say good-bye. And after we’d kissed, Miranda Hart said, “Please, Ed, promise me, you’ll try and understand…no matter what you hear.”

  And I promised to try.

  WE TOOK THE Tallaght exit off the M50 and kept on the bypass until it became the Blessington Road; the hills were white on all sides while the low December sun scorched our eyes; skeletons of forests changed places with service stations and new building developments until we cut off west toward Tyrellscourt through the open plains of Kildare.

  Tyrellscourt had long been associated with F.X. Tyrell and his prodigious stable of prizewinning racehorses, and with the Tyrellscourt stud, the jewel in the crown of the Irish bloodstock industry. More recently, the Tyrellscourt Country Club, a luxury hotel with golf course, leisure centre, gymnasium and spa, had opened, with elaborate fanfare in the press; apartments with life membership of the club were made available at prices in excess of seven figures; all had been snapped up the day they were released. Celebrities flocked to celebrate their weddings there, and an EU gathering of some description had reached its climax with the assorted heads of state stomping around the Tyrellscourt fairways in a variety of garish leisure wear.

  The third thing Tyrellscourt had become famous for, quite at odds with the first two, was the number of people who went there to disappear. The guitarist of an obscure late sixties English rock band, part of the Canterbury scene, hadn’t been seen since, following the breakup of the group, he got on a train at Victoria Station, headed for Brighton; thirty-five years later, following sightings all over the globe and a persistent rumour that he was now an obscure novelist nobody knew anything about either, an English music magazine tracked him down to Tyrellscourt, where he had been living with his Dutch wife running a candle-making business. The group subsequently re-formed and made quite a lot of money before breaking up for roughly the same reason they had in the first place: because they couldn’t stand one another. But this aspect of Tyrellscourt, its ability to give shelter and succour to a variety of misfits and ne’er-do-wells of one kind or another who couldn’t cut it in the new thrusting entrepreneurial Ireland, or simply refused to play by the new rules of the game, was particularly vivid given that the shiny happy face of the country club was so often used as a brochure to advertise the extent of the Irish success story. It was a script that could have been designed with Tommy Owens in mind; in fact, it turned out he’d been disappearing down here for years. Maybe they’d been running a bus from Hennessy’s bar.

  “I won’t go on about the country club, except to say they got the fuckin’ name right, and the stables is what it is, yeah, but if you want to know what Tyrellscourt’s about, then McGoldrick’s is the place to go,” Tommy said. “There are others places, Sheehy’s and the Big Tree, but McGoldrick’s has the best mix. And that’s the point, the mix, know I mean? Up in the country club they’re all prancing around in their Pringle and Lacoste like the cunts they are, a fucking kindergarten for the nouveau riche whose mammies won’t let them play outdoors. And the horsey fuckers have work to do, fair enough, they’re at the gallops and so on, and they have a couple of older restaurants they go to, salmon en croûte and Black Forest gateau they’re serving, like a fucking geezer theme park, sixties cuisine for the hundred Irish cunts who’ve been rich since then. But everyone passes through McGoldrick’s, not just the people I know: all the jockeys come there, and they’re fucking mental bastards. And even middle-class people want some action after a week of golf and spa treatments and Chardonnay. Because everyone knows if you need something extracurricular, McGoldrick’s the place to go.”

  “When you say all the jockeys go there—”

  “When they can, when they’re not in training, or wasting; they get a night out, they go mad.”

  “So there’d be boys who knew Patrick Hutton?”

  “Chances are. Boys who’d say they knew him. Anyone riding in Leopardstown probably won’t be there. But you never know, they do what they please, jockeys.”

  “Tommy, what happened between you and Miranda?”

  “What do you mean, Ed?”

  “I’m saying, fair enough to ask her about the call to Leo, but there was a real edge between you two. Why?”

  Tommy grimaced.

  “I’ll tell you over a drink.”

  “Why can’t you tell me now?”

  “Because you’re not going to like it. And when you don’t like something, you do better with a drink in your hand.”

  I pressed him a little further, and when we reached a set of traffic lights, he turned to me and said pretty much the worst thing Tommy could say about anyone.

  “Ed, I know her.”

  THE VILLAGE IS on a slope, and at its top, you can see the Tyrellscourt gallops stretching out below in two lazy figure-of-eights for the horses’ round and straight work. Driving down along the main street was like one of those posed features in a colour supplement about “The Subcultures of Our Time”: there were new-age crusties and tre
e-huggers with multicoloured sweaters and tights and those strange cropped-pate and pigtail haircuts with dogs on strings and petitions to save the whale, and the world; there were older hippies in saris and denim and leather, with moustaches and ponytails and nature shoes and raddled complexions; there were horsey, country types in Barbours and yellow and crimson and lime cords; there were obese white-faced teenage Goths in long leatherette coats and vast black T-shirts and six-inch steel-inlaid wedges; there were the usual complements of cheerful or surly layabouts, faces weather-beaten from standing smoking outside the pub or the betting shop all day; there were clutches of stripe-shirted men with mobile phones and oblong glasses thrusting their entrepreneurial way into the future; there were spiked-fin rugby boys and primped and groomed OMIGOD girls; there were slender, fine-boned blond women from Poland and Lithuania with their crop-headed sinewy men; there were ’oul ones with walking frames and tartan shopping trolleys getting the last of the Christmas messages, and ’oul fellas with papers rolled tight beneath their arms, transporting their custom from one pub to another.

  It was Christmas Eve in Tyrellscourt, and everywhere there was tinsel and holly and flashing neon and twinkling fairy lights; last-minute bargains were being bruited from shop doorways, and the queues from the two butchers for turkeys and hams together ran the length of the town. At the bottom of the main drag the road forked in two, and there was a central meeting place with benches and flower beds and a great Christmas tree, and throngs of folk were gathered to gossip and idle and pass the compliments of the season back and forth. An accordion-playing trio from Central Europe was providing musical backing to the festive hordes; as we passed, they finished “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and kicked into “Carolan’s Welcome,” a traditional tune from the seventeenth-century blind Irish harpist. I began to laugh at this point, and Tommy turned to me.

  “You know when Yanks say to you, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky to live in Ireland,’ like it’s some fucking Celtic theme park full of characters and crack and gargle? And we’re like, no, it’s just like anywhere else, except with rain? Well, sometimes that’s what Tyrellscourt is like. It’s like visiting Ireland for an Irish person.”