The Dying Breed Read online

  “What I’m saying is, maybe an outsider’s eye is just what we need, Mr. Loy.”

  She went back to her desk and sat down and turned the light off. Her face in the shadows immediately looked older, grey and tired, her great dark eyes pools, inviting strangers at their own risk.

  “Tell me about the family, then. Tell me about the Tyrells,” I said.

  “I don’t know about the Tyrells. But I can tell you about myself,” she said. “My mother died giving birth to me. I think that was hard on the boys. I never knew any different, but boys need a mother if they’re to avoid…a certain kind of coldness. Anyway, I grew up here, went to the local school, boarding school in Dublin.”

  “Is that where you got the accent?”

  She grinned.

  “I got the accent in Dublin, but not at boarding school. Everyone told me to get rid of it. Maybe that’s why I hung on to it. Too late now.”

  “I like it a lot.”

  “Listen to you. Say anything so you would. Say mass if you were let.”

  She laughed, an uneasy laugh, and it struck me that, beneath the brittle sheen, she was an uneasy woman. Maybe when you sat opposite a detective, only fools and knaves weren’t. Or maybe she had a lot to be uneasy about.

  “So this would have been sixties, seventies?”

  “Left school in ’74.”

  “F.X. would have been running the show here by then?”

  “For ten years. Francis trained his first winner at nineteen. Won the Gold Cup the following year, ’65. And on and on.”

  “And what about you? University? London?”

  “Nah. I came back here. I missed it like mad. And the horses. I was one of those pony girls. In boarding school up in the Dublin mountains…Jaysus, Mother Borgia, that was the mother superior’s name, Mother Borgia, you wouldn’t believe it now, but back then…anyway, I hated the place, all these snobby southside bitches, but there was a riding school nearby, and a couple of local lads who’d sneak me in and sneak horses out…oh, we had such a time of it. I think that’s where I got the accent. And of course, it gave the nuns conniptions, it went against everything they stood for, which wasn’t education at all, it was how to arrange flowers and give a dinner party and get into a sports car without showing your knickers so you could nab some young businessman and make him a fragrant wife. And certainly not be letting him down in front of his boss talking like some common-as-muck Dublin Chrissie. We’ve got over that now, at least. Anyone in this country with a few bob in his pocket’s as good as anyone else.”

  “And anyone without a few bob?”

  “Let them go out and work for it. That’s what the Poles and Latvians and all are doing, and fair play to them. If there’s a generation of Irish too lazy to work, that’s a shame for them, but what are we supposed to do about it? Sponsor them to drink all day and go to the shops in their pyjamas?”

  “So you came back to Tyrellscourt, and trained?”

  “Not really. You have to be…touched by God to be able for that.”

  “Touched by God?”

  “Laugh if you like,” she said. “But it is a kind of vocation. I’ve often watched Francis during the day, inspecting the horses and the lads in the morning before work begins, checking the earth and watching the sky, supervising the feeds, right the way to patrolling the yard at night, listening for a restless horse, the wrong kind of cough, and all in silence: there’s a kind of devotion to it, it’s…I used to think he was like a monk. Only the horses had called him, not God.”

  “Your brother Vincent said much the same: the horses knew F.X., they didn’t like Vincent at all.”

  “Good sense they had,” she said, the wistful look she had had in talking about F.X. curdling when it came to her other brother.

  “What caused the falling-out between you and Vincent?” I said.

  Regina simply shook her head. Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to hear it from her. She looked quickly at her watch, and I pressed ahead before I was cut off.

  “So you didn’t have a similar vocation?”

  “No. The only thing I can compare it to is a musician. The kind who, they make the records, they give the concerts, they have the career, but the only time they’re truly alive is when they’re playing, is in the music. And F.X. was like that, at race meetings, he’d be hiding behind the horses, and when they won, there were no fists in the air, no big shite talk to the crowd like some of the knackers you see masquerading as trainers these days, it was just a quiet nod, the sense that this was as it should be. And I loved to play piano, classical, my favourite thing now, but if you think you can play the piano, and then you hear a Barenboim, a Rubinstein, well if you’re not a total idiot, you understand immediately what you don’t have. And to try would be futile, really. But you want to do something, you believe in what’s being done. So I did what I could. I ran the house for him. I took night courses in bookkeeping so I could keep an eye on the money. I took cookery courses so when owners came to visit, they could bring their wives and children. I made sure the gardens were kept up. And I dressed up and went with him to Cheltenham and Aintree and Leopardstown and all, chatting to the Queen Mother and so forth.”

  “Like a wife.”

  “It wasn’t unusual where we came from. Eldest son inherits the farm—”

  “Youngest becomes a priest, unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for the brother—”

  “Not unusual at all.”

  “She never married.”

  “Nothing like that,” Regina said sharply. “There was more than one fella, over the years. But none of them…I don’t know, unless you’re going to settle for less. And I had all this, I didn’t need any man’s money.”

  She gestured toward the window, and then around the room.

  “This house was in ruins, some ’oul sisters were hanging on for dear life, until they gave up the ghost. We got it for a song in 1970. Francis put the whole thing in my name, I had the idea for all this.”

  “Well done,” I said, and meant it.

  “And so that was another thing, you’re a successful woman, you attract gorgeous-looking fellas with expensive tastes and no funds, and you scare off the me-Tarzan types. So what can you do?”

  “What did you do when Jackie Tyrell appeared on the scene?”

  Regina sighed and shook her head at that.

  “What did I do? I invited her down here, you know. Jackie Lamb. She was in school with me. And she’d been writing to me, all this very flattering stuff, she was working for one of those Irish women’s magazines, wanted to do a feature, sisters are doing it for themselves, all very exciting. So down she comes, and it’s soon very clear she has F.X. in her sights.”

  “And were you hurt by that?”

  “Hurt? What do you mean, hurt? I told you, there was nothing like that. Do you think I was after her?”

  “I didn’t mean about her. I meant, hurt that your brother…there must have been a very strong bond between you both. It can’t have been easy to bring another woman into that.”

  Regina Tyrell looked at her watch again, and lifted her hands up and almost clapped them.

  “Four-thirty. Sun over the yardarm. Miranda said you drank.”

  “I do.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Does F.X.?”

  “Of course he doesn’t.”

  Light spilled from the far end of the room as Regina opened a white wood door that concealed a fridge freezer and produced a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Schweppes tonic. She found glasses and brought the drinks to the desk and we drank in near darkness. I thought of asking her to put the light on, but then found I didn’t want to.

  “I wouldn’t say I was hurt,” Regina said. “But it was hard not to feel excluded. I mean, she was at the races instead of me. Literally. And of course, she had the finishing school thing going on, and the magazine and all, these lady writers who were friends of hers up in Dublin, gossip columnists and what have you, giving her great write-u
ps for the frocks. So yeah. But like I mean, I just moved in down here and let her get on with it. There was a time she was up and down to me three times a day, how does this work, when does Francis like his dinner, all that. Felt like his ma so I did.”

  “You said F.X. doesn’t drink. Jackie Tyrell said there were a lot of things F.X. didn’t do.”

  “Really. I wouldn’t know.”

  “Because it seems odd on the face of it that they never had children. She said—”

  “Yeah. She said that to me too. And says I to her, there are things a sister shouldn’t really have to know about her brother, and that’s one of them.”

  “No curiosity?”

  “No thank you. Did she tell you all this the night she died?”

  “She did. I was the last person who saw her alive. Apart from her killer.”

  “What did she say about me?”

  “She said you run all this, and you run your brother too.”

  Regina laughed mirthlessly.

  “That’s the way Jackie saw everything. It was all about control.”

  “And what is it all about for you?”

  The question seemed to catch her unawares. In the pale light I thought I saw something like vulnerability, even fear, cross her face.

  “The future. It’s all about the future.”

  I forbore from asking the obvious question—what kind of future could the Tyrells have when the current generation was too old to provide another?—but I felt it lay heavy in the air between us.

  “She also said you were glad when she and Francis got divorced. And that she was going to tell me a thing or two about you,” I said.

  “And did she?”

  “That was the last thing she said to me. The next time I saw her, she was dead.”

  Regina’s hand went automatically to her throat, and she shuddered, whether in sympathy or out of relief, I couldn’t tell.

  “What kind of relationship did you have with Miranda Hart?” I said.

  Regina shrugged.

  “I didn’t really get a look-in. Jackie was hugger-mugger there. I liked her as a teenager, she used to haunt the yard, drive the lads wild. In every way. Reminded me a bit of myself at that age. When her mother died, her father sent her off to boarding school in England, and she came back talking like Lady Diana, Jaysus, that was something to hear. Jackie kind of adopted her then, bought her clothes and all. Had her show-ponying around the place. I never thought Miranda had what it took to carry that off. Her name is Mary, you know.”

  “Mary?”

  “Yeah. I think she took some stick from the gels in Cheltenham over that, about being a little Irish colleen, holy Mary, all this, so when she got back here for good, she was Miranda, with the yah accent. Jackie bought into the whole thing, and it stuck. ’Course everyone knew she was Paddy Hart the publican’s daughter Mary, but if she says that’s not who she is anymore, who’s to say different?”

  Regina’s tone was jaunty and high, as if discussing the amusing caprices of a neighbour’s daughter. My next question not only put a stop to that, it retrospectively undermined any gaiety she had supposedly felt at Miranda’s adventures.

  “And what happened with Patrick Hutton?”

  “That was just an unsuitable, a wrong marriage, I told Jackie from the very beginning, she should and could have stopped it, but no, I was being petit bourgeois and lower middle class apparently, the snotty Cork bitch, she thought it was wonderfully brave. I honestly think she pushed it out of spite, because I got Francis to try and intervene. If he’s good enough to ride for F.X. Tyrell, she said, he’s good enough to marry a publican’s daughter. As if all the Miranda stuff, the airs and graces she’d taught her, was for nothing, or worse, a game to keep herself amused, like the girl was a doll, a toy to be played with. I felt sorry for the child…”

  She stopped, and raised her glass, and sighed, as if she’d said too much.

  “She was adopted, wasn’t she?” I said, in as pointed a manner as I could manage.

  “Are you asking me what I think you’re asking me?” Regina said.

  “She’s the image of you,” I said.

  “No, is the answer,” she said. “Fuck’s sake, I see the black eye, I’m not surprised, questions like that.”

  “She had a rough time of it after Hutton disappeared.”

  “A lot of which she brought on herself,” Regina said. “Ah, she lost the place altogether, I don’t know what happened to her. Drink, drugs…I suppose you heard she was little better than a prostitute there for a while. It wasn’t as if she needed money.”

  “Did she not? She was renting out her house, I know.”

  “She inherited the Tyrellscourt Arms when her father died sure. Ninety-two, was it? And she made a lot of money out of that.”

  “She sold it to you, didn’t she?”

  “For a quarter of a million pounds. That was before the boom, when two hundred and fifty thousand would have got you pretty much anything you wanted in Dublin. That little place in Riverside wouldn’t have been more than sixty then, if that. I never knew what got into Miranda. She got over it, at least. Jackie gave her work, helped undo some of the harm she’d done.”

  Regina looked at her watch again.

  “Now. Christmas Eve. I have family commitments.”

  “Just one last thing,” I said. “Patrick Hutton. Didn’t you ever wonder over the years what had happened?”

  She stood up and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “But I always hoped he was dead, to be honest with you. I hoped and prayed he was dead.”

  I couldn’t hold her gaze, and looked out the window, to see that the Range Rover that had been parked near the walls of Tyrells court House when we came up here had gone.

  FIFTEEN

  Regina Tyrell walked me down to the lobby. At reception, a tall slim girl of about nine or ten with long dark hair and dark eyes was waiting. When she saw Regina she ran to her and kissed her.

  “Karen, meet Edward Loy. Ed Loy, Karen Tyrell. My daughter.”

  I shook the girl’s hand, trying to fix a smile on my face. Her daughter? Behind the girl stood a slim male figure in his sixties, immaculate in tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, polished tan brogues, Tattersall shirt and cravat; only a small swollen belly betrayed F.X. Tyrell’s age. His weathered face had the same prominent cheekbones his brother’s had; his eyes were smaller, but the same deep brown as his sister’s; his lips were fleshy and loose. He had the quiet, watchful, half-sad, half-amused air of a man well used to having people report and defer to him; Regina, while not exactly going that far, seemed to genuflect an apology in his direction, which he dispelled with a half smile.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Tyrell,” I said.

  He nodded to acknowledge my sympathy, and again to deflect it, gesturing toward the child. Everywhere in the lobby people were trying not to stare at F.X. Tyrell and failing; they probably would have done so anyway, but with shy smiles on their faces; a glance at the pile of Evening Heralds at reception explained why they weren’t smiling today: OMEGA MAN KILLS TRAINER’S EX-WIFE, screamed the headline. I quickly scanned the story. They still hadn’t ID’d Hutton. When I turned back, it was to Karen Tyrell alone; Regina had drawn F.X. off down the steps to one side, and they were locked in conversation. Karen smiled at me, and I smiled back.

  “Do you have any children?” she said.

  I couldn’t really explain, not to a child.

  “Yes,” I said. “A little girl. She’d be about your age now.”

  “I’m nine,” Karen said. “What’s her name?”

  “Lily,” I said, and then heard myself saying: “She lives with her mother. In America.”

  “I live with my mother too,” Karen said. “And Uncle Francis, but he’s never there, and even when he is, he isn’t. If that makes sense. Sometimes I don’t make too much sense, Mum says.”

  “It sounds sensible to me,” I said. “A lot of men are like that.”

 
; “I wouldn’t know. My dad’s dead,” she said gravely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I suppose. I never knew him. I don’t think Mum knew him very well either. She doesn’t even have a photograph of him.”

  Karen had been surveying the come-and-go around the room while we talked; now she looked up at me through eyes widened to express her bemusement at the scant trail her father had left. Her gaze left me reeling, and I felt as if it was setting me a challenge which, if met, could solve the mystery of the Tyrells and of the killer who could be on their trail. For Karen Tyrell’s eyes were not identical: one was brown, and one was dark blue.

  Regina joined us and told me her brother was waiting to speak to me outside the hotel. I found him by the far end of the building, looking back toward his stables. He didn’t turn as I stood alongside him, barely moved a muscle.

  “Did Jackie say anything about me?” he said quickly.

  His voice was quiet but perfectly pitched, the kind of voice you listened closely to for fear of missing a beat. A king’s voice.

  “She said several things.”

  “What were they?”

  “Why do you want to know? It was a private conversation.” F.X. Tyrell made a sound in his throat, a sound like a dry branch snapping.

  “Just answer my question.”

  “No, I don’t think I will.”

  Tyrell still hadn’t moved, but I could hear his breath coming quickly through his nose. He started to say something that sounded like a threat, then stopped himself and changed course.

  “She was my wife, Mr. Loy.”

  From another man it might have been a plea; F.X. Tyrell made it sound like a command.

  “I know that. But you weren’t the subject of our meeting. Jackie spoke mainly about Miranda Hart, and Patrick Hutton. You know your brother has hired me to find Hutton?”

  F.X. Tyrell turned around and faced me, his small eyes blazing.

  “A brother is loyal or he is nothing. I have no brother.”

  “Father Vincent suggested I should ask you about close breeding.”