The Price of Blood Page 17

  "Martha O’Connor?"

  "That’s right. And all these stories came out, even into the nineties, some of the lay people were abusers—"

  "Vincent Tyrrell? He was there in the nineties for a while, when Leo and Hutton were there."

  "It wasn’t in the program. I don’t think Father Tyrrell…I mean, he’s a bollocks, but I’d never have put him down for that."

  “The dykey one.’"

  "What?"

  "Is that how we talk?"

  "It’s how I talk. I’ve nothing against them. Which is more than they can say for me."

  "Tommy."

  "All right Ed, Jasus, you’re very fucking Californian sometimes, do you know that?"

  "How’d Folan get to be the caretaker, if that’s what he is?"

  "Nobody knows. Steno said no application has been made for the property, so nobody even knows who owns it, the Church or the state or what. But that Folan has the keys to the locks, whether he appointed himself to put them on, or whether he’s carrying out duties for the owner, nobody knows."

  "And what about the tongue?"

  "No one had really seen Folan since Staples died, about five years ago. He’d come down to the town for groceries, and for his dole, but that was it. Then, about two years ago, he kind of presents himself, the head shaved, in the bar in McGoldrick’s, drinking the few pints, not saying a word. At the end of the night, he opens his mouth and shows the whole pub why he’s so quiet. Pleased by the reaction he gets, and away with him. After that, he’s in regularly. I got talking to Steno tonight, told him why you were in town, he said Bomber’s our man. When he came in, he remembered me. He actually can speak, he has enough of his tongue left for that, and to eat with. Anyway, I talked him through the whole thing, Pa Hutton, Leo, immediately he’s nodding, he’s got something to show us."

  "And what a show," I said.

  "Poor fucker."

  "What do people think happened? To the tongue, I mean."

  "They think he did it himself."

  "I want to see where he lives, Tommy."

  Tommy started up the engine.

  "It’s on the way back," he said.

  Maybe half a mile after the turnoff for the country club, there was a narrow mud boreen indented with car tracks. It curved back toward the town for maybe half a mile, climbing as it went, then dropped suddenly toward the river. Tommy stopped the car before the drop, and we got out. To one side, you could see the golf course sweeping down from the rear of the country club; on the other, there was a steady incline; nestled in the valley between the base of the hill and the river, I saw a couple of mobile homes, old cars and car parts, a mound of assorted scrap metal and wood, a stone cottage with a light burning and the Jeep Terry "Bomber" Folan had been driving. The light from the cottage spilled onto a small fenced-in paddock around which a horse was steadily pacing.

  On the journey back, I checked the plates of Regina Tyrrell’s Range Rover with those on the one Tommy had seen leaving Tibradden the night Jackie Tyrrell was murdered. They weren’t a match. I told Tommy that Regina Tyrrell had tried to hire me as her inside man, and that I had offered her him in my place; among other things, that’d give him a chance to check out F. X. Tyrrell’s Range Rover, and see if Miranda Hart was right about Derek Rowan or his son driving the car. Tommy looked taken aback, then flattered, then got all serious and businesslike about it.

  Then he said, "I’ll still have to do the four masses tomorrow morning, Ed."

  "Maybe the Omega Man will suspend hostilities for Christmas Day," I replied.

  Tommy didn’t know whether I was being serious or not. Neither did I. My mind was still reeling at the dumb show Bomber Folan had presented to us. A shrink I went to for a while after my daughter died, until he refused to see me unless I could at least be sober once a week for the hour-long session and I decided that that was not going to be possible, told me that in London during Jacobean times, people used to go to Bedlam to look at the lunatics in the way rich socialites used to swing by Harlem during the jazz age: it was what the smart set did. Eventually playwrights caught on to this, and inserted scenes with lunatics into their plays, in much the same way blackface sequences found their way into Broadway musicals, I suppose. I’d never seen one of those plays, but I thought of them tonight when the man with no tongue simulated anal rape in a red room beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  I kept coming back to the fact that Bomber Folan had resurfaced two years ago, around the same time Miranda Hart had Don Kennedy investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, in order to have him declared dead. And now there were three dead bodies, all with close connections to Miranda Hart, all with the same tattoos, all with their tongues cut out: Folan had the tattoo, Folan had no tongue, Folan must at the very least have been known to Miranda Hart, even if it was just a case of sharing the same smack dealer.

  Folan had put on a show tonight for my benefit. His parting gesture was to intimate that I should know who was behind all of this. The tattoo, the abuse, the tongue, they all seemed to be connected. If I were Myles Geraghty, I’d put Folan in a cell and beat the shit out of him until he confessed. When I saw his house, I was tempted to go down there and try that tack myself. I had too much information and not enough, the ideal time to take it out on someone weaker than you.

  I called Martha O’Connor. She might have brought me too much publicity in the past, but if anyone could be relied upon to know what had happened to whom in which industrial school, she could. Martha was somewhere noisy, getting pissed and having a nice time. I was happy for her, and I said so. Not convincingly enough, however; soon she was giving out to me for being a killjoy and a scold.

  "It’s not as if I go out every night, you know," she said. "Or any night, come to think of it."

  "I know. I’m sorry. Are you with Fiona Reed?"

  "Mind your own business YES and I think she’s really into me," Martha said, or yelled. Fiona Reed was Garda Superintendent in Seafield, and she didn’t like me, but I was convinced if she and Martha made a go of things, it couldn’t do me any harm. "Are you the last man working, Ed Loy? Take a break."

  "You’re one to talk."

  "If I can do it, you can. Even in the trenches, they stopped shooting for a day or two."

  "Yeah, that just occurred to me. About someone else, though."

  "The Omega Man?" Martha said, sharp as a tack, and abruptly the party noises faded.

  "Jesus, Martha, what did you do, kill everyone?"

  "I stepped out of the room. Is it the Omega Man? What do you need?"

  "I don’t know what you’re drinking, but I’d ask for my money back, it’s obviously not working."

  "That’s funny, Ed. I’ll make a note in my diary to laugh when I’ve time. What can I do?"

  "I need to see a documentary you made about St. Jude’s, or that St. Jude’s featured in. The industrial school."

  "Yeah, when? Now? Now is not great, but—"

  "Martha, you’re on a date."

  "We don’t all think with our dicks, Ed Loy."

  "I’ll give you that one, for Christmas. Tomorrow sometime. I know it’s Christmas Day—"

  "Big swing. St. Jude’s, Tyrrellscourt, Jackie Tyrrell, F. X. Tyrrell, Father Vincent, how does it stack up so far?"

  "Is a highly ranked police officer leaking you her best stuff?"

  "Not as often as I’d like. What time? She’s going to her mammy’s for dinner, I’m home alone all day."

  "Maybe two, two-thirty?"

  "The turkey twizzlers are on me."

  IN TOMMY’S KITCHEN there was a turkey and a ham, vegetables and fruit and a Christmas pudding, sauces and mustards, pickles and cold meats, cheese and wine, a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Jameson. Tommy looked at them and shrugged his I’ve-already-said-what-I-had-to-say shrug.

  I went upstairs. She was asleep in the box room. More than ever, she reminded me of my wife: how vulnerable a woman was when she slept, how it was then that you sa
w the little girl in her. I thought of everything Tommy had told me about Miranda Hart tonight, and all I felt was pity, and sadness, and an urgent sense that I could help her, and that she needed me to. I shut the door behind me and made my way out into the night.

  SEVENTEEN

  I dropped Tommy off at the church for midnight mass, and headed back up toward Castlehill. Dave lived on a quiet road down from the Castlehill Hotel in a semi-d he bought back when he first graduated from Templemore with the help of some money an aunt of his in America had left him; he couldn’t have afforded to buy a third of it on his current salary. I didn’t want to go to Dave’s party for any number of reasons, chief among them that it would be full of cops who wouldn’t want me there, a feeling one or two of them would relish making plain. Another of the reasons I didn’t want to go opened the door to me: Myles Geraghty, making himself at home. He clapped me on the shoulder as if we were the best of buddies and let out a loud roar.

  "It’s Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes, lads, as we live and breathe."

  "Language please, Detective Geraghty," snapped Carmel, snaking an arm around my waist and tugging me into the house. They continued on their exchange in mime over my head, which Carmel had tucked into her cleavage, which was on full merry-widow duty tonight and stoked with some musky aroma. When she let me up for air, something in her eyes was reckless, almost delusional; maybe she was just another party hostess flying high, but I wondered: Carmel had always had a sexy, flirtatious look that said you’d missed your chance with her, but only just; tonight, it looked like the "only just" had been set aside. She still had a great body, long-legged and rangy, but the dress she wore would have been cut too low and hemmed too high for a twenty-eight-year-old, and her heels put her maybe half a head below me, and I’m six two when I don’t slouch. I certainly didn’t object to the view, but it’s not one I’d have relished in a wife; I saw Dave eyeing her as she danced me toward the kitchen and poured me a glass of lethal-looking punch; he had the fixed, glassy smile of a man whose car has just rolled back off the viewing platform and tumbled into a quarry while he waits for it to explode. Carmel told me I’d missed the prospect she had lined up for me, but that we had to have a good long talk; this having been established, she clipped off to more urgent business: swaying about drawing hungry looks from every man in the place, or so it seemed.

  The party had wound down, but the dwindlers were determined to stay until the bitter end, despite the unwritten rule that if you’re in another man’s house after midnight on Christmas Eve, you’d better have a red suit and a big sack. The Guards had neither; indeed, a Guard I recognized from Seafield with no lips and no manners seemed hell-bent on proving he had no wits either: ranting lachrymosely and aggressively about how Christmas wasn’t what it used to be, and of course it never had been, he had to be physically restrained from breaking to Sadie, Dave’s angelic five-year-old, who was skipping about in a turquoise-and-lavender tutu with a magic wand, the news that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Dave did the physical restraining himself, and he looked to me like he’d have enjoyed doing a lot more of it. The lipless Guard resumed after a brief pause with an ill-tempered, sanity-taxing tirade about how contemporary Christmas songs weren’t fit to shine the shoes of the immortal classics of the genre, by titans such as Mud, Wizzard and Gary Glitter.

  In the living room, the source of the inferior contemporary sounds, Dave’s three boys, who were between ten and fourteen but looked like they’d been fed on beef three times a day since birth, were trying out their rucking and mauling techniques on a couple of Guards who wanted to show what good sports they were to three young female Gardaí who had drunk themselves to the land where the only response to any event is to shriek with laughter. The shrieks only got louder when Dave’s eldest lad tried a handoff that was more like a punch, causing a Guard’s nose to flow and his temper to fly a long way from where the good sports play.

  In the back room, a few older hands were putting on a different kind of show for their juniors, and after sinking the punch and finding some whiskey and hearing the Butler family being discussed, I felt emboldened enough to insinuate myself onto the edge of it.

  "They’re a blot, a fucking plague all over north Wicklow, and there’s nothing you can fucking do with them," a thickset ginger-haired comb-over said.

  "Are they all one family?" a spotty young fella said.

  Comb-over led the older hands in a burst of hollow laughter.

  "You could say that," he said. "Put it this way: Old Man Butler wasn’t fussy about where he dipped his wick. He didn’t mind if you were his cousin. He didn’t mind if you were his sister. He didn’t mind if you were his daughter."

  "He didn’t mind that at all at all," said a skinny cop with a hook nose and floppy gray hair in a side parting.

  "Oh, he liked his daughters very much," said Comb-over.

  "He liked his granddaughters too," added Hook Nose. The young Guards were appalled and delighted by what was obviously a practiced routine.

  "He was an equal-opportunities shagger," Comb-over said.

  “Twas the granddaughters that did for him though," said a crinkle-haired Galway man with a big mustache.

  "What, his granddaughters killed him?" a round-faced young smiler said.

  "In a manner of speaking," said Comb-over, who smoked a pipe, and would have strung this one out until New Year’s if he’d been let.

  "One of the daughters caught him with the granddaughter," Hook Nose said. "Not in the act, but in the bedroom, very cozy. She reefed him out of it, sent him home with a flea in his ear. Then the young one, she’s what, twelve, thirteen, doesn’t she tell her ma her elder sister’s been going in the bedroom with Granda for years now. The sister gets home, the ma gets it out of her, she hasn’t been riding him, she’s just been sucking him off, as if that wasn’t as bad. And Ma goes fucking mental."

  "There was three Butler sisters in the Michael Davitt," said Mustache.

  "And Vinnie," said Hook Nose.

  "Well they were hardly gonna get Vinnie involved, sure wasn’t Vinnie as bad as the old man?" said Comb-over.

  "So the daughters took the old man down the seafront there in Bray, in and out of any pub or hotel he wasn’t barred from, started at the harbor, ended up by the amusements, in full daylight this was, the wintertime, and they filled him full of drink and bullshit, bygones be bygones, nothing to forgive, sure nothing happened anyway. And the women were watching what they drank. And then they set off up the hill a little way and around the cliff path, work up a thirst for more, Da, they said, night falling fast. And when they got to the sheerest drop, little pick of a man at this stage, and two of the women twenty stone each, didn’t they pick him up and fuck him down onto the railway tracks."

  "And what happened?" said Spotty.

  "Into the station with them," said Hook Nose. "They told me Old Man Butler had committed suicide. I asked them why he’d done that, he didn’t seem the type, and they said that he’d finally seen the error of his ways, and then they each produced a statement detailing what he had done to them over the years. And what he’d begun to do to their children."

  Hook Nose stopped talking, and drained his drink, and Comb-over passed him a bottle of Paddy.

  "It didn’t make pleasant fucking reading, I can tell you that for nothing," he said.

  "You took leave, didn’t you?" Mustache said.

  "Ah, I needed a holiday anyway."

  "But…how do you know they murdered him?" Smiler said.

  "Because they were fucking boasting about it all over Bray that night. ’We killed our da, and we’ll kill you if you fuck with us.’ And Vinnie comes in three days later, the last to fucking know as usual, and he wants to press charges," said Comb-over. "They’ve told him they did it, they’ve told half of Wicklow they did it, and the other half know they did it anyway. So we prepare a file, and we send it to the DPP to see if they’ll take it to trial, and he comes back with his decision: Not In A Million Years."

&nbs
p; "It’d be a grand ’oul story," Hook Nose said, "like in a film or something, only for the fact that the daughters are fucking savages too, and they’ve raised broods of savages: junkies and dealers and whores. Every night there’s joyriding or robbing or fire-setting or some fucking shenanigans up there and it’s always the Butlers."

  "What do you do though?" Smiler said. "I mean, there’s always gonna be families like that on a council estate, families that drag the rest down. And the only sanction you have is to evict them. And then what do you do with all the evicted families?"

  "They used to go to England," Mustache said. "That’s where Old Man Butler came back from. With three brothers, you know what they were called? Seán, John, and John Junior. And Old Man Butler was called Jack. Fuck’s sake like. They all had the same fucking name. Making a show of us in front of the Brits, thick fucking Paddy can’t even think to give his kids different names like."

  "Seed and breed, seed and breed," Comb-over said.

  "When the blood goes bad, it’s a hard job to put it right," Mustache said.

  "It’s the job of generations," Hook Nose said.

  "It’s not our job lads," Comb-over said.

  "But seriously, what do you do?" Smiler had drunk himself earnest. "I mean, if it’s one or two families, and you get them out, what do you do with them then?"

  "Is this a social ser vices or a waste management problem?" Comb-over said.

  "Burn them," said Hook Nose.

  "Bury them," said Mustache.

  "Recycle them," Spotty chirped, staying up late with the big boys.

  They all looked at Smiler.