The Dying Breed Read online

  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 grey 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 practised 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 moustache.

  “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 cosy. 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 Moustache.

  “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 harbour, 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?” Moustache 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.”

  “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,” Moustache 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,” Moustache 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 services or a waste management problem?” Comb-over said.

  “Burn them,” said Hook Nose.

  “Bury them,” said Moustache.

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

  They all looked at Smiler.

  “I mean, it’s just such a tragic set of circumstances,” he said, sticking nervously to his guns. “There must be some way make an intervention, to break the cycle, to rehabilitate…some of them, at least,” he said. “The children?”

  Hook Nose and Moustache looked up at the ceiling and piously intoned the word intervention. Comb-over exhaled a cloud of smoke from his pipe, then leant through it and jerked his chin at Smiler.

  “In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one.”

  EVERYONE WAS TALKING about the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave appeared at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down them. He raised a finger to his lips, then went around the rooms, turned the music off in one and brought the noise level down in the others, then reappeared at the kitchen end of the hall and unlocked the door that led to the converted garage. Dave had wanted this space to be a den, or a home office; Carmel had argued for a family room, or somewhere she could start one of the business ideas she had had but never pursued; eventually it had become a garage with plasterwork: old computers, a canoe, a cutting machine for dressmaking, a swingball set, a turntable, two VCRs, the kids’ old schoolbooks, Dave and Carmel’s old schoolbooks, you name it. Dave locked the door behind him and found a chair without turning on the light; I sat on a railway trunk in the dark.

  “Thanks for coming, Ed,” he said in a low, anxious voice.

  “I wouldn’
t have missed it. What’s up?”

  “Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger, it’s just—”

  “Sure, I understand. What have you got, Dave?”

  “The latest from the postmortem. Hutton’s body was frozen. It still hadn’t completely thawed out. It means establishing a time of death is much more difficult, maybe impossible. They probably have to mess with entomology, what bugs were frozen when. But that’d take days in normal time: over Christmas in Ireland, it could be March. Both Hutton and Kennedy were killed elsewhere and moved to the scene. Each was strangled by hand: there are scars consistent with fingers digging into the neck; there’s some matter that may be fingernail debris, from which DNA might possibly be extracted, in the event that we ever get ourselves a suspect.”

  “And all of this applies to Jackie Tyrell as well?”

  “Except it seems as if the killer was wearing gloves this time: there are fewer finger tears at the neck. And one more thing. The bags of coins found on Kennedy and Hutton. There was another on Jackie Tyrell’s body. Same kind of bag each time, leather pouch with a drawstring. And there were thirty coins in each, thirty single euro coins. Remember your gospel?”

  “Judas. Thirty pieces of silver. That’s the last thing anyone remembers Patrick Hutton saying: ‘I won’t play the Judas for anyone.’ And the tongues cut out: Does that mean the betrayal lay in telling someone something? In confessing? Or in not speaking up?”

  “Either way, some kind of betrayal.”

  “And now someone is making people pay for that betrayal.”

  I thought of Father Vincent Tyrell kissing me on the mouth this morning. After I’d gotten over the shock, I had thought it seemed at once deliberate and cryptic, a statement I was to interpret—a Judas Kiss?

  “We still have no ID on the body, Ed.”

  “What do they make of the tattoos?”

  “They’ve got hold of a few people from Trinity College, a professor of art history and someone who works in heraldry—they’re both writing up reports. But I don’t see it that way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, a serial killer works at random, right? And then he does something to tie it all together, he only kills young women, or gay men, or whatever. And if he uses symbols or leaves tags, it’s a kind of taunt to the cops: I’m smarter than you. Come and get me if you think you’re good enough.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But in this case, the victims are linked: they’re all connected to a horse race in 1997, to a stable, to a town and to a family. So there’s a different kind of logic going on. It’s like the killer is saying, understand why I’m doing this. I have a plan, and it has a logic, and you better work it out before…”

  Before Miranda Hart is murdered, I thought. But the face I summoned up was not Miranda’s, but Regina Tyrell’s daughter, Karen: I could see her eyes, one blue, one brown, shimmering in the dark.

  “I laid it out for Geraghty, Dave. I gave him enough to connect Kennedy and Jackie Tyrell, which gives him Hutton—not an ID, but at least the lead.”

  “He doesn’t want to see it that way, Ed. He wants his own serial killer, with biblical quotes and runic symbols. And he has enough evidence tending in that direction to ignore anything that doesn’t.”

  “And he lacks a wise senior colleague he trusts who’d be better able to advise him.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What about Vinnie Butler?”

  “They’re running forensics on his van. He denies everything, including even being at the dump, but you’d expect that. My gut tells me no, but you never can tell with the Butlers.”

  “Anything on Don Kennedy?”

  “There was a team trawling through his home office today. They’ve sealed it over Christmas, but I’ve got the key. I’ll slip out tomorrow.”

  “Okay. There’s an industrial school in Tyrellscourt, St. Jude’s, I think it figures in this, too. I’m seeing someone tomorrow about it.”

  “Not your one off the telly? Fuck’s sake, Ed—”

  “What do you want? She’s the expert. And fuck it, you might need the publicity badly this time, when you get the killer and Myles Geraghty insists on taking all the credit.”

  There was a long silence, and I could hear Dave breathing deeply, as if trying to keep a lid on something. When he spoke, it was in a tremulous, quavering voice, as if he was trying to sound happy about something and not making out too well with it.

  “Sadie pegged out in my arms, she’s the only one in the house who still believes in Santa. I made a doll’s house for her, I was up nights most of November building the fucking thing. I always do November off the booze. Good to have something to do then. Otherwise you start noticing all sorts of stuff you wish you hadn’t. But you should have seen her little face tonight, Ed, I swear, looking at them when they sleep…you’d swear there wasn’t a thing astray, not a single thing in the world.”

  Dave did the breathing thing again, then got up and unlocked the door.

  “Better leave it awhile before you go.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks, Dave.”

  I sat in the dark for five or ten minutes, and then I looked out, and saw no one in the hall, and made it to the front door again. I could hear low murmurs from the living room, and I thought I’d make a quick escape, but then I remembered Carmel had taken my coat and put it upstairs, so I went up to get it. As I climbed the stairs, I thought I could hear a noise from the master bedroom. I figured the boys were in there watching TV. I found my coat in one of the boys’ bedrooms. I stepped out onto the landing and the door to the master bedroom flew open and Carmel stood there, panting, her hair all mussed up and her lipstick smeared, and I had an intense flash of my mother in a doorway just like this one, in the house in Quarry Fields that was more like this than not; in the room behind my mother was a man putting on his clothes: the man who killed my father. In the room behind Carmel, who was smiling desperately, even though we both knew there were tears in her eyes, was a man adjusting his shirt: Myles Geraghty.

  I’d parked around the corner near the hotel, and that’s where Carmel caught me up; I could hear her shoes clipping up the road after me; she must have kept her heels on, was the lurid thought, and image, that came unbidden and unwanted into my head. I didn’t want to look at her, but she tugged on my shoulder and spun me around. Her eye makeup had melted into two black smears across eyes prickling with what looked like desperation.

  “Ed, please don’t…it wasn’t what you thought…” she said, the words fading in and out of range on the ebb and flow of her emotion.

  “Don’t dem…all right, Carmel, what was it, then? Are we gonna agree to pretend it wasn’t what we know it was? Don’t—”

  “Don’t demean myself? Is that what you started to say? Having demeaned myself already, I shouldn’t demean myself by lying about it?”

  It was as if I’d hit her; the desperation flared into anger and defiance.

  “That’s about right,” I said.

  She hit me then; she was shaking with rage and unhappiness and she hit me a few times across the cheek, but her heart wasn’t in it, and I grabbed her wrist and hoped she’d subside, but she didn’t; she wrenched it off me as if I had assaulted her.

  “Don’t you judge me. You’re no one to judge me, you fucking…you’ve the morals of a beast in the fields, Ed Loy, you’d fuck your own shadow.”

  “I’m not judging you.”

  “You fucking are. The look on your face—”

  “What do you expect? Dave’s my friend, and you betray him, fine, you’re right, I’m no one to judge, but you could pick your moment, Carmel, and you could pick your man: Jesus, of all people, Myles fucking Geraghty, talk about rubbing a man’s face in it, do you not know what a nightmare he’s made Dave’s life since he joined the Bureau?”

  “No, I don’t know, how would I know? Do you think he talks to me about it? Any of it? Of course he tells you, men only, noble beasts grunt out your pain to each other
, then down the next whiskey and get on with things, don’t tell the little woman, she’d only get upset, or worse, think you were human.”

  “He said if he brought his troubles home, you’d think he was weak.”

  Carmel’s face nearly gave, she looked so hurt; she twisted it into a snarl and a harsh laugh.

  “Weak? Christ, he thinks that of me? And he said it to you? Who’s betraying who, Ed? Who do you think I am, Lady Mac-fucking-beth? Let me tell you about Dave’s mother’s funeral: after the removal, I found him in the garage, crying his eyes out. I went to him, arms out, you know. He backed away from me. He left the house, he drove around, I don’t know where, he came back when I was asleep, that was the last tear he let me see. I’d think he was weak? I’d think he was a human being. It’s got worse since you came back. He thinks you’re…I don’t know what, he’s always sniggering like a teenager about what you get up to…it’s as if he thinks you’re cool, that’s what it is.”

  “I’m not cool.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? Misery knows misery. I see you, Ed Loy. The same fucked-up woman in one guise after another. The booze, the fights. You’re so in love with your own fucking pain, you need to keep the wound fresh and flowing to feel half alive. Don’t take Dave down with you. He’s got like that: the job is everything, but he can’t talk about it, what he goes through, what he suffers, he removes himself from my life, from our lives. Absent. And then he shows up, expecting us to be like a family in a movie, he wants me to fuck him, the kids to adore him. Frolic along the beach with a big furry dog. We don’t even know him.”

  Carmel was shivering, maybe crying. I took off my coat and tried to put it on her shoulders, but she wouldn’t let me. She pushed me away, and then hung on my lapel, her hand on my shoulder. I knew that nothing like this happened for no reason, that making a family wasn’t easy, that Carmel and Dave were very far from the couple I’d idealized. But I’d seen her with Myles Geraghty, and I felt it in my gut, and I couldn’t let it go.