The Price of Blood Page 19

  "Sort of, but not quite. In a way, Patrick did exactly what he was told to that day; he just did it too well, too publicly, he brought down too much attention on the sport. And on the fix. In truth, at this stage, F.X. and Leo were pretty much in league. F.X. didn’t feel you could hold a horse like By Your Leave back, it was better to use her as a flagship for the other Tyrrell rides, you know, let her win, to hell with the odds, and let the glory drip through to the other horses in the stable. And Leo agreed. But this particular race, George had a lot of money laid against By Your Leave. So the word came down to hold the horse back."

  "And Hutton rebelled?"

  "Patrick was a hothead. He was a bit of a fucking eejit. In fairness to him, it was never going to be easy, unless you out and out doped the horse, and they’d heard she was going to be drug-tested. But Patrick didn’t even try."

  "Why would F. X. Tyrrell put up with this? What did George Halligan have on F.X.?"

  Miranda grinned, and stubbed her cigarette out in some bacon rind. I stared at this picture, trying to remember where I had seen it before.

  "Leo was a busy boy in those days. F. X. Tyrrell picked him and Patrick from St. Jude’s to be apprentices. And then he wanted extra ser vices. Well, Patrick wasn’t into that. But Leo was."

  "And F.X. was, you’re saying."

  "Oh yeah. Did Jackie not tell you?"

  "She just said it never really happened for them."

  "And that’s the reason. She was probably being loyal. She knew what was going on. Leo and F.X., Leo and Seán Proby, too. And Leo got it all on film. Photographs of F.X. and Leo in some position or other. Shots that wouldn’t look well on pages three to ten of the Sun during Cheltenham week. So F. X. Tyrrell belonged to the Halligans. Still does, I imagine."

  "And so what do you think? Did the Halligans get rid of Hutton for rocking the boat?"

  "I don’t know. They could have. Not because Leo wanted it, but George might have decided to cut him out. Either way, he had become a liability. So the Halligans gave the word that F.X. could cut him loose."

  "So George Halligan controls F. X. Tyrrell?"

  "To a certain extent. I mean, the thing about George is, he’s not stupid. It’s like, if you have a restaurant and you can eat free there. Well, if you go every night, if you bring all your friends, if you take the piss, there’s not going to be any restaurant. So George played it cute, a few scores here and there but nothing that’s going to make the headlines, or push F. X. Tyrrell over the edge."

  "And do you have anything to add to how you parted, you and Hutton?"

  "It was…more emphatic than I told you. On my side, I was so fucking pissed off, we could have had it both ways: we knew what Leo had on F.X., and we knew which races were crooked; plus, we had the Halligans offering to make side deals with us. We had an insurance policy, all we had to do was play it smart."

  Miranda seemed to wake up in the middle of saying this, wake to the realization that it made her sound like a cheap chivvying little piece of work. Again, to her credit, she held her hands up.

  "I imagine this makes me sound pretty bad," she said.

  "I imagine you wouldn’t make yourself sound like that if it wasn’t true."

  "It’s just, it was hard to draw the line. If a jockey pulls a ride for his own trainer, why is that better than pulling it for a gangster? It’s the same thing, just a question of degree. And if you get more money from the gangster, and if your trainer is already in league with him…"

  She shrugged, and flicked her hair, and pouted the way she did, and I could feel my heart breaking. I’d built her into a princess, and she was just a tramp on the make. Merry Christmas, Edward Loy.

  "Ask me anything else, please. I really want to…to set the record straight, Ed."

  She looked at me, unblinking, as if nothing had changed. And maybe nothing had. Maybe Carmel Donnelly was right, and I had fallen for another fucked-up woman I couldn’t possibly have, or didn’t want in the first place. I still didn’t want to believe that. And I tried not to, right up until she heard me ask the next question.

  "Did you ever come across a guy called Terry Folan? Bomber, most people call him."

  "No," she lied, so quickly I almost didn’t hear her. "No, I don’t…I don’t think so, I…or maybe…Bomber Folan, that rings a bell…"

  She said a lot more in that vein, until she arrived at the lie she was happy with: that she vaguely remembered him riding for F.X., and that he could have been around afterward, hanging out with Leo in McGoldrick’s. At that stage, I was on my feet. I told her I had to go, I had to meet someone, and she asked me if I’d make it up to Tommy’s for the Christmas dinner she was going to cook today, and I said I wouldn’t miss it, and she kissed me and held me in the way you would if you loved him, or if you wanted him to love you, and again I tried to believe in her, and got my coat, and just when we were at the door she asked me if I still had the photograph of Patrick Hutton she gave me. It was the only one she had. No, it wasn’t that, it was quite special to her, in a way she didn’t want to tell me. Or wouldn’t. Or hadn’t made up yet. I said I didn’t have it anymore. I don’t know if she believed me, or pretended to believe me. I pretended I didn’t care anymore. I left her at Tommy’s, looking so beautiful and so forlorn I couldn’t bear the sight of her. I think she knew what had happened; she couldn’t figure out how. I wasn’t sure I could either. I just knew that the next time we met, we’d be on opposite sides. You think you’re never going to fall in love with anyone again, and sometimes the only way you know you did is because she’s just broken your heart.

  At Tommy’s doorstep, after I’d said I wouldn’t come in, and she said it was a sin to waste all that food, that she’d been looking forward to spending the day with me, and I looked at the ground as if that was any kind of answer, and she nodded, and suddenly there was fear in her eyes, real terror, and she looked as if she was about to howl with it.

  "I can’t tell you any more," she said.

  "You know more than you’re telling me."

  Her eyes welled up with tears, her beautiful eyes.

  "I can’t…it’s not my fault…I’m sorry, but I just can’t…"

  I shook my stupid head.

  "Well, I’m sorry too, but neither can I."

  I waited down the road from Tommy’s until the taxi arrived to pick her up, and I tailed it until I was sure she was on her way back to Riverside Village. Then I drove to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, and found Tommy in the sacristy and took him through what I thought had happened.

  "Who’s going to cook our Christmas dinner then?" he said, which was better than "I told you so," but not much.

  I called Regina Tyrrell and apologized for not having been in touch, and checked that she still wanted an extra man.

  "Do you think we need one?"

  "I think you do, yes."

  I quoted her a price for Tommy and Regina agreed to it while he looked goggle-eyed at me.

  "Time you took yourself seriously," I told him.

  "You first," he said.

  I gave Tommy the key to my house and asked him to pack some surveillance equipment in the boot of his mother’s car before he left for Tyrrellscourt. Then I gave him Leo Halligan’s Glock 17. He flashed a look toward the door to the church, then stowed the gun beneath his cassock and nodded gravely to me, as if to say he appreciated the trust I was showing in him. I didn’t tell him I had no other option.

  When I left the sacristy I saw Vincent Tyrrell watching me from the altar; he seemed insubstantial to me, like a wraith; I wondered if I’d see him alive again.

  WHILE I WAITED on the pier for Proby, I called Jim Morgan, a cardiologist I’d worked with on the Howard case. Once he’d gotten over his dismay at being phoned on Christmas Day, and once we’d established that eyes were not his area, he listened to my description of Karen Tyrrell’s eyes, and suggested that it was possibly a condition known as heterochromia, that it was possibly genetic, and that if I want
ed to move beyond the possible, I should find an opthalmologist and spoil his Christmas lunch.

  Jack Proby was about my age, skinny and tall with boyish floppy hair in a seventies center parting and a seventies mustache to match and a mouth full of teeth that wouldn’t’ve shamed a pony and acne scars on his long face. He stood at the start of the West Pier in a fawn cashmere coat over a navy suit and tan Italian shoes, looking like a hotel lobby was his idea of out in the open. The wind off the sea was cold enough to give me second thoughts too.

  "The Royal Seafield know me," Proby said. "We can get in out of this."

  The Royal Seafield was a Victorian seafront hotel of indifferent quality, but they did know Jack Proby, and admitted him even though the hotel was open only to residents, which is how I found myself drinking a large Jameson in a bar on Christmas Day, apart from Good Friday the only day of the year you cannot get served a drink in Ireland. Proby drank the same.

  "How’s it looking for you at Leopardstown tomorrow?" I said.

  "What the fuck do you care?" Proby said. "Business, friend." His accent was educated northside, lazy and drawling; his voice was hoarse as a rule: it sounded like someone had cut him. I looked for a scar, but he wore his collar high.

  "All right: Are you still tied to the Halligans because of what they’ve got on your old man?"

  "What have they got?"

  "Photos of him and Leo Halligan. Photos his family wouldn’t like to see. Let alone the great Irish public."

  Jack Proby suddenly looked like his collar was a size too small for him; he worked his neck around and blinked his eyes and sniffed.

  "What is this? Is this blackmail, friend? ’Cause I tell you, if it is—"

  "It isn’t. It’s tell me what I want to know and don’t be a fucking prick."

  "Because I know some important people in this town—"

  "See, you’ve won already. The only important people I get to meet hire me to clean up the mess they make because they spent too much time with corrupt moneygrubbing scumbags like you. And afterward, they don’t want to know me. The feeling’s mutual, mind. Believe me, I’ve places I’d rather be today and all. Anywhere tops the list."

  Proby, calculating I’d got the market in aggressiveness tied up for the moment, nodded his consent, as if to a waiter.

  "All right," I said. "To be honest, I don’t much care if you’re feeding the Halligans tips or if they’re feeding you the inside on Tyrrellscourt horses—"

  "George Halligan is a legitimate player now, friend, he has horses in half a dozen stables, not just F. X. Tyrrell’s."

  "That’s what makes our system so great, isn’t it? Any murdering drug-dealing scum-sucking savage can call himself an entrepreneur and be forgiven. Business washes us all clean. But I’m not one of the ruthless boys in a hurry, impatient to get on with making and building and storing up wealth for the winter months. I’m one of the laggards, the stick-in-the-muds who are always looking back, endlessly worrying about some sticky little detail everyone else is too busy going forward to be bothered with."

  Proby looked at me as if the whiskey had gone to my head. Maybe it had. Get a refund if it hadn’t. Proby signaled to the waiter for more. I shook my head, but he pointed to himself. He leant forward, all confidential.

  "Look, I’m not proud of the life I led for a stretch there, in the late nineties…I ran with a pretty wild crowd…did a bit of this and that…but I swear, I was never a pimp."

  "I know."

  "You know?"

  "Miranda told me. Mind you, she tends to lie."

  The waiter brought Proby his second whiskey and he drank half of it back in one, and within seconds, seemed to turn into himself. He was that kind of drinker.

  "She’s not lying about that. We were both strung out for a while…I came out of a failed marriage, and she, well, there was the whole Patrick Hutton thing, you know? She was still freaking out about all that. But it was, it started off as, just a great time down there, party town, coke, champagne, all this bread, and I was doing some work for the old man, but it was so easy to keep George Halligan sweet. We had enough of the jockeys to spread the fixes to lay it so the betting patterns were never noticed. It was a fucking operation. Coining it. Beautiful, so it was. And then came heroin."

  "Whose idea was that?"

  "I don’t remember. Because I asked myself that, like with some mad fucking bird you wake up with, you know, retrace your steps, locate the fatal moment, don’t do this at home, kids. But I can’t…eventually it was that ponytail guy who ended up barman in McGoldrick’s, unbelievable, only in Tyrrellscourt would a smack dealer be taken on as head barman, what’s this his name was?"

  "Steno?"

  "Steno, the very fellow. Anyway, we got into it, and after a while, you start running low on readies, no matter who you are, drugs cost a lot of bread, so Miranda decides to sell her stuff. I didn’t like it, I argued against it, I was supposed to be her boyfriend, for fuck’s sake, but…I was out of it anyway. What was I gonna do?"

  Proby shrugged and finished his whiskey and immediately waved up two more.

  "And why do you think, was there any other reason for her to get into heroin? Apart from it being there?"

  "I think…well, I think after the whole thing with the baby, she found it hard to get back on track."

  "What baby?"

  "She had a kid…I can’t really remember the order of events back then…but she had a kid and gave it up for adoption…would it have been before Hutton took off? Or afterward? I think afterward, yeah, that’s why she gave it up, because he took off."

  Proby nodded stupidly, already drunk. He beamed as the fresh drinks arrived. I still had half of my first.

  "Weird to do something like that in 1997, ’98," I said. "Lots of women raising kids on their own then."

  "Not Miranda. Not her scene at all," Proby said.

  "And you don’t know who were the adoptive parents?"

  He shook his head, then held a finger up.

  "Tell you what I do remember. Who introduced smack to the Tyrrellscourt scene."

  "Who?" I said.

  "Patrick Hutton!" he said delightedly.

  "Patrick Hutton vanished after By Your Leave was put down at Thurles. Before Christmas 1996."

  "Oh no. No he didn’t. No, he was around, because he was around when the kid was born, except he was smacked out of it then. Wasn’t racing, wasn’t anything, just…hanging around town for it. And after that he disappeared. Kaput! I don’t know if they were still happy families, but I remember the three of them being around. And then it was just Miranda."

  Proby nodded, seemingly relieved to have sorted that out. I took out the photograph Miranda had given me and showed it to Proby.

  "Patrick Hutton," I said.

  "Patrick Hutton," he said. Then he peered at the photograph again.

  "Except, that isn’t Patrick Hutton."

  "I’m sorry."

  "That isn’t Patrick Hutton. That’s the other guy."

  "What other guy?" I said, but his name was on my lips, had been from the moment Miranda asked for the photograph back.

  "The jockey F.X. got in to replace Hutton. Only he didn’t last long. He lost it completely, became a kind of wino. Bomber, they called him."

  I could have prompted him, but I waited. He was the kind of drunk whose wits accumulate as the spirit level rises. He studied the photograph again, then lifted his weak face in triumph.

  "Terry Folan," he said. "Terry ’Bomber’ Folan. One for the road? Come on, it’s Christmas."

  IN MY CAR, I called Miranda Hart on her mobile and landline and left remorseful messages on each; the trip to Martha O’Connor’s place took me past Riverside Village but there was no one home and the Porsche was gone. I stood by my car and swore quietly. If the body I had thought was Patrick Hutton was Bomber Folan—and I had been led to believe that by the photograph Miranda Hart gave me—then there was a good chance Bomber Folan was really Hutton, and either Miranda Hart was in
league with him, or she was in his power. Bomber/Hutton was obviously a disturbed individual; if he was responsible for the killings so far, it was clear he had some kind of plan; it was entirely possible Miranda had been drawn into this plan out of fear, either for her own safety, or the safety of someone she prized. Jack Proby had told me Miranda had had a baby, with or without Hutton: that child would be about nine or ten now, and might well look like the girl Regina Tyrrell was raising as her own; I had thought Regina was Miranda’s mother, they looked so alike; equally Karen Tyrrell could be Miranda Hart’s daughter. Was Bomber/Hutton threatening Miranda’s child in order to make her an accomplice to the murders? It was all guesswork at this stage. I called Tommy and left a message on his voice mail asking him to set up surveillance on Bomber Folan/Patrick Hutton when he got established at Tyrrellscourt. Then I got back on the road.

  NINETEEN

  Martha O’Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house on Bachelor’s Walk on the North Quays, within sight of O’Connell Bridge. There was an antiques store on the ground floor, and a hotel named after an American military cemetery next door, and African immigrants pushing children in buggies on the streets and on the riverside boardwalk; I wondered if the rare pleasure of having the streets to themselves on Christmas Day compensated for the harsh winds whipping in off the Liffey. An Internet café with cheap dialing rates for Africa and Eastern Europe was open down toward the Ha’penny Bridge. When I left Dublin in the early eighties, this stretch of the quays looked like a disused set from a Hollywood studio, the false fronts of a western ghost town; now it was peopled and dressed and animated; even on Christmas Day, it exuded the kinetic energy of a living city. It was bloody freezing though, and I leant on the bell for far too long until I heard Martha O’Connor’s voice.

  "Sorry, Messiah on full," she trilled in her Oxford-inflected tones.

  Martha O’Connor had silky short hair like an English public schoolboy; her long fringe hung in her eyes, which were free of makeup, as was the rest of her pretty, youthful face; she typically wore what she was wearing today: jeans and a baggy jumper or sweatshirt which covered up as much as it possibly could; big-boned and wide-hipped, she carried more weight than she looked happy with; to my eyes she always carried it off well. I had never been in her apartment before, and admired it as she brought me into the front room whose three great sash windows looked out over the Liffey and south across the city to the snowcapped Dublin mountains; the wall to the rear had been knocked through, as had the kitchen partition, so that the entire floor made one great open-plan living space. The period plasterwork on the high ceilings was intact, but the furniture and decor was spare and modern.