The Price of Blood Read online

  FOURTH RACE: 2:00—Handicap Hurdle for Four years old and upward

  FIFTH RACE: 2:35—Novice Steeplechase for Four years old

  SIXTH RACE: 3:10—Handicap Steeplechase for Four years old and upward

  SEVENTH RACE: 3:40—Flat Race for Four-year-old colts and geldings only

  Each column had a list of the runners and riders drawn up like a race card, with owner, trainer and form recorded; even the jockeys’ silks had been drawn in a variety of inks. Tyrrell had a series of colored pencils with which he was making what I assumed were preliminary selections; he’d compare this with a form book he had compiled himself, a black hardback journal filled with figures and swollen with clippings from newspapers and racing journals. It was the first time I’d really understood what an exile he felt himself to be: this was more than a hobby or a passion, this was the liturgy of a lifetime calling, a vocation, as Regina had seen it in F. X. Tyrrell. F.X. had been chosen, but Vincent, the younger, had felt the call too.

  "Any tips for tomorrow?" I said.

  "The big trainers have good selections running," Tyrrell said coldly, like a cartoon Englishman talking to a foreigner. "Noel Meade, Dessie Hughes, Eoin Griffin."

  "F. X. Tyrrell."

  "Indeed. And I think the worst we’ll get is sleet, so the form book will be a reliable guide," he said, caressing the black-bound volume like it was holy writ.

  "Did you ever…I wonder, when you were back in Tyrrellscourt in the nineties, did you ever get the urge to train yourself? Did you get out among the horses? Watch the morning work? Or did F.X. not want you interfering?"

  Vincent Tyrrell stared hard at me through icy blue eyes and I had to stand firm not to be reduced to a shivering ten-year-old in line for a thrashing.

  "It seems to me, Edward Loy, that since I hired you, I should be able to fire you. You’ve been paid more than generously, and I don’t want any of the money back. I think it would be best for all concerned if you’d kindly just fuck off."

  I had often wondered if the word fuck would ever acquire force again; Father Vincent Tyrrell had just imbued it with some. Not that I was going to let him know that.

  "But I’ve come to report," I said. "You’re my client, yet you don’t seem remotely interested in how the case is going. You had affairs to set in order, and the main one was Patrick Hutton. Well, the good news is, I think I’ve found him."

  Vincent Tyrrell almost smiled. That was usual with him, the almost: his smile always looked as much like it was congratulating himself on his superior intelligence or his steely detachment from the little people or his conviction that whatever you were going to say, it couldn’t possibly surprise him, as it did like a smile. Once again, I wanted to wipe that smile off his face.

  "He was on a dump near Roundwood, and I had identified him to my satisfaction, and it was only a matter of time before the Guards ID’d him too. At least, that was what I thought. But of course, I turned out to be completely wrong: that wasn’t Patrick Hutton at all. It was someone called Terence Folan, who was a jockey at Tyrrellscourt, too; indeed he took over when Hutton was sacked by your brother. He was at St. Jude’s as well: who knows, perhaps you picked him out for F.X. I’m not really sure how that side of it was handled, but it must have been very difficult to turn a blind eye. Patrick Hutton, alive. Have you known all along?"

  "She said—" he started to say, and then stopped. His eyes flickered across the table, and my mind went back to the first time I saw it, with the remnants of three breakfast plates. One of them had had two cigarette butts stubbed out in bacon rind. I flashed on Miranda Hart in my kitchen this morning, stubbing her cigarette out in her half-eaten breakfast, and in that instant, I knew she had been the other breakfast guest, along with Leo Halligan. Her elaborate fear of Vincent Tyrrell must have been, in part at least, a charade.

  "She said what? That Hutton was dead? Or gone? That it would be safe? You knew people were being slain. Two men. Your brother’s ex-wife? Did it not matter to you? What did Miranda Hart tell you?"

  He shook his head.

  "Tell me about St. Jude’s, Father Tyrrell. You must have known what was going on there. I think I was in your room. The red one, with the Sacred Heart, and the Poussin Last Supper. That’s a tasteful atmosphere in which to rape a teenager. Did you do it yourself, or did you let F.X. come in and sample the wares?"

  "I’m not going to rise to this."

  "What did you think you were going to achieve by digging all this up? What did Miranda Hart promise you? That everything could be buried? Or was it not her idea? Maybe she didn’t have any choice in the matter. Yes, that’s more like it: Patrick Hutton was back, and he had a plan. I don’t know what that plan is. Maybe none of us does. We’ve seen what the first three installments are, but the rest of it? Who can say?"

  "Have you seen him?" Tyrrell asked quietly.

  "Yes, I think I have."

  "How…how does he look?"

  "He looks…like he’s suffered a lot. He looks quite mad."

  "Mary…Miranda…God help the poor child…she feels loyal to the creature…"

  I didn’t expect Vincent Tyrrell to astonish me, but spontaneous compassion for a fellow human being was enough to do it.

  "There are a lot of questions you could answer," I said. "Is Regina Miranda’s mother? Is Karen Tyrrell Miranda’s child? Was Patrick Hutton the father of that child?"

  "Why is any of that any of your business?"

  "I think you know why. And to know and do nothing makes you just as guilty."

  Tyrrell ran his fingers over his Leopardstown chart.

  "See here, the third race. Francis has Bottle of Red running, she’s a fine filly, but her rider will be lucky to make it. Fillies are allowed an extra five pounds over the ten-stone-nine, but Barry Dorgan is a greedy little boy, I remember him from St. Jude’s distinctly, round face full of sweets, a smiler and a crybaby. Francis has persisted with Dorgan, but to my mind it’s a sentimental attachment that has no place in the game: it’s unfair to the punters, it’s unfair to the horse and it’s unfair to the sport."

  "A sentimental attachment."

  "Dorgan has a plump wife and two plump babies. I think Francis is simply fond of the boy."

  "Like a son."

  "Well, perhaps. I wouldn’t know about that."

  "Neither would he. You don’t deny that F. X. Tyrrell had sexual relationships with boys from St. Jude’s?"

  "I wouldn’t deny that he had an unfortunate relationship with young Halligan, which has brought nothing but complications upon his shoulders. I wouldn’t deny that. As to the others: I really couldn’t say."

  "Couldn’t or wouldn’t?"

  "It all amounts to the same thing. It will come out eventually, I have no doubt. Bottle of Red, that would be my strongest tip for St. Stephen’s Day. The uncertainty about the rider has seen the odds drift satisfactorily; I’d say you could get it for nine to two, even five to one if you were up early. I imagine you get up early, Edward Loy."

  "Patrick Hutton—the man I believe to be Patrick Hutton—gave the strong impression that he had been raped, in that room at St. Jude’s—it was your room, wasn’t it?"

  Tyrrell shrugged and nodded.

  "He made it clear he had been blindfolded, that he hadn’t seen his rapist."

  "Perhaps it wasn’t rape. Perhaps it was consensual, and now he’s decided to cavort as if it wasn’t."

  "Cavort?"

  "Hutton and young Halligan were…well, they were about to be expelled for indecent conduct. I thought Hutton would fare well in the stables, I thought he had the makings of a jockey. I knew F.X. liked the look of him. And Leo…Leo was part of the deal. For Hutton and, eventually, for Francis. To the ultimate cost of each."

  "Two of the care staff at St. Jude’s were known abusers."

  "Have you been talking to your burly lesbian friend again? No charges were ever laid, no case was ever brought. I’ve always found it curious, these liberals, they have a very illiberal concep
t of justice: they seem ready to destroy a person’s life on the basis of one accusation."

  All of this came from the side of his mouth as he pored over his chart. I had rattled him, but not nearly enough. I put my coat on and joined him at the table.

  "When we spoke last, you talked about By Your Leave. Said it was something of a freak. What did you mean by that?"

  "I told you to ask someone who knew."

  "I did. I asked your brother. He said he’d stick to his discipline and you should stick to yours."

  Tyrrell didn’t flinch.

  "Martha O’Connor—you know, the burly lesbian you’re so fond of—her documentary about St. Jude’s was halted because nobody wanted to speak ill of F. X. Tyrrell. I don’t think anyone has the same sensitivity when it comes to his estranged brother, the Catholic priest. Maybe you are dying of cancer. You’re not dead yet. I could make your last days here a misery. Given the degree to which, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve obstructed this case—Jackie Tyrrell might be alive were it not for you—all because of your bullshit about what you know being told to you in confession."

  "But it was," Tyrrell said. "It’s not bullshit at all. That part of it is God’s truth."

  He leant his hands on the chart.

  "Very well. See here."

  He pointed to Bottle of Red.

  "Below the name of every horse, there’s a list with the year of foaling, color, sex, and then the name of sire and dam. That’s the horse’s father and mother. Bottle of Red is by Dark Star out of No Regrets. Now, Francis went through a phase of experimenting with extremely close breeding. That means mating between parents and offspring, or siblings. Siblings are the most volatile in any pedigree breeding, and you have to use the very finest mares and stallions, but even then, it’s discounted for everything except genetic research purposes: to breed out abnormalities, say, or uncover hidden gene types."

  "And are Dark Star and No Regrets brother and sister?"

  "Oh Lord, no. No, Francis has stopped all that. Or it was stopped for him."

  "With By Your Leave. A thing of beauty, like a Grecian urn."

  "What?"

  "You said By Your Leave was all we know on earth, and all we need to know. Keats. ’Ode on a Grecian Urn.’"

  "I didn’t think you’d get that reference."

  "Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being."

  "That’s right, and that’s where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it."

  "The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?"

  "Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination."

  CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy’s house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.

  In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn’t have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.

  "Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin," I said.

  Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.

  "You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They’re fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail."

  "Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?"

  "The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail."

  Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had BARRINGTON INVESTIGATIONS as its heading.

  I began to read.

  POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.

  1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99

  Inteviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner’s Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.

  SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD’S REPORT

  (DOCUMENT I (a)).

  I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.

  "Did anyone see him?" I said.

  "No," he said. "But that doesn’t undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too."

  "Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?"

  "No, actually."

  "You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn’t get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?"

  "In a way."

  Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I’d been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn’t felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.

  "See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it’s from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement."

  Dave rustled through the paper.

  "The payments begin about two years back."

  "When he searched for Hutton."

  "So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out."

  Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn’t contain himself; he looked like a children’s entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.

  "I don’t know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn’t spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise," Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother’s name I expected, Tyrrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not F for female, not Mary, later to be known as Miranda, but M for male: the child was a boy, born on the second of November, 1976, and his Christian names were P
atrick Francis.

  PART III

  ST. STEPHEN’S DAY

  FERDINAND: Strangling is a very quiet death.

  DUCHESS: I’ll tell thee a miracle;

  I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:

  Th’ heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass,

  The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

  I am acquainted with sad misery,

  As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar;

  Necessity makes me suffer constantly,

  And custom makes it easy.

  —John Webster,

  The Duchess of Malfi

  TWENTY-ONE

  I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.

  "I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…"

  "I’m not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you’re welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?"

  Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.

  "They think I’m working. Emergency shift. It’s not unusual."

  "And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?"

  "No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me."

  I couldn’t see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn’t have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?

  "Maybe you should go back there," I said. "You don’t want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her."

  "Carmel doesn’t need me," Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.