The Price of Blood Read online

  "You were saying you’ve tried to get the local council to sort the problem out," I said.

  "They do clear it up fairly regularly," Annalise said in a tone that suggested her husband was making a fuss about not very much.

  "They clean the estate every week. They clear the space between us and the estate every three months," Leonard said. "And they only take the big items away, there’s always a rake of small stuff left there. And phoning the council, you may as well be talking to the wall. No one ever calls you back, they don’t reply to letters. The whole system is bloody ridiculous."

  "I spoke to a councillor for the Green Party. Monica Burke. She has a son in Sara’s class. She was going to raise it at a council meeting," Annalise said.

  "Monica with the pink jeans and the scary eyebrows? And the mustache? She’s going to get a lot done."

  "She doesn’t have a mustache," said Annalise, trying not to giggle and failing.

  "She christened her son Carson. Carson Burke. For fuck’s sake. Six-year-old kid sounds like a firm of solicitors."

  Annalise laughed, then made a face at her husband, and he made one back, somewhere between a grin and a grimace, and something crackled in the air between them. Their marriage seemed to thrive on tension, the spiky energy of conflict, but it seemed uneasy and sour to me. Sometimes I envied married couples. Not this morning.

  "So what exactly do you want me to do?" I said. "I mean, if it’s people from the estate dumping a bag of bottles after a session, or an old bike, there may not be a great deal anyone can do, even if they’re caught. I can’t see the Guards getting too excited. And what are the council going to do, slap a few fines on them? Kind of people who dump their rubbish in the street are the kind who don’t get too fussed about being fined, they won’t pay them anyway."

  Annalise treated her husband to a told-you-so look and drained her glass. Joe Leonard wasn’t going to be put off though.

  "You know, at this stage, I don’t really care, I just…I mean, one of the consequences of our great property boom is to fling people like us into close proximity with…people like that—"

  "Fucking knackers, you usually call them," Annalise Leonard offered from the fridge, where she was refilling her glass. "Skangers, scobies, scumbags."

  I didn’t want any wine—my head was aching from the sherry Vincent Tyrrell had given me—but it would have been nice if she’d asked. Maybe she’d gotten so used to drinking alone that it didn’t occur to her.

  "I don’t pretend to any great fellow feeling," Leonard said. "Especially not after they broke into our car and took the spare tire, stole Sara’s bike and trashed it and dumped it in our garden, ripped washing off the line and dragged it through dog shit across the way, and burned a car right out in front of our house. But that’s not the point. There are five or six thousand people living in the estate. Walk through there and you’ll see, for every house that has garbage dumped in the front garden, there’s one with fresh paint and flowers planted. How are those people to thrive if they’re being dragged down by the others?"

  "The deserving poor," I said, earning myself an overemphatic "exactly" smile from Annalise. Leonard shrugged, unabashed.

  "Oh, I know, that’s supposed to shut down the argument. But I don’t have a problem with that. I mean, if you can’t clean up after yourself…if someone shits in the street, there’s something wrong with them, we all agree. But people from Michael Davitt Gardens dump their trash in plain sight and we have to put up with it. It isn’t fair."

  "So what do you do? Evict them? They’re council tenants. Where will they go? Into emergency accommodation, where they can do it again? Onto the street?"

  "You have to have some kind of sanction. We have a social one, you know, other people will think we’re pigs if we do it. We’ll think that ourselves. They don’t seem to. But we’ve all got to get along. I wish we didn’t. I wished we lived in a middle-class enclave, like the ones we grew up in. But we don’t."

  For once, Joe Leonard’s wife looked in total agreement with her husband, her wine-flushed face wiped clean of mockery and amusement. Most local authority estates had been built far from where the middle classes lived, back in the days when a teacher or a nurse could buy a semidetached house on a private development, days when their teenage kids viewed the prospect of "ending up" in a semi-d as a fate worse than death. But those days were gone, and young couples on good salaries were now living cheek by jowl with people they used to cross the city to avoid, and they were getting a crash course in the social policies that had left many of those people disaffected and alienated, confined to bleak estates decimated by drug abuse and criminality.

  Still, for all Leonard’s south-county Dublin brashness, at least he was trying to do something positive about it. Many liberals who’d be appalled by his views had the luxury of simply not having to confront the problem: they lived safely in the very enclaves he and his wife came from and dreamed of returning to, semidetached paradise lost. Who knows, if Leonard made it back there, maybe he could afford to be a liberal too.

  "So what do you want, photographs? Video? I can set up a pinhole camera and record the comings and goings across the way."

  "What if they see it? They’ll target us," Annalise said, all irony past.

  "They won’t see it," I said. "It’s about the size of a roll of coins, and it’s wireless. I can hide it in the trellis. Connect a receiver to your VCR, you can record all the comings and goings. You’d need to keep track of the tapes yourselves, unless you want me to move into your living room. But I’ll review them with you, and we can isolate any incidents of dumping where we can make out faces or registration plates or whatever, then have those sections transferred to disc."

  Leonard nodded, his eyes widening.

  "And that would be evidence, like CCTV," he said.

  "Something like," I said. "Chances are the council might recognize faces if they’re council tenants; if it’s kids, we can try the local schools."

  "And then?" Annalise said, her tone skeptical again; already the wine that had briefly lit her up was darkening her mood; her reddening eyes were squinting, as if hurt by the light. "We match a list of names from faces and/or registration plates, we present it to the Guards and the council and then what? We sit back and wait until fuck all happens, that’s what, until a rap on the knuckles is administered. And five minutes later the Butlers or whoever it is’ll be tossing cider bottles out their windows. Or through ours. And we’ll still be here because we can’t afford to fucking move. If it wasn’t for Mummy, we wouldn’t even have been able to buy this house."

  She didn’t have to direct this at Leonard for him to take it like a slap in the face; he blinked hard and grimaced, smarting from the rebuke. When he spoke, it was in that careful, steady, neutral kind of voice people who live with alcoholics often use, the kind of voice it’s difficult to infer any judgment from, however self-loathing the drinker.

  "I don’t know what I’ll do with the list of names. Maybe I’ll take an ad out in the local paper. Maybe I’ll nail it to the church door. I don’t know. What I can’t do is nothing."

  His petite wife rolled her eyes at this, and drained her glass again, and smiled in a knowing way at me, inviting me to join her in her contempt for her husband, and asking, in that pouty, lip-moistening way unhappily married women who drank often had, for something else: not sex, or even the promise of it, but sexual endorsement, the reassurance that I would if she wanted me to, even though we both knew all she really wanted was a good drink. But I didn’t want to give her that or any reassurance: I didn’t like the way she had humiliated Leonard in front of me, and I didn’t like the way she mocked his attempts to better their situation. I didn’t even like the way she drank, and I was no one to talk.

  I had initially thought Joe Leonard was one of those arrogant rugby guys, born to privilege and temporarily light on dough, unable to fathom how a successful school’s rugby career hadn’t led to greater things. But now he seemed more like
one of the also-rans, the lads who cheered the winners from the sidelines, the hangers-on who believed in the dream but couldn’t quite live it themselves. I felt sorry for him, but I liked his spirit.

  I nodded at Leonard, and reached my hand across to him, and he shook it. He looked anxious though, and when I went into the hall he came out after me and shut the kitchen door behind him.

  "I’m worried about money," he said in a low voice.

  "Aren’t we all?" I said.

  "I mean, I don’t know how long this will take, and…well, Christmas is here, and…"

  He stopped, and looked at me, his tired gray eyes enlarged by his glasses, his head bowed in exhaustion and shame. I could have pretended Leonard was what I had thought him to be in the first place and taken the money; the guy he wished he was certainly would have: you don’t get to the top cutting losers a break. He wasn’t that guy though, and neither was I, and even though the only reason I was working this case was for the money, Father Vincent Tyrrell’s cash advance meant I didn’t have to test my conscience too hard.

  "Give me five hundred. You’re going to be running the camera yourself. If it turns out that I need to work full-time on it, we’ll figure something out."

  Leonard nodded, his eyes blinking hard. He gestured toward the kitchen in a you-know-how-it-is way, and I shrugged and nodded, as if most guys I knew were married to women who were drunk by lunchtime. Most guys I knew were drunk by lunchtime themselves, which at least meant they didn’t have to worry anymore about their wives, who in any case had long fled the scene.

  I went out to my car and opened the trunk and got an oil-smeared canvas tool bag that belonged to my father. In it, as well as a bunch of small tools, I had a wireless covert video pinhole camera, a half-dozen nine-volt alkaline batteries, a wireless receiver, a DC adapter for the receiver and some cable to connect it to the VCR. I also took a bag of videotapes, closed the trunk and went back to the Leonard house.

  The trellis was about three inches deep, a crisscross lattice with triangular holes the size of a two-euro coin. The camera was about the size of a one-euro coin, so it was easy enough to fix it into the trellis with the help of some sturdy Virginia creeper, and to wedge a battery in behind it.

  When I went back in the house, Annalise Leonard was sitting at the table with her hand on her brow, shielding her eyes. The small boy was running up and down the kitchen floor around his father’s outstretched legs, all the while chanting something about a super-robot monkey team, if I heard it right. Sara was sitting at the table having a jokey conversation with her mother in which she did all the parts, both telling the jokes and supplying the laughter.

  I went into the living room and set up the receiver and its power adapter, connected it to the VCR after a bit of faffing about (I had to find a junction box to connect two cables together in order to make it work), powered it up, selected a channel on the VCR, broke a tape out of its packaging and put it in the machine and checked the sight lines. I went out and adjusted the angle the camera was at slightly, so it had the widest view of the dumping ground; then I went back inside and talked Leonard through the process.

  "Should I start it now?" he said.

  "Do they dump in broad daylight? Better leave it until night," I said. "The camera batteries last eight hours. I’ll turn it off when I leave; when night falls, turn it on and mark what time it is. And they’re two-hundred-and-forty-minute tapes, so…"

  "I’ll set the alarm for four hours after I’ve gone to bed," he said keenly.

  "You might want to sleep on the sofa," I said.

  Might want to anyway, I thought.

  He walked me to the front door, smiled grimly, as if we were men setting out on a terrifying journey, and presented me with a check.

  "Thank you, Mr. Loy," he said.

  "Thank you," I said. "Your wife said something about the Butlers—are they people you suspect?"

  "They’re the most likely. There’s one family in the estate, about four or five branches of them all told," Leonard said. "They’re notorious around here, always up to something."

  He looked around him furtively before passing a slip of paper to me, as if we were approaching the security check at the airport and the paper was a wrap of coke.

  "Couple of registration numbers I think might be involved. White transit vans both. The second one of them is Vinnie Butler’s."

  As I was walking to my car, a blue BMW pulled up outside the house and a petite, expensive-looking woman in her sixties with short auburn hair and a fur coat got out. She looked out over the council estate with pursed lips, including me in her dismayed sweep, then clipped up the drive of the Leonards’ house. When the door opened, she ignored the children who had run to greet their granny and were frolicking around her legs, instead embracing Annalise and laying her daughter’s head on her shoulder as if she were a wounded bird.

  THREE

  The broken bicycles and trashed stereo systems were strewn around the laneways and greens of Michael Davitt Gardens, a sure sign Christmas was on its way. Some houses had gigantic inflatable Santas and Rudolphs in their tiny gardens; some had flashing lights on their roofs, or tinsel and spray snow decorations in their windows; some were boarded up with bolts on their electricity meters. The pavements were carpeted with dog shit and broken glass; pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers festooned the gates and boundary walls; old trainers and plastic bottles filled with gravel hung on cords lassoed around telephone wires. There was nothing breathing on the street save for a few sullen dogs.

  The two reg plates Leonard had given me were both for white Ford Transit vans; I had already spotted half a dozen on the estate; it was the vehicle of choice for plasterers, roofers, any tradesmen who had to carry a lot of bulky materials around with them, alongside anyone who, strictly speaking, wasn’t a qualified tradesman at all, but who fancied his chances quoting low for a building job, completing half or three-quarters of it badly and then doing a bunk, or robbing your house and driving away with all you own, furniture and appliances included. Their drivers cut you off on the roads, and they let their kids ride up front in the cabin without seat belts, let alone car seats; they felt invincible in their white metal crates and drove accordingly. I didn’t like white Ford Transit vans and now I was parked four doors away from Vinnie Butler’s, trying not to look conspicuous in a forty-two-year-old Volvo with RIP scraped on the hood. I might have been many things, but at least I wasn’t the cops.

  Kids were drifting onto the streets: soon they’d be all over me, or at least, my car; not for the first time, I questioned the stupidity of driving a conversation piece, particularly when I didn’t have any of the lingo: if something went wrong with it, I called Tommy; his telephone number was the extent of my auto know-how. I called Tommy now to see what he knew of the Butlers. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message. Tommy was a reliable guide to the dodgier citizens in south Dublin and north Wicklow, not least because he’d invariably had dodgy business dealings with all of them at one time or another.

  I waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour, reading the same headlines over and over in yesterday’s Irish Times and trying to ignore the three young lads across the way from me playing street hurling with a tennis ball. That’s how I almost missed Vinnie Butler: when the ball smacked off my windshield, I turned to see the lads scarpering around the corner; when I turned back, Vinnie Butler’s Transit van was pulling away from the curb. I pulled out after him, drew up behind the van at the junction that led from the estate out onto the main road, and tailed it onto the N11 and south for a few miles until it turned off past Newtown and headed west toward Roundwood.

  Pine and fir trees flanked the road like troops massing for battle as we drove into the low winter sun’s glare. I kept my distance, and when the white van took a right up a small track with a makeshift signpost reading CHRISTMAS TREES, about a mile or so from the Vartry Reservoir, I kept going until I came to a lay-by maybe three hundred yards farther up the ro
ad but still in sight of the turn. I got out of the car, produced a notebook and a pair of Meade 10 x 25 compact binoculars and made a moderate show of casting about as if I were interested in the wildlife, although nothing wheeled across the skies but magpies and sparrows.

  About twenty minutes later the van piled out of the turn and I caught a brief glimpse of Vinnie Butler: burly, weathered complexion, tiny eyes, close-cropped brown hair. He tossed a fast-food carton and a soft-drink container and the colorful bag they’d come in out the window, flicked a cigarette butt after, anointed the lot with a gob of spit and hauled the Ford Transit back in the direction it had come.

  My phone bleeped: Tommy had left a voice mail. He said, "The Butlers eat their young. They’re a tribe of savages, Ed: cross one and ten’ll come after you. The women are worse than the men, but it’s not always easy to tell them apart. Vinnie is thick as shit, but he’s vicious with it. They’re caught up in any number of feuds over horses, cars, you name it. They sorted the last one out by burning a young one’s face with acid. No amount of money is worth messing with the Butlers. Just walk the fuck away."

  After that, I had little option but to check out what Vinnie Butler had been up to in the woods. The track he had exited led up to the edge of another encampment of fir trees, their serried ranks deepening in hue with the fading winter light, and then weaved back and down toward an old corrugated barn and a set of outbuildings; I couldn’t see a farmhouse, but the fields ahead were fenced and cows and sheep were grazing; I breathed a tumult of manure and aging hay and fermenting compost; in the nearest field, an old blood bay was munching steadily on damp grass. A half-dozen freshly cut fir trees were propped up by the barn. Maybe Vinnie Butler hadn’t come to dump his trash; maybe he had had legitimate business with the farmer; maybe he had come to buy a Christmas tree; after all, he had waited until he got back to the road before he tossed his lunch bag.