The Dying Breed Read online

  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 road 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 colourful 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 ageing 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.

  I turned and drove slowly back around, stopping when I reached a five-bar gate that opened onto a clearing wide enough to let a van drive through the forest; it was recessed at a sharp angle from the track and concealed by a modest platoon of pines; I had missed it completely on my way up, and I spotted it now only because I was looking for it—and because a white refuse sack clung to one of the trees. I tucked the Volvo behind the pines and climbed over the gate, which was padlocked and chained.

  Well-worn tire tracks sparkled bright as metal in the hard earth as I walked through the forest. Pine resin initially chased away the farmyard aroma; after about ten minutes the fresh smell receded; by the time I reached the dump, I’d’ve cheerfully stuck my head in a compost heap rather than breathe the rank air that surrounded it. A hole about thirty feet in diameter had been dug and the earth banked up the sides; piled high within were bags of domestic waste: rotting food, soiled nappies, detergent and bleach and paint. A halo of flies hovered above the garbage, humming, and there was the rustle and snap of foraging birds and rats; great crows hung in the nearby trees.

  On the far side, I could see the gleam of the reservoir water, and was drawn toward it. The edge of the dump was no more than fifteen feet from the shore. The reservoir supplied a substantial portion of the city’s water. At least I’d have something for Joe Leonard that no council official or Guard could ignore. I took a few photographs and then climbed up the bank nearest the water to see if I could find some personal traces among the trash: a utility bill or two would be enough to nail at least some of the people involved.

  I put on the surgical gloves I always carry and a set of shoe covers I’d packed because I figured the job might get dirty. I waved a scum of flies away and selected the driest-looking bag I could see, which was full of old magazines, and pulled it to one side and uncovered a bag of cast-off clothes, most of them children’s; mixed in were a few broken plastic toys and two empty vodka bottles. Beside that I could see the top of a bag of shoes.

  I reached down and tugged on the top shoe, thinking as I did, What’s the point of this? What are you going to find out from an old shoe? Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the same make I favoured; I could tell from the sole, barely worn, the mark still clear: Church’s English Shoes. Not the same shoe; I wore black wing tips, this had a buckle, and it was burgundy, a Blenheim, I thought, no, a Beckett, the last thought before my hand tugged on the shoe and what was in the shoe, and what was in the shoe gave against my hand. I flinched and yelled out and snapped my hand back as if I’d just tugged on a live rat, and I tumbled down the banked side of the dump and let gravity take me to the shore of the reservoir. I could hear the water lapping gently, as if that could distract me from what I’d just disturbed: not a rat, a foot, visible from where I stood, a foot attached to a man’s corduroy-clad leg, protruding from the mound of garbage and then slowly collapsing, like a guttered-out candle subsiding into a ruined cake.

  All I could hear now was my blood pounding out a funeral rhythm in my brain, and through the beats a calm, measured voice that said: “Call the Guards. Wait until they get here. Explain what you were doing. Tell them everything. All will be well.” What the voice said made sense, but I didn’t listen. It didn’t sound like me.

  The victim was a well—or at least, expensively—dressed man, unusually lean and wiry, about five foot three, with a weather-beaten face and blond hair, possibly dyed, aged anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. He wore a kind of gentleman-farmer costume: rust-coloured corduroys, olive-green sleeveless pullover, small-check shirt, brown wool sport coat. He’d been here—or dead, at any rate—at least two days, but not much longer: rigor had departed the body, but there was no sign of the abdominal staining or distension associated with further putrefaction. And there was no sign so far that the rats or birds had got to him. He’d been strangled, possibly by a ligature and by hand: there was a clear furrow around his neck, but a mess of bruising also; his eyes had been closed and it looked as if his mouth had been cleaned: there were no bloodstains. If I had to guess, I’d’ve said he’d been murdered elsewhere and the body had been dumped here within the last few hours—or possibly the last few minutes, courtesy of my friend in the white Transit van. I found four further things of note. The first three were a tattoo, a shredded slip of paper that looked like a betting slip and a small leather pouch full of coins. The fourth thing gave me such a fright I found myself back at the water’s edge again, gasping for breath, the air cold in my pounding chest.

  I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children’s clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal contact. I went down and pulled grass and weeds and offered them from my hand; the horse feasted eagerly, steam rising from her coat like brea
th in the cold air; I inhaled her deep, musky smell, let her old teeth gnaw my outstretched palm, relished every snort and whinny. When I withdrew from the gate, and she realized there was nothing more to come, she wheeled around and took off back to her spot at the bottom of the field, the clump of her hooves on the hard winter grass like mountain thunder, thrilling to the ear.

  Still shaken, I drove fast out of the forest of pines and down to the road and back onto the N11 and stopped off at the first pub I came to. It was a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet. A rough-looking Sunday-afternoon crowd of all ages was resentfully half watching an English Premiership game that could have been of little real interest to them, Wigan and Reading, perhaps, or Bolton and Portsmouth, the adults all drunk and surly, the kids bored and restless; the remnants of seasonal turkey-and-ham lunches littered the tables amid the full and empty glasses. It wasn’t a very nice place, but I was very glad to be there, among the living.

  I ordered a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness and a turkey-and-ham sandwich and found a quiet corner with a view of the car park and no view of a TV screen, and while I drank the whiskey with a little water, I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I had seen. Then I rang Dave Donnelly and told him some of it, including the need to get someone onto Vinnie Butler urgently. I told him it looked like the body had been killed elsewhere, then cleaned up and moved to the scene. I didn’t tell him I had moved the body and I didn’t tell him I had searched it, although I knew he’d assume I had. I didn’t tell him about the tattoo either—he’d find out about that when the crime scene unit examined the body. The tattoo was on the man’s left forearm: two symbols recently, and amateurishly, carved; they’d barely scabbed over. One resembled a crucifix, the other looked like the ancient Greek letter omega: † ?

  Dave went through the motions of reefing me out of it for not staying with the body until the scene had been secured, but his heart didn’t seem in it: I guess from his point of view, having me connected with the murder would be an inconvenience. I needed to be free to dig for the scraps he’d need in working the case; in return, he’d feed me what he could, and look the other way when I stepped outside the law, provided I didn’t do it in too visible a way. In case I didn’t understand the latter point, Dave signed off on it.

  “Just don’t get that O’Connor woman involved, all right Ed? Thought you had more sense than to trust a fucking journalist.”

  “Sure about that, Dave? Far as I can remember, the way she wrote you up on the Howard case was one of the main reasons you got your big promotion to the Bureau.”

  “Your memory’s playing tricks with you then, Ed. Knock off the gargle and cop onto yourself, would you?”

  You couldn’t slam a mobile phone down, but Dave ended the call so abruptly that it felt like that’s what he’d done.

  The other thing I didn’t tell Dave about was the shredded betting slip I’d found stuck inside the corpse’s trouser pocket, as if it had been through the wash. I prised it out and bagged it and pieced it together now. It had a mobile number written on it, faded but legible. I rang the number, and a hoarse male voice answered.

  “What can I do you for, friend?”

  There was a hubbub of voices in the background, and the rasp of a P.A. saying, “Winner all right. Winner all right.”

  “Was that the last race?” I said.

  “That’s the last done now, friend,” the man said. “All off-course accounts to be settled in the morning.”

  “Did Fish on Friday place?”

  “Did she what?”

  He barked out a loud, derisive laugh.

  “Best guess is she’s still out there, friend. Maybe she’ll be home for Christmas. Would you like to bet on it?”

  I ended the call. Fish on Friday was one of George Halligan’s horses, running at Gowran Park. The dead man had the mobile number of a bookie at the same race meeting in his trouser pocket. And when I’d held his face, back in the forest, his jaw had hung open, and his mouth gaped red down his throat, and I saw the last thing I decided not to tell Detective Inspector Donnelly. His tongue had been cut out.

  FOUR

  I had another large Jameson before I left the pub, but it didn’t do a lot to get the chill out of my bones. By the time I reached Michael Davitt Gardens, there were marked and unmarked Garda cars flanking the white Ford Transit van; kids climbed on walls and shinned up lampposts and neighbours stood in their doorways and gardens and watched as the crop-haired driver with the red face was led into a squad car. I drove on and parked around the other side of the estate, across the road from the closed gates of the Leonard house. The blue BMW was still parked outside. I called Joe Leonard on his mobile and he came out and sat in my car and I gave him a potted account of what had happened, up to the arrest of Vinnie Butler. Part of me felt relieved, as if the discovery in the woods had restored pride and dignity to us both: a trivial litter problem had become, or was at least on nodding terms with, a murder case. I don’t think Leonard saw it that way.

  “If they charge him for murder, will they let the dumping offences slide?” he said.

  I looked to see if he was serious. He was: deadly.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Well, in that case, I’ll keep the camera rolling, Mr. Loy. You’ll keep me posted if there are any developments, won’t you?”

  I said I would, and he got out of the car and crossed as far as the BMW, stroked the blue hood with his hand, then came back and leaned into my window.

  “I know you didn’t see us at our best this morning,” he said quietly, blushing and looking back quickly and furtively at the upstairs windows of his house, as if his wife and her mother might appear in one of them to spy on him, characters all in a not terribly comic opera.

  “It’s just that I…I had a run of bad luck a few years back…a dot-com start-up, and…and we lost our house, repossession, right when the boom was taking off…and, well, it’s been hard getting started again…the kids were so young when it happened. And Annalise was pretty angry…still is, really, don’t suppose you can blame her, I asked her to trust me…we lost so much. We’d be sitting on a lot of equity now, instead of…”

  He gestured around at his surroundings. I made a face intended to suggest that these kinds of things happened (which they did) and that often it was no fault of the person to whom they happened (which it wasn’t) and that I was sure nothing but good would come of it eventually (which it might). I caught sight of my expression in the rearview mirror. It didn’t reassure me. But Leonard didn’t notice, or didn’t mind; he simply wanted me to hear him out. I nodded and shrugged in a what-can-you-do sort of way, and he thanked me—for what, I couldn’t tell—and straightened up and shook my hand and crossed the road, stopping to stroke the hood of the BMW again as he passed.

  ACCORDING TO FATHER Vincent Tyrell, Patrick Hutton’s last known address was a town house in Riverside Village, a private estate by the Dodder River in Sandymount. Before I left the pub I had tried the two Patrick Huttons I could find in the phone book. One was a plasterer; the other was the senior executive solicitor at South Dublin County Council. Neither had been a jockey; the plasterer sounded amused at the suggestion, the solicitor mysteriously outraged, as if I’d accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ. Now I was driving north toward the city, the roads clogged with traffic on the last shopping Sunday before Christmas. I crossed the railway line at the Merrion Gates and took Strand Road for about a mile, then turned off into Sandymount. There was a video store on the green that offered Internet access, so I parked by O’Reilly’s pub and waited in line for the single computer terminal behind two Italian students.

  When it was my turn, I entered Patrick Hutton’s name in a search engine. Amid the university professors, secondary school headmasters and orthopaedic surgeons, I found a few references to Patrick Hutton the jockey, chief among them the following short piece in the Irish Independent in December 2004.


  REWARD OFFERED FOR MISSING JOCKEY

  Trainer F.X. Tyrell is offering ten thousand euro for information about the whereabouts of Patrick Hutton, the Wicklow-born jockey who apparently vanished seven years ago. Hutton, who rode over a dozen winners for Tyrell during 1996, including the Arkle Chase at Cheltenham on By Your Leave, dropped out of public view days before he was due to ride for Tyrell at the Leopardstown Christmas Festival, and hasn’t been seen since. Anyone with information should contact Derek Rowan, head man at Tyrellscourt.

  There was a small black-and-white head shot, but it was difficult to pick out any distinguishing features: like models, with whom they have a lot in common, jockeys all tend to resemble one another at first or even second flush. There were a few contemporary reports of races Hutton had run; the only other item of interest was a short account of a meeting at Thurles in October 1996, where By Your Leave finished last in a field of nine in the third race, and the subsequent inquiry at the Turf Club, where the question of Hutton deliberately stopping the horse was raised, but then dismissed.

  I spent some time trying to find out a bit more about F.X. Tyrell. There was plenty on his achievements in racing and breeding, but relatively little on the man himself: one marriage, which lasted ten years; no kids; usually accompanied in public by his sister, Regina. Legendarily reluctant to speak to reporters, so little was known about his life away from the track and the stud that it was logical to assume he didn’t have any. I copied down one quote from an interview, the only utterance of his that involved a subordinate clause: “It’s a simple game: it’s all in the breeding, all in the blood. If the bloodlines are right, the animals will be right, provided they’re given the nurture they need. Blood and breed, that’s the beginning and end of it.”