The Price of Blood Page 5

  "So you’re a private detective who used to live in L.A., and you’re looking for Patrick, and you can’t, or won’t say who hired you," she said. Her accent was an Anglo drawl; she said cawn’t for "can’t" and gave Patrick such a clipped reading she made it sound like a name rarely heard outside South Kensington and Chelsea.

  "That’s right," I said.

  "The last private detective was fuck all use. Or rather, I suppose he was a great deal of use, since he turned up fuck all."

  "When was that?" I said.

  "About two years ago. I wanted to have Patrick declared dead. More like, needed: I ran out of cash for a while, and couldn’t keep the mortgage on this little kip up. We’d bought it together, and he’d been gone longer than seven years."

  "And who insisted on the detective, the insurance company?"

  "That’s right. Big-arsed ex-cop in an anorak, Christ, he was a gruesome old heap, watching him get out of a chair was nerve-racking. Anyway, he went through the motions, checked Patrick’s bank records and credit history and so forth, and came up with what we all knew: he vanished off the face of the earth ten years ago. Ten years ago today, as a matter of fact. And now all this is mine."

  She rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette, a More, and offered me one, which I refused; I didn’t think my system would be up to it yet. I finished the tea and reached for the whiskey; the fumes didn’t make me gag: a good sign.

  "Lucky to have the place, I suppose, particularly since we bought before the boom. I got left some money in ’92, not long after we were married. Girlfriends said, don’t put Patrick’s name on it, but it’s just as well I did. ’Cause I’d still have a mortgage to pay if I hadn’t."

  "He disappeared ten years ago today?"

  "Twenty-third of December, 1996."

  "Will you tell me about it?"

  "I don’t know," she said. She took a hit of her drink, and a drag of her cigarette, and looked around for somewhere to tap the ash, and popped her gum out of her mouth and molded it into a bowl shape and flicked her ash in it and laid it on the arm of her chair.

  "I don’t know if I want Patrick back. That is, if he were alive and you found him."

  "You had him declared dead. Do you think he’s still alive?"

  She laughed, as if she’d been caught out in some strange but endearing foible, like using her chewing gum as an ashtray.

  "I wouldn’t put it past the little fucker, put it that way."

  "I know F. X. Tyrrell put up a reward for information about him."

  "Yes. Well. That was very good of him. Very good of F.X., all right."

  Hart’s general tone was so brittle I couldn’t tell whether she was being ironic or not.

  "Did he find out anything?"

  "The usual: people who thought they’d seen him on a ferry, or in Spain. Nothing concrete. That was before the detective had a go."

  "Were Tyrrell and your husband close?"

  "I don’t know if anyone gets particularly close to F.X. They were having a good year together, and Patrick was getting a lot of rides; he had three or four big ones at Leopardstown. And then: gone."

  "Money trouble?"

  "It was all a bit hand-to-mouth. But that’s just the life, he was making his way, he was only twenty-three, just the beginning. And he’d been gambling, but don’t we all? Everyone in racing gambles. No one came to me with major debts after he’d gone, the kind of debts that would’ve made him do a runner. And they’d need to have been big, Patrick had a lot of nerve."

  "There was talk of his stopping a horse for Tyrrell. By Your Leave? But the Turf Club found there was no case to answer."

  Miranda Hart smiled mirthlessly and ran a weary hand through her dark mane of hair.

  "The Turf Club are such dears."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means they know what goes on and we know what goes on, and they agree to pretend it doesn’t go on unless we’re too careless about it. And F.X. and Patrick were bloody careless that day."

  "What happened? What goes on?"

  She drained her glass and looked at me through narrowed eyes. "You’re not some asshole of a journalist, are you?"

  "I may be an asshole, but I’m no journalist," I said.

  That got a laugh; showing her my card got a wary nod. When I produced a press clipping I kept in my wallet (penned by a crime reporter who owed his career to the quality and frequency of the Garda leaks he received, and who showed his gratitude by toeing diligently whatever line the Garda Press office drew for him) featuring a quote from the Garda commissioner himself deploring the rise of "self-styled" private detectives and disparaging their "questionable personal ethics," and using a photograph of me as Exhibit A, Miranda Hart gave me a grin of what looked like kindred outlaw approval. I got up and fixed her a fresh drink, and took a hit of mine. Miranda Hart kicked off her boots and wriggled around until her long legs were splayed with one hanging over the arm of her chair.

  "How much do you know about horse racing?" she said.

  "Enough to lose betting on it. Not much more."

  "Well. First of all, it’s not an exact science," she said. "The favorite doesn’t always win. If he did, you wouldn’t have much of a sport, or a chance to bet. So that gives owners and trainers a certain license. If a horse with a good record is coming back after a rest, or at the beginning of the National Hunt season, no one will be too surprised if he loses a few races he was tipped to win. Maybe he’s carrying an injury, maybe he’s lost his edge, maybe he hasn’t warmed up yet, maybe the jockey isn’t giving him the best ride."

  "And what’s actually happening?"

  "The horse is being stopped. So that the odds can drift up, and his owner or trainer or a whole bunch of interested parties can have a big punt in a month or two, when it’s barely fancied and the price on the horse—and maybe the prize money—are better. Best to do with a horse that’s just made a name for himself, because it could always be a flash in the pan, as far as the authorities—and the punters—are concerned. Harder with an established mount, but you can still get away with it, because there are so many legitimate excuses: one trainer will push a horse to run off an injury, another will insist on rest; if either of those horses is stopped, the trainer is covered."

  "So the entire game is corrupt."

  "Of course it is, darling. Not all the time—there are the glamour races everyone wants to win fair and square—but quite a lot of the time. And that’s just the day-to-day; we haven’t even mentioned doping, or when big gamblers or bookies bribe jockeys to throw races."

  "And that’s what Patrick Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell did with By Your Leave? They deliberately set out to lose the race?"

  "Of course. It was evens at Thurles, and the Christmas meeting at Leopardstown was looming, so they wanted to get the price up before then. Unfortunately, By Your Leave was such a great goer, and Patrick ended up being way too obvious. So the whole thing got a little sour. And Patrick got the blame."

  "Not from the Turf Club."

  "No, from the punters. The footage of it was pretty clear, you could see Patrick checking his placing and holding the horse back when the two front-runners had bolted. A furlong from home and he’s still at it, as if By Your Leave could have made up the ground."

  "Sounds like he was deliberately drawing attention to what he was doing."

  "That’s what some people said. That the row was between him and F.X., that Patrick wanted to give the horse a decent ride, that he wasn’t happy to be instructed otherwise. And the Turf Club would have caused too much scandal if they’d found anyone at fault. And of course, punters forgive and forget, they know this kind of thing goes on, Patrick would have lost the ride for Leopardstown, but he would have been back on winners soon enough, and everyone would have been happy."

  "And how did By Your Leave fare at Leopardstown that Christmas?"

  Miranda Hart shook her head and looked at me gravely.

  "By Your Leave never made it out of Tipperary—fell at
the last fence. The going was unseasonably firm, and the horse broke her right ankle. Which might have been okay, but having unseated her rider, she took off at the gallop she’d been straining after all day. By the time the Tyrrellscourt lads caught her up, she’d broken the leg in thirty-four places. There was nothing anyone could do."

  I thought I saw tears in her eyes; the death of the horse seemed to matter more to her than the fate of her husband.

  "So what happened after that? Did Tyrrell and Hutton fall out? What did Patrick tell you?"

  "Do you know racing people, Mr. Loy? They’re not exactly what you’d call chatty. They’re certainly not introspective. I wasn’t looking for a blabbermouth. I have gob enough for two. Patrick never talked about work in any detail. He’d say, ’Not a bad horse,’ or ’Lucky today’—that’s what he talked about most often, when he talked: luck."

  "It sounds like he ran out of it at the last."

  "Maybe. He walked out on F.X. before he had the chance to be sacked. Refused to talk about that either. Said there were a few trainers in England who’d made inquiries, he’d take Christmas off, talk to them in the New Year."

  "Refused to talk about that. To his wife?"

  She shrugged again, flicking her hair back and pouting as she did so. It was very much her habit, but it had also been a tic of my ex-wife’s; I remembered now how incredibly irritating I used to find it in her; I found it weirdly alluring in Miranda Hart. She moved to stub her cigarette into her chewing gum and overturned her drink onto the crotch of her jeans. She climbed out of the chair amid a fusillade of fucks and shits, then stalked into the kitchen and returned with a few tea towels. She wiped the gin off the chair and the floor, and began to dab between her legs with a cloth, then thought better of it.

  "Clumsy fucking cow. I’m sorry, Mr. Loy, I’m soaked here, I’m going to have to get changed, have a shower. And I’m going out, so…"

  She looked toward the door, and I nodded and stood up.

  "Well, thanks for your time," I said. I gestured at the mud and straw on her boots. "I take it you’re a racing person yourself."

  She grinned in a side-of-the-mouth kind of way and shook her head.

  "I run a riding school for Jackie Tyrrell, up in Tibradden. It’s a far cry."

  "From what?"

  She looked toward the door again, then smiled carefully at me.

  "I used to ride, Mr. Loy. I grew up near Tyrrellscourt, I worked in the yard as a girl, I had a few amateur races. I was as good as Patrick. Better, some people thought. Then, after he took off, or disappeared, or whatever the fuck he did…I don’t know, it was as if I were to blame. Like I’d been a curse of some kind. Blame the black widow, y’know? F.X. cut me off, and other trainers followed suit. I got a bit of yard work with another trainer, but I wasn’t happy doing that anymore. So I kind of drifted off track, in more ways than one…rented this place out and just…let things slide, y’know? Got into a few…situations. And then F.X. and his wife split up, and Jackie called me. I needed to get myself together by then, so I jumped at the chance. Jackie helped me with the house, everything."

  "F. X. Tyrrell’s wife. All very cozy."

  "His ex-wife. They parted amicably, there were no children. Why is it so cozy?"

  "The person who hired me to find Patrick Hutton was Father Vincent Tyrrell."

  It was as if someone had flicked a switch, or pulled a cord, in Miranda Hart’s back: her shoulders slumped and her head dropped and something like a howl came from deep inside her. When she turned her face to me, I saw black eyes stained red and soaked with the black mess her tears had made of her makeup. She was shaking her head now, opening her mouth and trying to get the words out; I could see red lipstick stains on her teeth. Finally, she managed to coordinate palate and lips and tongue long enough to be understood.

  "Get out of here," she said. "Get the fuck out of here, or I’ll call the police."

  FIVE

  I sat in the car and tried to work out what I had seen in Miranda Hart’s eyes when she heard Vincent Tyrrell’s name, the split second before she fell apart on me: what combination of fear, anger, shame or guilt. The tears were real, the emotion convulsive, hysterical even, but Miranda Hart looked like she was capable of putting on quite a show if she put her mind to it. At least, that was what I figured by the end of our encounter, once my entire system had gotten the message loud and clear that she was not in fact my ex-wife.

  Next, I listened to the message my ex-wife had left on my phone, and then I did something I hadn’t done for maybe three years: I called her, and asked how she was, and how her little boy was doing; I spoke to her like I should have a long time ago. She told me she still felt bad about Lily, our little girl, especially at Christmas, thinking how she might have turned out, and I told her so did I, and she said every year on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Christmas she went to the Third Street Mall and bought all the gifts Santa would have brought and then on the Sunday she went to seven forty-five mass at St. Clement’s and donated the toys to the church’s Angel Toy Drive for needy children and orphans. She started to cry then, and I sat and listened, and wondered whether remembering our dead child by giving toys to poor kids at Christmas was better than remembering her by getting drunk and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to blame other people for pain that was nobody’s but your own. I decided that it was.

  We sat on the phone for a long while after that, after she had stopped crying, not saying very much, until she said the call must be costing me a fortune, and I said there was no need to worry, because I was a millionaire, a line we used to use before any of this had happened, and she laughed then, and told me she missed me, and I thought that was a good time to send her my love and wish her a Merry Christmas and end the call.

  I sat for another long while then, until I was able to catch my breath, and I could see straight. I wiped my face with a handkerchief and got out of the car and walked along the path by the Dodder River toward Londonbridge Road and smoked a cigarette and breathed in the cold winter air. Every so often I had the sense that I was being followed, but the only people I spotted were shoppers trudging home laden with bags. In any case, if Leo Halligan wanted to take me, he would, and there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about it.

  When I got back to my car, a taxi was pulling away from outside Miranda Hart’s house. I hadn’t spotted her getting in, but I didn’t have time to think, so I followed it down into Ringsend toward the city. I kept close, reasoning that she might not be in it anyway, and even if she was, she probably wouldn’t expect to be followed. In any case, the traffic was so thick that I couldn’t afford to let the cab out of my sight. Town was seething with drunks and merrymakers, shoppers and gawkers, young and old spilling off the pavements and jostling in the streets. We passed Trinity College and headed up George’s Street and around onto Stephen’s Green and in fits and starts rolled along until I saw the cab pull in outside the Shelbourne Hotel. I passed it and looked back to see Miranda Hart, wearing something shiny and black over something shiny and silver, clip up the hotel steps and flash a smile at the doorman. A car horn honked behind me; I cut down Merrion Street and found a parking space on Merrion Square. There was a brusque voice-mail message from Dave Donnelly on my phone, and I called him immediately, ready to take my medicine: I was on bad terms with too many Guards to fall out with Dave; he probably figured out I had examined the body in the woods, and wanted to bawl me out over it.

  He didn’t.

  "Ed, I want to talk to you."

  "Sure, Dave. Harcourt Square?"

  Harcourt Square was where the elite National Bureau of Criminal Investigation was based. DI Donnelly wanted to be seen with me there like he wanted to be caught drunk driving.

  "That’s funny, Ed. I’m still out in fucking Wicklow here. How about your place? When can you make it?"

  "I’m on something now, but I don’t know how long it’ll last."

  "It’s seven now. Say eleven?"

  "That shoul
d be fine. What’s it about, Dave?"

  "It’s about those bodies."

  "What bodies?"

  "The one you found, and the one we found earlier."

  "Are they connected?"

  "I’ll see you at eleven."

  The Shelbourne Hotel was built in 1824 and every so often they closed it and refurbished it and put a bar where a restaurant had been, but it was pretty much the same now as always, except smarter, although there was a tendency, if you got drunk here, to forget where the toilets were. Or so I was told; having left for L.A. when I was eighteen, I had only crossed the door for the first time a few months ago, to confirm to a Southside Lady Who Lunches that her suspicions about her errant husband were well founded. She took the photographs, wrote me a check and told me she’d double it if I joined her in a suite upstairs for the afternoon. Maybe I might have if she hadn’t offered to pay; she had gambler’s eyes, and a sense of humor, and a good head for drink. Next thing I knew, she had taken her husband for ten million and the family home in Blackrock and she was photographed on the back page of the Sunday Independent at an MS Charity Ball with new breasts spilling out of a dress twenty years too young for her getting very friendly with a member of the Irish rugby squad. Well done everybody. Another one for the PI scrapbook. Wonder what the Garda commissioner made of that.

  I didn’t have to look too hard for Miranda Hart; her silver dress blazed like magnesium ribbon amid the deep red and dark wood tones of the Horseshoe Bar. She had piled her dark hair high on her head; her black eyes flickered and her lips were the color of blood. Six foot in heels, she wore her dress calf length and cut high on the thigh; one of her stockings was already laddered. I was trying to get a look at her companions before she saw me, but she was restless, laughing quickly and nodding impatiently and chewing her gum and smoking and drinking and casting her gaze about the bar as if she expected me.