The Price of Blood Read online

  I poured Dave another drink and passed it to him; he raised it to his lips, then shook his head and set it down.

  "Ah no way, Ed, the first was enough."

  "So what happened, are you working the case?"

  "Just about. I’m coordinating the incident room in Bray.’"

  "DI Donnelly speaking, can I help you?"

  "Fuck off."

  Dave subsided again, not even angry this time, just deflated. In a quiet, introspective voice I didn’t know he possessed, he said, "I can’t go on like this, Ed. I’m not sleeping. There are calls on my mobile at all hours. When I answer, I can hear someone breathing on the other end. Thought it was someone I sent down, I changed the number, same story again. Geraghty’s behind it, I know he is. And at work one morning, there was a loaded gun on my desk with a Post-it stuck to it reading ’Can’t Cope, Supercop? Give it your best shot.’ Nobody knew anything, of course; everyone was shocked. But I could see people smirking, laughing behind their hands, Geraghty winking. I can’t handle it, Ed."

  Dave let his head sink into his hands. I looked at him in astonishment and dismay: Dave had always been so solid, so captain-of-the-school dependable, I guess I’d taken his strength for granted. It was like watching a cardboard cutout become real before my eyes. I wasn’t sure I needed another real person in my life, but then, I had been surprised when he’d chosen me to celebrate his transfer with. Carmel had often told me he didn’t have many friends, but I’d never really thought of myself as one, let alone his closest.

  "Maybe I should just walk. I could take the pension, get out early, go into business with Carmel’s brother. He’s got a car showroom in Goatstown. Awful gobshite, but he’s coining it there."

  "What does Carmel think?"

  "About going in with her brother? She’d like the extra change. But she knows what being a cop means to me."

  "No, I meant the phone calls. The weight loss. The stress."

  Dave shook his head.

  "We don’t really work on that level," he said. "I’ve always been…I don’t bring the job home, you know? Because Carmel doesn’t want to know."

  "I’m sure she’d be sympathetic—"

  "No. Our deal is, she has a stressful job raising four kids. She doesn’t need me coming home crying like a baby. If I want to change jobs, fine, so long as the money’s still coming in. But to talk to her the way I’ve talked to you…she’d consider it weak."

  "Sounds like the 1950s round your house, Dave."

  He shrugged, and rolled his neck, and flexed his still-massive arms.

  "It’s how we started out. I was the one in charge, the one to make things safe, the one she could rely on. I think how you start out…it colors how you proceed, you know?"

  "You sure she still feels the same way?"

  "I still feel the same way. End of story. Don’t ask me about Carmel, all right?"

  "All right."

  Dave lifted his head and, in what seemed like a determined effort, cracked a smile.

  "Fuck sake, look at us, like a pair of fucking ’oul ones, commiserating. Come on to fuck. It’s fine, everything’s just grand. Come on."

  Dave got up and drank the second whiskey and clapped me on the shoulder. It hurt.

  "Where are we going?"

  "To see dead people."

  We drove south on the N11 as far as Loughlinstown and came off at the exit for St. Colmcille’s Hospital. The hospital mortuary is at the far end, past A&E and the main entrance. Dave asked me to bring a hat and a scarf; the only hat I had was a black fedora Tommy Owens found in a secondhand store, which he insisted I have because it made me "look like a proper detective." It didn’t, it made me look like a sinister old-style priest, a detail Dave lit upon when we parked the car. He found a set of rosary beads in the glove compartment, and gave them to me, along with the black leatherette-bound Toyota manual.

  "You’re a priest, Ed," he said.

  "Thank you, Dave," I said.

  The door was opened by a red-eyed, unshaven hospital porter who didn’t speak English; he was joined by a young uniformed Guard who recognized Dave immediately. Dave took the Guard aside and chatted briefly to him. I held the rosary over the book and kept my eyes down.

  Dave came back and said, "This way, Father."

  The Guard nodded respectfully as I entered, and I acknowledged him briefly with a low priestly half wave, half blessing and a rattle of beads. We passed through a carpeted reception area with a screened-off corner for grieving families to identify their next of kin. The porter led us through double doors to a cold room with two bodies on hospital gurneys. Each body was covered with a white cloth. There was another room ahead where the autopsies were conducted, and a refrigeration room to one side. A life-size wood-and-plaster crucifix loomed above us on the wall. The porter nodded and withdrew behind the double doors.

  "What are we doing here, Dave?" I said.

  "The state pathologist has done the preliminary examinations at the scene. The second body meant it was too late to start the autopsies tonight. They’ll begin at eight in the morning. They brought them here because they finished late, they’re starting early, and it was nearer than the city morgue."

  "Okay. What are we doing here?"

  Dave Donnelly’s mouth was set; his eyes were burning and his hands began to shake.

  "The first body," he said. "The one Geraghty insisted on telling the press bore all the hallmarks of a gangland killing."

  I nodded.

  "I ID’d him straight off—not by the contents of his wallet, by his face. He was Don Kennedy. He was my sergeant when I was starting out, down Kildare way, twenty-five years ago. He was like a father to me. Stood godfather to Paul, my second eldest. He got out in ’99 or so, did a bit of private work, missing persons, insurance claims, that sort of stuff. I didn’t see much of him anymore. Godparents don’t seem to matter so much when your kids get older. But he never forgot a birthday. Look at him. He was strangled. And someone cut his tongue out, Ed. What do you think of that?"

  What did I think? I thought Don Kennedy was the private detective Miranda Hart had hired two years ago to find Patrick Hutton.

  "Because I know your body had his tongue cut out too, Ed. The Bureau may be trying to edge me out, but the incident room is in Bray station, and I have a lot of friends there. Your man was strangled and he had his tongue cut out too. What do you think? Coincidence?"

  "There’s no such thing, Dave. You know that."

  "And so do you."

  He took the sheet partly from one of the bodies to reveal a large male head with an unruly thatch of gray hair. The strangulation marks around the neck were similar to those on what Dave had called "my body." Dave lifted the sheet now on the blond gentleman farmer with the Church’s shoes I’d found upended in a dump. I looked at the face, wondered how closely I wanted to work with Dave and decided I needed him at least as much as he needed me.

  I took the photograph Miranda Hart had given me from my coat pocket and showed it to him. The hair was blond, whether dyed or not I couldn’t say, but the face looked very similar: same lined skin, same sunken cheeks, same tiny point of chin. I took a latex glove from my jacket and fitted it over one hand and pointed to the vivid blue of Patrick Hutton’s eyes in the photo. Dave nodded. With index and middle fingers, I tugged the corpse’s eyes open. They were far from vivid, but they were blue. We weren’t in a position to be definitive, but as far as we could tell, the dead man was Patrick Hutton, missing for ten years, dead for forty-eight hours. Without thinking, I turned to the crucifix on the wall and blessed myself. When I looked back, I saw Dave doing the same. I don’t know if Dave was thinking about the Four Last Things. I couldn’t tell you if I was either. Maybe we were just two spooked Paddies in the house of the dead. But we both had faith in this much: after violent death, there must come judgment.

  EIGHT

  Dave didn’t say a word on the drive back. The sleet had stopped, and when we got out of the car in Quarry Fields, t
he air was fresh and crisp, and a star-flecked fissure had cleft the sky. The ground was snapping underfoot as we walked up the drive.

  I checked my phone. Tommy had sent me a text message, all in capitals: WATCH OUT! LEO’S AFTER YOU! I figured having a high-ranking Garda detective as my guest was a reasonable precaution against anything Leo Halligan might do.

  I brewed a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. Dave started by saying that Aidan Coyne, the Guard who’d been on duty at the mortuary, had worked with him at Seafield, that he was a good lad and that he wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone about our visit. It was known in Bray station that Dave had served with Don Kennedy, and nobody was very happy about how Dave had been sidelined in the investigation. And there was always resentment when the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation started throwing their weight around with the local force, especially if Myles Geraghty had anything to do with it. Dave had told Aidan a version of the truth: that he wanted to say a few quiet prayers for a fallen comrade.

  When the coffee was ready I poured two mugs. I had put the heat on, but Dave was shivering, and he asked if he could have some Jameson in his. That struck me as a good idea, so I had some in mine too. We drank for a while in silence. I knew he was waiting for me to spill all I knew. I was happy enough that we had made a deal. We just needed to check the small print before we took it any further.

  "Dave, I’m not looking for a partner here. I want to be free to do things the way I would do them. And if that means withholding information, or taking a risk by following a hunch—"

  "Or riding the arse off one of the chief suspects, or all of them; yeah, I know how you work, Ed."

  Dave guffawed in what struck me as a rather forced manner, and I pretended to, hoping my laughter would spare my blushes, or his; I’d never heard him make that kind of remark before, and he didn’t seem relaxed about having made it. I wondered briefly if Dave had been the one tailing me tonight. Not that Miranda Hart was a suspect. I didn’t even know what the case was yet—another reason I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder.

  "Don’t worry—you won’t have to answer to me. I’ll feed you whatever you need, and you can go your own way."

  "If I didn’t trust you, Dave, I’d think I was being set up. You’re not setting me up, are you?"

  "Ed, this fucker Geraghty is a bad cop. He’s a rotten cop. I don’t want to tell you what I know about him, but let’s just say anything that can publicly embarrass him, any way I can trip the cunt up, anything to help push him out the door and I’ll be happy."

  "I don’t get it, Dave. What’s in it for you? I mean, say we get to the killer, or killers, before the Garda investigation does. We’ve still got to hand it over. I can’t arrest murderers myself. And no one’s going to give you credit for conducting some kind of maverick case. Quite the opposite."

  "Well, let’s say that’s my lookout, and leave it at that," Dave said bluntly, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. He laid a spiral bound reporter’s pad on the table and looked at me expectantly.

  A cat or a fox set the security light on in the back. I stared out at the two bare apple trees in the center of the garden, male and female, their branches nearly touching and never quite. I wondered briefly about Dave and Carmel, then as quickly put them from my mind: they had been rock solid since school, one of those partnerships where you could never see the join—however much Dave tried to portray the marriage as if it were something from the Dark Ages. Carmel was forever asking me around to the house, but the truth was, the warmth and energy and happiness they had built there always left me feeling desolate and bereft. No, those trees were a gloss first off on my parents’ ill-fated match, and latterly on the sorry chronicle of my own romantic history.

  I didn’t tell Dave that Vincent Tyrrell had hired me. But I went through most everything else: the likelihood that Don Kennedy was the PI Miranda Hart had hired at the insurance company’s behest to find Patrick Hutton; the fact that Hutton and Leo Halligan had been apprentices together at Tyrrellscourt after their joint stint at St. Jude’s reform school (Dave lifted his head from the pad for that one, his eyes wide, especially when he heard that Leo was fresh out of jail); the death of the racehorse By Your Leave; the consequent rift between Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell and its significance in Hutton’s disappearance; Hutton’s emotional declaration that he wouldn’t play the Judas for anyone; the bizarre and formidable force that was Jackie Tyrrell and her insinuation, barely countered by Miranda Hart, that Halligan and Hutton had a sexual relationship; the omega and crucifix tattoos on Patrick Hutton’s forearm.

  Dave stared at his pad in silence when I had finished. He looked up and shook his head, smiling at first. Then the smile faded from his broad face, and his mouth set, and his eyes hardened and flickered like jewels, and I had a reminder of what it felt like to sit across from him in an interrogation room. It didn’t feel very comfortable.

  "I went to the scene myself, Ed. I knew Geraghty wouldn’t like that, so I didn’t tell him. But I went there anyway, and I did what I guess you probably did: I gave the body a quick once-over and then I called it in to Bray station, along with the tip-off about Vinnie Butler. Bad enough a private cop risking the contamination of a crime scene, but a real cop? Why would he do that?"

  "I don’t know, Dave. Why did he do that?"

  "Because he knew that the private cop wasn’t really to be trusted. He knew that if the private cop found something really juicy, he’d keep it to himself. And he wanted to find out just what it was the private cop was holding back."

  "And did he?"

  "There had been a piece of paper—a note, I’d say—in the victim’s left trouser pocket. There were still shreds of paper adhering to the pocket fibers, which suggests that it had been freshly removed; there were mild ink stains on the pocket fabric, from which, as with the paper shreds, we might infer that the note had been through the wash with the trousers."

  "Do you do this for a living?"

  "What was written on the note?"

  "The mobile phone number for a bookie who had a pitch at Gowran Park racecourse today."

  "Do you know which bookie that was?"

  "Not yet. But I still have the number."

  "Anything else you want to tell me?"

  "I didn’t want to tell you that."

  "If I told Geraghty you’d interfered with the body—worse, you’d stolen evidence—what do you think he’d do?"

  "I have an idea what he’d do with me. What would he do with you?"

  "He’d probably blame me for knowing you."

  "There you are. Not to mention what he’d do if he was told you had given the scene a surreptitious one-two first."

  And there we were. He had me, but I had him. MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, they used to call it when it came to nuclear missiles. Safe as houses, unless one of us actually went mad. Dave wasn’t looking completely sane to me. He topped his coffee up with Jameson, laughing gently and nodding in private agreement with himself. Then he clapped his hands and almost winked.

  "So what did you make of this Miranda Hart then Ed? Is she a looker, is she?"

  It suddenly occurred to me that Dave might have formed as idealized a picture of my single life as I possibly had of his married one. I threw him a look I was more used to getting from him. The look said: Cop yourself on, you tool. It landed right between his eyes and spread crimson across his face.

  "All right," I said. "Each man had his tongue cut out. Do we have any other points of comparison?"

  "One: they were connected in life, in that Kennedy tried to find Hutton. Must have done a certain amount of digging. Two: they were both killed and mutilated elsewhere, and then cleaned up and deposited where they lay in the past couple of days. Three: they were killed in exactly the same way, strangled by hand and/ or ligature. Four: they were mutilated in the same way, tongue cut out. Five: they each had a small leather bag or purse full of coins."

  "Did Kennedy have any tattoos?" I said
.

  "Not in the obvious places. I didn’t get time to search the whole body. Nothing else was found on him."

  "What do you make of the tattoos on Hutton’s forearm?" I said.

  Dave shook his head. He had copied them in his notebook. He opened it to that page, and we studied them in silence for a moment.

  † Ω

  "Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet," I said. "From alpha to omega: from beginning to end."

  "From life to death."

  "And the crucifix represents death."

  "And life everlasting."

  "What do you make of it?"

  "I don’t know. A serial killer who’s into symbols and whatdoyoucallit, tarot cards and all this? That’s grand for American films, Ed. In real life, I’d say it’s all my hole."

  I almost laughed out loud. That sounded more like the Dave Donnelly I knew, a man who assumed everyone else needed knocking off his perch, and considered himself the man to do it. If he were a T-shirt, it would read: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? That could have accounted for some of the tension between him and Myles Geraghty: they were both cut from the same cloth. Apart from Dave’s not being a complete and total prick.

  "Still, when was the last time you came across a tongue cut out?" I said. "That’s a lot of work, and a lot of mess."

  "Not if the victim’s dead first. No blood to speak of then."

  "But you take my point? Two in the same day? And both strangled too?"

  Dave nodded.

  "It’s not rock solid, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if the MO was used by two different killers. And what is there no such thing as?"