The Price of Blood Page 9

  "And the fact that they were dumped within a mile or two of each other—does that not suggest the killer’s trying to tell us something?"

  "That’s the other thing I’ve never got about those films and all: why the killer wants to tell the cops anything. I mean, if he’s happy being a mad fucker who goes around killing people, why would he want the cops anywhere near him?"

  "Because it vindicates him as a person. The artistry of his killing spree is mythologized among the community at large, thus validating his ego. He is the superman, the cops humans every whit as petty and puny as his victims."

  Dave was giving me the "cop yourself on, you tool" look. I shrugged.

  "Hey, this stuff isn’t just in the movies. These fuckers are real, and they’re out there."

  "I know, and it usually goes back to something that happened in childhood. Mammy never bought me a bowwow, boo hoo hoo."

  "You know who you sound like, Dave? The man who, after I’d just witnessed a murder-suicide, and been advised that counseling was available to me, told me that what I really needed was a good boot up the arse. Your friend and mine, Myles Geraghty."

  Dave reacted as if I’d slapped him; he leapt to his feet and wagged a finger across the table at me, his lips quivering as he attempted to form words and failed, his face red and contorted with rage; then he stormed out of the room. When he came back in a few minutes later, he was shaking his head as if in amazement at the behavior of someone else entirely, our mutual friend with the short temper. He sat and made a show of looking through his notes.

  "I’ll tell you this much," Dave said. "Myles Geraghty will go a long way out of his way to avoid bringing this within a country mile of F. X. Tyrrell."

  "Why so?"

  "Are you kidding? The queue to be F.X.’s best friend in the tent at the Galway Races, you should see it. All the politicians and the big rich. This is the man whose horses beat the Queen’s, for fuck’s sake: this was one of Ireland’s heroes in the dark days when no one had an arse to his trousers: he stuffed the English every Cheltenham, an equestrian IRA man in a morning suit. No one will want Tyrrellscourt anywhere near this."

  "And maybe they’ll be right. We’ve got Leo Halligan connected to it, and he’s got form in this area, doesn’t he?"

  "Leo’s a bad lad all right. Do you remember him, Ed? He was in our school."

  "I know, but he was never there, was he?"

  "He was always on the hop all right."

  "I remember he went away to reform school for stabbing Christine Doran."

  "That was bad."

  "He was funny though, wasn’t he? He was a brilliant footballer."

  "He was a good footballer. He was a brilliant boxer."

  "Fly, wasn’t he?"

  "He went up to welter for a while, but he couldn’t keep the weight on."

  "It was weird, even though we were all scared of him, everyone kind of liked him, far as I can recall. I did at any rate," I said.

  "I wouldn’t say ’like.’ He wasn’t a fucking psycho like Podge, or a slick cunt like George, but yeah, he was…for a dangerous bollocks, he was kind of normal, wasn’t he? How did he pull that off?"

  "I think, because you didn’t feel he was gonna take you out for looking at him."

  "Yeah. Mind you, Podge would, and then he’d come after you for sorting Podge out."

  "Speaking of which. Did you see the Volvo? The RIP?"

  "Was that Leo? Of course, there was all this, when he got out, he was gonna get you for sending Podge down. I’d’ve thought it would be a relief to them to have him locked away, he was becoming a liability."

  "It all comes down to blood with the Halligans."

  Dave looked at his watch.

  "Time I headed back to the station, see if we’ve had any calls."

  "What’s the story with Vinnie Butler?"

  "He’s a Butler," Dave said, as if that were explanation enough. When I shook my head, he expanded, covering pretty much the same territory Tommy Owens had in his voice mail, if in greater detail: the Butlers were a large extended family scattered around north Wicklow and the Dublin border, into all manner of burglary, extortion, fencing and low-level drug dealing. They also spent a great deal of time feuding with each other over a variety of perceived slights and betrayals, real and imagined, one branch of the family doorstepping another with machetes and shotguns and, most recently, a jar of sulfuric acid: Dave told me the young girl whose face the acid was flung in was fifteen and pregnant; she was burned so badly she lost an eye.

  "Geraghty set a couple of his boys on him, but I don’t think he was dumping anything more than refuse. State of the body for one thing; Vinnie Butler couldn’t keep himself that clean: half an hour in the back of his Transit the corpse would have decomposed. Geraghty’s probably pining for the days of the Branch and the Murder Squad, when they’d have fitted up a gouger like Vinnie for this no bother."

  The National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had been formed from the ashes of the Garda Special Branch and the Murder Squad, elite outfits that, like many elite units within the Guards, had quickly become corrupt and unmanageable; they had been disbanded, and then after a decent interval, the NBCI was formed. Geraghty and many of his colleagues had been Branch or Squad men; now stewing with resentment, they were tipped into a Bureau they felt was beneath them but loftily consented to dominate. A lot of Dave’s problems probably stemmed from the tension between the old elite and new officers keen to make a name for themselves.

  At the doorway, Dave turned and looked me in the eye.

  "All right, Ed?"

  "All right, Dave. You?"

  It was as if a shadow passed across his face, or rather, as if I’d been squinting in the sun’s glare and was temporarily blinded when it passed behind a cloud: when I could see again, everything had changed. I’d never seen a grown man look so like an anxious, lonely child.

  "We’re having some people round tomorrow night, Ed. Christmas Eve. Will you come?"

  I was worried Dave might cry if I said no.

  NINE

  There was a message on my phone from Jackie Tyrrell, very grave and businesslike and, if I hadn’t known otherwise, perfectly sober, asking me to call her urgently, no matter how late. It was half one, which didn’t strike me as especially late, particularly if you were an alcoholic, so I called.

  "Ed Loy, about time."

  She sounded irritable and impatient, as if it was half four on a Friday afternoon and she was trying to clear her desk for the weekend and I was an employee who knew well what a trial on her patience I had become.

  "I want you to come up here at once. I’ve a few things you need to hear."

  Her voice had dwindled to a shrill bark. I have the normal portion of resistance to being spoken to like that, plus an extra serving on the side. I said nothing. I could hear her sighing, and then the clink of ice in a moving glass. When she spoke again, it was in a more conciliatory tone, as if there was nothing done that couldn’t be undone with some goodwill and understanding on both sides.

  "All right, I’ve been seeing her obsessing about it all, I’ve probably entered the argument at a more heated level than was wise."

  "What argument?"

  "The whole…look, there is nothing to be gained by raking over the whole business with Patrick Hutton, believe me. It can only cause Miranda needless upset. It happened ten years ago, it’s ancient history, Miranda desperately needs to get on with her life. Let the dead bury the dead."

  "That’s interesting. How do you know Patrick Hutton is dead?"

  "I don’t. I simply assume…if you vanish off the face of the earth like that, chances are you’re dead. But for all I know, he could be on the Costa del Sol, or in Australia. As good as dead, one way or the other."

  I heard the clink of ice in her glass again. I kept silent. She clearly wanted to talk; whether she had anything to tell me remained to be seen.

  "Look, I don’t want to talk on the phone. You’d better come up here.
You can be trusted, of course."

  The last without a glimmer of uncertainty. I could be trusted how? To lie to the cops? To keep rich people’s secrets and carry their bags? To do what I was told, provided the price was right? No harm in letting Jackie Tyrrell believe I was corruptible. As long as she told me all she had to tell.

  "Of course," I said.

  She gave me directions, I shut up my house and stepped out into the night.

  In the car, the first thing I noticed was the smell: French tobacco, Gauloises, or Gitanes, mixed with a lemony aftershave. It seemed to me that I had smelt that combination before. I could always have asked Leo Halligan, but since he held the point of a blade at the back of my neck, I decided now was neither the time nor the place. I looked in the rearview mirror. Leo Halligan, rail thin in a motorcycle jacket and black shirt with dark hair gelled into something not unlike a DA, his dark eyes glittering in a chalk-white face, silver sleeper earrings in both ears, cheekbones like polished knives, thin lips drawn in the mockery of a smile. Tommy had warned me he was coming, but I hadn’t paid enough attention.

  "Hello Leo," I said.

  "Hello Ed," he said. "No sudden moves now."

  He pressed the blade sharply against my neck until the skin broke. There was a little pain and then the unpleasant sensation of blood leaking down my collar.

  "Just to show you I’m not fucking around, yeah?" he said. His voice was not exactly camp, but it had a bored, eye-rolling drawl to it, as if he was exhausted dealing with the endless supply of fools and imbeciles sent to annoy him.

  "I would have taken that as read," I said.

  "Smart. You were always smart, Ed Loy."

  "So were you, Leo. Four years for a hit on a nineteen-year-old. That’s a sentencing policy to get concerned citizens onto the streets."

  "Alleged eyewitness said he was bullied into making his statement by the Guards. Alibi witness ignored. No forensic evidence."

  "So we’re supposed to think you’re innocent?"

  "Do I see you in a courtroom, Mr. Justice Loy? I couldn’t give a fuck what you think. Start the car."

  "Were you going to wait here all night long?"

  "If the lights in the house went out, I would have come in to you."

  "It’d be warmer in the house. Do you want to come in?"

  "No, I want you to drive. I have a gun as well."

  He showed me what looked like a Glock 17 semiautomatic, a gun his brother George favored. Whatever it was, I had to assume it worked.

  "Good for you. I don’t."

  "Just in case you were in the mood for heroics."

  "Never."

  "Shut up and drive. Up towards Castlehill."

  I did as he said. I hatched various heroic plans along the way, supposing he was going to kill me: I could reverse the car into a wall; I could stop at traffic lights, jerk away from the blade and roll out my door; I could smash into the rear of another vehicle and trust in the public to rescue me. I didn’t act on any of them, not because I thought they wouldn’t work. No, the reverse adrenaline of inevitability was working its phlegmatic spell on me. If Leo wanted to kill me, he would; if I had the chance to kill him first, I could try; as it stood, he had the stronger hand, and it seemed wiser to wait and see how he played it. Anyway, he could have done me in my driveway: there wasn’t a sinner about, or a light in the neighboring houses. He had something to say, that much was certain. And I was curious enough, now I knew he had a part in the Patrick Hutton story, to hear what it was.

  Leo directed me up toward the old car park near the pine forest, midway between Bayview Hill and Castlehill. It was quite a beauty spot, with views stretching out to the harbor of refuge at Seafield. The stars had spread until the sky was almost free of cloud. There were usually a few cars parked late here, lovers enjoying the seclusion. But it was too cold tonight, or too late, or too close to Christmas; there was nobody to see Leo Halligan wave a Glock 17 at me to walk ahead of him up the steps and around the edge of the quarry to the ruined church on the top of Bayview Hill, or to prod me in the back of the neck with the gun if I didn’t move fast enough. The view here was even more spectacular, from the mountains to the sea, past the candy-stripe towers of the Pigeon House to Dublin Bay, and then north to the great promontory of Howth; the city lights flickered as if they were reflected stars: as above, so below, a gauze of light stretched out across the dark.

  Leo stopped at an open patch of grass used for picnics, just below the ruined church, hard above the old quarry, where the granite for the harbor had been hewn. With the gun trained on me, he held the knife, a hunting blade with a gutter and a serrated edge, in front of my face and, looking me in the eye, nodded and lifted his arm. I braced myself to dodge it, knowing he could shoot me anyway, thinking I should try and argue with him but scared it would sound like pleading, wondering if I should run away but not wanting to be shot in the back. The knife flew over my shoulder and over the granite wall and out into the quarry and I thought I could hear it landing but I couldn’t be sure. When I looked back, Leo was holding up the Glock. He snapped out the clip and handed it to me and brandished the gun in his right hand.

  "Okay, Ed?"

  "One in the chamber, Leo."

  "Good point, Ed. Hope that’s not the last thing you remember."

  He pointed the Glock at me and grinned, and I saw he had more gold teeth than white ones, and I hoped that wasn’t the last thing I’d remember, then he tipped the barrel up into the sky and pulled the trigger. For a second, on the ground where I’d fallen, I thought he had shot me, classic fashion, one behind the ear. Then I realized as he dropped the gun with his right he’d brought his left around in the mother and father of all haymakers and laid me out like a drunken girl. And there he was now, crouching above me, bobbing from foot to foot, fists up, gold teeth flashing.

  "Come on," he said. "Come on."

  The last person to say "Come on, come on" to me was Miranda Hart. My face was deep between her legs and my hands were slipping inside her torn stockings and stroking her firm, yielding, scented flesh. She had wanted me to stay, and if I had, I’d still be there, drinking gin and lemon juice, fucking in the fire’s glow. Instead I had spent time in a morgue with two dead bodies, I had tried to deal with a friend who was apparently having a nervous breakdown and now I was getting to my feet on top of a hill in subzero temperatures at two in the fucking morning so a pawky little maniac could beat the living shit out of me with his bare fucking hands. Come on, come on. Jesus.

  Leo was about five seven, and he couldn’t’ve been more than eleven stone, which meant I had eight inches and fifty pounds on him, but none of that seemed to count because of three things. The first thing was, he was so much faster than me: he had popped my nose and cut my right eye before I had my guard up. The second thing was, he was wearing those rock-and-roll skull and serpent’s-head rings that worked like brass knuckles. And the third thing was, when I finally got a rhythm going and managed to block a few blows and land a few digs of my own, he suddenly reared back and swung into this Thai kickboxing maneuver and slammed me in the jaw with the sole of a red leather cowboy boot that, had it been the heel, would have broken it.

  Where the fuck was Tommy Owens? It was all very well his mother dying, but somebody needed to get my back: warning me wasn’t enough. I was reeling like a skittle, finding it hard to keep my head up, and Leo was grinning now, scenting blood, and steadying himself to finish me off, and in my lack of strategy came my opportunity: it wasn’t that I wasn’t falling apart, or that my limbs weren’t having trouble acting on instructions from my brain, but my judgment was unimpaired: I could see exactly when and where I was about to be hit. All I needed was one last great surge from the nervous system, one final synapse flash of a reaction. It came as the heel of his red boot came straight for my nose and I managed to sidestep the blow and to catch Leo’s calf before he regained balance—he had overstretched himself, reasoning justifiably that I was a dead man walking—and pulled bac
k and swung the eleven-stone man around and around by the legs, sensing the humiliation and unwilling to stop, having felt pretty humiliated myself in the past few minutes, until he suddenly shot out of my hands and crashed on the gravel near the ruined church and I was left with a red cowboy boot in my hand. Leo was up in a flash, his biker jacket in large part protection against the spill, a few lacerations down one cheek the only evidence of harm. He seemed far more concerned by the fate of his footwear. As he reached for it, I retreated to the wall above the quarry and held the boot out into the abyss.

  "They’re handmade, Ed. Imported from Texas."

  "I don’t care. One will do you. You can hop away to fuck."

  "They cost three grand."

  "My heart pumps piss. You could have killed me. A fistfight’s one thing, but you could have killed me there, with the heel in the head."

  Leo shrugged.

  "You sent Podge down. What else could I do? I’ve always had to look out for the kid. And clean up his mess."

  The kid. Podge Halligan, the steroid-swollen, heroin-dealing sadist who had raped Tommy Owens. Like George, sometimes you could mistake Leo for a human being. But the Halligans were all brothers in the blood, and however plausible an impression of enlightenment any might occasionally give, I guess each was just a version of the same savage when it came to it.

  I extended the red boot to Leo, my hand low, and when he reached down for it, I sucker-punched him with a southpaw uppercut I must have been practicing in my dreams, and laid him out cold beneath the stars in the shadow of the old ruined church.

  HE WASN’T OUT for long, although he didn’t look too chipper when he came to: on top of the broken nose, he’d lost a couple of teeth. My nose had stopped bleeding, and I could see out of my eye; a drink would be a help. I found Leo’s Glock where he’d dropped it but I wouldn’t give it back to him, not yet, at any rate. We walked down to the car park, an uneasy truce between us, where lo and behold, Tommy Owens in his green snorkel coat was sitting on a wall by the Volvo, a cigarette in his hand, his ability to confound second to none.