The Price of Blood (12 page)

"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 back 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.

"All friends now, I hope," he said. "Did you shake hands?"

Leaving Leo to tend his face, I walked Tommy to the edge of the pine forest.

"Did you know I was up there, Tommy?"

"I’ve been following you all night," Tommy said.

"Well. I’m glad to hear it. You know though, Tommy, when some boy threatens me with a knife, and then leads me up a hill at gunpoint, that’s a good time to make your move. Especially when that boy is Leo Halligan."

"I knew you’d be able for him, Ed. Better to sort it out now than have it hanging over you. And I knew Leo’d play fair. Nice eye."

"Whose fucking side are you on?"

"Yours, Ed. And mine, of course."

"Tell me the truth then. How’d you know Leo was after me?"

"Father Tyrrell. Leo came to see him this morning. They had breakfast together. I reckoned it must have had something to do with whatever Tyrrell wanted to see you about."

That was what I had smelt in the presbytery: French cigarettes, not cigars, and Leo Halligan’s lemon scent.

"What did Leo say to you?"

"Just, I have to straighten Loy out, Tommy. I’m not going to hurt him badly, because he’ll come in useful. But I have to straighten him out."

"Why didn’t you tell me that before I saw Tyrrell?"

"Because Leo didn’t tell me until
after,
after he had scraped the RIP on the Volvo. I’ll sort that out for you, by the way. So I followed Leo then, caught him staking out your place, texted you."

I said nothing. Tommy shrugged.

"You never asked for my help. You never leveled with me about the case. I mean, I’m not on salary here, am I Ed? Don’t take me for granted here man, I’m looking out for you out of the goodness of my own…so don’t fuckin’ start, all right?"

Fair enough. Tommy still wasn’t telling me everything he knew, but I couldn’t expect miracles. I nodded, and walked quickly back to Leo, snapping the clip back into the Glock and sliding a round into the chamber as I went. When I got close enough, I fired in the general direction of Leo’s precious red cowboy boots.

"Fuck sake, watch where you’re pointing that thing!" Leo said.

"Very difficult to predict where the bullet will go at close range, as we all know," I said. "And the waiting time in A&E over Christmas is even worse than normal, might not make it home until New Year."

"So what do you want?" Leo said.

"Breakfast with Vincent Tyrrell," I said. "What was that about?"

"I got a tip-off. Last night. About Pa Hutton, Patrick Hutton. I called Tyrrell, he agreed to meet."

"Who tipped you off? And what did they say?"

"I don’t know who it was, a woman, very southside, maybe even upper class, you know, Anglo type of thing. She didn’t say who she was."

Miranda. Or Jackie.

"What did she say?"

"She said, ’You were there. In Tyrrellscourt. It’s all going to come out now. The truth at last.’"

"Did she mention Patrick Hutton by name?"

Leo Halligan shook his head.

"She said, ’Ask Vincent Tyrrell. Vincent Tyrrell knows.’"

Leo’s hand went in his jacket, and I brought the Glock up. He carefully took a pale blue pack of Gauloises and a brass Zippo from his jeans and lit a cigarette. He offered the pack around. I took one, and so did Tommy. Then Tommy found a naggin of Jameson in the depths of his snorkel coat, and we each had a drink. Silence reigned for a while, an almost contented calm. Perverse camaraderie in the middle of the night, flanked by a petty criminal and a stone killer on the top of Bayview Hill: I almost laughed at how good I suddenly felt, at the adrenaline surge that reminded me who I was, and why I did what I did, and all the while at the anger I could feel building, anger that was never very far below the surface.

"And how did you get Patrick Hutton out of that call?" I said to Leo.

"There was nothing else for me to get. Pa and me were friends, you know? We…we were good friends, yeah? So that was what Tyrrellscourt meant to me, above anything else."

"So you called Vincent Tyrrell."

"Me and Father Tyrrell go back. I told Father Tyrrell Patrick Hutton was coming back to haunt everyone who knew him."

"Why did you put it like that?"

"I thought it had a nice ring to it. I thought it might scare the cunt. Anyway, he asks me to meet him for breakfast, fuck sake, like we’re a pair of suits, you know? And then he was all, oh, I can’t tell you anything, the sanctity of the confessional, all this. So I said, I remember you, baby, back in St. Jude’s Industrial School. I remember."

"What do you remember?"

Leo Halligan grinned.

"That’s for me to know. That was it, end of."

"Do you know how he disappeared?"

"All I’ll say is, you’re not going to find the answers up here. To any of it. You’re going to find them down in Tyrrellscourt."

He flashed his eyes at me, with the lubriciousness of someone who knows way more than he’s telling.

"Anyway, coming out, I met Hopalong here, Mr. Fucking Sacristan, honest to fuck, I thought I was going to burst me shite laughing. So when he said Tyrrell had asked you down, I decided to stick around, added a little design feature to your car. I was gonna string it out awhile for you. You know, leave a dead cat on your doorstep, potshot through your living-room window. Just like a regular psycho. But it’s too cold, and I couldn’t be arsed, to be honest with you," Leo said.

"All because of Podge."

Leo shrugged.

"Did you know that, Tommy? Leo was after me because I helped get Podge sent away. You remember Podge, don’t you Tommy?"

"No, Ed."

"Ah you do. Very well. Very very well, in fact."

"Stop, Ed."

"You know Tommy did a little work for Podge? A little courier work in the old import-export trade. And then they fell out, as fellows in that trade will. Over a gun. A Glock 17, in fact, this very model. And you know what Podge did to Tommy here?"

I could see the unease on Leo’s face.

"He raped him, Leo. More than once, far as I could make out, although once would be enough for most of us. Did you know that? Or are they too scared to tell you just what kind of a maniac your kid brother is? It’s not as if you don’t really know."

Leo stared at the ground and shook his head. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw shame in his face. I was probably wrong. I often imagine people are ashamed when they’re just a little self-conscious, or indifferent, or plain bored. I could feel the anger rising like acid in my chest, singeing the back of my throat. Leo started to say something, very quietly. Then he cleared his throat and said it out loud.