The Price of Blood (22 page)

   I dropped Tommy off at the church for midnight mass, and headed back up toward Castlehill. Dave lived on a quiet road down from the Castlehill Hotel in a semi-d he bought back when he first graduated from Templemore with the help of some money an aunt of his in America had left him; he couldn’t have afforded to buy a third of it on his current salary. I didn’t want to go to Dave’s party for any number of reasons, chief among them that it would be full of cops who wouldn’t want me there, a feeling one or two of them would relish making plain. Another of the reasons I didn’t want to go opened the door to me: Myles Geraghty, making himself at home. He clapped me on the shoulder as if we were the best of buddies and let out a loud roar.

"It’s Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes, lads, as we live and breathe."

"Language please, Detective Geraghty," snapped Carmel, snaking an arm around my waist and tugging me into the house. They continued on their exchange in mime over my head, which Carmel had tucked into her cleavage, which was on full merry-widow duty tonight and stoked with some musky aroma. When she let me up for air, something in her eyes was reckless, almost delusional; maybe she was just another party hostess flying high, but I wondered: Carmel had always had a sexy, flirtatious look that said you’d missed your chance with her, but only just; tonight, it looked like the "only just" had been set aside. She still had a great body, long-legged and rangy, but the dress she wore would have been cut too low and hemmed too high for a twenty-eight-year-old, and her heels put her maybe half a head below me, and I’m six two when I don’t slouch. I certainly didn’t object to the view, but it’s not one I’d have relished in a wife; I saw Dave eyeing her as she danced me toward the kitchen and poured me a glass of lethal-looking punch; he had the fixed, glassy smile of a man whose car has just rolled back off the viewing platform and tumbled into a quarry while he waits for it to explode. Carmel told me I’d missed the prospect she had lined up for me, but that we had to have a good long talk; this having been established, she clipped off to more urgent business: swaying about drawing hungry looks from every man in the place, or so it seemed.

The party had wound down, but the dwindlers were determined to stay until the bitter end, despite the unwritten rule that if you’re in another man’s house after midnight on Christmas Eve, you’d better have a red suit and a big sack. The Guards had neither; indeed, a Guard I recognized from Seafield with no lips and no manners seemed hell-bent on proving he had no wits either: ranting lachrymosely and aggressively about how Christmas wasn’t what it used to be, and of course it never had been, he had to be physically restrained from breaking to Sadie, Dave’s angelic five-year-old, who was skipping about in a turquoise-and-lavender tutu with a magic wand, the news that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Dave did the physical restraining himself, and he looked to me like he’d have enjoyed doing a lot more of it. The lipless Guard resumed after a brief pause with an ill-tempered, sanity-taxing tirade about how contemporary Christmas songs weren’t fit to shine the shoes of the immortal classics of the genre, by titans such as Mud, Wizzard and Gary Glitter.

In the living room, the source of the inferior contemporary sounds, Dave’s three boys, who were between ten and fourteen but looked like they’d been fed on beef three times a day since birth, were trying out their rucking and mauling techniques on a couple of Guards who wanted to show what good sports they were to three young female Gardaí who had drunk themselves to the land where the only response to any event is to shriek with laughter. The shrieks only got louder when Dave’s eldest lad tried a handoff that was more like a punch, causing a Guard’s nose to flow and his temper to fly a long way from where the good sports play.

In the back room, a few older hands were putting on a different kind of show for their juniors, and after sinking the punch and finding some whiskey and hearing the Butler family being discussed, I felt emboldened enough to insinuate myself onto the edge of it.

"They’re a blot, a fucking plague all over north Wicklow, and there’s nothing you can fucking do with them," a thickset ginger-haired comb-over said.

"Are they all one family?" a spotty young fella said.

Comb-over led the older hands in a burst of hollow laughter.

"You could say that," he said. "Put it this way: Old Man Butler wasn’t fussy about where he dipped his wick. He didn’t mind if you were his cousin. He didn’t mind if you were his sister. He didn’t mind if you were his
daughter.
"

"He didn’t mind that at all at all," said a skinny cop with a hook nose and floppy gray hair in a side parting.

"Oh, he liked his daughters very much," said Comb-over.

"He liked his granddaughters too," added Hook Nose. The young Guards were appalled and delighted by what was obviously a practiced routine.

"He was an equal-opportunities shagger," Comb-over said.

“Twas the granddaughters that did for him though," said a crinkle-haired Galway man with a big mustache.

"What, his granddaughters killed him?" a round-faced young smiler said.

"In a manner of speaking," said Comb-over, who smoked a pipe, and would have strung this one out until New Year’s if he’d been let.

"One of the daughters caught him with the granddaughter," Hook Nose said. "Not in the act, but in the bedroom, very cozy. She reefed him out of it, sent him home with a flea in his ear. Then the young one, she’s what, twelve, thirteen, doesn’t she tell her ma her elder sister’s been going in the bedroom with Granda for years now. The sister gets home, the ma gets it out of her, she hasn’t been riding him, she’s just been sucking him off, as if that wasn’t as bad. And Ma goes fucking mental."

"There was three Butler sisters in the Michael Davitt," said Mustache.

"And Vinnie," said Hook Nose.

"Well they were hardly gonna get Vinnie involved, sure wasn’t Vinnie as bad as the old man?" said Comb-over.

"So the daughters took the old man down the seafront there in Bray, in and out of any pub or hotel he wasn’t barred from, started at the harbor, ended up by the amusements, in full daylight this was, the wintertime, and they filled him full of drink and bullshit, bygones be bygones, nothing to forgive, sure nothing happened anyway. And the women were watching what they drank. And then they set off up the hill a little way and around the cliff path, work up a thirst for more, Da, they said, night falling fast. And when they got to the sheerest drop, little pick of a man at this stage, and two of the women twenty stone each, didn’t they pick him up and fuck him down onto the railway tracks."

"And what happened?" said Spotty.

"Into the station with them," said Hook Nose. "They told me Old Man Butler had committed suicide. I asked them why he’d done that, he didn’t seem the type, and they said that he’d finally seen the error of his ways, and then they each produced a statement detailing what he had done to them over the years. And what he’d begun to do to their children."

Hook Nose stopped talking, and drained his drink, and Comb-over passed him a bottle of Paddy.

"It didn’t make pleasant fucking reading, I can tell you that for nothing," he said.

"You took leave, didn’t you?" Mustache said.

"Ah, I needed a holiday anyway."

"But…how do you know they murdered him?" Smiler said.

"Because they were fucking boasting about it all over Bray that night. ’We killed our da, and we’ll kill you if you fuck with us.’ And Vinnie comes in three days later, the last to fucking know as usual, and he wants to press charges," said Comb-over. "They’ve told him they did it, they’ve told half of Wicklow they did it, and the other half know they did it anyway. So we prepare a file, and we send it to the DPP to see if they’ll take it to trial, and he comes back with his decision: Not In A Million Years."

"It’d be a grand ’oul story," Hook Nose said, "like in a film or something, only for the fact that the daughters are fucking savages too, and they’ve raised broods of savages: junkies and dealers and whores. Every night there’s joyriding or robbing or fire-setting or some fucking shenanigans up there and it’s always the Butlers."

"What do you do though?" Smiler said. "I mean, there’s always gonna be families like that on a council estate, families that drag the rest down. And the only sanction you have is to evict them. And then what do you do with all the evicted families?"

"They used to go to England," Mustache said. "That’s where Old Man Butler came back from. With three brothers, you know what they were called? Seán, John, and John Junior. And Old Man Butler was called Jack. Fuck’s sake like. They all had the same fucking name. Making a show of us in front of the Brits, thick fucking Paddy can’t even think to give his kids different names like."

"Seed and breed, seed and breed," Comb-over said.

"When the blood goes bad, it’s a hard job to put it right," Mustache said.

"It’s the job of generations," Hook Nose said.

"It’s not our job lads," Comb-over said.

"But seriously, what do you do?" Smiler had drunk himself earnest. "I mean, if it’s one or two families, and you get them out, what do you do with them then?"

"Is this a social ser vices or a waste management problem?" Comb-over said.

"Burn them," said Hook Nose.

"Bury them," said Mustache.

"Recycle them," Spotty chirped, staying up late with the big boys.

They all looked at Smiler.

"I mean, it’s just such a tragic set of circumstances," he said, sticking nervously to his guns. "There must be some way make an intervention, to break the cycle, to rehabilitate…some of them, at least," he said. "The children?"

Hook Nose and Mustache looked up at the ceiling and piously intoned the word
intervention
. Comb-over exhaled a cloud of smoke from his pipe, then leant through it and jerked his chin at Smiler.

"In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one."

   EVERYONE WAS TALKING about the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave appeared at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down them. He raised a finger to his lips, then went around the rooms, turned the music off in one and brought the noise level down in the others, then reappeared at the kitchen end of the hall and unlocked the door that led to the converted garage. Dave had wanted this space to be a den, or a home office; Carmel had argued for a family room, or somewhere she could start one of the business ideas she had had but never pursued; eventually it had become a garage with plasterwork: old computers, a canoe, a cutting machine for dressmaking, a swingball set, a turntable, two VCRs, the kids’ old schoolbooks, Dave and Carmel’s old schoolbooks, you name it. Dave locked the door behind him and found a chair without turning on the light; I sat on a railway trunk in the dark.

"Thanks for coming, Ed," he said in a low, anxious voice.

"I wouldn’t have missed it. What’s up?"

"Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger, it’s just—"

"Sure, I understand. What have you got, Dave?"

"The latest from the postmortem. Hutton’s body was frozen. It still hadn’t completely thawed out. It means establishing a time of death is much more difficult, maybe impossible. They probably have to mess with entomology, what bugs were frozen when. But that’d take days in normal time: over Christmas in Ireland, it could be March. Both Hutton and Kennedy were killed elsewhere and moved to the scene. Each was strangled by hand: there are scars consistent with fingers digging into the neck; there’s some matter that may be fingernail debris, from which DNA might possibly be extracted, in the event that we ever get ourselves a suspect."

"And all of this applies to Jackie Tyrrell as well?"

"Except it seems as if the killer was wearing gloves this time: there are fewer finger tears at the neck. And one more thing. The bags of coins found on Kennedy and Hutton. There was another on Jackie Tyrrell’s body. Same kind of bag each time, leather pouch with a drawstring. And there were thirty coins in each, thirty single euro coins. Remember your gospel?"

"Judas. Thirty pieces of silver. That’s the last thing anyone remembers Patrick Hutton saying: ’I won’t play the Judas for anyone.’ And the tongues cut out: Does that mean the betrayal lay in telling someone something? In confessing? Or in not speaking up?"

"Either way, some kind of betrayal."

"And now someone is making people pay for that betrayal."

I thought of Father Vincent Tyrrell kissing me on the mouth this morning. After I’d gotten over the shock, I had thought it seemed at once deliberate and cryptic, a statement I was to interpret—a Judas Kiss?

"We still have no ID on the body, Ed."

"What do they make of the tattoos?"

"They’ve got hold of a few people from Trinity College, a professor of art history and someone who works in heraldry—they’re both writing up reports. But I don’t see it that way."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, a serial killer works at random, right? And then he does something to tie it all together, he only kills young women, or gay men, or whatever. And if he uses symbols or leaves tags, it’s a kind of taunt to the cops: I’m smarter than you. Come and get me if you think you’re good enough."

"Yeah?"

"But in this case, the victims are linked: they’re all connected to a horse race in 1997, to a stable, to a town and to a family. So there’s a different kind of logic going on. It’s like the killer is saying, understand why I’m doing this. I have a plan, and it has a logic, and you better work it out before…"

Before Miranda Hart is murdered, I thought. But the face I summoned up was not Miranda’s, but Regina Tyrrell’s daughter, Karen: I could see her eyes, one blue, one brown, shimmering in the dark.

"I laid it out for Geraghty, Dave. I gave him enough to connect Kennedy and Jackie Tyrrell, which gives him Hutton—not an ID, but at least the lead."

"He doesn’t want to see it that way, Ed. He wants his own serial killer, with biblical quotes and runic symbols. And he has enough evidence tending in that direction to ignore anything that doesn’t."