The Price of Blood (27 page)

"Couldn’t or wouldn’t?"

"It all amounts to the same thing. It will come out eventually, I have no doubt. Bottle of Red, that would be my strongest tip for St. Stephen’s Day. The uncertainty about the rider has seen the odds drift satisfactorily; I’d say you could get it for nine to two, even five to one if you were up early. I imagine you get up early, Edward Loy."

"Patrick Hutton—the man I believe to be Patrick Hutton—gave the strong impression that he had been raped, in that room at St. Jude’s—it was your room, wasn’t it?"

Tyrrell shrugged and nodded.

"He made it clear he had been blindfolded, that he hadn’t seen his rapist."

"Perhaps it wasn’t rape. Perhaps it was consensual, and now he’s decided to cavort as if it wasn’t."

"Cavort?"

"Hutton and young Halligan were…well, they were about to be expelled for indecent conduct. I thought Hutton would fare well in the stables, I thought he had the makings of a jockey. I knew F.X. liked the look of him. And Leo…Leo was part of the deal. For Hutton and, eventually, for Francis. To the ultimate cost of each."

"Two of the care staff at St. Jude’s were known abusers."

"Have you been talking to your burly lesbian friend again? No charges were ever laid, no case was ever brought. I’ve always found it curious, these liberals, they have a very illiberal concept of justice: they seem ready to destroy a person’s life on the basis of one accusation."

All of this came from the side of his mouth as he pored over his chart. I had rattled him, but not nearly enough. I put my coat on and joined him at the table.

"When we spoke last, you talked about By Your Leave. Said it was something of a freak. What did you mean by that?"

"I told you to ask someone who knew."

"I did. I asked your brother. He said he’d stick to his discipline and you should stick to yours."

Tyrrell didn’t flinch.

"Martha O’Connor—you know, the burly lesbian you’re so fond of—her documentary about St. Jude’s was halted because nobody wanted to speak ill of F. X. Tyrrell. I don’t think anyone has the same sensitivity when it comes to his estranged brother, the Catholic priest. Maybe you are dying of cancer. You’re not dead yet. I could make your last days here a misery. Given the degree to which, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve obstructed this case—Jackie Tyrrell might be alive were it not for you—all because of your bullshit about what you know being told to you in confession."

"But it was," Tyrrell said. "It’s not bullshit at all. That part of it is God’s truth."

He leant his hands on the chart.

"Very well. See here."

He pointed to Bottle of Red.

"Below the name of every horse, there’s a list with the year of foaling, color, sex, and then the name of sire and dam. That’s the horse’s father and mother. Bottle of Red is by Dark Star out of No Regrets. Now, Francis went through a phase of experimenting with extremely close breeding. That means mating between parents and offspring, or siblings. Siblings are the most volatile in any pedigree breeding, and you have to use the very finest mares and stallions, but even then, it’s discounted for everything except genetic research purposes: to breed out abnormalities, say, or uncover hidden gene types."

"And are Dark Star and No Regrets brother and sister?"

"Oh Lord, no. No, Francis has stopped all that. Or it was stopped for him."

"With By Your Leave. A thing of beauty, like a Grecian urn."

"What?"

"You said By Your Leave was all we know on earth, and all we need to know. Keats. ’Ode on a Grecian Urn.’"

"I didn’t think you’d get that reference."

"Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being."

"That’s right, and that’s where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it."

"The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?"

"Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination."

   CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy’s house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.

In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn’t have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.

"Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin," I said.

Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.

"You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They’re fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail."

"Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?"

"The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail."

Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had
BARRINGTON INVESTIGATIONS
as its heading.

I began to read.

POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.
1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99
Inteviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner’s Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.
SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD’S REPORT
(DOCUMENT I (a)).

I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.

"Did anyone see him?" I said.

"No," he said. "But that doesn’t undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too."

"Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?"

"No, actually."

"You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn’t get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?"

"In a way."

Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I’d been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn’t felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.

"See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it’s from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement."

Dave rustled through the paper.

"The payments begin about two years back."

"When he searched for Hutton."

"So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out."

Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn’t contain himself; he looked like a children’s entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.

"I don’t know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn’t spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise," Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother’s name I expected, Tyrrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not
F
for female, not Mary, later to be known as Miranda, but
M
for male: the child was a boy, born on the second of November, 1976, and his Christian names were Patrick Francis.

FERDINAND:
Strangling is a very quiet death.
DUCHESS:
I’ll tell thee a miracle;
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:
Th’ heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery,
As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar;
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy.
—John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi

   I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.

"I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…"

"I’m not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you’re welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?"

Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.

"They think I’m working. Emergency shift. It’s not unusual."

"And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?"

"No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me."

I couldn’t see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn’t have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?

"Maybe you should go back there," I said. "You don’t want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her."

"Carmel doesn’t need me," Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.

"Oh yes she does," I said. "She…she told me she did."

"Last night? And what else did she tell you?"

Some things are more important than who fucked who.

"Dave, whatever’s happened between you…you have a woman who wants you. And like any woman, she needs you to pay her some attention. To behave as if you know she’s there, and you’re as glad of it today as you were twenty years ago."

Dave looked skeptically at me.

"You almost sound as if you’d like to be in my shoes," he said. "Football practice and sleepovers and Friday-night pizza and mass on Sundays and nodding off in front of the TV and watching each other get old."

I looked out the back window at my apple trees, close but never touching; the bare limbs looked like bones in the hard wind. I looked out into the hall, where a pine stood bare and unadorned in a coal scuttle; I had forgotten, or hadn’t bothered, to decorate it.

"It would have its compensations," I said.

Dave looked at me in disbelief.

"Anyway, you can’t stay. No one with a woman who wants him sleeps here."

He thought about that for a while.

"You don’t know what she did…"

I took a chance.

"Do you? Really? Maybe she needed to get your attention so badly…she tried before and failed…maybe it was your last chance…"

"Is that what she said?"

There was fear in his eyes. I shook my head.

"I don’t know. She was upset. She wants you. I know what I’d do."

Dave was doing his best to look wounded and noble, but I think he was relieved. We talked about the case for a while, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere; on the doorstep, he looked at me as if, in some crucial way, I’d let him down. If I’d told him to leave his family, would that have suited his image of me better? Now I’d let him believe I envied him, he felt happier about himself. Just to make sure, I asked him to keep his mobile on: I told him I might need him, and I could see he liked the idea that I might. After he drove away, I rang Carmel and told her he was coming home. She started to say a lot of stuff about being sorry and ashamed, but I told her nobody wanted to hear any of that, now or ever, wished her a happy Christmas, hung up and left the house.

   THE THREE MEN who took me were under orders not to hurt me; that’s why each of them carried a gun. None of them wore sportswear either: with their dark leather jackets and jeans and boots, they could have been construction workers on a stag night; they certainly didn’t draw the eye the way Burberry hoodies did. They put me in the back of a Mercedes Estate with blacked-out windows, one on either side, one to drive. When we got to Redlands, which is where I assumed we were going—they could have shot me on the doorstep if they’d wished—I was led to a small bungalow George Halligan had built in the grounds, a three-room den with a pool table, a home cinema system, a bar and an en suite bedroom. What more could a man want? A head butt from Leo Halligan would not have been top of my list; nor would the kicks to the head and body that followed; a cowboy boot to the liver wouldn’t have made the backup list; it felt like a week before I could breathe again. Leo was breathing heavily when George called a halt; he was almost out of breath when he stopped. The off-duty construction workers got me upright and propped me in a chair; George presented me with a tumbler of whiskey and sat opposite me; Leo hovered to one side, an elaborate dressing with some kind of metal frame over his nose.