The Price of Blood (28 page)

"Compliments of the season," George said in his fifty-a-day rasp. "Sorry about that, Ed, but it sounds like you were asking for it."

"I’m sure I was," I said. "Still, I didn’t think Leo was such a girl he’d have to get his brother to hold me down."

Leo came at me so fast he forgot to bring his brain along; he was drawing a blade from his jacket, but before he pulled it free, I smashed my tumbler hard against the metal-framed dressing on his nose and jammed the shattered glass against his throat; the metal jarred the bone out of its setting and blood was flowing from his nose and he was screaming and gurgling, and I was on my feet now, a red mist swirling around my head.

"You see what can happen? You see?" I heard myself shouting. I had lost any sense of where or who I was. I dug the broken glass into Leo’s throat. I could see George waving at his henchmen to drop the guns they had pulled. George’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying; it took me a while to realize that that was because I was still shouting.

"You see? When we all live like savages? Blood! You see? You see?"

I could see the panic in George’s eyes as he pointed at Leo; the sudden sight of Leo’s face covered in blood, of the punctures the glass had made in his throat, of the choking quivering mess of him beneath me brought me to my senses. I signaled George to kick the guns across the floor to me; when he hesitated, I jammed the glass back into Leo’s throat until I heard the skitter of metal across the floor; then I let him have Leo, whose injuries looked worse than they were; it was only because I had him lying on his back that he was choking; George sat him forward and gave him a bar cloth to stanch the flow, and one of the construction workers got some ice from the bar and wrapped it in another cloth and passed it to him.

My head was throbbing and there was blood on my face where Leo had opened the eye he had blackened on Bayview Hill and the pain on my right side where he’d caught my liver hurt so bad I felt like crying, and possibly did. But I watched Leo with his face in his hands, whimpering, and George, his prematurely white head bowed over his brother, and the three construction workers, their faces registering as much shock as you could discern through their folds of beer and steroid fat, and I thought: They won’t forget this in a fucking hurry. And fool that I was, I felt stupid blood pride in my victory, suppressing the ache that, worse than any physical pain, warned me that maybe the only way the Halligans could properly settle this was to kill me.

I gathered up the guns: two Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer compact. I didn’t know what was waiting for me down in Tyrrellscourt, but I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to be prepared for it. I popped the Glocks in my coat pockets and kept the Sig trained around the room. George Halligan gave me two looks: one included a nod to Leo and an arched eyebrow, meaning all friends now; that was George’s way, but I knew I’d have to watch my back with Leo, and resolved to help put him back behind bars as soon as possible, a resolution that I suspected would find favor with his brother. The second look followed the guns into my pockets.

"I’m going to need them," I said. "I’m going down to Tyrrellscourt."

"That was the main reason we wanted to talk to you, Ed," George said, as if we’d spent the last five minutes chatting about football before getting down to business.

Leo lifted his head, and dabbed his nose: the flow of blood had diminished to a trickle. George leant in and conferred with him in a low voice. Then he looked around and directed the largest of the construction workers, who had a goatee and no neck, to fix three drinks and pass them around. George had caught me like this in the past, so I watched closely to see that the liquid, which turned out to be brandy, was all coming from the one decanter. It was, and when I had a tumbler of it, I waited for George and Leo to drink, and then I did likewise, and we got down to business, Halligan-style.

"We heard you were asking questions," George said.

"Who told you? Jack Proby, I suppose."

Leo and George looked quickly at each other.

"Yeah, Jack called me," George said unconvincingly. "You see, the festival starts tomorrow, and we don’t want anything to get the way of…a good day’s racing."

"Well, let me put your minds at rest," I said. "I don’t give a damn about what deals you have with F. X. Tyrrell or Jack Proby. I don’t give a damn which horse wins or doesn’t, although I am always in the market for a sure thing. All I care about is that since I started looking for Patrick Hutton, the bodies have been piling up. Far as I’m concerned, if F.X. is shy about who he sleeps with, that’s his lookout. And allowing for the fact that I don’t like blackmailing, extorting, scum-sucking sociopaths like yourselves on any level you care to mention, you’re not my problem. My problem is finding out what happened to Patrick Hutton. Allied to that, I’ve inherited the problem of who killed Don Kennedy, Jackie Tyrrell and Terry Folan."

"Terry Folan?" Leo said, looking up at me. "Bomber Folan?"

"That’s right," I said. "Who’d you think that body on the dump was? Patrick Hutton? Or did you not think anyone else’d find out?"

Leo began to say something, then stopped himself. George looked from his brother to me and back, a Cohiba chafing against his still-dark mustache.

"Anything here I should know about, lads?" he said. We both ignored him.

"It wasn’t just you at breakfast with Vincent Tyrrell, was it Leo? Miranda Hart was there too."

Again Leo went to speak, but stopped himself.

"That’s why I’m here, is it? In case the inconvenient deaths of three people get in the way of a fucking horse race?"

"And if you go blundering about down there, you could fuck up quite a few fucking horse races, Ed Loy: the last thing we need is the Tyrrell horses being withdrawn because their trainer is up on a charge, Bottle of Red in particular," George barked from a blue cloud of cigar smoke. A descant of coughing followed; Leo winced and flapped a hand in front of his face.

"Fair enough," I said. "Is that what you’re telling me, that F. X. Tyrrell is the killer?"

"That’s just a for instance," George spluttered.

"Well, here’s another: the killer takes F. X. Tyrrell out. Maybe he already has. Same result to you: no Tyrrell horse at the races."

George sat still, his black eyes vanishing into his clenched fist of a face.

"I don’t think it was Jack Proby you were talking to at all," I said. "I think it was either Miranda Hart, or Gerald Stenson."

George’s face didn’t flicker. Leo on the other hand, finally spoke.

"I thought I knew what was going on there, but I don’t. Your woman’s a lying cunt, every disrespect, she’s a whore and a pig and she always will be, right?"

He knew I had to take that, and I did.

"I think her and Steno are into the fucking Tyrrells for some fucking score, I don’t know what it is."

"How do you know?"

"Good question. Because she told me: which almost guarantees it isn’t true. Steno always was a sly cunt, mind you."

"Did she know about the bodies?"

"She knew about Kennedy. And she said she thought the other body was Pa Hutton. She said it was nothing to do with her, but she couldn’t stop it. Wouldn’t explain that. Father Vincent said she needed to call the cops and tell them. She said there was no way she could get out of it. All this, and of course she’s crying and wailing and looking up out of her big eyes like a fucking panda, oh poor her."

"What do you think?"

"That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know."

"What about Steno? He’s beginning to sound like an interesting character."

Leo drew his narrow lips farther into his mouth.

"Steno was a nasty piece of work. People talked about St. Jude’s, you know, the abusers on the staff. The one I remember, going around, you had to watch your back, was one of the boys: Steno. And later, when he was dealing smack, he’d take his pick of the junkies. When Miranda Hart was at her worst, that was Steno she was running around with. Pair of them suited each other."

I thought of Hutton’s dumb show of rape and abuse.

"Did Steno ever attack Hutton?"

Leo looked astonished at the question.

"How the fuck d’you know that? Did Father Vincent tell you? Fuck, I don’t think even he knew."

"He raped him, didn’t he?"

"I always blamed him. Pa never knew for sure, said he had a blindfold on. I don’t think Pa ever really got over it. Seriously, how do you know? Is Pa Hutton alive? Have you seen him?"

George cleared his throat in aggressive distaste.

Leo flung a look at George, and I thought for a moment he was going to show him what aggressive meant; then he turned back to me, his dark eyes suddenly desperate for a word from beyond the grave.

"I think he may be, yes. The more you can tell me, the closer I’ll get to him. What about back in the day, you and F. X. Tyrrell?" I said. "Was F.X. interested in Hutton too?"

"Pa was never into that."

"Vincent Tyrrell said the pair of you were about to be expelled from St. Jude’s for indecent conduct. He said at first, F. X. Tyrrell had his eye on Patrick Hutton."

"Father Tyrrell is a devious cunt. Father Tyrrell wants you to find things out, but he doesn’t want to help you. Father Tyrrell must think you’re going to get divine inspiration."

"How could he have helped me?"

"He could have told you that I was the one F.X. wanted. Sure he had a notion of Pa as a jockey, but I was the one he wanted all along."

   One of the construction workers drove me back to Quarry Fields, and Leo sat in the backseat beside me. For some reason, the physical threat seemed to have receded, or at least that was what my gut told me. My gut had been wrong before, but this late in a case, it was almost all I had. When we got to the house, he put a hand on my arm.

"As long as Bottle of Red loses tomorrow, George’ll be happy. Don’t fuck that up, all right?"

I said I wouldn’t.

"It might all sound very seedy and fucked up at this distance, you know, industrial schools, abuse, all this. And then F. X. Tyrrell…as if he came in and said, I’ll have him over there, that one. But it wasn’t like that, you know?"

I looked at Leo, and by reflex at the driver.

"He’s Ukrainian. Fuck-all English. Apart from beer, isn’t that right man, beer, beer, voddy vodka and beer?"

The driver nodded dutifully, a grim smile on his wide mouth. Leo turned his dark eyes back to me.

"It was…he’d chosen me, but I was willing. He was a serious guy, F. X. Tyrrell, he was a fucking legend. I mean, say you were sixteen and I don’t know who asked for you, some older one, Michelle Pfeiffer, or Ellen Barkin, or fuckin’…your one…who would you have liked?"

I shrugged.

"Your one," I said, and Leo giggled.

"I can’t remember her name, the English one who’s always in the nip. But I mean, you would have said, fucking sure, wouldn’t you? And that’s what it was like, he was a charismatic guy, a suave fucker, and we were always into the ponies so he was like a fucking hero: I said, which way do you want me? I’m not sayin’ there was no shit at St. Jude’s, there fucking was, and it was always the weaker kids that got fucked, in every way. But I wasn’t one of them. I was older anyway. And I was looking out for Pa, too, I…I loved the guy, you know? Mates. Not that there was anything between us, I mean, he was never that way, though I gave it a decent go…but we were like brothers…only, not like my fucking brothers…no need to mention Podge, I should pay someone in Mountjoy to shank the fat fuck…and as for fucking George, since I got out, I don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is, always shitein’ on about fuckin’ business lunches and helipads and fucking interest rates, I’ve a pain in me hole listening to the cunt, I’m not coddin’ you…I knew Pa needed a helping hand, you know, but he was a class jockey…so anyway, we were both getting what we wanted, that’s how it was."

Leo lit a Gauloise and exhaled and sat in wistful reverie for a while.

"That was the time of my life, know I mean? The time of my life."

"And then when Miranda Hart came back from school…"

"Mary Hart as was. That was Jackie as well, claiming her, using her as a pawn against Regina. The politics of the house."

"And she made her play for Patrick Hutton."

"Yeah, they just, they got together, they got married, we were all working at the stables, getting our first rides, so forth. Then three things really: Patrick’s career took off, and mine didn’t, and F. X. lost interest in me."

"This would be coming up to the By Your Leave incident?"

"This would. Because Pa rode By Your Leave. And because…I was gonna lie about this even now, I was gonna say it was George’s idea, but it wasn’t, it was mine."

"To blackmail F. X. Tyrrell."

"Yeah. I suppose I felt a bit excluded, know I mean? There they were, on the gallops, in fucking Cheltenham, and where was I? Back up in fucking Seafield sorting out Podge’s mess. Dealing to skin-popping scobies. George looking at me like I’m some kind of fucking burden. So I decided to cash in."

"You had photographs."

"I had videotape. I took it without F.X. knowing."

"Planning ahead."

"I don’t know. Maybe I was. Maybe deep down I’m a double-dealing scumbag. I thought I wanted a record of it, to believe it myself, to get off on it all. So I’d never forget. Maybe I’m lying to myself. You look back on what you were like, and you can’t swear to anything, can you? Anyway, I took the tape to George. I made him watch it first. That was funny, seeing him sit through it, watching him squirm. And then he got his hooks into the Tyrrells."

"A lot of money over the years?"

"I wouldn’t let him take it too far. I mean, Podge never knew about it, can you imagine? Podge and his crew swarming around the country club, the whole thing would have collapsed. Nah, George took it steady. A race here and there, and the opportunity to get all the money laundered."

"That was Seán Proby, wasn’t it?"

"Yeah. Well, once I had F.X. on board, I figured, may as well get stuck into Proby. I knew he was up for it, he was always panting around Tyrrellscourt hoping for action, too shy to do anything about it, so it wasn’t too hard to set him up with a couple of nice-looking young fellas and record the results. And bingo, Proby was the route for clean cash."