The Price of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  When our eyes met, her face turned to stone for a second and I thought she would start to scream; instead she turned her lamps full on, mouthed "Darling" at me and beckoned me over with the hand she held her glass in, flicking some of its contents over a fat red-faced man of sixty or so with a wispy strawberry-blond comb-over who affected to find this as hilarious as he appeared to be finding everything else. A well-preserved, shrewd-looking blonde in her fifties turned around to take an appraising look at me as the barman brought me the pint of Guinness I’d ordered. I had to remind myself that none of them, and nobody else here in this opulent Christmas melee, none of the lush young women or their overweight, red-faced partners in candy-stripe shirts and blazers or the older horsey types in tweed and corduroy and their sleek beige-and-ivory women groomed within an inch of their lives, not one of them had paid a cent for me, and I owed them nothing in return.

  I carried my pint across to Miranda. Her party had grabbed banquette seats around a small table. Miranda kissed me on both cheeks, and in the ear farthest from her friends, said, "Sorry about that earlier. I do want you to find Patrick. I can pay you."

  "I’m already getting paid," I said. "But thank you."

  We were cheek to cheek, the room a clamor of laughter and jostling voices. Her bathroom had been full of Chanel No. 5 and I could smell that on her now, but faintly; her own scent overpowered it. Deep salt with a tang like oranges, it had gotten under my skin in her house; now I almost felt like the sole reason I had trailed her here was to breathe it again. She smiled at me, and opened her mouth; she still had lipstick on her teeth and I could see her tongue shift her chewing gum to one side. I laughed, and took a drink of my beer.

  "What’s so funny?" she said.

  "You are," I said. "Is there any situation in which you don’t chew gum?"

  "That would be for you to find out," she said. "Mr. Private Investigator."

  The shrewd-looking blonde, who was wearing cream and gold and the slightest hint of leopardskin, said something pointed to the comb-over and he exploded in a fit of convulsive laughter, his hair slipping in a long unruly strand down his face. She looked at him pityingly, like a mother would glance at her obese child when no one else was looking, then raised an appraising gaze, and her glass, to me; I saluted her in the same fashion and we both drank.

  "Jackie Tyrrell," Miranda said quietly. "It’s our works do. The fatso is Seán Proby."

  "The bookie?"

  "The father. The son, Jack, runs the day-to-day now. Seán is the figurehead, on TV telling war stories. He was a great comrade of F. X. Tyrrell’s. They made a lot of money for each other. Then they fell out."

  "Over what?"

  "Whatever came to hand. F.X. falls out with everyone sooner or later. You can be my date, if you like. We’re going to the Octagon for supper."

  "Did you not have a date?"

  "Are you worried he might show up and want to fight you?"

  "I only like fighting in the morning. At least then there’s a chance the day might improve."

  "Scaredy-cat."

  "Are Proby and Jackie an item?"

  They were cackling with each other on the banquette, hand in hand. Miranda did an eye-rolling silent laugh at my question and shook her head at me.

  "Oh dear God no. Seán bats for the other side, darling."

  "Despite being someone’s father. This is all getting a bit too sophisticated for me. Why did you go to pieces when you heard Father Vincent Tyrrell’s name?"

  Jackie Tyrell, who had been giving a very good impression of a drunk, stood bolt upright and apparently sober.

  "We can’t be late," she barked in a highly polished accent with a trace of Cork in it. "Gilles will sulk. What’s his name?" This last to Miranda of me.

  "Ed Loy," I said, extending my hand.

  "Ed’s writing a book," Miranda announced. "About horse racing and the Irish."

  "Oh God no," Jackie Tyrrell said. "That book gets written every year. It’s always a fucking bore. You’re not going to be a fucking bore, are you?"

  "Compared to you?" I said.

  She looked me up and down as if she had been offered me for sale.

  "At least he’s tall," she said to Miranda. "Not a skinny little boy. He’s actually like a man, Miranda."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Don’t get smart with me," Jackie Tyrrell said. "I’m hungry."

  On his feet now, Seán Proby was pumping my hand up and down and laughing uproariously; the more I tried to retrieve my hand the tighter he held it, and the harder I struggled the louder he laughed; there we were like two clowns in hell until Jackie Tyrrell punched him sharply in the arm and he came to and beamed genially at me, now apparently sober himself.

  The Octagon was a converted meeting hall around the corner in a lane off Kildare Street that had been painted white and gussied up with a lot of stained glass and indoor trees hung with fairy lights and gauze. People sat at several different levels on a succession of balconies and mezzanines. The staff were Irish and French and they made a big fuss of Jackie and Miranda; I heard Jackie speaking in immaculate French to Gilles, the maître d’, and Gilles instructing a wine waiter to bring Mrs. Tyrrell "the usual." The restaurant was full of the same kind of people who had been in the Shelbourne, and I quickly discovered why: the prices were absurdly high, but the food was very straightforward: onion soup and egg mayonnaise, pork belly and Toulouse sausages, steak frîtes; none of your two-scallops-on-a-huge-white-plate nonsense. Thus Irish people could indulge their aspirational need to get all fancy and French, and sate their ferocious desire to spend as much money as possible, while getting a huge amount of meat inside them.

  Jackie waved a hand at me.

  "I’ll order, unless you have some particular preference." She said preference in the sense of "disease."

  "Go ahead," I said.

  The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, "Just pour," at the wine waiter.

  I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn’t had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.

  "You’re very tall for a writer," she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.

  "How far are you into your book?" she said.

  "I’m nearly finished," I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn’t have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you were finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn’t a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.

  "Well in that case, it’s too late for us to tell you anything, isn’t it? You must know it all by now."

  "Well, actually, it’s at this stage—when I think I know it all—that’s when meeting the experts is really useful. Now I know what questions to ask."

  Jackie drank half a glass of Sancerre in one and stared at me deadpan.

  "Ask me then. The questions. Now you know it all. Go on."

  A hush fell around the table, and I could see Seán Proby and Miranda Hart looking excited, as if Jackie Tyrrell were the Queen and she’d just put me on the spot.

  "Do you breed, Jackie?" I said.

  "Not as a rule, but with you, I’d make an exception," she said, and blew me a kiss. She sat back and poked Seán Proby in the ribs, and he dutifully exploded with laughter again. I looked at Miranda Hart, who leant in and said quickly and quietly, "They
were at Gowran Park, they’ve been going since lunchtime."

  The starters came, and we ate in silence. Jackie put her face down and shoveled onion soup and bread into it. At length she resurfaced, flush-cheeked and panting. Little beads of sweat dotted her mysteriously unlined brow, and frosted the tiny soft hairs above her upper lip.

  "I don’t breed anymore," she announced. "I used to look after that side of things for Frank. The Tyrrellscourt Stud. Still going strong. I’ve a good eye for a horse still, though. I’ll go on a trip with him, when he’s buying. As long as he’s buying."

  "No one is allowed to call F. X. Tyrrell Frank except Jackie," said Seán Proby, the first coherent utterance he had made in my hearing.

  "Well, no one does, at any rate, "Jackie said. "Maybe no one wants to."

  "How was Gowran today?" Miranda said to Proby.

  "Not bad," Proby said. "Nothing like a small country meeting. Jack was working, of course; I was merely Mrs. Tyrrell’s lunch companion. But we did all right."

  "The bookies always do," snapped Jackie.

  "The Tyrrell horses underperformed nicely," Miranda said.

  Jackie smiled thinly at this.

  "Leopardstown’s the main event," she said. "The ground was too firm today anyway."

  "Did Jack of Hearts place?" I said.

  "Won the first by four lengths at six to one. Held up well," Proby said.

  "Why the interest?" Jackie said. I had the impression she was playing with me.

  "It just caught my eye."

  "I thought it might be because of its owner. You know who owns it, of course."

  "Do I?"

  "I think you do, Edward Loy. After all, when you’re not writing books about horse racing in Ireland, which I would say is all of the time, you hire yourself out as a private detective. And a while back you had a hand in putting away Podge Halligan, the drug dealer, also the brother of George Halligan, who owns Jack of Hearts. Miranda, why did you think it necessary to fabricate an absurd identity for Mr. Loy? A writer, of all things. Everyone knows writers are all badly dressed overweight cantankerous faux-humble alcoholics with a chip on each shoulder and a grudge against the world. And that’s just the women."

  Miranda looked like a schoolgirl hauled before the head mistress; she stared at her plate in silence, her face burning.

  "It was my idea," I said.

  "And gallant too. Tall and gallant. We don’t see many of you round here anymore. You’re not gay, are you?"

  Seán Proby shook his head.

  "Absolutely not," he said.

  "Seán’s my gaydar when it comes to men. Are you working, Ed Loy?"

  "He’s looking for Patrick," Miranda said, her voice thick with emotion. She choked back what might have been a sob, then muttered an apology and fled to the loo. The waiter came and took our plates. I watched Jackie Tyrrell closely, but her expression was blank; she gave nothing away. When the table had been cleared, and Seán Proby had gone outside for a smoke, she smiled keenly at me.

  "You know about Patrick Hutton and the Halligans?" she said.

  I shook my head.

  "Patrick and Leo—" she began, and then stopped as cutlery arrived for the main course. She repeated the names when the waiter had gone, her eyes dancing, then stopped again as Miranda came back to the table, eye makeup freshly and thickly applied.

  "I’ll tell him about that myself, Jackie, if it’s all right with you," Miranda said, quite sharply to my ears.

  "But of course, my darling, of course," Jackie said, all charm.

  "He was my husband, and I think I’m best placed to know what’s important and what’s just rumor and innuendo, don’t you?"

  Jackie Tyrrell gave Miranda Hart what looked to me to be a very fond, warm smile, and leant across and touched her hand.

  "I do," she said softly. "And you are. Nobody but you."

  Miranda blushed again, and nodded; in removing her hand from Jackie’s, she managed to upset a full glass of white wine over both of us; by the time we had that cleared up, the main courses had arrived. I ate steak frîtes with béarnaise sauce, washed down with two slow glasses of red. I could drink a lot, and generally did, but I had no head for wine; in any case, I wanted to study these people at the periphery of the Tyrrell family closely: there was history between them, and I’d need my wits about me to pick up on it.

  As we ate, Seán Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O’Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary’s Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn’t racing at all, he sniffed.

  Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt’s premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O’Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.

  She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school’s worth.

  "No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their ’06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding’s an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing’s wasted on them."

  Miranda beamed at her satirically.

  "There speaks Jackie Tyrrell, who went to finishing school in Geneva. Dressmaking and deportment and Italian and place setting and flower arrangement."

  "Quite right too. Made a real woman of her," Seán Proby said.

  "Miranda doesn’t agree. About the girls," Jackie said, seemingly reveling in any exchange that approached the condition of a row.

  Miranda shrugged wearily: this was evidently something they rehearsed on a regular basis.

  "Girls were always interested in hair and makeup and clothes. They just didn’t have the money to do anything about it back in our day. Now they do."

  "Too much money," Jackie said severely. "Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?"

  "I’d always be in favor of wealth redistribution," I said. "The problem is, how to dole it out, and who decides?"

  "I decide," Jackie said, and then, straight-faced: "Ed, do you think teenage girls should be taught to ride?"

  Miranda and Proby burst out laughing at this, and Jackie Tyrrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honor at her own table. Champagne arrived, and we drank a toast to the riding school (in which Seán Proby had some kind of interest) against her protests, and to Christmas. Then Jackie, unprovoked and with no challenger, launched into a long and involved defense of the Irish Revenue Inspectors’ tax exemption for the bloodstock industry, inviting my support on the grounds that, as a creative writer, I benefited from a similar dispensation. I tried to remind her that I wasn’t, in fact, a writer, but she and Proby were drinking Calvados by now, impervious to any music but their own. Occasionally she would scribble something on a napkin, briefing herself for her rhetorical assault against illusory foes. It was after ten; it felt much later. I offered Miranda a lift home. She was on her feet before I’d finished speaking.

  I offered Jackie Tyrrell some money for the dinner, but she forced it back into my hand and pulled me down until we were eye to eye. Her face was fixed in a comedy leer; her breath was a yeasty cloud of alcohol; I thought she was going to kiss me, and didn’t see what I could do if she did, but when I looked her in the eye, she fixed me with an unexpectedly clear gaze.

 
; "Call me. We need to talk," she said quietly, urgently, and then pushed me from her and yelled with laughter as if she’d propositioned me. I waved good-bye to Proby from a distance, not wanting to risk giving him my hand again for fear I’d never get it back.

  "See you racing!" he bellowed twice as we were leaving.

  When we got out into the night, the rain was falling softly. I opened my coat and turned to Miranda Hart to see if she needed it. She snaked her arms inside it and around my neck and pulled my mouth down onto hers and kissed me; she smelled of oranges and salt; when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the shimmer of the streetlights in the rain. I thought for a second they were stars.

  "What happened to your gum?" I said.

  Her tongue snaked quickly out of her mouth with a little wad of chewing gum on its tip, then vanished again, to be replaced by a smile.

  "Come home with me," she said. "And I’ll show you how I did it."

  She reached up to my mouth and wiped it with her hand. It came away red with her lipstick, and she waved it in front of me and grinned.

  As we walked down Merrion Street to my car, amid weaving groups of happy and belligerent and bedraggled drunks, shiny and sodden in the damp night, I straightened the bills Jackie Tyrrell had crushed into my hand and put them in my wallet. Among them, I found her business card. On one side was printed: The Jackie Tyrrell Riding Academy for Girls, Tibradden Road, along with her phone numbers. On the back, in red ink, she had printed:

  PATRICK AND LEO

  RODE TOGETHER

  SIX

  I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her arm and made to leave. She grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed me again.

  "I can’t stay," I said.

  "I don’t want you to stay all night," she said. "Just long enough."

  She held on to me with one hand while she worked the key in the lock. It occurred to me that if I was going to stop sleeping with clients, or with women implicated on some level in the cases I worked, now would be the time to start. But I didn’t. What’s more, I didn’t want to. Miranda Hart dragged me into the darkened living room and pushed me onto the couch and fell on top of me; she was wild and ardent at first; then, after a while, there were tears in her eyes, and she said,