The Price of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  THIRTEEN

  Back in Quarry Fields, I showered, shaved and changed into a fresh white shirt and a clean black suit. I had fallen into dressing like this when I arrived back in Dublin but my luggage did not; I was dressed for a funeral and, once I’d taken off my tie, I found no great reason to dress any differently afterward. Occasionally I felt a little overdressed, but that was rare in the city of suits Dublin had become; mostly it suited my purposes, whether to curry favor with a headwaiter or at a reception desk, or to impress a client, or simply to remind myself in the hours when I was flagging to keep my shoulders back and my head held high. I looked at my face in the mirror: it was drawn and sallow, but something in the eyes was different; the ghosts of the past had lifted, and there was light instead of darkness; for the first time that I could remember, as I heard the front door slam and the creak of floorboards below, I had a glimmer of a future, by which I meant a woman. The fact that the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to my ex-wife was a detail that appeared lost on me.

  In the kitchen, Tommy Owens was making tea. He greeted me with a shake of the head and a look of appalled fascination, as if to say he’d seen some gobshites in his time but I could be their king. I didn’t much care though, as Miranda Hart was by then in my arms, her tears wetting my cheeks, holding me as if she’d never let me go; what was Tommy next to that?

  "Is Patrick dead? Is he one of the bodies they found?" she said.

  Tommy looked at me keenly.

  "I think so," I said. "I can’t be sure."

  She was shivering, in coat and scarf with her gloves still on.

  "We need to talk, Ed," Tommy said.

  "Let’s talk then," I said. "If we’re going down to Tyrrellscourt, Miranda can help us: she knows the place inside out. There’s nothing to say she can’t hear."

  Tommy and Miranda exchanged glances, and I got the impression that Tommy had already had a go at her on the journey here.

  "Ask her about Leo Halligan," Tommy said. "The phone call."

  I shook my head.

  "What’s up, Ed?" Tommy said. "Gauze on the lens, is there?"

  Miranda Hart understood immediately what was happening.

  "Ask away, I’ve nothing to hide. I don’t need kid gloves," she said to Tommy.

  "Did you ring Leo Halligan on Saturday night?" he said.

  "I didn’t even know he was out of jail," she said.

  "But you’d’ve had his number," Tommy said.

  "I used to have his number, years ago. That was another life, as far as I was concerned, until—"

  "Until what?" Tommy snapped.

  "Until Ed came around yesterday asking questions about Patrick, about the Tyrrells, about the whole bloody thing. And now there are these dead bodies…"

  "One of them is Don Kennedy, the private detective you hired to find Patrick two years back."

  Miranda Hart shook her head.

  "And Patrick, and now Jackie…good Jesus, what’s happening?"

  "That’s what we need to find out."

  "Someone—a woman with a posh accent—called Leo and told him that the story of Tyrrellscourt was about to blow, and that Vincent Tyrrell knew the full story," Tommy said.

  "Do you want me to draw you a fucking map? That wasn’t me," Miranda said to Tommy.

  "Maybe it was Regina Tyrrell," I said.

  "Regina Tyrrell doesn’t have that kind of accent," she said in that crisp, faux-objective way women take care to use when slighting one another.

  "What kind of accent does she have?" I said.

  "Oh, you’ll find out. You’ll find out soon enough."

  She colored after she’d said this, and looked down, and I wondered again what had passed between her and Tommy.

  "Tommy followed a car that left Jackie Tyrrell’s house last night," I said. "The bells had begun to toll, and the car screeched out from the stables, an old Land Rover with UK plates. Tommy followed down the N81 past Blessington and then west toward Tyrrellscourt. He lost it somewhere in the approaches to the village."

  "We hadn’t reached the stables," Tommy said, shamefaced still that he had lost the car. "By the time I got to the entrance, there was no sign of the Land Rover."

  "Derek Rowan was head man at Tyrrellscourt ten years ago. He always used import secondhand Land Rovers from England," Miranda said. "I don’t know if he’s still there. If it’s not him, it may be his son, Brian; Derek was training him up."

  Miranda Hart’s tea bag was beside her cup; she had been smoking, with her gloves still on; Tommy looked on in disgust as she doused her cigarette in the tea bag and dunked the lot in her half-empty cup.

  "We’d better get moving," I said. "Christmas Eve. No one will want to talk to us if we don’t get down there soon."

  "No one will be in a fit state to talk to us," Tommy said.

  I began to talk Miranda through the eccentricities of my heating system when Tommy interrupted me.

  "Ed, if your one is really under threat, your gaff is not the place to be. The killer knows you’re on the case, knocked you unconscious last night; if he’s looking for her, your house is going to be the first place he comes."

  "You’re right. We’ll find a hotel—"

  "She can stay at my place," Tommy said. "Plenty of room, nobody there, quiet road."

  And with instructions not to answer the door to anyone, and an unconcerned look around at what a not very apologetic Tommy accurately described as "the state of the place," she stayed there.

  Before we hit the road, Tommy retreated to the car to let us say good-bye. And after we’d kissed, Miranda Hart said, "Please, Ed, promise me, you’ll try and understand…no matter what you hear."

  And I promised to try.

  WE TOOK THE Tallaght exit off the M50 and kept on the bypass until it became the Blessington Road; the hills were white on all sides while the low December sun scorched our eyes; skeletons of forests changed places with ser vice stations and new building developments until we cut off west toward Tyrrellscourt through the open plains of Kildare.

  Tyrrellscourt had long been associated with F. X. Tyrrell and his prodigious stable of prizewinning racehorses, and with the Tyrrellscourt stud, the jewel in the crown of the Irish bloodstock industry. More recently, the Tyrrellscourt Country Club, a luxury hotel with golf course, leisure center, gymnasium and spa, had opened, with elaborate fanfare in the press; apartments with life membership of the club were made available at prices in excess of seven figures; all had been snapped up the day they were released. Celebrities flocked to celebrate their weddings there, and an EU gathering of some description had reached its climax with the assorted heads of state stomping around the Tyrrellscourt fairways in a variety of garish leisure wear.

  The third thing Tyrrellscourt had become famous for, quite at odds with the first two, was the number of people who went there to disappear. The guitarist of an obscure late sixties English rock band, part of the Canterbury scene, hadn’t been seen since, following the breakup of the group, he got on a train at Victoria Station, headed for Brighton; thirty-five years later, following sightings all over the globe and a persistent rumor that he was now an obscure novelist nobody knew anything about either, an English music magazine tracked him down to Tyrrellscourt, where he had been living with his Dutch wife running a candle-making business. The group subsequently re-formed and made quite a lot of money before breaking up for roughly the same reason they had in the first place: because they couldn’t stand one another. But this aspect of Tyrrellscourt, its ability to give shelter and succor to a variety of misfits and n’er-do-wells of one kind or another who couldn’t cut it in the new thrusting entrepreneurial Ireland, or simply refused to play by the new rules of the game, was particularly vivid given that the shiny happy face of the country club was so often used as a brochure to advertise the extent of the Irish success story. It was a script that could have been designed with Tommy Owens in mind; in fact, it turned out he’d been disappearing down here for years. Maybe they’d been ru
nning a bus from Hennessy’s bar.

  "I won’t go on about the country club, except to say they got the fuckin’ name right, and the stables is what it is, yeah, but if you want to know what Tyrrellscourt’s about, then McGoldrick’s is the place to go," Tommy said. "There are others places, Sheehy’s and the Big Tree, but McGoldrick’s has the best mix. And that’s the point, the mix, know I mean? Up in the country club they’re all prancing around in their Pringle and Lacoste like the cunts they are, a fucking kindergarten for the nouveau riche whose mammies won’t let them play outdoors. And the horsey fuckers have work to do, fair enough, they’re at the gallops and so on, and they have a couple of older restaurants they go to, salmon en croûte and Black Forest gateau they’re serving, like a fucking geezer theme park, sixties cuisine for the hundred Irish cunts who’ve been rich since then. But everyone passes through McGoldrick’s, not just the people I know: all the jockeys come there, and they’re fucking mental bastards. And even middle-class people want some action after a week of golf and spa treatments and Chardonnay. Because everyone knows if you need something extracurricular, McGoldrick’s the place to go."

  "When you say all the jockeys go there—"

  "When they can, when they’re not in training, or wasting; they get a night out, they go mad."

  "So there’d be boys who knew Patrick Hutton?"

  "Chances are. Boys who’d say they knew him. Anyone riding in Leopardstown probably won’t be there. But you never know, they do what they please, jockeys."

  "Tommy, what happened between you and Miranda?"

  "What do you mean, Ed?"

  "I’m saying, fair enough to ask her about the call to Leo, but there was a real edge between you two. Why?"

  Tommy grimaced.

  "I’ll tell you over a drink."

  "Why can’t you tell me now?"

  "Because you’re not going to like it. And when you don’t like something, you do better with a drink in your hand."

  I pressed him a little further, and when we reached a set of traffic lights, he turned to me and said pretty much the worst thing Tommy could say about anyone.

  "Ed, I know her."

  THE VILLAGE IS on a slope, and at its top, you can see the Tyrrellscourt gallops stretching out below in two lazy figure-of-eights for the horses’ round and straight work. Driving down along the main street was like one of those posed features in a color supplement about "The Subcultures of Our Time": there were new-age crusties and tree huggers with multicolored sweaters and tights and those strange cropped-pate and pigtail haircuts with dogs on strings and petitions to save the whale, and the world; there were older hippies in saris and denim and leather, with mustaches and ponytails and nature shoes and raddled complexions; there were horsey, country types in Barbours and yellow and crimson and lime cords; there were obese white-faced teenage Goths in long leatherette coats and vast black T-shirts and six-inch steel-inlaid wedges; there were the usual complements of cheerful or surly layabouts, faces weather-beaten from standing smoking outside the pub or the betting shop all day; there were clutches of stripe-shirted men with mobile phones and oblong glasses thrusting their entrepreneurial way into the future; there were spiked-fin rugby boys and primped and groomed OMIGOD girls; there were slender, fine-boned blond women from Poland and Lithuania with their crop-headed sinewy men; there were ’oul ones with walking frames and tartan shopping trollies getting the last of the Christmas messages, and ’oul fellas with papers rolled tight beneath their arms, transporting their custom from one pub to another.

  It was Christmas Eve in Tyrrellscourt, and everywhere there was tinsel and holly and flashing neon and twinkling fairy lights; last-minute bargains were being bruited from shop doorways, and the queues from the two butchers for turkeys and hams together ran the length of the town. At the bottom of the main drag the road forked in two, and there was a central meeting place with benches and flower beds and a great Christmas tree, and throngs of folk were gathered to gossip and idle and pass the compliments of the season back and forth. An accordion-playing trio from Central Europe was providing musical backing to the festive hordes; as we passed, they finished "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and kicked into "Carolan’s Welcome," a traditional tune from the seventheenth-century blind Irish harper. I began to laugh at this point, and Tommy turned to me.

  "You know when Yanks say to you, ’Oh, you’re so lucky to live in Ireland,’ like it’s some fucking Celtic theme park full of characters and crack and gargle? And we’re like, no, it’s just like anywhere else, except with rain? Well, sometimes that’s what Tyrrellscourt is like. It’s like visiting Ireland for an Irish person."

  We braked suddenly as a BMW Estate pulled out of its parking spot, and then Tommy smartly rolled the Volvo into its place and killed the engine. He flipped a half-smoked roll up from his shirt pocket to his mouth, lit it and exhaled with a grin.

  "Of course, by half three, the light will be dying, and the freeze will be kicking in, and half the town will be pissed, and the other half will be getting there, and the blood will be up and the knives will be out, and all of this fucking…Brigadoon will just…"

  Tommy held his hand out to the color and bustle of the town, and raised it in a parting wave.

  "See ya…"

  EVERYONE PASSES THROUGH McGoldrick’s, Tommy said, so it only seemed right that we did too. It had a traditional frontage and an old mahogany bar with snugs on either side; double doors led through to a larger lounge and restaurant area; at the end of this another set of doors gave onto a vast room that looked like an old warehouse: girders had been painted pillar-box green and floorboards had been waxed and tossed with sawdust and old suitcases and books and vintage bicycles and typewriters were stacked on shelves and in alcoves; lunch was being served from an open kitchen that ran the length of one wall by young staff with the striking looks and excellent manners of Eastern Europeans to tables filled with Christmas Eve revelers, mainly families with supernaturally excited kids. We retreated to the lounge, which seemed to have a more upscale buzz to it, judging by the high-maintenance sheen of its predominantly female clientele. Without even having to look at each other, we found ourselves back in the bar, perched on two bar stools and ordering pints of Guinness and bowls of Irish stew. The graying ponytailed barman, whose name was Steno, gave Tommy a high five and made fun of his short hair and close-shaven face; evidently Tommy had established a minor reputation down here for himself. I wondered if I should tell Steno about Tommy’s recent career move to the Church. Better to keep that in reserve, I decided. The bar’s customers were on the horsey Barbour side, chomping brown bread and pâté and drinking hot ports and yelping about Leopardstown.

  "Later in the day, it all gets a bit…looser," Tommy said.

  The foaming half-poured pints sat by the taps to settle, and I nodded to Tommy to get on with it, and he nodded at the pints, so we waited until Steno had topped them up and gave them another couple of minutes and at last set them down in front of us, the swirling brown now solid black, the heads creamy and firm. We tipped them back. I don’t know about Tommy’s, but mine tasted like the first pint God made.

  "All right then, Tommy, I have the drink; now, tell me what you know about Miranda Hart."

  Tommy grimaced, then raised his eyebrows to heaven resignedly.

  "All right, Ed, but don’t go blaming the messenger."

  "Just get on with it, will you?"

  "Right, I used to come down here a fair bit, ’98, ’99, things weren’t going so well with Paula, better than before they started to go really badly but still, anyway, I was down here, doing, I never told you this, a bit of work for Leo Halligan. Don’t get the wrong idea, Ed, only Leo wasn’t the maniac everyone thought he was, and no one thought he done that young fella, he was covering up for someone else, or something else, and there was a lot of talk that he was happy to do the time, get himself out of the way. Anyway, I was doing a bit of work for Leo—"

  "What kind of work was this, Tommy? For a
Halligan brother? Painting and decorating, were you?"

  "You were away, Ed, so you missed a lot of…when George and Podge Halligan were getting going back in the nineties, Leo was down here, trying and failing as a jockey. Not as if he was morally opposed to his brothers, he just had a different plan. After that plan didn’t work, he hung on down here, and he became a kind of…I don’t know, he was like, at the center of a whole bunch of guys, jockeys, a bookie or two, even a few racing journalists."

  "At the center of them how?"

  "He’d be buying them dinner, drinks, comping them to events, you know, gigs in Dublin. Lining up women. And a little dope, a little blow, a few E’s."

  "And you were his distribution network for the drugs, yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  "And so what was it all about? Was it some kind of charitable work maybe? These horse-racing professionals were all-work-and-no-play merchants and Leo stepped in to modify their work–life balance? Or, having given all their lives, they decided it was time they got something back."

  "You may laugh."

  "Some days, I do little else."

  "Leo may be a Halligan, but being gay is like a passport across the classes. And racing has a fair bit of that as well. So you’d be surprised who you’d’ve seen down here. And Leo was always setting up the jockeys to go to these charity balls for MS and the Hospice Foundation and whatever, photographs of them in the Sunday Independent with a bunch of orange-faced models. He knew all these guys who trot around after the ladies who lunch and, you know, go with them to all these events their husbands can’t be bothered going to anymore. And they’re all hoovering up blow any chance they get, so it worked out nicely, all very respectable."

  "Meanwhile."

  "Well, I don’t know, I mean, I have no evidence, no proof. But the story was, it was all about race fixing. Leo was working with George at this stage—George has a place in the Algarve, and a lot of the jockeys were flown out there on golfing holidays, they were given presents, sometimes cash, sometimes cars or whatever. George has been running a book for ages for people who can’t bet legally, usually because their money isn’t clean. So the jockeys were holding up horses mostly, in some cases maybe doping them."