“Too much money,” Jackie said severely. “Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?”
“I’d always be in favour 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 Tyrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honour 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 defence 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 Tyrell 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 Tyrell 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 Tyrell 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,
“Maybe this is not such a good idea,” and I said,
“Now she tells me,” struggling to get the words out, and then,
“Do you want to stop?” and she said,
“Fuck no, do you?” and I said,
“No I don’t,” and she said,
“Come on then. Come on, come on.”
It wasn’t how I thought it would be, at once gentler and more passionate; afterwards, she cried a little. When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I said, “Gin,” and she said, “Good idea.” I’d be late for Dave Donnelly, but I couldn’t leave, not just yet. What’s more, I didn’t want to. We sat in the living room, both on the sofa, half dressed, the light from the kitchen bleeding into the dark, reflecting off the glass doors at the other end that gave onto a small garden. I could see her chewing, and shook my head in wonder. Where did she keep it? It was a gift that passed all understanding.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“Sorry about what?” I said.
“You know. The make-up-your-fucking-mind, the tears, the all-round crapness. Being messy. Behaving like a girl. I thought I could just…”
I took her hand and held it.
“We all think we can just…and sometimes we can, and sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.”
“Just the day, you know? You coming around asking about Patrick…the very day he disappeared. How weird is that?”
“Maybe Father Tyrell planned it that way.”
Something close to a shudder rippled through her body.
“You were going to tell me. What is it about Vincent Tyrell that frightens you so?”
She took a gulp of her gin, pulled herself into a corner of the couch, and brought her knees up to her chin.
“He came around here that day. Ten years ago. It wasn’t a Sunday, it was the middle of the week. Everything was a bit chaotic here, after the whole By Your Leave thing. A lot of drinking, a lot of…well, I wasn’t the most…I could have been a lot more sympathetic to Patrick, put it that way.”
“You thought he’d made a mess of the situation.”
“I thought he’d been unprofessional. I mean, the rules of the game: jockeys do what they’re told. And maybe sometimes you’ll stretch that, you’ll leave it a bit later than you’ve been told, you’ll take an earlier lead, but it’s all forgiven if you win. But what Patrick did, to make such a song and dance about stopping a horse, it was really stupid. I mean, what was the point? Everyone knows what racing is like. And it wasn’t as if it changed anything.”
“Didn’t he ever try to explain himself? To you, at least?”
“No.”
“Miranda, I can’t help you if you’re keeping something back.”
“I’m not. I swear to God. Look, it wasn’t as if we had a big discussion, we didn’t work like that. I didn’t know I wasn’t going to see him again.”
“Was he going to find it hard to get another trainer to take him on?”
“I was worried he might. But I was wrong; he’d been riding well that year, and once the hue and cry had died down, he’d have got another job easily. I was…I was horrible to him, really, put him through a whole guilt trip. I suppose I thought…you know, that Tyrellscourt has such a reputation, it’s been number one for so long, I thought he’d been at the very top and thrown it all away. And what were we, twenty-three or something? It was ridiculous, we were just starting out. And the last time I saw him…”
Her voice faltered and she began to tear up again.
“The last time I saw him was in the morning, I’d made him sleep in the spare room. He’d brought me up a cup of tea, and begged me to talk to him, to forgive him. He said he’d make it all right. I remember, I was lying on my side away from him, and he sounded so sad…so desperate…”
“Can you remember anything he said?”
Miranda took another long drink of gin, this time tipping the glass too far up and spilling it down both sides of her chin.
“Fuck it!” she said. “Don’t laugh at me!”
“You have to be the clumsiest person I’ve ever met,” I said.
“Patrick used to say tha
t too. He said I’d never make it as a jockey, my body’d never cope with the injuries, I got bruises enough walking around a room.”
She drained her gin and wiped her mouth and passed her glass to me. Her lipstick was smeared all over her mouth like some crazy lady from an old black-and-white movie, Joan Crawford with the sirens howling, and I laughed again, and she glared at me, and I pulled her toward me and put my arms around her, and she punched me a couple of times in the chest and then put her head on my shoulder.
“I was such a cow to him.”
“You didn’t know you were never going to see him again,” I said. We sat for a while like that, as if we’d known each other forever, until I began to wonder whether it was Miranda Hart I was embracing, or the ghost of my ex-wife. Maybe Miranda felt the chill; she leapt up and sat by the fire, where the embers were smouldering, and tried to poke and then to blow them back into life. There was red in the turf and she coaxed it into flame and put another couple of sods on top. When she turned around, the flames danced in the silver of her dress, and her dark eyes flashed red and I found that I couldn’t breathe.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said. I nodded.
“Someone who hurt you very badly. Someone I remind you of, someone who maybe looks a little like me.”
I nodded again, dumbstruck.
“And now, at last, you’re beginning to get over her. That’s all right,” she said, smiling. “I wanted you too.” Then her mouth set hard.
“Now, I think you’d better ask your questions, and go.”
I hadn’t touched my gin, and found I needed it badly. I felt like I’d been slapped, and for no good reason, and I didn’t like it. Miranda Hart was the kind of woman who could sense your weakest spot and reach straight for it. And she could see I wanted something more than what she had given.
“Jackie Tyrell told me Patrick and Leo Halligan rode together. What did she mean by that?”
“What do you think she meant?”
“That they were both jockeys who came up together at Tyrellscourt. That they were lovers. What’s the truth?”
“Leo didn’t have the talent, or the temperament, to be a jockey. Because he was a fucking lunatic, and not in a good way. But I’m sure you know that, if you know his brothers. He was at a reform school near the stables. St. Jude’s. So was Patrick. F.X. made a point of taking a couple of lads from there once they’d done their time, as apprentices. They were set to work in the yard; they both graduated to working the horses in the mornings. They’d be given pieces of work. Patrick took to it; Leo didn’t. Leo was too smart. In every sense: too quick, too cunning, so sharp he’d cut himself.”
“Were you there at the same time?”
Miranda nodded.
“I grew up in the village, a couple of miles downriver. I was the daughter of the local publican. The Tyrellscourt Inn. Adopted, they never made any secret of that. They tried to make a lady out of me, too, but I was up at the stables any chance I got. My mother died when I was twelve, and they thought sending me to an all-girls’ boarding school in England would give me a female influence, and encourage me to show willing. Except the school was in Cheltenham. It just meant I got to the Festival every year of my teens. Finally Jackie made a deal with my father: as long as I finished school, I could come and work at the yard. They didn’t say I had to pass my A Levels though, and I didn’t.”
“Jackie made a deal with your father? Why did she do that?”
“I guess she always looked out for me. She picked me up more than once when I fell. And her and F.X. Tyrell couldn’t have kids—or didn’t, I don’t know, same difference. I suppose she stood as a kind of mother to me, though it didn’t seem that way back then. More like a big sister. We’d go on the tear together, all that. She was a bit trapped down there in Tyrellscourt, working up the nerve to get out.”
“And were Patrick and Leo lovers?”
She smiled, her eyes glittering, as if to say: Some people might think that an insult, but I’m not one of them. I knew then that I could fall in love with Miranda Hart, if I wasn’t careful. And I wasn’t, as a rule.
“Were they? I don’t know. The school had a reputation that way. And there’s a bit of it in every stable. Like a jail, the hours are so long, you’ve no money, you’re confined to camp most of the time, and you don’t get enough to eat. All these young boys are dieting all the time, and they’re at the horniest time of their lives, and dieting, extreme dieting, can make you absolutely obsessed with sex. It always does me. So. Can’t say I’d blame them.”
“Did it have any effect on your marriage? I mean, do you think he was gay?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t shy away from his…marital duties, as they used to say. But maybe, in another life…put it this way, what age are you, forty, forty-two?”
“Something like that.”
“I bet you had a girlfriend when you were twenty-two, twenty-three, you drank a lot together, or got high, whatever, you laughed and cried, you said you loved each other, you fucked a lot, but even at the time, you knew it probably wasn’t forever. Maybe that’s the way it was with Patrick and me. We should never have got married, I don’t know why we did: to get away from my family, and his lack of one. Maybe that’s why. We were so young. And now…you know, we could run into each other on the street, and we probably wouldn’t know what to say. So for all I know, he could be anything…”
She grimaced then, and waved a hand in the air, as if conceding that she had merely given one version of many, that there was probably rather more to her marriage than youthful folly, certainly more than she was willing to tell me. She turned her dark head and looked into the fire. A glow of red flickered through her hair, which she suddenly shook forward and then swept back; the shadows and light bounced off the glass doors and played around the room.
“Get us another drink, would you Ed?”
I went through to the kitchen and fixed a gin; we’d been drinking it with lemon juice, which she had made up fresh and leavened with sugar syrup and orange juice. When I brought her the drink, her dismay that I hadn’t made myself one was palpable.
“Not thirsty anymore?”
“I can’t stay. I told you that.”
She nodded, and turned her gaze back to the fire.
“Do you have a photograph of Patrick?”
She didn’t move.
“Miranda, you said earlier you wanted me to find him. If you still mean it—”
She got to her feet and left the room. I looked around at the pictures on the walls, but they were all action or parade-ring photographs of Hutton in full livery; he looked like a jockey, all right, but so did all the others. When Miranda came back with a photo, I glanced quickly at it, long enough to see it was a full face shot, not so long that I began to compare it to the man I had found dead and mutilated on a dump earlier that day. I didn’t want to be the bearer of that bad news, not yet.
“Can you remember the name of the private detective you hired to find Patrick?”
“Don…something. Kelly? Kennelly? I can find out.”
“Let me know as soon as you do. Last thing. You said Vincent Tyrell came to see you the day Patrick disappeared. What happened?”
“He told me Patrick had made a confession. To him, as a priest, the sacrament. And he couldn’t, of course, disclose anything he had said. But he was very…it was as if he knew something about me, something I had done, or something about the way I lived…and that whatever it was, I should be ashamed of myself. All his insinuations…like I was, I don’t know what, a whore, worse than a whore, some kind of…corrupter…I couldn’t really follow it back then. I was angry, I threw him out, what right did he have—but I must have run it through in my head a thousand times since. That whatever had happened to Patrick, the reason he disappeared, it was all my fault, and it was somehow up to me to work out why.”
“And have you?”
Miranda shook her head, aiming for a laugh that came o
ff as a muted wail. She picked up her drink from the mantelpiece. I could hear the ice clinking, her hand was shaking so much.
“There was something about Father Tyrell…the scorn for me, the contempt in his eyes…it was so belittling. As if I had…yes, he used the word betrayal… as if I had betrayed Patrick somehow. But he wouldn’t say how.”
She took a long, steady swallow of gin. Her use of it seemed medical, sacramental.
“The other thing was, he said something like, ‘Well, he’s better off now,’ or ‘It’s probably for the best.’ I thought he was just trying to placate me, because I was screaming at him, you know? I was mad at Patrick anyway, and now he’d made it even worse, setting this creepy fucking priest on me. I mean, confession? Who goes to fucking confession anymore? Old ladies. Children. Nuns. All the people who don’t need to, who have no sins worthy of the name. So I really lost it with him. And I chose to remember it as, you know, well, he tried to bully me but I let him have it. And he scuttled off mouthing platitudes, you know, not to worry, all will be well. But that wasn’t what happened. He knew Patrick wasn’t coming back. And he was basically saying, he’s well shot of you.”
She drank again, emptying her glass. My phone announced the arrival of a text message: it was from Dave Donnelly, asking me where I was. I got my coat, and held Miranda Hart close, and headed for the door. Miranda stopped me in the hall.
“I did love Patrick,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to think…”
“I don’t,” I said. She was shaking, face flushed red. I went to hold her, but she put up her hands and shook her head.
“No. Just, so you don’t think…I may not have wanted to go back over any of this again, but…don’t think I didn’t love that man. Don’t ever think that.”
There were tears in her eyes. I nodded, and waited for the rest.
“There’s one last thing,” she said. “That morning—ten years ago today—when Patrick was leaving—when I wouldn’t listen to him, or look at him—the thing he kept saying was, he wouldn’t be a Judas. That was the last thing I heard Patrick say.
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