The Dying Breed

by Declan Hughes

  “I never—”

  “I know you never, that was what was so beautiful, you got them to do it themselves. Last man standing, Ed Loy. Jaysus, in here we talked about nothing else for weeks, we were drawing diagrams to keep it all clear: Dublin mountains, Fitzwilliam Square, Shelbourne Road, he’s off again!”

  Despite myself, I was a little flattered. A case usually ended with justice of a sort, but with most of the survivors’ lives in tatters; very rarely was anyone in the mood to offer thanks, let alone praise. Myles Geraghty might have been a buffoon, but he was a senior policeman, and if what he had said was a quarter true, well, the respect of your peers is always something. Then, just in time, my brain came to, and I began to see where this was going, mere seconds before Geraghty leant in and spelled it out for me.

  “And we all felt the credit should have gone where it was due, instead of to people who, if we’re to be scrupulously fair, did not deserve it. Now I know he’s a friend of yours, and fair play, loyalty is what I look for in my officers too, I don’t expect you to tell tales out of school, but the least we should acknowledge is that you’re the man, Ed Loy. You and Lee Harvey Oswald both: ye acted alone, ha?”

  I nodded, understanding what the game was. It looked like Dave had good reason for his fears: Geraghty was clearly out to undermine him. Geraghty took my nod as an assent, and continued.

  “Good man. Because here’s the thing: I don’t believe you had anything to do with Jackie Tyrell’s murder up above. I want to hear what you were doing there, sure I do, down to the last detail, but I know there’s no reason for you to kill her. And even if there was, you wouldn’t have…all the other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?” I said.

  “You first,” Geraghty said. When I stayed silent, he went on.

  “Because of course, I have enough to keep you here all day, and maybe charge you and all, keep you in over Christmas, even if we drop the charges then. A lovers’ tiff, a drunken spat, private detective and a rich divorcée—who do you think’s going to give a shite? So if you want to get out and get back to your case, you better let me know what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Donnelly, what are ye cooking up? What’s he been telling you?”

  “Nothing, what?”

  “He was at your house last night. He was seen leaving.”

  “What, are you having him followed?”

  “He was just…an off-duty officer spotted him, happened to be going the same way, saw him entering your house.”

  I waited to see what more there was. If there’d been a tail on Dave, if they’d followed us to the mortuary…no, they’d’ve stepped in then and there. Wouldn’t they? Maybe they’d arrested Dave last night, after he left my house the second time. Maybe they were questioning him alongside me.

  And if they were? What was I going to do, grass him up?

  “I’ll tell you about the case I’m working. Dave Donnelly’s visit was…a personal matter.”

  Geraghty flinched as if I’d slapped him; his tiny eyes flared up.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, it was a private matter. Between two old friends. You know, there’s something on your mind, you drop around a friend’s house, ask his advice. Trouble with your neighbours, or your kids. Or your wife. Type of thing. And of course, to make sure I’d be at the party he’s throwing tonight. He said Carmel really wanted me to be there.”

  Geraghty was sucking his teeth and his nostrils were flaring; when I said the word wife I thought I saw him flush; by the time I mentioned Carmel, he was nodding briskly, as if this were a file whose contents he had already read.

  “Better take me through the case you’re working then,” he said quickly, reaching to switch the video camera back on and not meeting my eye the while.

  I told him about Father Vincent Tyrell asking me to find Patrick Hutton. There was no reaction from him to this, which I took to mean that they still hadn’t identified the body. I told him about Miranda Hart and Jackie Tyrell, about the meal at the Octagon with Seán Proby, about getting a late call from Jackie Tyrell, about the ten-year-old controversy surrounding F.X. Tyrell’s Gold Cup–winning horse By Your Leave and the race meeting at Thurles where the horse met her death. There wasn’t a single thing I said that couldn’t have been discovered with an Internet connection and, possibly, five minutes’ chat with a racing journalist, or failing that, with one of the standing army of punters all over the city who divided their time between pub, bookie’s and social welfare office, with the exception of the late-night drink with Jackie Tyrell. Once he had established that Jackie had called to invite me over, and I had assured him that our conversation was largely about Jackie’s anxiety that Miranda not be hurt in the process of finding Patrick Hutton, he was nodding as if our business was done.

  “And were Mrs. Tyrell’s anxieties really enough to get you driving into the mountains in the middle of the night?”

  “Well, I hoped I’d get more from her than anxiety, hoped she had something to tell me about Hutton’s disappearance, something nobody knew but her. I hoped in vain.”

  When I’d finished, Geraghty looked at his watch, snapped the tape player off and stood up.

  “As I say, Loy, we don’t think you’re in the frame for Mrs. Tyrell. I’ve got an important case. You’re free to go. Just make sure you’re available for further questioning…and watch your step, am I clear?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  But Myles Geraghty was far from clear, and as I walked down Harcourt Street to Stephen’s Green and into the thick of the last hurling wave of Christmas shoppers in the icy morning, I set to wondering why. Geraghty had hoped to flatter me into dishing the dirt on Dave, but as soon as I suggested Dave was concerned about his wife, he backed off so quickly he was practically helping my coat onto me to get me out the door. Did he have a crush on her? There couldn’t be anything going on between them, that was inconceivable, Carmel’d never have an affair, full stop. Still, Dave had not looked happy the other night, and he was a tough old bastard; maybe a few hard chaws in the Bureau were giving him a hard time, but all that “anonymous phone call, loaded gun” malarkey, it may have been happening, but I couldn’t see it getting to him like that. You never really knew what went on in someone else’s marriage, no matter how well you thought you knew them. And you were better off that way, as far as I was concerned.

  When I got to the taxi rank on the Green, I texted Dave and asked him to call me when he could. There was a message on my phone from Tommy Owens:

  Took the car before the cops arrived. Call me when you’re out. T

  I called him, and he told me he had ten mass in Bayview to get through, and that after that, we were taking a trip down to Tyrellscourt. He told me why, and I told him he could drive.

  But first, I needed to see a priest.

  TWELVE

  I took the Dart out to Bayview: it was as quick as a cab, and a lot cheaper, and the direction I was going, no one else was: the northbound trains were jammed with last-minute shoppers heading for the city centre. The railway line hugged the coast; the bay sparkled cobalt in the bright winter light. I ran through the case in my mind. The only people who knew the man on the dump was Hutton, apart from his killer or killers, were me and Dave. But Geraghty would make the face soon enough, or someone on his team would; no more than the rest of us, Guards were desperate men for the ponies.

  It was a little after ten when I got to Bayview. I bought the rest of the papers and had breakfast in a café off the main street. All the tabloids led on what they had been instructed to call the OMEGA MAN, and the broadsheets too, apart, inevitably, from the Irish Times, which preferred an EU directive on the regulation of wind farms and a Christmas Eve message of peace and goodwill from the Irish president for its leads. There was little new in any of the stories; Myles Geraghty’s picture was ubiquitous in all; maybe he was employing his own publicist. When Dave’s number came up on m
y phone, I stepped out onto the street to answer.

  “Dave, what’s shaking?”

  Before he’d talk, I had to give him a full report on what I knew of Jackie Tyrell’s murder, and on my time with Myles Geraghty in Harcourt Square, the latter severely edited to omit any mention of Carmel, or of Geraghty’s grudge against Dave.

  “Makes sense Geraghty didn’t waste his time with you, even for sport. The State Pathologist’s reports are nearly done. Word is, Kennedy had a crucifix and an omega symbol carved into his back, at the base of his spine. And one of the boys on the scene up in Tibradden, one who’s loyal to me, gave me more on Jackie Tyrell: she was hanged, and her tongue was cut out, but she also had an amateur tattoo, the same kind as Hutton and Kennedy: a crucifix and an omega.”

  “So Geraghty’s right, this is a serial killer.”

  “It looks like. Both Don Kennedy and Jackie Tyrell had links to Patrick Hutton. Now they still haven’t identified Hutton.”

  I thought about that. The Guards were better placed to conduct a murder investigation than I was, especially one on this scale. Keeping information from them didn’t sit easily with me, particularly if that endangered people in Hutton’s circle. In the end it was Dave’s call.

  “Strictly speaking, neither did we, Dave. We think it’s Hutton, but jockeys look a lot alike. I say we keep it that way for now. We don’t know what the killer wants. I’m heading down to Tyrellscourt today. I think whatever this is about, it has its roots down there. But look, if you want to tell Geraghty who you suspect it might be…”

  There was pause during which Dave digested that one. He sounded like he was chewing on a twig.

  “We’ll play it our way for now,” Dave said gruffly. “I have enough friends at court to keep the information coming, so I’ll get it to you as I hear it. You might like to let your lady friend know what’s happening though. I hear they questioned all the employees up at Tibradden this morning, then let them go. They start first thing up there.”

  “Will do.”

  “And Ed, listen, about last night, in the house…you know—”

  “It was very cold, wasn’t it? Did you find that?”

  “I made a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “And now you have to live on top of it. You’ll need a hat. Maybe even a scarf.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Leo was connected to Hutton. You don’t figure him for the murders, do you? Now he’s out, revenge type of thing.”

  “Not if one of the dead is Hutton himself. They were friends, maybe more than friends.”

  “But—”

  “Look, Dave, I’m a private detective. I find missing persons. Solving murders, that’s just not my job. What you want to do with murder, you want to get the Guards in.”

  MIRANDA HART WAS distraught.

  “I can’t believe it. Who would want to murder Jackie?”

  “She said you were like a daughter to her.”

  “And she was like a mother to me. Oh Jesus, Ed—”

  “Miranda, are you at home?”

  “Yes. I’m not long here, I was up in Tibradden, but everything’s cancelled for the day.”

  “I want you to pack a bag and get out here. In fact, I’ll have you collected.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think you’re safe. Jackie Tyrell is not the only one dead—”

  “What, is this the Omega Man that was in the papers? Who else is dead? Patrick? Have they found Patrick? Is he one of the bodies out in Roundwood?”

  “They don’t know. But the deaths seem to be connected…look, I’m sending someone for you. We’ll talk soon. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I FOUND TOMMY in the sacristy, brought him up to date with the case, gave him Miranda Hart’s address and asked him to pick her up. Before he left, I checked over some recent church history with him.

  Father Vincent Tyrell was sitting at his table with a fountain pen and a lined pad in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, exhaling two blue plumes of smoke into space, or at The Taking of Christ, which was directly ahead of him. I had knocked on the presbytery door and it gave against my fist. I announced myself and he told me to shut the door behind me. He sounded like he wished he had done that in the first place, and turned the key. He didn’t look at me when I joined him at the table.

  “Of course, Judas had his part to play,” he said. “Had he not betrayed our Lord, who would have? And if Jesus had not been betrayed, maybe He would never have been taken. And who would have died for our sins then? Who would have been our redemption?”

  “Peter did betray him. I’m sure others would have as well. Seems to me there was quite a queue. When powerful people want someone dead, they generally get their way.”

  “That is true. Maybe too much is made of Judas, and his blood price. Maybe we’re falling for the great-man theory of history.”

  “I heard that was back in vogue.”

  “Maybe it is. I don’t keep up. It’s better not to. Stay where you are, and everything comes back to meet you. Provided you wait long enough.”

  “This all sounds to me like an Easter sermon, not a Christmas one.”

  “You’re right, of course. Incarnation, not redemption. The beginning, not the end.”

  “On the other hand, we know that the last words Patrick Hutton had to say to anyone—to anyone who’s prepared to talk—were something like, ‘They won’t make me play the Judas.’”

  Tyrell brought his steely-blue eyes around to meet me. A faintly appalled smile played around his tiny mouth, as if he had just learnt afresh what fools these mortals be.

  “That would have been Miss Miranda Hart who told you that.”

  “Yes. But you could have told me that without violating the secrecy of the confessional. You could have told me you visited her that night—after you’d heard Patrick Hutton’s confession—and insulted her, impugned her character and generally scared the living daylights out of her. You could tell me about it now.”

  “Could she not recall in detail what I told her?” Tyrell said, as if astonished that his words hadn’t seared themselves verbatim on Miranda’s brain. “Well, I don’t think I can remember either. I may have spoken abruptly—as I remember it, I may have held her responsible for…well, for some of Patrick’s…misfortune. No doubt I was harsh. I believe the young lady…gave as good as she got, that night. I was sent from the house with a flea in my ear.”

  “Of course, you knew her before, didn’t you? You knew Patrick before. And Leo Halligan, your breakfast companion of yesterday morning.”

  Tyrell smiled in what almost looked like delight.

  “Well, I must say I feel vindicated in my choice of sleuth; nothing seems to have slipped past you yet. Am I to take it from the marks on your face that you managed to rendezvous with the unfortunate Leo?”

  “You are. And the unfortunate Leo told me to ask you about your years at St. Jude’s Industrial School. See I thought he must have got that wrong. I thought you were here all along. But I checked it out with Tommy, and he said no, you’d gone down there for a few years. How did that happen? Did you run into a little trouble up here?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Tyrell said, his cheek beginning to pulse. “I went down to Tyrellscourt, I…it was at the request of Francis…my brother…he wanted masses said in the house regularly, more often than the local priests could manage, or were willing to, and the archbishop at that time was a great racing man, he was reared not far from Tyrellscourt, and he arranged it that I could serve there, and that if and when things changed, I would find a place again in Bayview.”

  My bewilderment must have been obvious.

  “It’s not unusual at a racing stables where there’s a good number of staff for the local priest to come and say mass before big meetings, and bless the horses, and so on. Or at least, it wasn’t. And Francis went through a phase of taking this very seriously indeed, and wanted…no exaggeration
to say, he wanted his own priest. And for a time, he got one.”

  “This was before you two fell out.”

  “Yes, this was…this would have appealed to me. I was wearying of parish work, of the pastoral round of wayward youths and despairing women and their shiftless husbands. It had…I suppose it had another kind of pastoral appeal, that of paradise regained. The childhood we had shared, among horses, always horses. I missed the horses most of all.”

  “And when would this have been?”

  “Much of the nineties: 1990 until ’98, I’d say.”

  “You were there for the By Your Leave episode then, you were at Tyrellscourt when Patrick Hutton vanished.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “But I thought Patrick Hutton came here, made his confession here.”

  “I never said that. I said he made his confession to me. But he made it in the chapel at Tyrellscourt.”

  “All right then. Tell me about St. Jude’s Industrial School.”

  Again the muscles in Vincent Tyrell’s face quivered, again he brought them under his control, all apart from a rogue eyebrow that continued to pulse like an insect caught on a pin.

  “It was no longer an industrial school, that’s the first canard to shoot down. It had been, well into the eighties, under the Christian Brothers, and a number of…incidents took place there, many of which have now been dealt with by the Residential Schools Redress Board. St. Jude’s closed for a short while, and reopened in the nineties as a boys’ home, under the joint auspices of the departments of education, health, and social welfare. The Church played no official role there; indeed it was no longer actually called St. Jude’s, although that’s how everyone in the locality referred to it; as a local priest, I paid the occasional pastoral visit, at the centre’s request.”