Proby looked at me as if the whiskey had gone to my head. Maybe it had. Get a refund if it hadn’t. Proby signalled to the waiter for more. I shook my head, but he pointed to himself. He leant forward, all confidential.
“Look, I’m not proud of the life I led for a stretch there, in the late nineties…I ran with a pretty wild crowd…did a bit of this and that…but I swear, I was never a pimp.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Miranda told me. Mind you, she tends to lie.”
The waiter brought Proby his second whiskey and he drank half of it back in one, and within seconds, seemed to turn into himself. He was that kind of drinker.
“She’s not lying about that. We were both strung out for a while…I came out of a failed marriage, and she, well, there was the whole Patrick Hutton thing, you know? She was still freaking out about all that. But it was, it started off as, just a great time down there, party town, coke, champagne, all this bread, and I was doing some work for the old man, but it was so easy to keep George Halligan sweet. We had enough of the jockeys to spread the fixes to lay it so the betting patterns were never noticed. It was a fucking operation. Coining it. Beautiful, so it was. And then came heroin.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“I don’t remember. Because I asked myself that, like with some mad fucking bird you wake up with, you know, retrace your steps, locate the fatal moment, don’t do this at home, kids. But I can’t…eventually it was that ponytail guy who ended up barman in McGoldrick’s, unbelievable, only in Tyrellscourt would a smack dealer be taken on as head barman, what’s this his name was?”
“Steno?”
“Steno, the very fellow. Anyway, we got into it, and after a while, you start running low on readies, no matter who you are, drugs cost a lot of bread, so Miranda decides to sell her stuff. I didn’t like it, I argued against it, I was supposed to be her boyfriend, for fuck’s sake, but…I was out of it anyway. What was I gonna do?”
Proby shrugged and finished his whiskey and immediately waved up two more.
“And why do you think, was there any other reason for her to get into heroin? Apart from it being there?”
“I think…well, I think after the whole thing with the baby, she found it hard to get back on track.”
“What baby?”
“She had a kid…I can’t really remember the order of events back then…but she had a kid and gave it up for adoption…would it have been before Hutton took off? Or afterwards? I think afterwards, yeah, that’s why she gave it up, because he took off.”
Proby nodded stupidly, already drunk. He beamed as the fresh drinks arrived. I still had half of my first.
“Weird to do something like that in 1997, ’98,” I said. “Lots of women raising kids on their own then.”
“Not Miranda. Not her scene at all,” Proby said.
“And you don’t know who were the adoptive parents?”
He shook his head, then held a finger up.
“Tell you what I do remember. Who introduced smack to the Tyrellscourt scene.”
“Who?” I said.
“Patrick Hutton!” he said delightedly.
“Patrick Hutton vanished after By Your Leave was put down at Thurles. Before Christmas 1996.”
“Oh no. No he didn’t. No, he was around, because he was around when the kid was born, except he was smacked out of it then. Wasn’t racing, wasn’t anything, just…hanging around town for it. And after that he disappeared. Kaput! I don’t know if they were still happy families, but I remember the three of them being around. And then it was just Miranda.”
Proby nodded, seemingly relieved to have sorted that out. I took out the photograph Miranda had given me and showed it to Proby.
“Patrick Hutton,” I said.
“Patrick Hutton,” he said. Then he peered at the photograph again.
“Except, that isn’t Patrick Hutton.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That isn’t Patrick Hutton. That’s the other guy.”
“What other guy?” I said, but his name was on my lips, had been from the moment Miranda asked for the photograph back.
“The jockey F.X. got in to replace Hutton. Only he didn’t last long. He lost it completely, became a kind of wino. Bomber, they called him.”
I could have prompted him, but I waited. He was the kind of drunk whose wits accumulate as the spirit level rises. He studied the photograph again, then lifted his weak face in triumph.
“Terry Folan,” he said. “Terry ‘Bomber’ Folan. One for the road? Come on, it’s Christmas.”
IN MY CAR, I called Miranda Hart on her mobile and landline and left remorseful messages on each; the trip to Martha O’Connor’s place took me past Riverside Village but there was no one home and the Porsche was gone. I stood by my car and swore quietly. If the body I had thought was Patrick Hutton was Bomber Folan—and I had been led to believe that by the photograph Miranda Hart gave me—then there was a good chance Bomber Folan was really Hutton, and either Miranda Hart was in league with him, or she was in his power. Bomber/Hutton was obviously a disturbed individual; if he was responsible for the killings so far, it was clear he had some kind of plan; it was entirely possible Miranda had been drawn into this plan out of fear, either for her own safety, or the safety of someone she prized. Jack Proby had told me Miranda had had a baby, with or without Hutton: that child would be about nine or ten now, and might well look like the girl Regina Tyrell was raising as her own; I had thought Regina was Miranda’s mother, they looked so alike; equally Karen Tyrell could be Miranda Hart’s daughter. Was Bomber/Hutton threatening Miranda’s child in order to make her an accomplice to the murders? It was all guesswork at this stage. I called Tommy and left a message on his voice mail asking him to set up surveillance on Bomber Folan/Patrick Hutton when he got established at Tyrellscourt. Then I got back on the road.
NINETEEN
Martha O’Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house on Bachelor’s Walk on the North Quays, within sight of O’Connell Bridge. There was an antiques store on the ground floor, and a hotel named after an American military cemetery next door, and African immigrants pushing children in buggies on the streets and on the riverside boardwalk; I wondered if the rare pleasure of having the streets to themselves on Christmas Day compensated for the harsh winds whipping in off the Liffey. An Internet café with cheap dialling rates for Africa and Eastern Europe was open down toward the Ha’penny Bridge. When I left Dublin in the early eighties, this stretch of the quays looked like a disused set from a Hollywood studio, the false fronts of a western ghost town; now it was peopled and dressed and animated; even on Christmas Day, it exuded the kinetic energy of a living city. It was bloody freezing though, and I leant on the bell for far too long until I heard Martha O’Connor’s voice.
“Sorry, Messiah on full,” she trilled in her Oxford-inflected tones.
Martha O’Connor had silky short hair like an English public schoolboy; her long fringe hung in her eyes, which were free of makeup, as was the rest of her pretty, youthful face; she typically wore what she was wearing today: jeans and a baggy jumper or sweatshirt which covered up as much as it possibly could; big-boned and wide-hipped, she carried more weight than she looked happy with; to my eyes she always carried it off well. I had never been in her apartment before, and admired it as she brought me into the front room whose three great sash windows looked out over the Liffey and south across the city to the snowcapped Dublin mountains; the wall to the rear had been knocked through, as had the kitchen partition, so that the entire floor made one great open-plan living space. The period plasterwork on the high ceilings was intact, but the furniture and decor was spare and modern.
“Good digs,” I said. “Can I be your boyfriend?”
“You come with the wrong bits. Have you been drinking already? Jesus Ed Loy, you’re falling apart.”
“Business. Seriously, how’d a pointy-headed journo like you afford a place like thi
s?”
“I didn’t. My mum and dad bought it for a song in the eighties, when it was a total shambles; thinking ahead, I’d just been born; it was left to me when Daddy died in ’99, by which time it was already worth ten times more; now…”
Handel’s Messiah blared in the background, a melodramatic underscoring of the unspoken truth between us: that both Martha’s parents had been murdered, and that I had helped solve the case.
“Just lucky, I suppose,” I said, and Martha laughed.
“Well, yes, and it’s vitally important for pointy-heads like me to have a nice place to begin with, preferably one you bought before the boom, or even better, with the mortgage paid off. That way, we can bemoan the dreadful property bubble and sneer at everyone’s obsession with house prices and cheerlead for a bust in the market so that ordinary people can afford houses in the areas they grew up in and be impeccably liberal and PC about it all at absolutely no cost or risk whatever to ourselves.”
“Not just a pointy-head, a self-loathing pointy-head. Is that cooking I smell?”
“It is cooking. I figure the kind of woman who falls for you, or on you, only knows her way to one room in the house, so I thought you might like your lunch.”
“I did have a dinner offer, you know. She’d bought the turkey and everything.”
“And what happened?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t quite keep the brittle ball in the air; it was too soon, and I was too disturbed by what I thought I’d discovered about Miranda and Patrick Hutton. Martha vanished and reappeared with a tumbler of whiskey and a smile.
“Fiona Reed spoke warmly of you when I told her you were coming here.”
“I’m sure she did. Was she here?”
“She’s just gone. She’s here most nights now.”
“Listen to you, Anaïs Nin. How warmly did Superintendent Reed speak of me?”
“She said you were a total fucking bollocks who needed to have his legs broken. But I could tell she meant it with affection.”
“Is that a diesel thing?”
“We’ll do our own jokes, thank you. Me kitchen, you TV. It’s all lined up.”
St. Jude’s was one of three industrial schools Martha looked at in the documentary, which was called Say Nothing. It was the least severe case, in that nobody had actually been killed and anonymously buried there, say, but it wasn’t easy viewing. The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves, as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial; harrowing testimony from a man in his midforties who looked about sixty, red-faced and swollen, about the serial abuse he had suffered from the age of five, by religious brothers he named and others he said he never saw; a caption ran underneath his interview saying he had hanged himself before the program was shown; a bland non-apology apology from the archbishop of the diocese with a semolina face and a prissy, sibilant voice, who barely conceded that any abuse had been committed by priests or religious at all, in such a hurry was he to condemn “the wider decline in standards among society as a whole, particularly in the area of chastity”; a wheedling excursion in self-justification and evasion from the minister for something or other, keeping the shit from sticking to the government of the day, probably, that kept insisting, eventually in a rather menacing fashion, that what we had to remember was that these events, terrible though they were, all took place in a different time. The St. Jude’s section ended with a bunch of apparently happy boys swarming around the front lawn with the river view, and the announcement that St. Jude’s was now being run as a boys’ home under the joint control of the departments of education, health, and social welfare.
I finished my drink by the window, looking out at the same river and wondering how many tales of ruined lives and broken hearts it carried from its source through the hard-knock city of Dublin to the sea. Martha joined me with a refill, which by now I badly needed, and a drink for herself, and I toasted her achievement in silence.
We ate mostly in silence, too. Martha had cooked pretty much everything you could: turkey, ham, roast potatoes, sprouts, bread and cranberry sauces, the lot; there was plenty of wine, and Christmas pudding to finish. It all tasted good, and I was glad to have it. But I didn’t feel like celebrating, and Martha, usually relentlessly upbeat, didn’t either. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe it was the case, maybe it was just that, when you’re alone, you eat your Christmas dinner at a table full of empty chairs.
Afterwards, Martha made some coffee and took out a red-and-black bound A4 notebook.
“Right, that’s Christmas done,” she said.
“Thanks for me dinner,” I said.
“Easy for you, only have to eat it once. I’ll have leftovers until February. Okay, Say Nothing covered the first incarnation of the school, ending in the late eighties. Subsequent to that, it reopened staffed by lay people, supervised by social workers, but there were two abusers among them, one from a care centre in Wales where there had been systematic abuse.”
“This would have been through the nineties.”
“It finally closed in ’98. That was to have been the second part of the film: how, when the Church’s influence declined or was removed, the conditions in residential homes did not improve; in fact, in certain cases, they got worse.”
“And why didn’t you make that film?”
“Because people involved—doctors, civil servants, care workers and others—refused to cooperate, and in several cases threatened us with legal action. And there was a marked reluctance on the part of the national broadcaster, all of a sudden, to tangle with so many different forces. So what you get at the end of Say Nothing is basically this complete fucking lie, these happy boys gambolling about on a front lawn they were still forbidden to walk across. I could tell you three of those boys at least whose lives were ruined by the abuse they suffered during that time, after the Church had withdrawn from St. Jude’s.”
“Not completely though. I mean, there was still a chapel, it was still basically a Catholic institution. It had its own chaplain pretty much. Didn’t it?”
Martha sat back and smiled.
“You tell me,” she said.
“Father Vincent Tyrell,” I said. “But he says he had nothing to do with anything.”
Martha poured herself another glass of red and looked through her notes.
“All right. The way it happened, the abusers in the nineties, they found a couple of older boys happy to serve as willing helpers. And they got to join in, too. But most importantly, they helped to conceal the identities of the chief perpetrators.”
“Including people from outside the school.”
Martha sat forward and looked at me keenly. “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. Did you find people in the town would talk to you about it all?”
“No way. All they want to talk about is horses, or that fucking country club for rich Americans and golfers. It’s like it never existed.”
“Despite the fact that the casualties were wandering around Tyrellscourt for years afterwards, doped or smacked out of it, the walking wounded of the town.”
“I know. They turn that into almost a badge of pride, you know, oh yeah, it’s not just the Celtic Tiger down here, we have our share of Characters. And because a couple of burnt-out musicians from the sixties decamped there, they try and sell the whole package like, you know, Haight-Ashbury on the Liffey. A few of the people in McGoldrick’s will talk, but more in general, and it always goes back to the Church, you know, it has to be some priest to blame. I mean, fair enough, the Church did its share, but it’s a fraction of what went on.”
“Was your film instrumental in getting St. Jude’s closed down?”
“No, it was already shut. It m
ight have thwarted any possibility of it ever opening again, but I don’t know. What did you mean by the chief abusers being people outside the school?”
“Can I have a look at that last scene again, all the boys by the river?”
“I have an image of it here,” Martha said, and showed me a scanned photograph of the boys of St. Jude’s by the river.
“This would be about ’92,” she said. “And here’s the legend—sorry, you have to keep turning over.” On the next page, there was a pencil tracing of the photo with each face numbered, and a list of the names to match the numbers beneath it. I flicked back and forth, and quickly spotted Leo Halligan, who was fully grown then. Patrick Hutton’s name was there, but his head was almost completely hidden behind another boy’s: that boy had vivid eyes and blond hair, and his name was Terence Folan. And there was a fourth boy, whose face I had difficulty matching with the one I knew, but whose name rang a bell: Gerald Stenson.
“Did you come across this guy?” I said. “Steno?”
Martha nodded.
“The barman in McGoldrick’s. He reminded me of a hippie from the first time ’round, actually, someone who you think must be really sweet and love and peace because he’s got the hair, then you find out he deals bad acid, or he’s a rapist.”
“Anything concrete to base that on?”
“Nah. Except for extreme prejudice against guys with ponytails.”
“Extreme prejudice means you kill them.”
“What jury’s gonna convict? What did you mean by abusers coming from outside the school that’s the third time I’ve asked and I gave you your dinner so if you don’t answer you can fuck away off with yourself.”
“If you give me any more publicity, I won’t be able to do my job.”
“So I won’t give you any more publicity.”
“Promise. Swear.”
“I swear, if I get anything I can use that won’t land me with a libel action, I’ll take full credit and cut you out totally. If you had a lawyer, he’d fire you.”
The Dying Breed Page 20