The Dying Breed

by Declan Hughes

  Miranda groaned in anguish and disgust.

  “That’s how I thought. And I kept it going, hints and caresses and invitations, I’d give him rubdowns after the day’s work with the horses, so he’d see how well I could run things here, how I’d be a credit to him. And one day, in the snow, in the white of the stable, in the white of the snow…the rustle of the paper now, so soft in your ears…like music it was…”

  It was Miranda’s turn to retreat now; I could hear her trying to control her breath.

  “A few months, that’s all it was. A few days within a few months. He brought it to a close. We both knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care. And then…and then I was pregnant. I never knew…the nuns in Scotland said they’d look after the child, but Francis insisted he knew the right family. I never dreamed for a second it would be the Harts at the Tyrellscourt Arms. It was almost…it was almost like it amused him. Like it was a game for him. And of course, I suspected, everyone assumed it, for heaven’s sake, are you two sisters, are you mother and daughter? But I didn’t want to believe…couldn’t let myself believe…”

  “Why did he do that, Regina? Why did he place her so close to you?”

  “To punish me. Just as I had punished him.”

  She said the words blankly, without affect.

  “What about Hutton? What about Vincent Tyrell?” I said.

  Regina’s face clouded over.

  “That’s where it got…I never…oh God forgive me…it was Christmas, Vincent was staying here…I was drunk, and a bit…maybe I was talking loose…flirting with Francis, who wasn’t responding, and with Vincent, who was…I got angry with them both, and stormed off…and Francis came, and said, why didn’t I…if I slept with Vincent, I could be with him again…so I did. It wasn’t even…I’m trying to make it better now on myself, saying I was drunk, I knew what I was doing…I knew damn well what I was doing. I don’t know why I wanted it…still don’t…Francis was all I ever wanted…”

  “But you went with Vincent just the one time. How did you know Hutton was his child, and not Francis’s?” I said.

  “Francis had an operation, after Mary…after Miranda was born, a vasectomy. So nothing like that could happen again.”

  “And then when the boy was born, you said you couldn’t raise him.”

  “The child of a priest? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I let him go. Francis persuaded me it was the best thing. I was young, starting out, I didn’t need that. Didn’t need it.”

  “But you stayed here all those years, and let them both come back into the house, and saw them come together—”

  “I did everything I could to block that match. Everything. I…and don’t forget, I didn’t know Miranda was my daughter—”

  “But you suspected. Why didn’t you act on those suspicions?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And then there was a child.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the child,” Regina said. “She’s had every test, every…they found no disability, nothing. And Francis…I don’t think he enjoyed a day of peace after those children were born. Neither of us did, really. It was a kind of torture to him, knowing what he had done, never quite being able to forgive himself. I think…I think what we made was a kind of sacrifice, to live through it together. And I was blessed that Karen was given to me. Unworthy as I was.”

  “Why?” I said. “What possessed him? To experiment with human lives that way?”

  Regina shook her head, all tears spent for now.

  “He once told me, out in the stable, he said he thought the purest blood might make the finest offspring. That if it could work for horses…”

  “But it doesn’t work for horses.”

  Regina nodded.

  “And you went along with him,” I said. “Why?”

  Regina looked at me with what almost looked like pity in her extraordinary eyes and shook her head. Again, when she spoke, it was in a voice that seemed to come from the very depths of her soul.

  “You don’t understand. No one could understand who wasn’t there.”

  “Who wasn’t where?”

  Regina turned her gaze on Miranda as she spoke.

  “My mother died when I was born, I told you that. But I didn’t grow up here. I was taken into care, placed in a home. It was just the two boys and Da, in a small tenant cottage out the road a few miles from Tyrellscourt, two rooms, that’s all they had. Francis was fourteen, Vincent twelve. Da was a farm labourer, drinking a lot, and…well, other things. With both of them. Until Francis stood up to him. Francis put an end to that. Francis turned him out. And our da was never seen again. And Francis worked every hour God sent on farms in the area, his eye for a horse quickly noticed, training for this owner, then that one, and the winners began to come, and then the Derby in ’65. Sure he became a hero in the town, more. He found this place, it was in a tumbledown condition, the family had left for England during the war and never come back, and he set us up here. Came and got me, told me my place was with him, was here, at the heart of the Tyrells. Made sure I went to school. Sent Vincent for the priesthood.”

  “And was your name Tyrell to begin with?”

  Regina almost smiled, a rueful flicker, as if still bewitched by the family mythology.

  “We…we became the Tyrells,” Regina said. “Francis called himself that after he got rid of Da. And then he had his name legally changed. The town had been on its knees until Francis came. So anyone who tried to call us something else was quickly silenced. And soon, no one even wanted to. It was as if we had been expected. As if F.X. Tyrell was a king in exile, come home at last to regain his throne. Without him, what would anyone around here have been? And what would I have become, a charity girl scrubbing floors and scalding laundry in an orphanage?”

  She looked at me as if there was any answer I could give her, other than: What have you become now? Her story had explained everything and nothing. I turned to Miranda, who was staring at Regina with tears in her reddened eyes, the Sig Sauer Compact suddenly flashing in her hand, a droning, humming sound coming from the back of her throat. She looked like she was ready to do something rash. I edged forward to the sofa to get the Glock 17 I’d hidden there, much use it had done me.

  “Miranda?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Let me get this straight: Patrick was supposed to kill F.X. Tyrell first, is that right?”

  “That’s right. First F.X. Then himself. He had a confession. That he was the Omega Man. He takes all the blame.”

  “He’d never killed anyone before, had he? Not intentionally, not in cold blood. How was he supposed to do it this time?”

  “Because it was F.X. Tyrell.”

  “And why should that have made a difference?”

  “Because Vincent Tyrell told us that F.X. had raped Patrick in St. Jude’s. He said F.X. had been a frequent visitor there. He said that’s largely why he was asked back to Tyrellscourt in the nineties: to facilitate F.X.’s visits again.”

  “That can’t be right,” Regina said. “Francis always told me…that after you were born…and after Patrick…never again. That would be his way of atoning.”

  “His way of atoning,” Miranda said, her scorn like a whip. “What about F.X. and Leo Halligan? You must have known about that.”

  Regina shook her head.

  “I…since Karen came here, I suppose I…I’ve kept my head down. I’ve see as little of Francis as possible. I haven’t wanted to know…about anything.”

  Regina was shaking, her face like a mask; she looked helpless and old, her last illusions carried away on the relentless wind.

  “His way of atoning,” Miranda said, rolling the words around in her mouth like sour fruit. “His way of atoning. What could that be? What could that possibly be?”

  I had the gun now, and came up with it loose in my hand, not pointing it at her, just ensuring she could see it. Miranda saw it, and looked at me, and smiled.

  “I’m sorry, Ed. I’m so very s
orry. It was hard to know what to do. I know I’ve done wrong. I thought I could survive. But not everyone can be a survivor.”

  She turned to Regina.

  “Please, just one thing. Don’t tell Karen the truth. In this instance, it’s better if she never knows. Do the right thing. Tell no one. Say nothing.”

  Miranda Hart put the barrel of the Sig Sauer compact in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  THIRTY

  Regina ran to Miranda and fell to her knees and howled, and pulled Miranda’s body to her and clung to it as she never had, as she never would, the daughter she had found and lost in a day. I located the key I was looking for in Miranda’s sports grip. I tried to tell Regina I was going to check on Karen, but she couldn’t see or hear for grief. I shut the door behind me and went down the corridor to the child’s room. I checked my appearance in the window opposite to make sure that I wouldn’t scare her, and I saw that the snow had finally come. I knocked, and identified myself, and turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

  THEY NEVER FOUND Steno. They had a witness (Tommy) who saw his Range Rover leaving Jackie Tyrell’s house the night of her murder, and they reckoned they had enough forensic evidence from that messy night to make a case. They had Vincent Tyrell as well, to testify to all manner of things he had been told by Miranda Hart, but they didn’t think Vincent Tyrell would stand up in court. But they had no Steno: he never returned to his house, or to Tyrellscourt. No one has seen him since.

  When I say they, I mean DI Dave Donnelly; Myles Geraghty had taken two days’ Christmas leave to go to a race meeting at Kempton Park, where his brother-in-law had a horse running in the George VI Steeplechase. Tommy had called Dave as soon as Steno had fled from Leopardstown. Dave was the man on the spot, and thanks to Tommy, and eventually, to me, he had enough inside information and witness testimony to close the case. I made sure Martha O’Connor got a blow-by-blow account, and suggested to her that if anyone wanted to run a story ridiculing the “Omega Man” theory, that would be no bad thing. Martha’s paper ran it front page every day for a week, until I almost felt a little sorry for Geraghty. And the brother-in-law’s horse came home eighth in a field of nine.

  Dave and Carmel are still sharing a home, and to the best of my knowledge, a bed, although I’m happy to say my knowledge of that is strictly limited to Dave having grunted, “Everything’s grand thanks,” as a way to close the subject down. He’s taking the family to Disneyland at Easter, the news of which was certainly enough to cure me of any residual envy of family life.

  Nobody told the truth about F.X. Tyrell, out of respect and solicitude for Karen Tyrell, but that doesn’t mean that people didn’t know, in the way news like that always spreads to those it needs to and to some it doesn’t, in Ireland at any rate. Tyrell did not hang himself for shame, but he was found dead within six months anyway; nobody at the stables or the stud farm would work with him; no one in racing wanted to know him; his life’s achievement as a trainer and a breeder had been irrevocably disgraced; the very thing that had kept him alive, the only thing he had ever really loved, was the thing he could no longer work with: horses. His doctors said it was a burst aortic aneurysm. But, insofar as I have any insight into the opaque character of the man, I believe he died of a broken heart.

  Vincent Tyrell did not have to be quietly retired from his parish; his cancer did that work for him. I visited him in hospital not long before he died because I had so many questions that only he could answer: what kind of hold had his brother possessed over him that Vincent should sire a child with his sister, or enable F.X. to abuse boys in Vincent’s care? What had happened in that cottage after their mother died, the two boys alone with their father? Did Vincent save his brother’s life to make him suffer more? Or did he hope his son would kill him first? Had he been leading me by the nose all along? I didn’t get any answers. I don’t know if I expected any. Maybe there were none to be had. In the end, it was a not-at-all sacred mystery. It was the last breath of a dying breed. It was the price of blood. I left Father Vincent Tyrell dreaming over the day’s racing in The Irish Field, working the race cards with his fingers like rosary beads.

  Regina Tyrell, fearing that Karen would be taken away from her, left the country with the child. I don’t know where they are. Every time I think of them, I recall F.X. Tyrell’s belief in the bloodline, his creed that blood and breed are the beginning and the end. I hope his granddaughter can find a future that will prove him wrong.

  After a lot of digging, Martha O’Connor discovered that the Tyrell family name had originally been Butler. And after some digging of my own in registration offices in Wicklow and Kildare, I established that John Butler, F.X. Tyrell’s father, was a distant cousin of the Butlers that settled in North Wicklow. The Butlers that eat their young, that settle disputes with sulphuric acid, the Butlers Tommy Owens called “a tribe of savages.”

  The Butlers had an eventful Christmas also, as did the Leonards. On Christmas night, Joe Leonard came out of his house to chase off two young men in sportswear and hooded tops who were messing around with his mother-in-law’s blue BMW, the car he had seemed so in awe of. The men were joined by two others, and they refused to stop. Instead, they picked up their attack, kicking the vehicle and scraping the bodywork with keys and knives. When Joe Leonard put himself between them and the car, they kicked him and stabbed him and left him bleeding in the street. Joe Leonard died later that night in Loughlinstown Hospital. The whole incident was recorded on one of the tapes Leonard had hired me to set running to find out who was trashing his neighbourhood. The tapes were admitted as evidence, and the Guards were able to get a case brought against the men, who weren’t men at all: three of them were fifteen and one sixteen. They were too young to be named, but three of them were from the extended Butler family. None showed any remorse; they all felt Leonard was reckless and foolhardy for trying to defend his property. Dave told me what the sixteen-year-old said.

  “What the fuck did he have to get in our way for? I mean, he should have known. Family man, he shouldn’t’ve been taking risks like that.”

  He said that over and over again, each time with mounting rage.

  I went up to see the Leonards. I went to the removal, and to the funeral. All I can remember are the weeping children clinging to their mother, and their mother not being able to walk very well, and my wondering was it from grief, or from the fact that the kids were clinging to her, and wondering why I was wondering. I still have the picture on my phone of the Leonards wishing me a Merry Christmas. I find I look at it almost every day.

  KAREN TYRRELL STOOD at the far end of the room with her back to me. She faced a big sash window that looked out across a paddock to the river. She was working at something, and when I got closer I saw that it was a painting. She had a table by the window, and around it on the wall, sketches and oils of the same view: the paddock, always with two horses, and two trees just far enough apart that they never touched, and the river. The river was altered in the paintings so that its flow caught the eye: it seemed as if the horses, and the viewer, yearned to be taken by the river, to be caught up in its current, to escape, while the trees stood upright, implacable, season in, season out, shedding and sprouting and never touching. I watched for a while as she worked, very deliberate, very careful, incorporating snow into the scene as it fell in real life. I set my face to try to feel as little as possible, to think of nothing but the picture she worked on and the scene it represented. There were no horses in the paddock today, but there were two in Karen Tyrell’s painting, of course. I stood and watched that little girl work, oblivious to the horrors that had taken place in her house that day, to the legacy of horror she had inherited, stood and prayed that the Guards would get here before she asked me what had happened, and if not, that I would find the heart to know what to say.

  She turned around, and I almost gasped at her tear-stained face, at the dark hair, her mother’s hair, at the startling eyes, one blue, one brown, her father’s
eyes, at her clear, confident gaze, as if we were at the very beginning of things.

  “Where’s my mother?” she said.

  About the Author

  DECLAN HUGHES has worked for more than twenty years in the theatre in Dublin as director and playwright. In 1984, he co-founded Rough Magic, Ireland’s leading independent theatre company. He has been writer in association with the Abbey Theatre and remains an artistic associate of Rough Magic. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. This is his third novel.

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  ALSO BY DECLAN HUGHES

  The Wrong Kind of Blood

  The Colour of Blood

  Credits

  Jacket design Dan Rembert

  Jacket photograph by Russ Merne/Alamy

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE PRICE OF BLOOD. Copyright © 2008 by Declan Hughes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.