The Price of Blood (20 page)

I walked back into town thinking about Karen Tyrrell. Ten years ago Regina would have been forty-two or forty-three, reaching the end of her fertility; many single women who get pregnant by accident at that age keep a child they would have aborted ten years previously: some go out with the intention of getting pregnant by an anonymous one-night stand. But nine years ago would also bring us back to the aftermath of Patrick Hutton’s disappearance; nine years would be long enough for someone who’d been made pregnant by Patrick Hutton to have his baby, almost a year after his disappearance. That would help to explain Miranda Hart’s less than fond tone when she mentioned Regina. It might also go a long way toward accounting for Miranda’s self-destructive trawl through Tyrrellscourt in the period after Hutton’s disappearance: hard enough for your husband to disappear, but knowing (assuming she did know) that he had impregnated another woman, an older, richer woman whose family had in a sense informally adopted Miranda and Hutton both: that must have felt like betrayal.
I won’t play the Judas for anyone,
Hutton said; perhaps he already had, with Regina Tyrrell, and when Miranda found out, she made sure the Tyrrells got to see the ugly consequences on the streets of their own town. Maybe that accounted for Regina’s dismissive attitude to the marriage: not because she considered Patrick Hutton unworthy of Miranda, but because she had been in love with him herself. I called Dave Donnelly, and a couple of minutes later he called me back.

"Dave, I want you to see if you can get hold of Don Kennedy’s case files. He looked into Patrick Hutton’s disappearance a couple of years ago, so that Miranda Hart could have him declared dead."

"What am I looking for?"

I thought for a minute.

"Birth cert, baptismal cert, anything official. Hutton seems to have been a man without a past. And anything else that Kennedy turned up…I mean, he cleared the way for the insurance company to sign the house over to Miranda, but any time you do a trawl like that, you always uncover other stuff. Anything, even if it feels like gossip to you."

"Want to explain?"

"Not sure if I can. Just feeling my way."

Dave ended the call, and I kept along the road.

My thoughts turned to my own little girl, and the lie I had told, and how I felt about telling it. It hadn’t been about me: it was to spare Karen Tyrrell’s feelings. Not that she needed me to. Kids don’t live in quite such dread of death as adults do. But it reminded me of the relief I had felt when my daughter was born, that I was no longer the center of my own world, she was. I had moved contentedly away from center stage in my own life. I remember the initial vertigo, and then the thrill, the rush to embrace the natural feeling that a new generation is more important than your own. And the grief of her death was accentuated and prolonged by my revulsion at having to deal with myself and my own feelings: it felt like indulgence, or worse: I made myself sick. A month ago, I wouldn’t have told a lie about Lily, even to say she would have been nine, instead of five, let alone that she was alive when her ashes lay scattered in the ocean at Santa Monica under an indifferent sky. But I told it, and I was glad I had, and Karen Tyrrell’s kiss on my cheek had made me feel closer to Lily than three years of drinking and fucking and fighting had. I said a prayer, or something like a prayer, offering it up to the clear, starry sky, then slipped and nearly fell on an early frost outside McGoldrick’s pub. I righted myself, hand on cold railings, my breath pluming in the freezing air, relieved to be upright with blood in my veins, the living voices from the pub swirling around my head; relieved to be among the living, with the memory of what Karen Tyrrell had whispered still fresh in my ears:
Don’t look so sad.

Before I went inside I played a hunch. I called the bookie whose mobile number I had found in Hutton’s pocket.

"Yes, friend?" came the reply.

"Jack Proby?" I said.

"Who wants to know?"

"Edward Loy. I’m a friend of Miranda Hart’s. I’d like to talk to you about a horse called By Your Leave."

"Yeah? What are you, friend, some kind of journalist?"

"No, I’m some kind of detective. Friend."

"Well, I’m kind of busy at the moment, friend. How did you get this number anyway?"

"If I told you, you’d have to kill me."

"That’s very funny, friend, but I’m here at home with my family and I really don’t appreciate—"

"I hear you, friend. That’s what I’m calling about actually, the unappreciated. The jockeys who disappear because they won’t carry out orders. The women who sell their bodies because the men they love are scumbags who’d rather pimp them out than care for them. The men whose fathers are gay and vulnerable to blackmail, who end up working for gangsters to keep the family secrets. Unappreciated, every one. We really should do something for them, don’t you think? In this season of goodwill."

"What do you want?"

Proby’s voice had lost the hail-fellow-well-met tone; now he sounded edgy and dangerous, like a rat in a trap.

"Where do you live?" I said.

"Foxrock," he said.

"Foxrock? Nice up there."

"I worked for every penny," he said.

"So do most people. They just don’t seem to end up with as many pennies. A shame, isn’t it?"

"Keeps me awake at nights."

"I’m sure it does. I’ll see you at midday tomorrow down in Seafield. The West Pier."

"Tomorrow’s Christmas Day, friend—"

"So it is. Where are my manners? Merry Christmas. Friend."

It was called pushing the boat out. The cops would be all over this case soon, if they weren’t already. But what lay beneath it might never come out in their investigation. It would in mine. Call it justice. Call it curiosity. Whatever it was, it came down to this: I needed to know that nine-year-old girl had a future, one in which she would not be betrayed. And I wasn’t convinced that, without my help, she would.

   TOMMY OWENS WAS sitting on the same stool he’d been on when I left the pub, but it was as if a carnival had erected itself around him: face painters and street performers in clown costumes; folk musicians wearing bad hats; bearded bikers in leathers and their women in lace and feathers; three Santa Clauses and several drunken helpers in green-and-red elf costumes and, holding the line at the bar, a phalanx of little old men in jumpers of all ages, drinking seriously and devotedly and steadfastly resisting the temptations of excessive gaiety, even if one or two couldn’t resist a stray look in the direction of the drunken elves, particularly the one who kept threatening to get her tits out unless one of the Santas promised to "do" her in his costume. Steno the barman, who had a reassuring aura of calm authority, finally brought this seasonal tableau to a close by ejecting the offending elf, but she was accompanied off the premises by one of the Santas, although possibly not the one she favored.

The lounge was calmer and tonier, with a crowd that looked bored by their money and keen to get rid of it; you could sell a lot of blow here tonight, and someone no doubt was. In the warehouse, it was as if everyone we had seen on the street earlier today was crammed inside; indeed, when I pulled open the double doors, three people stumbled back into the lounge; Noddy Holder was shrieking "It’s Chriss-miss" on a jukebox as I made my way back to Tommy. I assumed he had been drinking all this time, but in fact he was stone-cold sober, or as stone cold as Tommy ever got; he nodded at me and introduced me to the short, slightly built guy on the stool next to him, who wore an olive-green flight suit and looked like a shaven-headed heroin addict: his taut flesh was mottled and pocked; his drawn cheeks had tight vertical folds like stiletto scars; his tiny eyes were recessed deep beneath heavy brows: dark blue and bloodshot, they glowed like hot coals.

"Ed, Bomber Folan. Bomber, Ed."

Bomber promptly stood up and left the bar. Tommy got to his feet to follow.

"Come on, Ed, we’ve a trip to make. Bomber’s driving."

I followed reluctantly. If I had learned anything over the years, it was not to do business with anyone called "Bomber," and especially not to get into a vehicle with him. Besides, I wanted a drink. I needed a drink.

Outside, Tommy grinned.

"The expression on your face man."

He started to laugh. I didn’t like being laughed at, especially not by Tommy Owens. Coming on top of what he had told me earlier this afternoon about Miranda Hart, I liked it even less. Without pausing for thought, I hit Tommy a dig in the mouth that send him skidding on the frosted ground. The smokers in McGoldrick’s porch stiffened and a murmur of interest ran through them. Bomber drove up in a Jeep that looked like it had been fashioned from a corrugated iron shed and some old scaffolding. He jumped out and came at me, his hands up.

"No, Bomber, it’s all right."

Tommy was on his feet, wiping blood from his mouth. He brought his face close to mine, close enough that I could see the anger in his eyes.

"Fair enough, Ed. I probably would have done the same. But you left before I could explain. Earlier."

"Explain what?" I said, knowing already I was in the wrong, and fearing it was only going to get worse. Tommy looked around at Bomber and nodded him back to the Jeep.

"I paid Miranda money. But I didn’t get my money’s worth. I didn’t…she was so out of it that it wouldn’t have been right. And anyway, I…I was never into that, into paying for it…I was kind of goaded into it…"

"You don’t have to tell me this, Tommy," I said.

"I do, actually. Because you’re the only one who…who even half believes I’m…you know…and the look on your face today when I told you about your one…I didn’t want you thinking I’m some kind of fuckin’—"

"I don’t, Tommy. All right? I don’t."

Tommy nodded, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked me in the eyes, and I thought I saw tears in his. And then he hit me, a smack to the left cheek that dropped me to my knees and left my head jangling. I laid my palms on the cold ground to steady myself, and then I got slowly to my feet. The smokers were all beaming at the prospect of what this pair of out-of-town clowns might do next.

"Gonna have that drink now," I said.

"We’ll wait for you."

I went back inside and Steno poured me a double Jameson and I added a third of water and he nodded approvingly at me as I drank it down like breakfast juice. The adage about being able to choose your friends but not your family ran through my mind. It wasn’t true though, or at least, not as you got older. Unless you were the choosy type, or you went on a lot of cruises. No, you were stuck with your family and you were stuck with your friends, and you’d better just make the best of it. I thanked Steno, who had the solemn confessional gravity I prized in a barman, or at least the appearance of it, and went out to join Tommy in the back of a Jeep driven by a man called Bomber.

   Bomber was a good driver, given the vehicle, and he had been a promising jockey until the heroin whose ravages still showed in his face had worked its way mercilessly through body and soul, calling a halt to his burgeoning career. Now he "did something with scrap," Tommy assured me. As we crossed a humpbacked bridge across the river at the far end of town and the suspension rattled and clanked like a mechanical press, I concluded that one of the somethings with scrap he did had become the Jeep we were sitting in. We turned in along the river and pulled up briefly outside a set of high iron gates. Bomber unlocked the padlock and uncoiled the chain and opened them and we drove up the short gravel drive to a large granite building with a slate roof that looked like a cross between a church and an asylum. The windows were all boarded up, with the exception of one stained-glass pane high on the rectangular bell tower; the grounds were overgrown; broken glass and beer cans and the dead embers of fires lay strewn about.

"St. Jude’s," Tommy said.

Bomber, who hadn’t spoken and didn’t look like starting anytime soon, produced flashlights from a toolbox in the Jeep and gave us one each. He set off up the steps and unlocked a further three padlocks and set aside three iron bands and pushed the door open, and we followed him inside.

We found ourselves in a blue-tiled entrance hall. Bomber used his flashlight to guide our eyes. On the turn of the stairs, the Blessed Virgin Mary stood in matching blue; facing us, Christ hung from the cross, minus a hand but otherwise intact. Bomber set off down a corridor to the left, flashing the light from side to side to illuminate classrooms still filled with desks and blackboards. Cobwebs hung like lace curtains and dust clung to every surface, but the classrooms were intact, as if their occupants had stepped out in a hurry, expecting to return at their leisure. At the end of the corridor Bomber flung open a heavy oak door and waited for us to pass through. We were in a small chapel, with rows of plain wooden pews and, near the altar, individual mahogany chairs with padded seats and matching kneelers. Bomber hoisted one of the kneelers on his shoulder, wheeled around and headed out of the chapel again, turning at the door to indicate that we should follow. I looked to Tommy for some explanation, but he wasn’t talking either.

We followed Bomber upstairs past the Blessed Virgin Mary and onto the first floor, where we filed through a spartan dormitory; the beds were separated into small cells by means of wooden partitions; a small locker stood adjacent to each bed, with a chamber pot beneath. Bomber had paused by one of the cells; he shined his flashlight on the side of the locker nearest the bed, where the occupant had carved some hieroglyphics; I crouched down close to see what they were. Bomber stared at me until I nodded to confirm that I had understood what I had seen; then he was up and off, through a communal bathroom and down a carpeted passageway paneled in dark wood. He stopped outside a door, nodded to us and went in.

The first thing I saw was the reproduction of Poussin’s
Last Supper,
one of the paintings Father Vincent Tyrrell had hanging in his Bayview presbytery. Then I took in the thick-pile red carpet, the burgundy-and-gold-flock wallpaper, the luxurious eiderdown on the queen-size bed, the red velvet seat on the mahogany carver chair, the gilt-framed mirror above the marble fireplace, and the image of the Sacred Heart watching it all, although His light had been extinguished. Bomber’s light was burning bright: he waved his flashlight and fixed his eyes on us as if to check he had our full attention. We nodded, and then he presented what amounted to a kind of grotesque pantomime. He took a black scarf from his pocket and wrapped it around his eyes, then he took the kneeler and set it down so that it faced the Sacred Heart; this left him with his back to us. He knelt down and rested his elbows on the arm rail of the kneeler and brought his hands together ready for prayer; he raised his flashlight toward the Sacred Heart and brought forth the first sound I had heard him make. I thought he was cawing like a crow, but soon it was clear he was making a sheep’s baa. After a bit of this, he clapped his hands together and blessed himself, then bent down until he was on all fours, with his head beneath the kneeler; he brought his hands up to hang from the kneeler’s rail, and with his rear end extended toward us, proceeded to squeal and roar and scream, like an animal in pain. He rocked back and forth on the kneeler until it tumbled over and brought his head crashing down on the floor, where he stayed, whimpering now, like a dog that’s been beaten too much.