The Price of Blood (29 page)

"And after By Your Leave, after Thurles, you went back down to Tyrrellscourt, dealing. What happened to Patrick Hutton then?"

Leo grabbed my arm.

"That’s what I want you to find out. Steno…I kept in touch with Steno, but I never trusted the cunt. You bring smack in, say good-bye to business, it’s a fucking fire sale. I mean, Pa Hutton and me, we weren’t really close anymore, not with your woman around…the guy had lost it anyway, he was on heroin. And the baby could have been anyone’s, Miranda’s baby, Jack Proby’s, Steno’s, anyone’s."

"Bomber Folan’s?"

"Bomber didn’t last long with F.X., fuck sake. Out on his ear, he had no discipline, the stupid cunt. I told Steno, I said the fucking smack was more trouble than it was worth. I got out, and he wound it down and reefed them all to fuck. And that was the last I heard until I got the phone call on Saturday night."

Leo still held my arm; it reminded me of Vincent Tyrrell’s grip the morning I took the case. He brought his other hand around and clasped my hand and locked eyes with me; his breath came through his mouth in sodden gusts.

"You want to get that seen to," I said.

"Where d’you think Boris is taking me after this? Christmas night at the A&E in St. Anthony’s, fuck sake, I should have you killed."

"Don’t start that again."

"You could do with a checkup yourself."

"In the New Year."

"You think you’ve seen him. How does he look?"

"If it’s who I think it is, he looked fit, but he didn’t look well. Not in his head. I’m sorry."

Leo gripped me harder, and tears brimmed in his eyes.

"Try and keep him alive," he said.

"I can’t promise anything. He already looked pretty out of control. If he’s the killer…"

I didn’t have to spell it out. Leo nodded, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me his forearm. The tattoo there was a familiar one, a crucifix and an omega symbol: † Ω

"I know there’s all this, the Omega Man going on in the papers, like he’s some Mister Evil fucker, yeah? And I read how the crucifix represents whatever, Christmas, or it’s the killer pleading for forgiveness. But that’s all bullshit man, it’s not an omega, it isn’t even a crucifix. It’s, we all got them done in McGoldrick’s that time, there was all raggle-taggle tradheads and eco cunts with dogs on strings and this cornrow chick used to do tattoos and we all got them, or I can remember everyone getting them anyway."

"And what does it mean?"

"No big mystery. Just T and C, a fancy way of doing a T and a C."

"T and C standing for—"

"Tyrrellscourt."

   THERE WEREN’T MANY people on the road, but those that were out were mostly drunk, so I had to take it easy on the drive, which I would have anyway, since my right eye had almost closed now, and it was past midnight when I arrived in Tyrrellscourt. I had showered before I left, and cleaned my wounds, and gobbled some Nurofen Plus, and resisted the call of my bed, although not without difficulty: What could eight hours change? I asked myself, and answer came there: Absolutely everything.

An unshaven security guard in a black uniform was on duty at the gates to Tyrrellscourt House, which was surrounded from the roadside by high granite walls; I gave the guard my name and he went back into his booth and opened the gates. I drove up the long gravel drive and came to a crunching halt in front of the imposing house, whose stained-glass windows and glittering granite stonework and Victorian Gothic features gave it the look of a haunted house in a child’s storybook. I could hear the whinny and snort of horses in the yard beyond. Snow was falling lightly in the moonlight as I climbed the steps of the house. Before I had time to knock, the great black front door with the stained-glass panels depicting horses in full flight opened, and the fairy tale was interrupted by Tommy Owens, standing there in tan brogues, red cord trousers, a check shirt and a sleeveless pullover, his face flushed and his hair wet. He looked at the new map Leo had kicked onto my face and shook his head, as if my brawling ways would someday drag his squeaky-clean twenty-first-century operation down. I heard piano music, and the wow and flutter of a television or computer game. Tommy looked at his watch and shook his head again. I always liked it when Tommy began to think the case was slipping away from me, and he had to pick up the slack.

"Come on," he said, his voice prim and impatient, and led me briskly across a flagstoned hall, along a corridor and down a flight of stairs. We walked through a passage stuffed with riding hats and boots and Wellington boots and red coats and Barbour jackets and dog baskets and into a darkened conservatory with walls of glass on three sides. Once your eyes adjusted, you could see right across the valley in the moonlight: to the right, the lazy S and straight green band of the gallops; center bearing left, the river and the golf course to the rear of the country club, and at the extreme left, the tip of a mobile home that was part of the old Staples property.

Tommy had a MacBook laptop set up on a low table by a cane sofa; a videotape was recording the signal from a wireless receiver not unlike the one I had set up for the Leonard family to trap their neighborhood dumpers; on a side table there was turkey and ham and lettuce and tomatoes and French bread and mayonnaise and mustard and chutney and pint bottles of Guinness and a bottle of Jameson and a flask of coffee. If this was an all-nighter, we were traveling first class.

"Miss Tyrrell said if you came in at a reasonable hour, you should go up and see her," Tommy said. "She’s a class act, that one."

"Miss Tyrrell?"

"Regina. Miss Tyrrell, I call her."

"What’s with the young-country-squire outfit?"

"I needed a change of clothes. Miss Tyrrell kindly—"

"Sounds good. So take me through what you’ve been up to."

"Go up and see her first. She’s playing the piano up there, I think."

"Tommy, you know conventional wisdom? It’s always incomplete. Never keep a lady waiting—provided you know what you’re going to say or do to her when you meet her. I don’t, and I’m relying on you to help me."

I made myself a turkey salad roll, poured Guinness into a glass and sat back on the sofa. Tommy looked at me in dismay.

"What do you think this is, a fucking picnic? That lady up there is at the end of her tether."

"Really? How did that happen? She struck me as a pretty cool customer when I met her. What’s happened to get her so panicked?"

"There’s no one she can turn to. And the situation is sinking in, you know? And I think someone’s been talking to her."

"Who?"

"Your one."

"Miranda? Say her name at least, Tommy."

"Yeah. So…I mean, some of us have been…while you…"

Tommy waved dismissively at me, as if I’d arrived in white tie and tails with two strippers and a big bag of coke. The pain around my right eye suddenly shot out of the gates, neck and neck with the pain in my liver. It was hard to call the odds on which would romp home first: a joint favorite photo finish was my conservative forecast. I popped a few more Nurofen, tipped some Jameson into a glass and threw the lot back. When that didn’t immediately help, I turned on Tommy.

"This face came from Leo Halligan, one of your little drug-dealing friends, Tommy. Whose attack was a result of Podge Halligan, who again was a business associate of yours, just like the fucking Reillys or any other number of thugs and scumbags whose affairs you get embroiled in and I end up dealing with, usually with my fucking chin, because you can’t cope and come crying to me like the fucking…so I really don’t fucking need—"

I stopped then, because Tommy didn’t have the heart to take what I would have said, or because I didn’t have the heart to say it. I put a hand in the air, and he matched it, and he pointed at the red-and-green Jameson bottle, and I poured us both whiskeys and we knocked them back and that was that. So while I ate my sandwich and drank my beer, Tommy took me through what some of us had been doing.

   First off, they’ve no servants here since Christmas Eve until after Stephen’s Day, they give them Christmas off, Miss Tyrrell said it was so Karen can see how Christmas should be in a proper family, without being waited on hand and foot like," Tommy said. "So security-wise, all there is is that fat fuck at the gates. I suppose if they wanted anything, they could send over to the hotel for it, but they haven’t, or at least, not since I’ve been here; there’s a big kitchen with an Aga and all in it and Miss Tyrrell was going at it there since eight this morning. I got down here just as they were about to eat and they made me join them, insisted on it. F.X. wasn’t around then, I didn’t see him until later. Miss Tyrrell just said Christmas Day was always a working day for him, on account of Leopardstown, and horses had gone to Chester as well: he does be out and about all day, checking up on the work, the horses, the boxes, so on. And then it’s an early start, he has a lodge over near the stables so he sleeps there.

"Anyway, it was a beautiful dinner, and little Karen said grace and all, and I was dreading it, on account of it’s the first time I ever ate Christmas dinner without me ma, know what I mean, and Regina—Miss Tyrrell, I told her about it and she was very…she understood. Wine and pudding and hats and crackers and everything. They were both giddy then, playing games and so forth, but I said I needed to get some work done. I don’t know if Miss Tyrrell took me entirely seriously, but that didn’t matter, I’m used to that. Anyway, she was kind, and she’s a real lady. No question.

"I had the Range Rover in my sights, first off. I counted three around the stables alone. Two of them had UK plates; neither of the registration numbers matched. I had a run-in with Brian Rowan, he’s head man here, getting the horses settled for the night. Big curly top, thought I was some skanger on the loose, or a bookie’s spy, but he called the house and Miss Tyrrell set him straight. I went through, there’s a couple of garages with horse boxes and transporters and so on, but I didn’t see any more Range Rovers.

"Next thing was to set up the pinhole camera on Bomber’s place. I reckoned the only way was to approach by the river; he’s bound to have some way of scoping whoever comes head-on. I packed a little bag and walked the track down from here, there’s a path above the river by the trees that runs the length of the golf course. Now, when you meet the lane we drove down, that leads to a bridge across the river; the Staples property lies to the other side, and there’s a mesh of chicken wire and barbed wire on that side. I thought about placing the camera there, but it wouldn’t really have caught anything except the coming and going of vehicles, and not even them in any great detail. But it was bleedin’ freezin’ out there, and the one thing I didn’t pack was gloves, I did have a pair of bolt cutters though, so I used them to snip the wire, just enough to squeeze through, reminded me of robbin’ orchards, don’t let the gardener see how you got in and you’ll always be able to go back."

Just listening to Tommy was making me feel cold. I poured a couple more Jamesons. Tommy took a hit of his whiskey, then picked up his story.

"Other side of the wire, I can’t get enough purchase on the ridge to take me around to the Staples place, there’s a dirty big bank sloping down to the riverbed, it’s got, you wouldn’t call it a waterfall, a bit of a gusher, there’s a stream up on the property, anyway, I can’t get around it so I’ve got to climb down, there’s a bank of brambles and nettles, then there’s elder and sycamore a bit further on, I cling to some ivy and get as far as a sycamore that’s trunk is swathed in the stuff and I can scale down the ivy to the riverbed no bother.

"Getting up to the house is a bit more of a problem, because the moon has gone behind a cloud and I don’t want to use a torch. I’m also in difficulties because my shoes are soaked and freezing and there’s marsh stretching on as far as I go, until I find another sycamore on the Staples side. The ivy only climbs about fifteen feet, and there’s a fork in the tree another ten feet up and nothing but the odd whorl and nub to get me there and the bark is all frosted now, slippier than a whore’s knickers but I make it, and from the fork there’s enough branches to get ten feet above the backyard, which I now see in the moonlight has a fucking fence of
palings,
so I’m there, sodden, shivering, crackling with the fucking cold, thinking, if this fucker has searchlights, or dogs, or both, I am finished, because I don’t see where the extra yard of whatever is coming from. And then I think, fuck it, we’re mates, he was gonna step in for me with Ed outside McGoldrick’s. And then I’m, yeah, but how friendly is he gonna be, you just dropped out of a fucking tree into his backyard on Christmas night, chances are he’s gonna revise his opinion of you downward.

"But to be honest with you, there’s only so long you can stay up a fucking tree, by its nature it’s a temporary location, so I’m ready to jump, I’m watching the yard, there’s a couple of mobile homes, an avalanche of scrap, I can see lights in the stone cottage, Bomber’s homemade Jeep and another vehicle, a Range Rover looks like. And I’m watching, and I hear an engine, and lights approaching, and I’ve leant so far forward I feel I’m slipping, and Bomber comes out of his house and stands in his doorway and I’m jamming myself back against the bough that’s above my head and sliding my arse in tight against the trunk as another fucking Range Rover bounces up into view. Out get Miranda Hart and some bloke, can’t make him out, expected, it looks like, and they all go into the cottage, five minutes, ten minutes, half a fuckin’ hour, great, I’m like, if I fell on the palings, maybe they’d bring me to hospital, where the heat would be on. And then I’m like, maybe they wouldn’t."

Tommy stopped then because I was laughing so much; he did his best to look indignant, poured himself a fresh drink and waited until I’d composed myself before continuing.

"Anyway, if good things don’t come to all who wait, something does: the three of them pile out, all business, and into one Range Rover, at this stage I’m fucked if I can remember which one is which, and off they go. I give it a minute or two before I jump, and all I’m thinking is, if I’ve actually frozen solid and I shatter into, you know, blocks, fragments, whatever, then that’s it, much relief, I Can Do No More man, know I mean?