The Price of Blood (6 page)

It was dark by the time I got to Riverside Village; the Christmas decorations were more discreet and tasteful than they had been in Michael Davitt Gardens: hardly surprising, as an 800-square-feet three-bed went for nine hundred thousand here in Dublin 4; number 20 had a lighted candle in the window and a holly wreath on the doorknob and a red 1988 Porsche 928 in the drive. My phone rang as I pressed the bell; when I checked the number and saw the 310 area code, I realized it was my ex-wife again. Nine in the morning in West L.A. and she could think of nothing better to do than call me. I felt a momentary stab of panic, but that gave way to the sad knowledge that there was no longer anything between us to panic about, and then to anger at her unwillingness to leave me the fuck alone. And that gave way to genuine panic, because when the door of number 20 opened, there was the dark hair, the pale skin, the great dark eyes, the long legs, the slightly crooked, wide red lips of my ex-wife standing before me.

   I WAS SITTING on the black leather couch in the living room. I had asked for a whiskey, and was told I could only have one if I drank a cup of hot sweet tea first, so that’s what I was doing while the woman who looked like my ex-wife sat on the black leather chair across from me. Her name was Miranda Hart, and whether she was uneasy or excited at having a strange man in her house, or both, I couldn’t tell; her way of dealing with it to was to laugh a little, and smile a lot, and chew her gum vigorously; she was doing all three now.

I hadn’t exactly fainted, but I had swayed a little out there on the doorstep, unsteady on my feet, clutching the door frame as the woman I thought was my ex-wife tried to shut the door on my hand, and then my scalp had sparked with sweat, and my tongue felt too large for my mouth, and I knew I was going to be sick. And had I not managed to blurt out Patrick Hutton’s name, I would never have been let past the door, let alone allowed to use the bathroom to throw up, and then wash my face, and now sit by the fire in the living room with the dark burgundy and racing-green walls and the dark wood floorboards and the paintings and framed photographs of horses and jockeys on the walls and ask my questions. Because Miranda Hart was Patrick Hutton’s widow.

She sat in a pair of skinny jeans and black boots with low heels and a black wraparound top over a dark wine-colored camisole with six silver bracelets on one slender wrist and seven on the other and no wedding ring. Her nails were painted dark red, but they were bitten and the varnish was cracked; her mascara had run into smudges around her huge brown eyes; her lipstick had smeared a little around her mouth. There was mud and straw and what looked like shredded paper on her boots. She had poured herself a large gin, and she gulped it enthusiastically now and spilled some of it down her chin, which she wiped with the back of her hand. I didn’t tell her she looked like my ex-wife; instead I said I’d had a sandwich that must have disagreed with me, but she didn’t seem at all interested; maybe strangers threw up regularly in her bathroom.

"So you’re a private detective who used to live in L.A., and you’re looking for Patrick, and you can’t, or won’t say who hired you," she said. Her accent was an Anglo drawl; she said
cawn’t
for "can’t" and gave
Patrick
such a clipped reading she made it sound like a name rarely heard outside South Kensington and Chelsea.

"That’s right," I said.

"The last private detective was fuck all use. Or rather, I suppose he was a great deal of use, since he turned up fuck all."

"When was that?" I said.

"About two years ago. I wanted to have Patrick declared dead. More like, needed: I ran out of cash for a while, and couldn’t keep the mortgage on this little kip up. We’d bought it together, and he’d been gone longer than seven years."

"And who insisted on the detective, the insurance company?"

"That’s right. Big-arsed ex-cop in an anorak, Christ, he was a gruesome old heap, watching him get out of a chair was nerve-racking. Anyway, he went through the motions, checked Patrick’s bank records and credit history and so forth, and came up with what we all knew: he vanished off the face of the earth ten years ago. Ten years ago today, as a matter of fact. And now all this is mine."

She rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette, a More, and offered me one, which I refused; I didn’t think my system would be up to it yet. I finished the tea and reached for the whiskey; the fumes didn’t make me gag: a good sign.

"Lucky to have the place, I suppose, particularly since we bought before the boom. I got left some money in ’92, not long after we were married. Girlfriends said, don’t put Patrick’s name on it, but it’s just as well I did. ’Cause I’d still have a mortgage to pay if I hadn’t."

"He disappeared ten years ago today?"

"Twenty-third of December, 1996."

"Will you tell me about it?"

"I don’t know," she said. She took a hit of her drink, and a drag of her cigarette, and looked around for somewhere to tap the ash, and popped her gum out of her mouth and molded it into a bowl shape and flicked her ash in it and laid it on the arm of her chair.

"I don’t know if I want Patrick back. That is, if he were alive and you found him."

"You had him declared dead. Do you think he’s still alive?"

She laughed, as if she’d been caught out in some strange but endearing foible, like using her chewing gum as an ashtray.

"I wouldn’t put it past the little fucker, put it that way."

"I know F. X. Tyrrell put up a reward for information about him."

"Yes. Well. That was very good of him. Very good of F.X., all right."

Hart’s general tone was so brittle I couldn’t tell whether she was being ironic or not.

"Did he find out anything?"

"The usual: people who thought they’d seen him on a ferry, or in Spain. Nothing concrete. That was before the detective had a go."

"Were Tyrrell and your husband close?"

"I don’t know if anyone gets particularly close to F.X. They were having a good year together, and Patrick was getting a lot of rides; he had three or four big ones at Leopardstown. And then: gone."

"Money trouble?"

"It was all a bit hand-to-mouth. But that’s just the life, he was making his way, he was only twenty-three, just the beginning. And he’d been gambling, but don’t we all? Everyone in racing gambles. No one came to me with major debts after he’d gone, the kind of debts that would’ve made him do a runner. And they’d need to have been big, Patrick had a lot of nerve."

"There was talk of his stopping a horse for Tyrrell. By Your Leave? But the Turf Club found there was no case to answer."

Miranda Hart smiled mirthlessly and ran a weary hand through her dark mane of hair.

"The Turf Club are such dears."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they know what goes on and we know what goes on, and they agree to pretend it doesn’t go on unless we’re too careless about it. And F.X. and Patrick were bloody careless that day."

"What happened? What goes on?"

She drained her glass and looked at me through narrowed eyes. "You’re not some asshole of a journalist, are you?"

"I may be an asshole, but I’m no journalist," I said.

That got a laugh; showing her my card got a wary nod. When I produced a press clipping I kept in my wallet (penned by a crime reporter who owed his career to the quality and frequency of the Garda leaks he received, and who showed his gratitude by toeing diligently whatever line the Garda Press office drew for him) featuring a quote from the Garda commissioner himself deploring the rise of "self-styled" private detectives and disparaging their "questionable personal ethics," and using a photograph of me as Exhibit A, Miranda Hart gave me a grin of what looked like kindred outlaw approval. I got up and fixed her a fresh drink, and took a hit of mine. Miranda Hart kicked off her boots and wriggled around until her long legs were splayed with one hanging over the arm of her chair.

"How much do you know about horse racing?" she said.

"Enough to lose betting on it. Not much more."

"Well. First of all, it’s not an exact science," she said. "The favorite doesn’t always win. If he did, you wouldn’t have much of a sport, or a chance to bet. So that gives owners and trainers a certain license. If a horse with a good record is coming back after a rest, or at the beginning of the National Hunt season, no one will be too surprised if he loses a few races he was tipped to win. Maybe he’s carrying an injury, maybe he’s lost his edge, maybe he hasn’t warmed up yet, maybe the jockey isn’t giving him the best ride."

"And what’s actually happening?"

"The horse is being stopped. So that the odds can drift up, and his owner or trainer or a whole bunch of interested parties can have a big punt in a month or two, when it’s barely fancied and the price on the horse—and maybe the prize money—are better. Best to do with a horse that’s just made a name for himself, because it could always be a flash in the pan, as far as the authorities—and the punters—are concerned. Harder with an established mount, but you can still get away with it, because there are so many legitimate excuses: one trainer will push a horse to run off an injury, another will insist on rest; if either of those horses is stopped, the trainer is covered."

"So the entire game is corrupt."

"Of course it is, darling. Not all the time—there are the glamour races everyone wants to win fair and square—but quite a lot of the time. And that’s just the day-to-day; we haven’t even mentioned doping, or when big gamblers or bookies bribe jockeys to throw races."

"And that’s what Patrick Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell did with By Your Leave? They deliberately set out to lose the race?"

"Of course. It was evens at Thurles, and the Christmas meeting at Leopardstown was looming, so they wanted to get the price up before then. Unfortunately, By Your Leave was such a great goer, and Patrick ended up being way too obvious. So the whole thing got a little sour. And Patrick got the blame."

"Not from the Turf Club."

"No, from the punters. The footage of it was pretty clear, you could see Patrick checking his placing and holding the horse back when the two front-runners had bolted. A furlong from home and he’s still at it, as if By Your Leave could have made up the ground."

"Sounds like he was deliberately drawing attention to what he was doing."

"That’s what some people said. That the row was between him and F.X., that Patrick wanted to give the horse a decent ride, that he wasn’t happy to be instructed otherwise. And the Turf Club would have caused too much scandal if they’d found anyone at fault. And of course, punters forgive and forget, they know this kind of thing goes on, Patrick would have lost the ride for Leopardstown, but he would have been back on winners soon enough, and everyone would have been happy."

"And how did By Your Leave fare at Leopardstown that Christmas?"

Miranda Hart shook her head and looked at me gravely.

"By Your Leave never made it out of Tipperary—fell at the last fence. The going was unseasonably firm, and the horse broke her right ankle. Which might have been okay, but having unseated her rider, she took off at the gallop she’d been straining after all day. By the time the Tyrrellscourt lads caught her up, she’d broken the leg in thirty-four places. There was nothing anyone could do."

I thought I saw tears in her eyes; the death of the horse seemed to matter more to her than the fate of her husband.

"So what happened after that? Did Tyrrell and Hutton fall out? What did Patrick tell you?"

"Do you know racing people, Mr. Loy? They’re not exactly what you’d call chatty. They’re certainly not introspective. I wasn’t looking for a blabbermouth. I have gob enough for two. Patrick never talked about work in any detail. He’d say, ’Not a bad horse,’ or ’Lucky today’—that’s what he talked about most often, when he talked: luck."

"It sounds like he ran out of it at the last."

"Maybe. He walked out on F.X. before he had the chance to be sacked. Refused to talk about that either. Said there were a few trainers in England who’d made inquiries, he’d take Christmas off, talk to them in the New Year."

"Refused to talk about that. To his wife?"

She shrugged again, flicking her hair back and pouting as she did so. It was very much her habit, but it had also been a tic of my ex-wife’s; I remembered now how incredibly irritating I used to find it in her; I found it weirdly alluring in Miranda Hart. She moved to stub her cigarette into her chewing gum and overturned her drink onto the crotch of her jeans. She climbed out of the chair amid a fusillade of
fucks
and
shits,
then stalked into the kitchen and returned with a few tea towels. She wiped the gin off the chair and the floor, and began to dab between her legs with a cloth, then thought better of it.

"Clumsy fucking cow. I’m sorry, Mr. Loy, I’m soaked here, I’m going to have to get changed, have a shower. And I’m going out, so…"

She looked toward the door, and I nodded and stood up.

"Well, thanks for your time," I said. I gestured at the mud and straw on her boots. "I take it you’re a racing person yourself."

She grinned in a side-of-the-mouth kind of way and shook her head.

"I run a riding school for Jackie Tyrrell, up in Tibradden. It’s a far cry."

"From what?"

She looked toward the door again, then smiled carefully at me.

"I used to ride, Mr. Loy. I grew up near Tyrrellscourt, I worked in the yard as a girl, I had a few amateur races. I was as good as Patrick. Better, some people thought. Then, after he took off, or disappeared, or whatever the fuck he did…I don’t know, it was as if I were to blame. Like I’d been a curse of some kind. Blame the black widow, y’know? F.X. cut me off, and other trainers followed suit. I got a bit of yard work with another trainer, but I wasn’t happy doing that anymore. So I kind of drifted off track, in more ways than one…rented this place out and just…let things slide, y’know? Got into a few…situations. And then F.X. and his wife split up, and Jackie called me. I needed to get myself together by then, so I jumped at the chance. Jackie helped me with the house, everything."