The Price of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  "And were Mrs. Tyrrell’s anxieties really enough to get you driving into the mountains in the middle of the night?"

  "Well, I hoped I’d get more from her than anxiety, hoped she had something to tell me about Hutton’s disappearance, something nobody knew but her. I hoped in vain."

  When I’d finished, Geraghty looked at his watch, snapped the tape player off and stood up.

  "As I say, Loy, we don’t think you’re in the frame for Mrs. Tyrrell. I’ve got an important case. You’re free to go. Just make sure you’re available for further questioning…and watch your step, am I clear?"

  "I think so," I said.

  But Myles Geraghty was far from clear, and as I walked down Harcourt Street to Stephen’s Green and into the thick of the last hurling wave of Christmas shoppers in the icy morning, I set to wondering why. Geraghty had hoped to flatter me into dishing the dirt on Dave, but as soon as I suggested Dave was concerned about his wife, he backed off so quickly he was practically helping my coat onto me to get me out the door. Did he have a crush on her? There couldn’t be anything going on between them, that was inconceivable, Carmel’d never have an affair, full stop. Still, Dave had not looked happy the other night, and he was a tough old bastard; maybe a few hard chaws in the Bureau were giving him a hard time, but all that "anonymous phone call, loaded gun" malarkey, it may have been happening, but I couldn’t see it getting to him like that. You never really knew what went on in someone else’s marriage, no matter how well you thought you knew them. And you were better off that way, as far as I was concerned.

  When I got to the taxi rank on the Green, I texted Dave and asked him to call me when he could. There was a message on my phone from Tommy Owens:

  Took the car before the cops arrived. Call me when you’re out. T

  I called him, and he told me he had ten mass in Bayview to get through, and that after that, we were taking a trip down to Tyrrellscourt. He told me why, and I told him he could drive.

  But first, I needed to see a priest.

  TWELVE

  I took the Dart out to Bayview: it was as quick as a cab, and a lot cheaper, and the direction I was going, no one else was: the northbound trains were jammed with last-minute shoppers heading for the city center. The railway line hugged the coast; the bay sparkled cobalt in the bright winter light. I ran through the case in my mind. The only people who knew the man on the dump was Hutton, apart from his killer or killers, were me and Dave. But Geraghty would make the face soon enough, or someone on his team would; no more than the rest of us, Guards were desperate men for the ponies.

  It was a little after ten when I got to Bayview. I bought the rest of the papers and had breakfast in a café off the main street. All the tabloids led on what they had been instructed to call the OMEGA MAN, and the broadsheets too, apart, inevitably, from the Irish Times, which preferred an EU directive on the regulation of wind farms and a Christmas Eve message of peace and goodwill from the Irish president for its leads. There was little new in any of the stories; Myles Geraghty’s picture was ubiquitous in all; maybe he was employing his own publicist. When Dave’s number came up on my phone, I stepped out onto the street to answer.

  "Dave, what’s shaking?"

  Before he’d talk, I had to give him a full report on what I knew of Jackie Tyrrell’s murder, and on my time with Myles Geraghty in Harcourt Square, the latter severely edited to omit any mention of Carmel, or of Geraghty’s grudge against Dave.

  "Makes sense Geraghty didn’t waste his time with you, even for sport. The State Pathologist’s reports are nearly done. Word is, Kennedy had a crucifix and an omega symbol carved into his back, at the base of his spine. And one of the boys on the scene up in Tibradden, one who’s loyal to me, gave me more on Jackie Tyrrell: she was hanged, and her tongue was cut out, but she also had an amateur tattoo, the same kind as Hutton and Kennedy: a crucifix and an omega."

  "So Geraghty’s right, this is a serial killer."

  "It looks like. Both Don Kennedy and Jackie Tyrrell had links to Patrick Hutton. Now they still haven’t identified Hutton."

  I thought about that. The Guards were better placed to conduct a murder investigation than I was, especially one on this scale. Keeping information from them didn’t sit easily with me, particularly if that endangered people in Hutton’s circle. In the end it was Dave’s call.

  "Strictly speaking, neither did we, Dave. We think it’s Hutton, but jockeys look a lot alike. I say we keep it that way for now. We don’t know what the killer wants. I’m heading down to Tyrrellscourt today. I think whatever this is about, it has its roots down there. But look, if you want to tell Geraghty who you suspect it might be…"

  There was pause during which Dave digested that one. He sounded like he was chewing on a twig.

  "We’ll play it our way for now," Dave said gruffly. "I have enough friends at court to keep the information coming, so I’ll get it to you as I hear it. You might like to let your lady friend know what’s happening though. I hear they questioned all the employees up at Tibradden this morning, then let them go. They start first thing up there."

  "Will do."

  "And Ed, listen, about last night, in the house…you know—"

  "It was very cold, wasn’t it? Did you find that?"

  "I made a bit of a mountain out of a molehill."

  "And now you have to live on top of it. You’ll need a hat. Maybe even a scarf."

  "Thank you."

  "Thank you."

  "Leo was connected to Hutton. You don’t figure him for the murders, do you? Now he’s out, revenge type of thing."

  "Not if one of the dead is Hutton himself. They were friends, maybe more than friends."

  "But—"

  "Look, Dave, I’m a private detective. I find missing persons. Solving murders, that’s just not my job. What you want to do with murder, you want to get the Guards in."

  MIRANDA HART WAS distraught.

  "I can’t believe it. Who would want to murder Jackie?"

  "She said you were like a daughter to her."

  "And she was like a mother to me. Oh Jesus, Ed—"

  "Miranda, are you at home?"

  "Yes. I’m not long here, I was up in Tibradden, but everything’s canceled for the day."

  "I want you to pack a bag and get out here. In fact, I’ll have you collected."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don’t think you’re safe. Jackie Tyrrell is not the only one dead—"

  "What, is this the Omega Man that was in the papers? Who else is dead? Patrick? Have they found Patrick? Is he one of the bodies out in Roundwood?"

  "They don’t know. But the deaths seem to be connected…look, I’m sending someone for you. We’ll talk soon. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  I FOUND TOMMY in the sacristy, brought him up to date with the case, gave him Miranda Hart’s address and asked him to pick her up. Before he left, I checked over some recent church history with him.

  Father Vincent Tyrrell was sitting at his table with a fountain pen and a lined pad in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, exhaling two blue plumes of smoke into space, or at The Taking of Christ, which was directly ahead of him. I had knocked on the presbytery door and it gave against my fist. I announced myself and he told me to shut the door behind me. He sounded like he wished he had done that in the first place, and turned the key. He didn’t look at me when I joined him at the table.

  "Of course, Judas had his part to play," he said. "Had he not betrayed our Lord, who would have? And if Jesus had not been betrayed, maybe He would never have been taken. And who would have died for our sins then? Who would have been our redemption?"

  "Peter did betray him. I’m sure others would have as well. Seems to me there was quite a queue. When powerful people want someone dead, they generally get their way."

  "That is true. Maybe too much is made of Judas, and his blood price. Maybe we’re falling for the great-man theory of history."

  "I heard that was back in vogue."


  "Maybe it is. I don’t keep up. It’s better not to. Stay where you are, and everything comes back to meet you. Provided you wait long enough."

  "This all sounds to me like an Easter sermon, not a Christmas one."

  "You’re right, of course. Incarnation, not redemption. The beginning, not the end."

  "On the other hand, we know that the last words Patrick Hutton had to say to anyone—to anyone who’s prepared to talk—were something like, ’They won’t make me play the Judas.’"

  Tyrrell brought his steely-blue eyes around to meet me. A faintly appalled smile played around his tiny mouth, as if he had just learnt afresh what fools these mortals be.

  "That would have been Miss Miranda Hart who told you that."

  "Yes. But you could have told me that without violating the secrecy of the confessional. You could have told me you visited her that night—after you’d heard Patrick Hutton’s confession—and insulted her, impugned her character and generally scared the living daylights out of her. You could tell me about it now."

  "Could she not recall in detail what I told her?" Tyrrell said, as if astonished that his words hadn’t seared themselves verbatim on Miranda’s brain. "Well, I don’t think I can remember either. I may have spoken abruptly—as I remember it, I may have held her responsible for…well, for some of Patrick’s…misfortune. No doubt I was harsh. I believe the young lady…gave as good as she got, that night. I was sent from the house with a flea in my ear."

  "Of course, you knew her before, didn’t you? You knew Patrick before. And Leo Halligan, your breakfast companion of yesterday morning."

  Tyrrell smiled in what almost looked like delight.

  "Well, I must say I feel vindicated in my choice of sleuth; nothing seems to have slipped past you yet. Am I to take it from the marks on your face that you managed to rendezvous with the unfortunate Leo?"

  "You are. And the unfortunate Leo told me to ask you about your years at St. Jude’s Industrial School. See I thought he must have got that wrong. I thought you were here all along. But I checked it out with Tommy, and he said no, you’d gone down there for a few years. How did that happen? Did you run into a little trouble up here?"

  "Nothing of the sort," Tyrrell said, his cheek beginning to pulse. "I went down to Tyrrellscourt, I…it was at the request of Francis…my brother…he wanted masses said in the house regularly, more often than the local priests could manage, or were willing to, and the archbishop at that time was a great racing man, he was reared not far from Tyrrellscourt, and he arranged it that I could serve there, and that if and when things changed, I would find a place again in Bayview."

  My bewilderment must have been obvious.

  "It’s not unusual at a racing stables where there’s a good number of staff for the local priest to come and say mass before big meetings, and bless the horses, and so on. Or at least, it wasn’t. And Francis went through a phase of taking this very seriously indeed, and wanted…no exaggeration to say, he wanted his own priest. And for a time, he got one."

  "This was before you two fell out."

  "Yes, this was…this would have appealed to me. I was wearying of parish work, of the pastoral round of wayward youths and despairing women and their shiftless husbands. It had…I suppose it had another kind of pastoral appeal, that of paradise regained. The childhood we had shared, among horses, always horses. I missed the horses most of all."

  "And when would this have been?"

  "Much of the nineties: 1990 until ’98, I’d say."

  "You were there for the By Your Leave episode then, you were at Tyrrellscourt when Patrick Hutton vanished."

  "Oh yes."

  "But I thought Patrick Hutton came here, made his confession here."

  "I never said that. I said he made his confession to me. But he made it in the chapel at Tyrrellscourt."

  "All right then. Tell me about St. Jude’s Industrial School."

  Again the muscles in Vincent Tyrrell’s face quivered, again he brought them under his control, all apart from a rogue eyebrow that continued to pulse like an insect caught on a pin.

  "It was no longer an industrial school, that’s the first canard to shoot down. It had been, well into the eighties, under the Christian Brothers, and a number of…incidents took place there, many of which have now been dealt with by the Residential Schools Redress Board. St. Jude’s closed for a short while, and reopened in the nineties as a boys’ home, under the joint auspices of the departments of education, health, and social welfare. The Church played no official role there; indeed it was no longer actually called St. Jude’s, although that’s how everyone in the locality referred to it; as a local priest, I paid the occasional pastoral visit, at the center’s request."

  Industrial schools had become part of the folklore of what might be called the secret history of Ireland, which had only in the past twenty years or so begun to be told: unruly, unmanageable children, or simply those whose parents were unable to cope, whether psychologically or financially, were effectively detained in schools controlled by a variety of religious orders who subjected their charges to a catalog of abuses, ranging from the basic contempt and casual disregard that was the lot of the poor anywhere in Ireland in those days, to physical beatings and psychological torture, all the way up to continual and brutal sexual abuse. The religious involved were not all equally culpable, and many had been raised in similarly harsh conditions, but it is impossible to find excuses even for those who claim they knew nothing of what went on; that said, it was a social and a national scandal as much it was a church affair: we were very happy to have someone else to look after the losers and misfits, the weak and the halt, happy to close our eyes and ears to the tales they told, to dismiss them as the hysterical and obscene ravings of a negligible class of people.

  "Leo Halligan certainly suggested there was more to it than that."

  "Leo would. Leo has an eye to the main chance. As soon as Leo saw there was money to be made in compensation from abusive clerics, Leo counted up the number of priests he had met in his life and multiplied it by a thousand."

  "But you knew Patrick Hutton there too."

  "I met Patrick there, and then he came across to Tyrrellscourt as an apprentice, the pair of them did."

  "Miranda Hart told me F.X. made a point of taking boys from St. Jude’s on as apprentices. Did he rely on you to choose them?"

  "Not in every circumstance. But I recommended Patrick and Leo, yes."

  "And would you have been aware of the relationship between them?"

  "I was aware that they were friends. What you’re suggesting—"

  "That they were lovers."

  "Yes. I don’t believe any such…nothing like that. Really."

  Vincent Tyrrell looked appalled at the very notion of homosexuality, or at least, he wanted me to believe he was. He shook his head, looked at his watch and lifted up his pad.

  "Blank page, Edward Loy. If I can’t have it finished, I like at least to break the back of the damn thing by lunchtime. Otherwise it’s a joyless meal, and no wine either."

  "I wanted to ask you about Regina. Your sister."

  "I know who Regina is. What about her?"

  "Are you close? Is she close to F.X.? Where does she fit in the family?"

  Vincent Tyrrell’s face reddened. He stood up and started to shout.

  "Why on earth should I answer that? I didn’t pay you to…who the hell do you think…What gives you the right to ask all these questions?"

  I stood up now. The days when I sat in my seat while an angry priest shouted at me were done.

  "You did. I don’t know what you intended. Maybe you don’t know yourself. Maybe you wanted Patrick Hutton to remain a mystery. Maybe you wanted me to throw a scare into Miranda Hart. Maybe it has something to do with Leo Halligan, something neither of you is willing to tell me, and you hoped I could somehow brush it under the carpet for you both. But it’s too late now. You see, you didn’t ask me to find Patrick Hutton. You didn’t as
k me, in the event Hutton was dead, to locate his killers. You just told me his name. And you paid me. Way too much, as it happens. And now I can’t stop until I know the truth. Maybe you thought you were clever just giving me a man’s name. But it looks like it’s enough to build an entire world around. And I won’t stop until that’s what I’ve done."

  Vincent Tyrrell had retreated behind the supercilious smile that had served him so well, the smile that didn’t know whether to mock or pity the rest of humanity. I wanted to wipe that smile off his face.

  "You know your former sister-in-law was murdered this morning? And nobody thought to ring you, not your brother, nor your sister, not the Guards, nobody. You charged me with having a footfall too light upon the earth for comfort. Well, it takes one to know one, Vincent Tyrrell. You have no one belonging to you who cares enough to tell you one of your family is dead. How did that happen?"

  I don’t know how I thought I’d feel when I succeeded in wiping the smile off his face. Not very good would have been my guess, to reduce an old man dying of cancer to a pale, twitching frame of flesh and bone. I made a gesture with my hands, something approaching an apology but not going all the way, and made for the door.

  "Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on Miranda Hart. But it would have been impossible to tell the child the truth," Tyrrell said.

  I opened the door. Father Vincent Tyrrell stopped me with what he said next.

  "By Your Leave was an experiment. Very unusual. Something of a freak, you know. If you get to talk to Francis face-to-face, ask him what he thought he was doing. If you don’t, ask someone who knows about close breeding."

  Tyrrell was standing behind me now; I felt his breath on my collar, and then he tugged my arm with his claw of a hand and spun me round to face him. He was smiling again, a gleeful, more than half-mad smile I wanted to look away from but couldn’t.

  "By Your Leave. That is all you know on earth, and all ye need to know," he said. And then Father Vincent Tyrrell kissed me on the mouth.