"So I come down here and check the receiver and yes, we’re in business. Nothing happening down there since I got back, but if anything does, we’ll see it."
Tommy nodded and picked up his drink and I nodded back and toasted him: job well done. He hadn’t finished yet, however. He had a DVD in the MacBook. It was a collection of races Patrick Hutton had run. He fast-forwarded through the action, freeze-framed on two moments from a postrace interview, and pointed out the salient point to me and its relevance. The man who had taken us to St. Jude’s, who we thought to be Patrick Hutton, had blue eyes. That was relevant because in his interview, the salient point about Patrick Hutton’s eyes was that one of them was blue and the other one was brown—"just like little Karen has," as Tommy put it. Just like little Karen Tyrrell.
TWENTY-FOUR
The piano tones were still wafting from above as I retraced my steps to the entrance hall and climbed the wide wood-paneled stairway to a landing the size of the average house, with couches and easy chairs and occasional tables laid out beneath exposed beams; I could see two corridors, and chose the one I thought the music was drifting from: the acoustics in the house were sound, and I was soon knocking on a dark wood-paneled door.
"Come in," said a woman’s voice, and I did, my eyes drawn instantly toward an upright piano from where I assumed the music to be coming, assumed it so strongly that I stared in disbelief at the vacant stool and the covered keyboard, as if I’d been the victim of some devious trompe l’oeil effect. When I came to, I saw Regina Tyrrell on a couch at the foot of her bed; the music came from speakers I couldn’t see; I flashed on Jackie Tyrrell’s house the night of her murder.
"You look like you’ve seen a ghost," she said, her Dublin accent adding to my sense of the incongruous: how had she clung on to it after all these years of the Queen’s horses, in this old Anglo setup? Maybe it helped her to recall a time when she was young, and her life spread out before her full of nothing but promise and adventure, a time when dressing in pink and listening to the "Moonlight" Sonata were the motifs of an overture, not an elegy.
There were three matching chairs set in a ring around the couch, which was white and gold and enough like Jackie’s to maintain the sense of haunted unease I felt. I sat on one of the chairs, and looked tentatively around the rest of the room, as if fearful of other phantoms lurking there. My fears on that score were in vain. On the evidence of this and her office in the hotel, Regina’s visual sense had been set in stone, and brightly colored stone at that, when she was a teenager: pink and white, ruched curtains, satins and silks; she wore pale pink satin pajamas and a matching gown; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see stuffed animals on the bed. The music was in a similar vein: the "Moonlight" Sonata had given way to the slow movement from Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto in all its glutinous glory. I think I was with the Musical Powers That Be on that one. In contrast, Regina herself looked hard and shrewd and sanguine; her bloodred lips stained the tips of the cigarettes she smoked, and the glass of gin she drank; if she was at the end of her tether, I wondered how Tommy had noticed.
I sat for a long while without speaking. Regina didn’t appear unduly bothered; indeed, she seemed grateful for the company. I looked up at one point to see that the music had brought tears to her eyes, or something had; she dabbed at them with a tissue and sat back as if hoping for more. I could think of nothing to ask except the darkest questions, nothing to consider except the most horrific possibilities. Finally, I just produced the copy of the birth certificate of Patrick Francis, born to Regina Tyrrell on November 2, 1976, and passed it to her. She looked at it, and nodded wearily and sadly, and shrugged.
"Patrick Hutton?" I said, and it was as if a wind had blown through the room, leaving everything apparently still and settled and yet altered irrevocably.
"How did you find out?"
"I didn’t. Another detective, Don Kennedy, did. And somebody murdered him, either for that, or for whatever else he discovered."
Regina tipped her head back and looked in the direction of the gold chandelier at the center of the ceiling rose.
"I suppose it explains a lot. Why you mightn’t have wanted him as a match for Miranda. On the other hand, it explains nothing. Why you haven’t tried to find him. Why you didn’t help him more when you could."
"I offered the reward. When Miranda was looking for him. It was in Francis’s name, but it was my offer. And what more should I have done? He was taken on as an apprentice, his career was growing fast, if he hadn’t been so bloody headstrong—"
"He was raised in an orphanage, worse, a boys’ home where there had been serious allegations of abuse—worse than allegations, it had been closed down once already. A home just down the road from here, from your country house, your country club, your exclusive country life."
"I couldn’t raise that child. I couldn’t raise that child. His father…I couldn’t’ve raised that child."
"Why not? His father…explain."
Nothing from Regina but the ability to meet my eye.
"So you couldn’t raise that child. You could have afforded better than St. Jude’s, where the kids nobody wanted were dumped."
"It wasn’t as bad as it was painted, that place. The boys who came through to the yard, they were good lads, they seemed to have survived all right. I thought it would give the child a spine."
She nodded, as if she had somehow been vindicated by events, then blinked hard and turned away.
"You could have fostered him—"
"And lost him."
"Did you not lose him anyway? What did you gain?"
Regina hugged herself as if the wind was still blowing chill, and shivered.
"What is it, Edward Loy? What do you want, to tear the Tyrrells asunder? If I told you now that we’ve suffered enough for everything we’ve done, and it’s not over yet, every sin I’ve committed has been paid for ten times over and will be until the end of time. Would that be enough? Would that make you leave, drop this and go?"
"It’s not up to me anymore," I said. "There are people out there…some of them your children…they’re angry. They want you to pay more, and to go on paying."
Regina shook her head, scorn in her eyes and in the curl of her lips.
"Children of mine? Who?"
"Patrick Hutton. Miranda Hart."
"She’s not my child," Regina said.
"I couldn’t help noticing your daughter Karen’s eyes. Very unusual. Unless of course she was Patrick Hutton’s daughter by Miranda Hart. He had that feature, too, didn’t he? Heterochromia, is that what it’s called? I suppose it’s genetic. Can it be inherited?"
Regina Tyrrell’s head was in her hands. I thought she was weeping, and I hoped she was too; if she was, maybe I could stop torturing her like this, and maybe she could think of something that would satisfy me, and bring the whole hateful saga to a close, make it vanish into thin air. She wasn’t weeping though. When she sat up, she had something filmy glistening between finger and thumb, and one of her brown eyes was now blue. A tinted lens could give a blue eye the look of a brown. And if it could do it for the mother…
"Yes it can be inherited. Karen Tyrrell is my daughter," she said. "She is my daughter."
"I don’t believe you, Regina. I think Karen is Miranda Hart’s daughter by Patrick Hutton. And because she was incapable of looking after the child, she gave her to you. And you’ve brought Karen up as your own, protected her from the truth. But now it’s too late, and the truth is crowding in like wind."
Regina got to her feet. Shaking one hand at me, she stretched the other out toward the door and began slowly to gravitate toward it, as if being tugged gently by an invisible cord.
"I think you better leave now, Edward Loy, or I’m going to call the Guards—"
"That’s increasingly looking like our safest bet," I said. "You see, Patrick Hutton isn’t dead. He’s out there, living like a wild man on the old Staples place—"
"That’s Bomber Folan."
"That’s not Bomber Folan, Bomber Folan was murdered years ago and Patrick Hutton took his place, he kept Folan’s body on ice and then made it appear on a dump in Roundwood two days ago. Alone, or with Miranda Hart, and a fellow called Gerald Stenson, Steno, another former inmate of St. Jude’s. Between them, they murdered Folan, and the detective Don Kennedy, because whatever he found out when he searched for Hutton two or three years back was not something they wanted revealed. Kennedy was blackmailing someone—maybe Miranda, maybe you, maybe Francis. I don’t know. All I do know is, he’s not blackmailing anyone anymore. And then they killed Jackie Tyrrell; Tommy saw the car they drove from Jackie’s house the night of her murder up at the old Staples place tonight, and all three of them in it: Steno, and your son, Patrick. And your daughter, Miranda."
"She’s not my daughter."
"I’ll take your word for it. She does look awfully like you."
"She’s not my daughter. She can’t be."
Rachmaninov gave way to Schubert now, a piano impromptu, the yearning, plaintive one, regret for the life not lived. Regina moved toward me, as if fixing her gaze and holding mine could insulate her from what she feared most.
"She can’t be your daughter?"
"Francis promised."
"Francis promised? What had he to do with it?"
"He…I wouldn’t stop working…but I couldn’t…not have the child…"
"There was another child? A girl? And you wouldn’t have an abortion?"
"It was unthinkable. To me. I don’t condemn others, but for me…so Francis…when the time came, he arranged the adoption. I went away, you see, there was a place outside Inverness, in Scotland, to avoid the scandal, you could go there, a convent…they would have taken the child, too, but Francis insisted…said he knew the right family…then later on, when Miranda came in here, people used to say, you could be sisters, you could be mother and daughter, Jackie Tyrrell was never done worrying away at it, giggling away at it, all very sophisticated, as if we were some kind of small-town inbreds, and I asked Francis, was there any possibility…No, he said. Emphatic about it. I had to believe him, I had to. I mean…why would he lie?"
"Who was the child’s father? The child that…you don’t believe was Miranda?"
Regina stared at me, but wouldn’t answer.
"Who was Patrick Hutton’s father?"
She stared harder, but stayed silent. I felt like she was willing me to understand, imploring me to guess it. Her eyes not matching heightened her beauty and gave her a vulnerability that made me think of Karen Tyrrell; I told myself I had to keep going, for the child’s sake, though every word I spoke was like a thorn in Regina Tyrrell’s flesh.
"Vincent Tyrrell told me something about close breeding. He said your brother used to be very interested in it. That it was quite controversial, even with horses. He said By Your Leave, the horse that caused all the trouble for the Tyrrell family, was the offspring of two generations of brother and sister pairings."
Regina Tyrrell stared at me, her eyes glistening.
"Vincent Tyrrell met Miranda Hart before he hired me. And then he gave me one man’s name—Patrick Hutton—and I’ve found a whole history of secrets to go with it. Who was Miranda Hart’s father? Who was Patrick Hutton’s father?"
Still holding my gaze, she began to shake her head.
"Was F.X. the father, Regina? Was Vincent? You were raped, you were abused by your older brother, no wonder you were ashamed, wanted to keep it a secret, it wasn’t your fault, no one would ever hold it against you—"
"You cannot say such things. You cannot know such things. Think of the children, what nightmares they’ll have if they find out."
I thought of the title of Martha O’Connor’s documentary: Say Nothing.
"Think of the nightmares they’ll have if they don’t. Think of the nightmares some of them are living, or are destined to live. If Patrick and Miranda are brother and sister…and if Karen is their child…"
Regina Tyrrell was beginning to shake, the start of what appeared to be a convulsive tide of grief. She reached for my hand and fell to her knees.
"Maybe the others know the worst already. But Karen’s only nine years old, for pity’s sake."
"Yes," I said. "Young enough to survive it. If we’re lucky."
She bent her head over my hands, as if in prayer, as if I had the power to change the past. But all I had, all we both had in common, was the desperate need to hear the truth, and to understand it. I think Regina had felt that need for a long time. And in that moment, maybe she finally chose to act on it. She stopped herself shaking, and breathed hard and deep, and looked up at me.
"All right," she said. "All right then. I dreaded this day. But I think I prayed for it too. It was always too much for one soul to bear."
And then, before she could say another word, the doorknob clicked and the door swung open and the cold relentless wind blew through the room again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Steno didn’t really give a fuck about anyone but Steno. When it came down to it, that was all there was: Number One. The rest was bullshit, and he didn’t mind saying that, although in truth he had learned over the years to never actually say it to anyone but himself, even if it was what everyone believed, deep down. People couldn’t bear the truth, but the truth had never bothered Steno. You didn’t have to be brutal about it, and if you weren’t a fucking savage, you’d avoid that side of things as much as you could: it was messy, and there was a lot of cleaning up afterward, and broken bones and blood and dead bodies; the whole thing was a bit of a fucking downer. It could get you down—especially if that was all there was to it. Some of the rows he had seen in the bar, over fuck-all, if you broke it up, and Steno always had to, and asked them what it was all about, neither of them could tell you. Waking up the next day with a broken face and for what? That was short term, that was amateur hour, that was no better than a beast in the fields. Because you could brood about the blood, how it would linger in your eye line like the red sparks you see when you close your eyes at night. And sometimes, the eyes of the dead, they’d pin you so they would, you’d wake before dawn with the memory of that last look, the last hope. And to go through that for no reason, for "The fuck are you looking at?"; for "Are you calling me a liar?" No way. Not in this life man.
That’s why, if you were going to get involved on that level, you needed the long view. Fair enough, there’d been times when accidents happened, and you just had to get someone from location A to location B where B was a ditch or a dump or a riverbank: that’s just day-to-day, that’s just business, you can’t shirk when that comes around. But if you were ambitious, and Steno was, the long term made the grief worthwhile.
Not to make too much of himself—Steno hated when people did that, you had to put up with it behind the bar day in day out, stable lads who had "really" trained Gold Cup winners, salesmen who "really" ran the companies they worked for, all the drunks and losers who were going to run marathons and write books and get record deals and act in movies and be models and comedians and every fucking thing, and there they fucking were ten, twenty, thirty years later, fatter and redder and still in the fucking pub.
The usual? The usual.
Steno was happy to admit it had all been a happy accident. It was when the Halligans had got their claws into F. X. Tyrrell, and Leo was running his happy band of jockeys and golfers and tooting them up big-time, and young Proby and Miranda Hart were hanging out. Twenty of them in the back room—it was before the Warehouse refurbishment, just a lounge at the back—no one else got in: Private party sir, sorry sir. Aw, again? Private party every night sir.
Steno could see there was something happening there, the cars, the money, the action. There was a whole bunch of women hanging around that time, skinny, expensive-looking women, the kind of women who appear like thin air when there’s coke around, kind of like models but not as attractive, kind of like whores but not really into the money. Steno had just started working i
n McGoldrick’s then, and he couldn’t remember how many times he had his cock sucked to let some flooze in leopardskin and lace into the back room. Not that a woman knew how to blow you. How would she? Like knows what like likes, it’s only common sense. Steno had no great interest in women. No, he had no use for them, that was more like it. Although if he had to, he’d find a use, just like he had with Miranda Hart.
She was up in the shower now, but she was still here, wasn’t she? And maybe she had screamed when he’d done her the way he wanted, maybe she’d screamed at first, but she’d stopped screaming. She’d stopped screaming, and she was still here. Because it was worth her while. Because she was using him, too. Just like those coke whores, when he’d got tired of their sloppy fucking lips and he told them what he wanted, the ones who really wanted to make the scene, the ones who really wanted to score, they’d deliver like pros, they’d shut the fuck up and take it. As for the others, crying and blubbering and he hadn’t even touched them, amateur fucking hour. He had nothing but contempt for that kind of carry-on. One thing Steno had never done was take what wasn’t on offer. Of course, you always had to work the angles to maximize what was offered, or even to make it available at all, but who didn’t do that? Or at very least, who didn’t want to? And maybe there were people going to their graves crying over not getting what they wanted because they didn’t go after it hard enough, but Steno was not one of those people, never had been.
In fairness, it wasn’t true to say Steno didn’t have a use for women. There was no percentage in being the way Steno was, not in Tyrrellscourt; it was dangerous most places now, not to mention pathetic and embarrassing. What you did was (and Steno couldn’t understand how people couldn’t get this through their heads, now that air travel had come down in price, and not be going around playgrounds and schools making shows of themselves, or acting the bollocks on the Internet, those days were done) you went to Thailand, or the Philippines—parts of Africa were good, too, or so he’d been told, but Steno thought Africa might be a bit of a fucking downer—and there you were, whatever you wanted, as many, as often, as young. Twice or three times a year—last year, Steno took four trips—and that was you set up for a few months. And if you couldn’t be happy with that, what kind of a sick fuck were you anyway? The odd weekend in Amsterdam didn’t do any harm either, you could always get what you wanted in Amsterdam.
The Price of Blood Page 24
