The Dying Breed

by Declan Hughes

  “What can I do for you, Father?” I said.

  His lips vanished into his wet mouth as he thought about this, and I almost smiled. It was always the same, and worse if they were used to being in control, the moment when I asked them what they wanted. Because however much they wanted to conceal it from themselves, it wasn’t want that drew them to me, but need: a need that family or friends, public officials, politicians or the police couldn’t satisfy. Just like the need for a whore, and sometimes I took little more than a whore’s bitter pride in my work.

  “It’s about a boy,” he said.

  I waited a long time for him to say something else.

  “Patrick Hutton was…is his name.”

  There was another long silence, during which Tyrell finished his drink and stared into his glass. He wore an open-necked black shirt and a black jacket, classic priest’s mufti; the clothes themselves were finely cut, the shirt silk, but then it had always been clear not only that Vincent Tyrell came from money but that he still had some; the crucifix on his lapel was inlaid with tiny diamonds.

  “I’m sorry, I appreciate this isn’t very helpful, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more,” Tyrell said finally, the blue eyes glinting again, as if almost amused by his reserve.

  “Much more? You haven’t told me anything, Father. You’ve given me a name. I’m not overburdened with modesty about my abilities, but there’s not a lot I can do with a bare name. Look it up in the phone book. But sure you could do that.”

  Tyrell produced an envelope, opened it to reveal a sheaf of bills and laid it on the table between us.

  “Five thousand. Just to get you going.”

  I stared at the money. It would sort out my mortgage debts and pay my bills and go some way toward keeping my head above water and the bank off my back until the New Year. There was need on my side too, and the thin smile spreading across Tyrell’s face showed he recognized it. I shook my head and stood up.

  “This is a waste of my time. Maybe Tommy Owens has you thinking I’m some kind of charity case—”

  “I told you, Tommy hasn’t said a word. Or more accurately, I haven’t listened to a single word he says. Even in grief, he does like to prattle. And I assure you, if this were charity, you’d hardly be a deserving beneficiary. Patrick Hutton. He was a jockey. His last known address—known to me, at least—is in the envelope. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “But you know more,” I said, suddenly seeing where this was heading.

  “Yes, I know more, much more. But what I know was told to me in confession, Ed. You remember the rules about that, don’t you?”

  I nodded and sat down again. The sanctity of the confessional: the promise that sins confessed to a priest during the sacrament of penance will not be divulged, because of course the priest is merely the channel through which God’s reconciling grace flows to the penitent; it is up to God to tell what He has heard, no one else. And God hasn’t been talking much of late. Tyrell stretched a hand toward me and patted the envelope of money on the table between us.

  “Well, so do I. And even on the occasions when there are very good reasons to break them—and I fear this is such an occasion—the rules still apply. Maybe one day they won’t, maybe one day the liberals’ prayers will be answered, and the Church will transform itself as they believe Pope John the Twenty-third intended, and all manner of change will occur: women and homosexuals will dance together on the altars, and teenagers will copulate in the aisle, and obese children will make their first holy communions with giant hosts made of cheese-and-tomato pizza. Maybe one day the Church, like everything else on this rock of ours, will dwindle to a mere machine devoted to making us feel good. But that day will come too late for me. Thanks be to God.”

  Tyrell’s hand shot out suddenly and seized mine.

  “I’m dying, Ed. They said I should do chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, but I don’t want any therapy. I don’t want to be healed. It’s my time. I want to die. But not without setting a few affairs in order. Chief among them Patrick Hutton.”

  His hand felt like a claw; the bones shone ivory through flesh mottled like stained parchment. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I sat still and stared at his hand until he released mine. He poured another two drinks and passed me one, and held his glass up in a toast to—I don’t know, to death by cancer, or to ordering his affairs, or to Patrick Hutton and the secrets Tyrell and God were keeping.

  “You’ll take the case?”

  “Patrick Hutton was a jockey,” I said. “Tommy says you’ve been tipping him winners. Says you have insider information. How’s that?”

  “I don’t,” Tyrell said. “But people always think I do.”

  I waited for him to explain. He looked surprised that I needed him to.

  “I suppose the time you spent away means there are gaps in your local knowledge, Ed. My brother is F.X. Tyrell. We don’t speak, haven’t for many years. But people don’t know that, or don’t believe it.”

  Francis Xavier Tyrell was the trainer of the winning horse I didn’t back yesterday, and of most of the winners I hadn’t backed in the days before that. He’d been doing it for a long time, and you didn’t have to know very much about horse racing to have heard of him: he had been a national figure for decades, stretching back to his first Gold Cup triumphs at Cheltenham in the sixties.

  “Must be in the blood then,” I said.

  “Francis had the true feel for it—I always said Saint Martin of Tours was watching over him; the horses liked him, they didn’t know me—and I couldn’t stand coming second. Pride has been my besetting sin. It’ll see me broken on the wheel one day.”

  Tyrell smiled at the prospect of this, and I had a flash of his instructing my class in the seven deadly sins, and what the appropriate punishment for each was: avarice would see us boiled in oil; gluttony and we’d be force-fed rats and snakes; pride would have us broken on a wheel. Father Vincent Tyrell was quite the young firebrand in those days, his blue eyes bulging with cold fervor, his hands rapping an ominous tattoo on the blackboard as he talked us through the tortures of hell. We were nine years old.

  Tyrell was a fanatic and a bully and a snob, and my rational self despised all this, but part of me insisted on liking him, the part I had no control over, the part that drank whiskey in the morning and took the wrong woman home at night, liked him for his unflinching absorption in what used to be called the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. Because increasingly, these were the objects of my own devotions. The difference being, I didn’t believe in Heaven.

  He raised his glass and we finished our drinks and I stood up and nodded at him.

  “How do you know I won’t just take the money and tell you I couldn’t find him?” I said.

  Tyrell’s face clouded momentarily, the muscles quivering as if he were having a slight stroke; he controlled them by what looked like the angry force of his will, and directed his cold, penetrating gaze at me.

  “I doubt if your footfall upon the earth is especially heavy as it is, Edward Loy. You would never act like that, never betray the only calling you have. You wouldn’t do it out of fear. Profane fear: of the harm that would be done to your reputation. And spiritual fear: that if you acted so out of character, you’d run the risk of disappearing entirely.”

  The bells began to ring for the next mass. He drew his thin lips into a smile, and I found I couldn’t meet his piercing eyes; I nodded at the floor to seal the deal. At the presbytery door he gave me a blessing I didn’t ask for. Despite myself, I felt glad of it.

  TWO

  I wanted to ask Tommy some more about Vincent Tyrell, but he was busy setting up for the next mass: there was a priest home from the African missions who needed minding. I couldn’t wait until the mass was over; I was late already for another job. I didn’t like to work more than one case at a time, but I didn’t like being broke either; I wasn’t in a position to turn anyone down. The car park was filling up as I walked toward t
he racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S that had been my father’s, and that Tommy, wearing his mechanic’s hat, had done up for me. I was by no means a petrol head, but looking at a roly-poly man and two boys in matching anoraks clustered around the car’s bulky hood, I felt a stupid kind of pride. As I drew nearer, and they turned and looked at me and looked quickly away, I understood how stupid: what had caught their attention was not the car, but the damage done: the windscreen wipers had been torn off and laid in the shape of a cross on the hood; beneath them someone had scraped RIP on the hood. The man muttered something about not even church car parks being safe nowadays; I agreed and said that in my day, all we used to do was drink cider here and then break the bottles beneath the tires of the parked cars. He took off quickly after that, hustling his giggling sons into mass. I threw the wipers on the backseat, sat into the car and started the engine. At least it wasn’t raining.

  Heading south toward the Dublin–Wicklow border, I called George Halligan on his mobile.

  “The fuck do you want?”

  The tar-and-nicotine rasp was sandpaper harsh: he sounded like an emphysemic wildcat sizing up its prey.

  “Nice talking to you too, George. Out and about, are you, taking a walk?”

  “A walk? The fuck class of swish cunt d’you think I am? I’m in the parade ring at Gowran Park so I am.”

  “How’d you get in there, George? Do they not know who you are?”

  “I’m here to see Jack of Hearts strut his stuff. Very sleek he looks an’ all. And after that, I’ll wander across and see him walk away with this little maiden hurdle. And I’ve Fish on Friday in the last race. What are you doing today, Ed Loy? Dole office not open on a Sunday, is it? Suppose that leaves the pub, if there are any left that’ll give you credit. Or you could always stand outside mass with an accordion. If there isn’t a Romanian there ahead of you.”

  “George. You told me you’d let me know when Leo got out.”

  There was a pause, during which all I could hear was the double-bass rumble of George Halligan’s breath. When he spoke it was in as soft and careful a voice as he could summon up.

  “Oh Jesus fuck. Friday. I forgot myself, to be honest with you. Why? What’s he fuckin’ done? Whatever it is—”

  “Just some inventive damage to my car.”

  “Send me the bill, Ed.”

  “That’s not the point, George.”

  “D’you think I don’t know that? I was supposed to have him picked up outside the Joy. He hasn’t been in touch. He must’ve been sulking all fuckin’ weekend…listen, Ed, I’m surrounded by cunts here, I’ll have someone, eh, look into that matter, and I’ll get back to you, all right my friend?”

  George’s natural Dublin accent had suddenly upped anchor and set sail for the mid-Atlantic. I pictured him: a known gang boss turned property developer and “businessman” hobnobbing with the Barbour Jackets and the Cashmere Coats in the parade ring. I reeled through the scene in my mind’s eye for its incongruity. Nothing doing. George’d fit in nicely there: beggars on horseback all. Although I doubted if many of the other owners and trainers had a brother fresh out of Mountjoy Prison to worry about.

  “We’re not friends, George, and we never will be. And you be sure and get hold of Leo and remind him why it was a very good idea Podge went down, for the Halligans as well as the rest of us.”

  Podge Halligan was a murderer and a rapist, an unhinged, volatile nightmare of a man, but it was only when he began to set up secret deals with rival drug dealers, in the process compromising George’s attempts to take the family business legit (not to mention stealing from the business before it had acquired that legitimacy), that George had moved against him. I worked the case that helped put Podge away, with George’s assistance. At the time Leo had sent word from jail that Podge should do the right thing for the family; ever since, the drumbeat coming from the Joy was that I was to blame for Podge’s fate, and that I would pay when Leo came out.

  “I’ll get the first fifteen on that one for you, yeah? Ciao for now.”

  “Just remember there, George: you can’t buy respectability,” I said.

  George Halligan’s voice dropped and his accent flashed back, a whip laced with salt: “Maybe not. But if you’re too broke to make a profit from it, it’s fuck all use to you, isn’t that right Ed?”

  He ended the call before I could respond. But George Halligan getting the last word was the least of my worries. Leo Halligan had gone away for a bullet-behind-the-ear hit on a nineteen-year-old drug dealer; he was thought responsible for at least another three murders, and possibly as many as ten, some of them drug-related, some because the victims had committed the fatal error of getting in his way, or on his nerves. He was smart like George, without craving legitimacy, and ruthless like his younger brother, Podge, without being mental: easily the most dangerous of the Halligan brothers, everyone said. And now he was on my trail, in the season of goodwill. Merry Christmas everyone.

  I had avoided the N11 but traffic was thick on the old roads too. I turned on the radio to pass the time. The crime reporter on the news told me that the man’s body found in a shallow grave near Roundwood this morning was being examined by the state pathologist, but that “early indications were that it bore all the hallmarks of a gangland killing.” Fortieth of the year, if I was counting right. On a hunch, I called Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly at home. His wife Carmel answered.

  “Hey Ed. Are we going to see you? Come up to the house on Christmas Eve, we’re having a party.”

  “My invite must’ve got lost in the post.”

  “Why’d we waste an invite? You’ve stood us up the last three times. And Dave the only Guard in Dublin who’ll talk to you.”

  Dave had been with Seafield Guards until the Howard case, when his work caught the eye of someone in Garda Headquarters and he was transferred to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. They used him on murder and organized crime investigations, and he used me, and did what he could to keep me out of trouble with Superintendent Fiona Reed and her merry band.

  “Is Dave there?” I said. “I…I have a horse for him.”

  “Do you now? And have you lost his mobile number?”

  “He’s not there, is he?”

  “Are you fishing, Ed? You have a horse for him.”

  “I do.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “All right, you’ve got me. I was calling to see if the coast was clear. I could be there in five minutes.”

  “Oh, Ed,” she purred, her voice all husky. “You know what we could do.”

  “You tell me.”

  “You could mind Sadie, who has chicken pox, and pick the lads up from football and cook their dinner, and put two loads of washing through the machine, and I could nip over to Dundrum and do some last-minute shopping, then have a long lunch in Harvey Nick’s.”

  “We could do all that?”

  “And I’d never tell Dave. It would be our secret.”

  “I don’t think I could do that to him, Carmel.”

  “Boys’ club. You’re all the same, just talk.”

  “I’m actually in Wicklow now, Carmel. Not far from Roundwood.”

  “He likes you at the moment, Ed. Don’t go annoying him.”

  “Just wanted to know.”

  “Christmas Eve. That’s tomorrow, Ed. Bring a date. Or I’ll find one for you.”

  South of Bray I crossed the N11 and headed west into the hills, snow-topped in the distance, then cut off onto an old road flanked on one side by the pedestrian entrance to a sprawling local authority estate called Michael Davitt Gardens and on the other by a stretch of oldish semidetached houses with asbestos tile roofs.

  I pulled up outside a house with three feet of trellis on top of its perimeter walls and six-foot-high wooden gates and got out of the car. Across the road the pavement widened to include a broad patch of grass running ten yards or so by a twelve-foot concrete wall before it swung into the council estate. My client, Joe Leonard, was c
oncerned about the garbage being illegally dumped outside his house, an increasingly common problem now that most local councils had privatized their refuse collection service. I walked across to have a look. The grass was clogged with plastic and glass bottles, pizza boxes and chip papers, sacks of household waste, broken bicycles and scooters, disabled stereos and vacuum cleaners. How jealous the other PIs would be when they heard they’d missed out on this job.

  I crossed the road and walked up the drive past the black SAAB 93 and rang the bell of number four. There was a purple-and-red wreath hanging on the doorknob and paper angels stuck on the inside of the glass. A girl of about six or seven opened the door. She had shiny new teeth that seemed too large for her Cupid-bow lips and dark hair in plaits and bright brown eyes. When she saw me she frowned in disappointment. I pulled a cross-eyed face in return, and she rolled her eyes and giggled.

  “You’re not Granny!” she said.

  “I try to be,” I said.

  “You can’t be. You’re not an old lady.”

  “Well. I knew there was something,” I said.

  “Who are you then?” she said.

  “My name is Edward Loy,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “Sara,” she said. She pronounced it to rhyme with Tara. Just as I was about to ask her where her dad was, he appeared. Joe Leonard had sounded cross on the phone and he looked even crosser in the flesh: he had shaving rash and thinning hair ruffled up with gel to give the appearance of volume, and he wore those oblong Yves Saint-Laurent–style glasses young men in a hurry seemed to favour these days and a rugby shirt with the collar up and deck shoes and flared jeans that made his short legs look even shorter.

  “Sara, I told you not to answer the front door. Go back inside please,” he said.

  The little girl pulled a cartoon face of appeasement at her father, which he greeted with an impatient flick of his hand. Turning to me, she drew the corners of her mouth down in mock panic, said, “Ulp!” and went back into what I guessed was the kitchen. There was room for two people in the hall, but I was still outside. Sara’s father smiled at me thinly.