The Dying Breed

by Declan Hughes

  “I hear all that, Carmel, and fair enough, I don’t really know what it’s like…I was only married a short while, and I didn’t make a great go of it. But…sorry, I can’t get away from this, in front of all his colleagues, and if they didn’t see, you can be fucking sure they’ll be told, Myles Geraghty. I think Dave knows something is going on—”

  “Of course he knows. There’s not much point to it unless he knows. Do you think I like Myles Geraghty? Do you think I want to do this? Turns out it’s all I have, after fifteen years of kids, these legs, these tits, and I won’t have them for long, not in this shape anyway. Getting old, Ed, and I don’t want to wait around to die. I’ve tried talking to him, tried warning him. Nothing. Calls for desperate measures. Rub his face in it? Yes. Demean myself? Yes. What next? I know what you’d do. Walk away. School of Ed Loy says, just walk away. But you don’t put twenty years into what I’ve built up to walk away. You can’t.”

  A breath at the corner, a foot snap on frost, and there was Dave. Carmel turned to him, and nodded, and turned back to me.

  “I’m sorry if what I said hurt you,” she said.

  “That’s ‘Happy Christmas’ in Irish, is it?”

  “Some things are more important than who fucked who. You know that.”

  I thought of my daughter, how she hadn’t been mine, not in blood, yet I called her mine and always would and knew it to be true. I nodded, and Carmel gave me a kiss, and walked up to Dave and put an arm around his waist and put her head on his shoulder. Dave raised his hand in the air, and I returned his salute, and they walked back down to their house, and their family, and their life, about which, it turned out, I knew next to nothing.

  The roads had frosted up, powder bright in the moonlight; I drove back slowly, wondering how this would affect the Leopardstown Festival: Irish racing did not like firm ground, and would cancel a meeting rather than risk the horses.

  When I got back to Quarry Fields, I found Tommy Owens’s key on my kitchen table and Miranda Hart in my bed. Better than the other way round, I remember thinking as I got in beside her, trying not to wake her, but not trying too hard. She awoke, and her breath smelled of oranges, and the rest of her smelt just as good.

  “Merry Christmas, Edward Loy,” she said, and for a while, it was.

  EIGHTEEN

  The door creak again, and the rustle of straw, of paper, and the bolt run with a crack, and her dark head turning, Miranda Hart, and then the bolt again, or the sound of it, like a pistol shot, like the slam of a door, my Spanish girl, my ex-wife, now the rustle of straw, the pistol crack, the turning head, my mother, dark-headed, too, as she was when I was a boy, rustle, crack, door, turning head, Regina Tyrell, fear in her eyes, and another, someone else, I can’t make out his face, rustle, crack, door, head turn: Karen Tyrell, one eye blue, one eye brown, and the hand closing on her, the hand about to touch her, I can’t see his face, Karen, Miranda, Regina, my wife, my mother, rustle, crack, door, the turning head, the reaching hand…

  I woke up alone, bathed in sweat, with Carmel Donnelly’s words burning in my ears. You’re so in love with your own pain. The same fucked-up woman over and over again. It didn’t have to be that way. I wouldn’t let it be that way. I went out on the landing, and smelt breakfast being cooked downstairs, bacon and eggs, or something that good. I remembered how I’d felt yesterday, before the trip to Tyrellscourt, when I heard Miranda’s footfall and felt the promise of a future. But as I showered, it all came back to me: not just what Tommy had told me about her operating as a prostitute, not just the drugs, not just Bomber Folan or Jack Proby, but what it all amounted to: that she knew so much more than she had told me. What I saw in the bathroom mirror as I shaved was not promise; it was resignation, and something worse than that: betrayal, and the fear of betrayal. The Judas Kiss.

  I didn’t think I owned as many pots and pans, plates and cooking utensils, as Miranda Hart had used to make a breakfast fry; she emerged from the debris with two plates as I sat down; I wanted to greet her smile with something more than the polite nod I managed, but found that I couldn’t. We ate in silence. Miranda broke it.

  “I suppose Tommy told you, did he?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, he probably remembers it all better than I do. I was pretty far gone, most of the time. What did he say?”

  “That you took money for sex. That you were available to a whole circle of men that formed itself around Leo Halligan and Jack Proby. He said he didn’t know whether you were doing it of your own free will or not. That you were doing so much heroin you maybe didn’t even know yourself.”

  I found myself trying to make it easy for her. To her credit, she didn’t want that. She popped some gum in her mouth, lit a cigarette and exhaled.

  “No, I wasn’t forced. The opposite. I was with Jack Proby at the time, nothing serious, just for laughs—funny how relationships that are just for laughs quickly run out of them—and we were doing a lot of drugs, too much coke, and then I got into smack to take me down, I couldn’t sleep, and then I needed the coke to get me back up, and that became a cycle. And that became expensive. And it had gotten so I didn’t much care what I did—I can’t quite explain how that happens, but when it does, it seems so simple and so realistic, you know: there’s a rich golfer, or a trainer, or a jockey, why don’t I just fuck him for five hundred quid, or spend the night for a grand. I won’t feel anything anyway, the smack guaranteed that, so why not make a profit, you know?”

  “And what was this about? This was all after Patrick disappeared: Was it a kind of grief, a distorted mourning for him?”

  She bowed her head, and I thought she was crying. When she looked up at me, there was laughter in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, it’s just…I didn’t really give you the full picture before, Ed. Not sure that I should have, worried I’d scare you off. ‘I really like you, come in for coffee, but first listen to my life as a smackhead and a hooker.’ Above and beyond on a first date, don’t you think? But…I don’t know, is the answer. I don’t know what happened then. What I can tell you about is what happened with Patrick. What happened to By Your Leave.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  “That was a version.”

  “Let me try my version,” I said. “Patrick Hutton was getting paid by Leo Halligan, possibly fronting for George, possibly acting on his own, to hold various horses back, dope them or otherwise interfere with them. At Thurles that day, Leo wanted a winner; F.X. wanted to lengthen the odds for Leopardstown; Hutton was caught between them, so he made it obvious he was holding the horse up to throw the blame onto F.X., but also to show Leo he couldn’t be bossed around.”

  “Sort of, but not quite. In a way, Patrick did exactly what he was told to that day; he just did it too well, too publicly, he brought down too much attention on the sport. And on the fix. In truth, at this stage, F.X. and Leo were pretty much in league. F.X. didn’t feel you could hold a horse like By Your Leave back, it was better to use her as a flagship for the other Tyrell rides, you know, let her win, to hell with the odds, and let the glory drip through to the other horses in the stable. And Leo agreed. But this particular race, George had a lot of money laid against By Your Leave. So the word came down to hold the horse back.”

  “And Hutton rebelled?”

  “Patrick was a hothead. He was a bit of a fucking eejit. In fairness to him, it was never going to be easy, unless you out and out doped the horse, and they’d heard she was going to be drug-tested. But Patrick didn’t even try.”

  “Why would F.X. Tyrell put up with this? What did George Halligan have on F.X.?”

  Miranda grinned, and stubbed her cigarette out in some bacon rind. I stared at this picture, trying to remember where I had seen it before.

  “Leo was a busy boy in those days. F.X. Tyrell picked him and Patrick from St. Jude’s to be apprentices. And then he wanted extra services. Well, Patrick wasn’t into that. But Leo was.”

  “And F
.X. was, you’re saying.”

  “Oh yeah. Did Jackie not tell you?”

  “She just said it never really happened for them.”

  “And that’s the reason. She was probably being loyal. She knew what was going on. Leo and F.X., Leo and Seán Proby, too. And Leo got it all on film. Photographs of F.X. and Leo in some position or other. Shots that wouldn’t look well on pages three to ten of the Sun during Cheltenham week. So F.X. Tyrell belonged to the Halligans. Still does, I imagine.”

  “And so what do you think? Did the Halligans get rid of Hutton for rocking the boat?”

  “I don’t know. They could have. Not because Leo wanted it, but George might have decided to cut him out. Either way, he had become a liability. So the Halligans gave the word that F.X. could cut him loose.”

  “So George Halligan controls F.X. Tyrell?”

  “To a certain extent. I mean, the thing about George is, he’s not stupid. It’s like, if you have a restaurant and you can eat free there. Well, if you go every night, if you bring all your friends, if you take the piss, there’s not going to be any restaurant. So George played it cute, a few scores here and there but nothing that’s going to make the headlines, or push F.X. Tyrell over the edge.”

  “And do you have anything to add to how you parted, you and Hutton?”

  “It was…more emphatic than I told you. On my side, I was so fucking pissed off, we could have had it both ways: we knew what Leo had on F.X., and we knew which races were crooked; plus, we had the Halligans offering to make side deals with us. We had an insurance policy, all we had to do was play it smart.”

  Miranda seemed to wake up in the middle of saying this, wake to the realization that it made her sound like a cheap chivvying little piece of work. Again, to her credit, she held her hands up.

  “I imagine this makes me sound pretty bad,” she said.

  “I imagine you wouldn’t make yourself sound like that if it wasn’t true.”

  “It’s just, it was hard to draw the line. If a jockey pulls a ride for his own trainer, why is that better than pulling it for a gangster? It’s the same thing, just a question of degree. And if you get more money from the gangster, and if your trainer is already in league with him…”

  She shrugged, and flicked her hair, and pouted the way she did, and I could feel my heart breaking. I’d built her into a princess, and she was just a tramp on the make. Merry Christmas, Edward Loy.

  “Ask me anything else, please. I really want to…to set the record straight, Ed.”

  She looked at me, unblinking, as if nothing had changed. And maybe nothing had. Maybe Carmel Donnelly was right, and I had fallen for another fucked-up woman I couldn’t possibly have, or didn’t want in the first place. I still didn’t want to believe that. And I tried not to, right up until she heard me ask the next question.

  “Did you ever come across a guy called Terry Folan? Bomber, most people call him.”

  “No,” she lied, so quickly I almost didn’t hear her. “No, I don’t…I don’t think so, I…or maybe…Bomber Folan, that rings a bell…”

  She said a lot more in that vein, until she arrived at the lie she was happy with: that she vaguely remembered him riding for F.X., and that he could have been around afterwards, hanging out with Leo in McGoldrick’s. At that stage, I was on my feet. I told her I had to go, I had to meet someone, and she asked me if I’d make it up to Tommy’s for the Christmas dinner she was going to cook today, and I said I wouldn’t miss it, and she kissed me and held me in the way you would if you loved him, or if you wanted him to love you, and again I tried to believe in her, and got my coat, and just when we were at the door she asked me if I still had the photograph of Patrick Hutton she gave me. It was the only one she had. No, it wasn’t that, it was quite special to her, in a way she didn’t want to tell me. Or wouldn’t. Or hadn’t made up yet. I said I didn’t have it anymore. I don’t know if she believed me, or pretended to believe me. I pretended I didn’t care anymore. I left her at Tommy’s, looking so beautiful and so forlorn I couldn’t bear the sight of her. I think she knew what had happened; she couldn’t figure out how. I wasn’t sure I could either. I just knew that the next time we met, we’d be on opposite sides. You think you’re never going to fall in love with anyone again, and sometimes the only way you know you did is because she’s just broken your heart.

  At Tommy’s doorstep, after I’d said I wouldn’t come in, and she said it was a sin to waste all that food, that she’d been looking forward to spending the day with me, and I looked at the ground as if that was any kind of answer, and she nodded, and suddenly there was fear in her eyes, real terror, and she looked as if she was about to howl with it.

  “I can’t tell you any more,” she said.

  “You know more than you’re telling me.”

  Her eyes welled up with tears, her beautiful eyes.

  “I can’t…it’s not my fault…I’m sorry, but I just can’t…”

  I shook my stupid head.

  “Well, I’m sorry too, but neither can I.”

  I waited down the road from Tommy’s until the taxi arrived to pick her up, and I tailed it until I was sure she was on her way back to Riverside Village. Then I drove to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, and found Tommy in the sacristy and took him through what I thought had happened.

  “Who’s going to cook our Christmas dinner then?” he said, which was better than “I told you so,” but not much.

  I called Regina Tyrell and apologized for not having been in touch, and checked that she still wanted an extra man.

  “Do you think we need one?”

  “I think you do, yes.”

  I quoted her a price for Tommy and Regina agreed to it while he looked goggle-eyed at me.

  “Time you took yourself seriously,” I told him.

  “You first,” he said.

  I gave Tommy the key to my house and asked him to pack some surveillance equipment in the boot of his mother’s car before he left for Tyrellscourt. Then I gave him Leo Halligan’s Glock 17. He flashed a look toward the door to the church, then stowed the gun beneath his cassock and nodded gravely to me, as if to say he appreciated the trust I was showing in him. I didn’t tell him I had no other option.

  When I left the sacristy I saw Vincent Tyrell watching me from the altar; he seemed insubstantial to me, like a wraith; I wondered if I’d see him alive again.

  WHILE I WAITED on the pier for Proby, I called Jim Morgan, a cardiologist I’d worked with on the Howard case. Once he’d gotten over his dismay at being phoned on Christmas Day, and once we’d established that eyes were not his area, he listened to my description of Karen Tyrell’s eyes, and suggested that it was possibly a condition known as heterochromia, that it was possibly genetic, and that if I wanted to move beyond the possible, I should find an ophthalmologist and spoil his Christmas lunch.

  Jack Proby was about my age, skinny and tall with boyish floppy hair in a seventies centre parting and a seventies moustache to match and a mouth full of teeth that wouldn’t’ve shamed a pony and acne scars on his long face. He stood at the start of the West Pier in a fawn cashmere coat over a navy suit and tan Italian shoes, looking like a hotel lobby was his idea of out in the open. The wind off the sea was cold enough to give me second thoughts too.

  “The Royal Seafield know me,” Proby said. “We can get in out of this.”

  The Royal Seafield was a Victorian seafront hotel of indifferent quality, but they did know Jack Proby, and admitted him even though the hotel was open only to residents, which is how I found myself drinking a large Jameson in a bar on Christmas Day, apart from Good Friday the only day of the year you cannot get served a drink in Ireland. Proby drank the same.

  “How’s it looking for you at Leopardstown tomorrow?” I said.

  “What the fuck do you care?” Proby said. “Business, friend.” His accent was educated northside, lazy and drawling; his voice was hoarse as a rule: it sounded like someone had cut him. I looke
d for a scar, but he wore his collar high.

  “All right: Are you still tied to the Halligans because of what they’ve got on your old man?”

  “What have they got?”

  “Photos of him and Leo Halligan. Photos his family wouldn’t like to see. Let alone the great Irish public.”

  Jack Proby suddenly looked like his collar was a size too small for him; he worked his neck around and blinked his eyes and sniffed.

  “What is this? Is this blackmail, friend? ’Cause I tell you, if it is—”

  “It isn’t. It’s tell me what I want to know and don’t be a fucking prick.”

  “Because I know some important people in this town—”

  “See, you’ve won already. The only important people I get to meet hire me to clean up the mess they make because they spent too much time with corrupt moneygrubbing scumbags like you. And afterwards, they don’t want to know me. The feeling’s mutual, mind. Believe me, I’ve places I’d rather be today and all. Anywhere tops the list.”

  Proby, calculating I’d got the market in aggressiveness tied up for the moment, nodded his consent, as if to a waiter.

  “All right,” I said. “To be honest, I don’t much care if you’re feeding the Halligans tips or if they’re feeding you the inside on Tyrellscourt horses—”

  “George Halligan is a legitimate player now, friend, he has horses in half a dozen stables, not just F.X. Tyrell’s.”

  “That’s what makes our system so great, isn’t it? Any murdering drug-dealing scum-sucking savage can call himself an entrepreneur and be forgiven. Business washes us all clean. But I’m not one of the ruthless boys in a hurry, impatient to get on with making and building and storing up wealth for the winter months. I’m one of the laggards, the stick-in-the-muds who are always looking back, endlessly worrying about some sticky little detail everyone else is too busy going forward to be bothered with.”