The Dying Breed

by Declan Hughes

  “Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being.”

  “That’s right, and that’s where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it.”

  “The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?”

  “Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination.”

  CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy’s house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.

  In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn’t have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.

  “Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin,” I said.

  Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.

  “You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They’re fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail.”

  “Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?”

  “The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail.”

  Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had BARRINGTON INVESTIGATIONS as its heading.

  I began to read.

  POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.

  1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99

  Interviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner’s Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.

  SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD’S REPORT

  (DOCUMENT I (a)).

  I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.

  “Did anyone see him?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “But that doesn’t undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too.”

  “Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?”

  “No, actually.”

  “You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn’t get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?”

  “In a way.”

  Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I’d been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn’t felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.

  “See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it’s from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement.”

  Dave rustled through the paper.

  “The payments begin about two years back.”

  “When he searched for Hutton.”

  “So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out.”

  Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn’t contain himself; he looked like a children’s entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.

  “I don’t know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn’t spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise,” Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother’s name I expected, Tyrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not F for female, not Mary, later to be known as Miranda, but M for male: the child was a boy, born on the second of November, 1976, and his Christian names were Patrick Francis.

  PART III

  ST. STEPHEN’S DAY

  FERDINAND:

  Strangling is a very quiet death.

  DUCHESS:

  I’ll tell thee a miracle;

  I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:

  Th’ heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass,

  The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

  I am acquainted with sad misery,

  As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar;

  Necessity makes me suffer constantly,

  And custom makes it easy.

  —John Webster,

  The Duchess of Malfi

  TWENTY-ONE

  I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.

  “I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…”

  “I’m not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you’re welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?”

  Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.

  “They think I’m working. Emergency shift. It’s not unusual.”

  “And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?”

  “No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me.”

  I couldn’t see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn’t have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?

  “Maybe you should go back there,” I said. “You don’t want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her.”

  “Carmel doesn’t need me,” Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.

  “Oh yes she does,” I said. “She…she told me she did.”

  “Last night? And what else did she tell you?”

  Some things are more important than who fucked who.

  “Dave, whatever’s happened between you…you have a woman who wants you. And like any woman, she needs you to pay her some attention. To behave as if you kn
ow she’s there, and you’re as glad of it today as you were twenty years ago.”

  Dave looked sceptically at me.

  “You almost sound as if you’d like to be in my shoes,” he said. “Football practice and sleepovers and Friday-night pizza and mass on Sundays and nodding off in front of the TV and watching each other get old.”

  I looked out the back window at my apple trees, close but never touching; the bare limbs looked like bones in the hard wind. I looked out into the hall, where a pine stood bare and unadorned in a coal scuttle; I had forgotten, or hadn’t bothered, to decorate it.

  “It would have its compensations,” I said.

  Dave looked at me in disbelief.

  “Anyway, you can’t stay. No one with a woman who wants him sleeps here.”

  He thought about that for a while.

  “You don’t know what she did…”

  I took a chance.

  “Do you? Really? Maybe she needed to get your attention so badly…she tried before and failed…maybe it was your last chance…”

  “Is that what she said?”

  There was fear in his eyes. I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. She was upset. She wants you. I know what I’d do.”

  Dave was doing his best to look wounded and noble, but I think he was relieved. We talked about the case for a while, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere; on the doorstep, he looked at me as if, in some crucial way, I’d let him down. If I’d told him to leave his family, would that have suited his image of me better? Now I’d let him believe I envied him, he felt happier about himself. Just to make sure, I asked him to keep his mobile on: I told him I might need him, and I could see he liked the idea that I might. After he drove away, I rang Carmel and told her he was coming home. She started to say a lot of stuff about being sorry and ashamed, but I told her nobody wanted to hear any of that, now or ever, wished her a happy Christmas, hung up and left the house.

  THE THREE MEN who took me were under orders not to hurt me; that’s why each of them carried a gun. None of them wore sportswear either: with their dark leather jackets and jeans and boots, they could have been construction workers on a stag night; they certainly didn’t draw the eye the way Burberry hoodies did. They put me in the back of a Mercedes Estate with blacked-out windows, one on either side, one to drive. When we got to Redlands, which is where I assumed we were going—they could have shot me on the doorstep if they’d wished—I was led to a small bungalow George Halligan had built in the grounds, a three-room den with a pool table, a home cinema system, a bar and an en suite bedroom. What more could a man want? A head butt from Leo Halligan would not have been top of my list; nor would the kicks to the head and body that followed; a cowboy boot to the liver wouldn’t have made the backup list; it felt like a week before I could breathe again. Leo was breathing heavily when George called a halt; he was almost out of breath when he stopped. The off-duty construction workers got me upright and propped me in a chair; George presented me with a tumbler of whiskey and sat opposite me; Leo hovered to one side, an elaborate dressing with some kind of metal frame over his nose.

  “Compliments of the season,” George said in his fifty-a-day rasp. “Sorry about that, Ed, but it sounds like you were asking for it.”

  “I’m sure I was,” I said. “Still, I didn’t think Leo was such a girl he’d have to get his brother to hold me down.”

  Leo came at me so fast he forgot to bring his brain along; he was drawing a blade from his jacket, but before he pulled it free, I smashed my tumbler hard against the metal-framed dressing on his nose and jammed the shattered glass against his throat; the metal jarred the bone out of its setting and blood was flowing from his nose and he was screaming and gurgling, and I was on my feet now, a red mist swirling around my head.

  “You see what can happen? You see?” I heard myself shouting. I had lost any sense of where or who I was. I dug the broken glass into Leo’s throat. I could see George waving at his henchmen to drop the guns they had pulled. George’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying; it took me a while to realize that that was because I was still shouting.

  “You see? When we all live like savages? Blood! You see? You see?”

  I could see the panic in George’s eyes as he pointed at Leo; the sudden sight of Leo’s face covered in blood, of the punctures the glass had made in his throat, of the choking quivering mess of him beneath me brought me to my senses. I signalled George to kick the guns across the floor to me; when he hesitated, I jammed the glass back into Leo’s throat until I heard the skitter of metal across the floor; then I let him have Leo, whose injuries looked worse than they were; it was only because I had him lying on his back that he was choking; George sat him forward and gave him a bar cloth to stanch the flow, and one of the construction workers got some ice from the bar and wrapped it in another cloth and passed it to him.

  My head was throbbing and there was blood on my face where Leo had opened the eye he had blackened on Bayview Hill and the pain on my right side where he’d caught my liver hurt so bad I felt like crying, and possibly did. But I watched Leo with his face in his hands, whimpering, and George, his prematurely white head bowed over his brother, and the three construction workers, their faces registering as much shock as you could discern through their folds of beer and steroid fat, and I thought: They won’t forget this in a fucking hurry. And fool that I was, I felt stupid blood pride in my victory, suppressing the ache that, worse than any physical pain, warned me that maybe the only way the Halligans could properly settle this was to kill me.

  I gathered up the guns: two Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer compact. I didn’t know what was waiting for me down in Tyrellscourt, but I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to be prepared for it. I popped the Glocks in my coat pockets and kept the Sig trained around the room. George Halligan gave me two looks: one included a nod to Leo and an arched eyebrow, meaning all friends now; that was George’s way, but I knew I’d have to watch my back with Leo, and resolved to help put him back behind bars as soon as possible, a resolution that I suspected would find favour with his brother. The second look followed the guns into my pockets.

  “I’m going to need them,” I said. “I’m going down to Tyrellscourt.”

  “That was the main reason we wanted to talk to you, Ed,” George said, as if we’d spent the last five minutes chatting about football before getting down to business.

  Leo lifted his head, and dabbed his nose: the flow of blood had diminished to a trickle. George leant in and conferred with him in a low voice. Then he looked around and directed the largest of the construction workers, who had a goatee and no neck, to fix three drinks and pass them around. George had caught me like this in the past, so I watched closely to see that the liquid, which turned out to be brandy, was all coming from the one decanter. It was, and when I had a tumbler of it, I waited for George and Leo to drink, and then I did likewise, and we got down to business, Halligan-style.

  “We heard you were asking questions,” George said.

  “Who told you? Jack Proby, I suppose.”

  Leo and George looked quickly at each other.

  “Yeah, Jack called me,” George said unconvincingly. “You see, the festival starts tomorrow, and we don’t want anything to get the way of…a good day’s racing.”

  “Well, let me put your minds at rest,” I said. “I don’t give a damn about what deals you have with F.X. Tyrell or Jack Proby. I don’t give a damn which horse wins or doesn’t, although I am always in the market for a sure thing. All I care about is that since I started looking for Patrick Hutton, the bodies have been piling up. Far as I’m concerned, if F.X. is shy about who he sleeps with, that’s his lookout. And allowing for the fact that I don’t like blackmailing, extorting, scum-sucking sociopaths like yourselves on any level you care to mention, you’re not my problem. My problem is finding out what happened to Patrick Hutton. Allied to that, I’ve inherited the problem of who killed Don Kennedy, Jackie Tyrell and Ter
ry Folan.”

  “Terry Folan?” Leo said, looking up at me. “Bomber Folan?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Who’d you think that body on the dump was? Patrick Hutton? Or did you not think anyone else’d find out?”

  Leo began to say something, then stopped himself. George looked from his brother to me and back, a Cohiba chafing against his still-dark moustache.

  “Anything here I should know about, lads?” he said. We both ignored him.

  “It wasn’t just you at breakfast with Vincent Tyrell, was it Leo? Miranda Hart was there too.”

  Again Leo went to speak, but stopped himself.

  “That’s why I’m here, is it? In case the inconvenient deaths of three people get in the way of a fucking horse race?”

  “And if you go blundering about down there, you could fuck up quite a few fucking horse races, Ed Loy: the last thing we need is the Tyrell horses being withdrawn because their trainer is up on a charge, Bottle of Red in particular,” George barked from a blue cloud of cigar smoke. A descant of coughing followed; Leo winced and flapped a hand in front of his face.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Is that what you’re telling me, that F.X. Tyrell is the killer?”

  “That’s just a for instance,” George spluttered.

  “Well, here’s another: the killer takes F.X. Tyrell out. Maybe he already has. Same result to you: no Tyrell horse at the races.”

  George sat still, his black eyes vanishing into his clenched fist of a face.

  “I don’t think it was Jack Proby you were talking to at all,” I said. “I think it was either Miranda Hart, or Gerald Stenson.”

  George’s face didn’t flicker. Leo on the other hand, finally spoke.

  “I thought I knew what was going on there, but I don’t. Your woman’s a lying cunt, every disrespect, she’s a whore and a pig and she always will be, right?”