“Get out of my sight, the lot of you! How dare you!” he cried.
Nobody moved. Now there was silence, and the relentless wind, and the insistent sleet on the windowpanes. F.X. Tyrell looked from face to face, and for the first time, uncertainty appeared on his. It was like an old play when the conspirators confront the king, and the king commands them to desist, failing to grasp that at the instant of their challenge, he has ceased to rule. He turned to Brian Rowan with his big plump farm-boy head, his shock of fair hair, his shrewd, watery blue eyes.
“Brian,” he said. “Brian, for God’s sake.”
Brian looked at the floor, then briefly at Steno, before fixing on Regina.
“It’s like Miss Tyrell said, boss,” he said. “Think of Miss Karen. Better to go along with it. It’s…it’s just one race.”
The last idea was the one Rowan evidently found the most difficult to express, and it was clearly one of the major difficulties for F.X. Tyrell as well.
“Just one race?” he said, as if the very notion of looking at the sport in that light was so bizarre he’d never contemplated it before. “This is Bottle of Red.”
Regina spoke then, her tone suddenly hard and cold.
“Francis. They know…everything.” F.X. Tyrell flashed her a look that mixed anger with real fear.
Steno yawned and looked at his watch.
“Want to get moving,” he said quietly, waving his MP5K submachine gun gently back and forth, like a wand.
Tyrell peered at Steno as if he hadn’t noticed him before.
“That’s Stenson, isn’t it?” F.X. Tyrell said. “From McGoldrick’s? I’ll have you dismissed from your post for this.”
“I already quit,” Steno said. Then he took Tyrell’s right arm and bent it behind his back until his wrist was at his neck. The old man gasped in agony.
“Now you go along with this, and behave yourself, and you do your thing in the parade ring, and you talk nice to the TV people with Patrick afterwards if he wins, do you understand?”
Tyrell nodded, whimpering in pain.
“And you don’t call for help, and you don’t tell anyone, especially not the Guards?”
“No!”
Steno let Tyrell’s arm go, and the old man dropped to his knees. I don’t know if the hoarse sound he made was breathing or weeping, but I know that all the other men in the room turned away. When I looked at Regina Tyrell and Miranda Hart, however, I saw that they could not take their eyes off his suffering. Brian Rowan helped Tyrell to his feet and began to talk to him in a low, quiet voice as he led him out. Tyrell’s face was haggard with pain and confusion.
Steno summoned Tommy and gave him what looked like another warning. Then Steno nodded at Miranda, waved the SMG at us all and followed Tommy out.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Miranda Hart trailed after Steno. While she was gone, I thought about various ways of getting free of my bonds, but the chair was too solid to be wrenched apart, and I didn’t carry a blade as a matter of course, and short of launching myself out the window, nothing else occurred to me. If I could manoeuvre my way to the couch, I could maybe get hold of the Glock, although how I’d aim it at anything worth shooting was another matter. Just as this thought was forming, Miranda came back. She brought a tray with a pot of coffee, cups and milk with her and offered it round.
“That’d be nice if we had our hands free,” Regina said.
Miranda looked at the grips tying our wrists to the arms of the chairs and nodded and apologized, then poured a coffee for herself.
In the silence, I heard a muffled voice coming from down the hall. It was the voice of a child.
“Mummy? Mummy? Mother? I can’t open the door!”
“Karen…oh my God, let me go to her,” Regina said.
Miranda looked anxious and shook her head.
“Just reassure her, all right? Shout from here.”
“Mummy? I’m locked in!”
Regina took a deep breath to compose herself, then raised her voice to a yell.
“It’s all right, sweetheart. The lock’s broken.”
“Just find the key.”
“The key won’t work. We have to find a locksmith.”
“Mummy!”
The child was wailing. Miranda held her face in her hands.
“It’s all right, sweetheart. Just…find a book and get back into bed. Or do some drawing. We’ll get you out soon. Okay?”
There was silence then. Miranda looked shamefaced, and shook her head at me, as if to say that she wasn’t in fact responsible for this. I shook my head right back and looked her in the eye.
“One thing I don’t understand, Miranda,” I said. “Well, that’s not true, actually, there are many things I don’t understand about this case, but best to take them one at a time. What’s in it for Steno?”
“You have to understand,” Miranda began. “You have to try and track this from the beginning. It’s all because of Patrick. And Patrick will have what he’s dreamed of today, after all this time. He’s been training, he’s in good condition. It’s the least he deserves.”
“And what? Are the other horses just going to sit back and let him win?”
“You’ll just have to wait and see. Live on television.”
“And what then? He takes the fall? He has his Tyrellscourt tattoo, he has no tongue, he’s perfect for a clogger like Myles Geraghty. Best of all, you probably have him so he wants to confess. He’s the Omega Man, he acted alone, and you all walk away scot-free? But what about Steno, what does he get? I mean, Regina here is in the way, isn’t she? Maybe the Omega Man needs to claim a fourth victim. Get rid of Regina and Miranda hits the jackpot. Karen Tyrell is the heiress, Miranda is reunited with her daughter, and Gerald Stenson gets paid off until his dying day.”
Miranda shook her head.
“You’re looking at everything the wrong way round. Start with Patrick, living half-wild up on the Staples place, a bunch of scrap and a fistful of memories, some sweet, many bitter. The private detective Don Kennedy found his birth certificate. It wasn’t in Lombard Street, it was at the registration office in Naas, I remember that much. Maybe because I was trying to remember anything but what he was telling me. See, Kennedy didn’t come to me first, like he was supposed to. From the word go he had wanted to go and see Folan, he kept saying since Folan and Patrick were contemporaries, and in many ways had a shared history, he was a crucial witness. I kept making excuses not to go—I don’t think I could have handled it. Anyway, I think he suspected Folan was Patrick, and now he had a foolproof way of finding out. He went up to the Staples place and showed Patrick the birth certificate, right there in black and white: Mother: Regina Mary Immaculate. And I can’t remember what Patrick was working on at the time, I think he might have been putting up some fencing. Anyway, he had a pair of metal snips in his flight suit pocket. I don’t know why, he took to dressing in flight suits when he went to live up there. Kennedy confronted him with the birth cert, and asked him what he thought. And Patrick took snips and pulled his tongue out and snipped a good half of it off.”
Regina screamed at this, and began to shake her head, wailing. While I listened to that sound, and to Miranda talking, I was aware again of Karen calling for her mother, over and over again, sometimes through tears, sometimes angrily, rattling the door or banging on it. I hoped the sash windows in her room were too stiff for her to open, and if they weren’t, that she didn’t do anything foolish. Regina was still wailing, keening like a banshee. Miranda leant across and slapped her hard across the face, and she stopped.
“Listen to me,” she said. “This is the beginning. This is just the beginning. Don’t forget what you did to him, Regina. Don’t forget you dumped your son into an orphanage, no, a torture chamber, then took him into your house while never acknowledging him. Do you know what that did to him when he found out? That you were his mother, but you had never treated him like a son?”
It couldn’t have been much after nine in the mo
rning then, but that was the point where I thought: I could really do with a drink.
“Kennedy got Patrick a doctor he knew, avoided a hospital situation where the police would have been involved. Setting me and Patrick up, getting us to trust him, so he could blackmail the fuck out of us. But you know what Patrick told me? He wrote it down, he couldn’t speak at all back then. Because I kept asking, in the days and weeks after, pleading with him to tell me why he had done it. And eventually he took a piece of paper and he wrote two things on it. The two things were: ‘Tell No One,’ and ‘Say Nothing.’
“I knew what that meant. When Patrick had been in St. Jude’s, he’d been raped twice. He didn’t know who the rapists were. He wasn’t even sure there were two, but he thought there were, he said they smelled different. He said sometimes he thought it might have been Vincent Tyrell, sometimes Leo, sometimes even Steno. I asked Steno and he swore he hadn’t touched Patrick.”
I intervened at that point.
“You didn’t believe him, did you? I know you didn’t believe him. Leo Halligan always thought it was Steno who raped Hutton.”
Miranda looked at me and swallowed, and continued from where she left off.
“And Patrick said, they’d each said that. Each of the perpetrators—and the other boys who were victims were told the same thing too. Tell no one. Say nothing.”
Tell no one. Say nothing. The secret history of Irish life.
“I asked you what was in it for Steno. Looks like you won’t answer. Explain something else to me, Miranda,” I said. “I can understand Folan—a row, or a brawl, or some messy accident that got covered up. I can understand Kennedy, the blackmailer. What I don’t get is Jackie Tyrell. She was your friend, in many ways your champion. You clearly revered her. Why did she have to die?”
Miranda began to nod her head very quickly, as if someone was disagreeing with her but she had right on her side, and if only they’d stop talking, she’d set them straight.
“It’s the same answer to both questions. Patrick wanted to return. He wanted one last race, that was all. And I felt…because of how I’d treated him, the way I’d abandoned him, given up our child…I felt I had a lot to make up for. I felt I’d betrayed him, and I needed to atone. Patrick killed Bomber Folan years ago, and I was there. It was an accident, but Steno knew we were both involved. He cleaned up afterwards, and then we were both in Steno’s power. When Kennedy started the blackmail, we both wanted him to die. I don’t feel guilty about Kennedy, he was a piece of filth, extorting money out of our unhappiness and shame. But I couldn’t do it myself, and neither could Patrick, as it happened. So Steno did it for us.”
“And Steno’s price was Jackie Tyrell. Why?”
Miranda stared at the floor.
“I said no harm could come to Regina. And…as you said, Steno wanted to know what was in it for him. I was…I am Jackie Tyrell’s heir. Her estate: the riding school, the house, everything, it all goes to me.”
“And now it all goes to Steno.”
“I couldn’t argue him out of it,” she said. “I begged him, I said I could get her to advance me enough to keep him going…it wasn’t enough. Steno went his own way. It frightened me.”
Miranda looked at me with tears in her eyes, and everything I had felt for her brimmed to the surface again. Complicity in Jackie’s murder had pushed her beyond the pale; now I knew she was not directly responsible, my flexible moral code longed to find some clause that would welcome her back to the fold. Regina Tyrell looked between us, her face closed to everything but her own pain. The sleet had picked up to hail now; it pounded needle sharp against the windowpanes; I had to raise my voice to compete.
“What else had Kennedy on you, Miranda? I mean, it couldn’t’ve just been Regina as Patrick’s mother, there must have been more to it. Otherwise he would have been blackmailing Regina, or F.X., not you.”
Miranda took a page from her coat and unfolded it. It was a long-form birth certificate.
“Kennedy was a predator. He was real scum. He wanted more money. He threatened to go to Regina, to tell her what he had found out. I didn’t think she knew…I reasoned that no one but me knew, that Regina had a better chance of…of bringing up my little girl properly if she didn’t know either.”
“I think Regina suspected, at the very least,” I said.
“You can suspect, and go on living. You can suspect, and keep lying to yourself, and survive. That’s what people do every day. But you might not make it past knowing. Anyway, this pig wanted more to keep the secret. I couldn’t afford it. That kicked the whole thing off, really. Steno helped us then. Helped us to scare the daylights out of Kennedy until he gave us the key to a safe in his house where this was kept. Helped us to kill him. And good riddance.”
“What’s the secret?” Regina asked.
And Miranda Hart said: “That you are my mother. That Patrick and I are brother and sister. That our daughter, Karen…”
She didn’t need to continue. Regina nodded her head wearily. She had said to me earlier that she had dreaded this day, but prayed for it, too. I think dread was the dominant emotion in the room, especially because of what Miranda Hart said next.
“Maybe we could have gotten past that,” she said. “Maybe…I don’t know…but when Patrick…when Patrick went to confession with Vincent Tyrell…it was after By Your Leave, and all the shenanigans with the Halligans and so forth, and Patrick was sick to his stomach, he didn’t like the cheating, that side of the game, he was straight as a die, really. And he went to confess his sins. And he told Vincent Tyrell he was worried about getting another job, with a bad reputation, because his wife was pregnant. Tyrell got very angry, and Patrick was confused: he knew he’d been in the wrong, but surely these things happened to everyone at one time or another. Surely even a Catholic priest could be more understanding than that.
“And Vincent Tyrell told him that this child would be an abomination. It would be against nature. Patrick asked why. And Vincent Tyrell said, because its mother and father shared the same mother, and their fathers were brothers.”
All you could hear when Miranda stopped speaking was the hail against the windowpanes and the slow, steady wailing of Karen Tyrell.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Tommy witnessed what happened in Leopardstown that day at first hand, and this is the way he told it to me:
“I was the driver, Steno in the back with Hutton. Hutton kept drizening this tune to himself, over and over, driving me mad so it was. Steno seemed as ever, you know, Mr. Chill. I was trying to get something out of him on the whole operation, find out what the plan was: giving him a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, not laying it on too thick ’cause he’s obviously not a fucking plank. Telling him I’d had it up to here with fucking Ed Loy taking me for granted and paying me shit and expecting me to watch his back all the fucking time. But Steno played it cool and steady: is that right, no really, Tommy, all this. Pretty soon I gave it up. The driving was taking up all my attention anyway, the hail and the sleet, our number one weather choice, and cunts in Mercs and boy racers still pissed from the night before cutting me up in a poxy dribble of muddy water morning light, you wished you were in your bed with nothing more taxing than a trip to the pub ahead. Stephen’s Day, a few bets, a few jars, and home to see what’s on the box. Turkey sandwich, bottle of beer. Not this year.
“We’re on the M50, heading south, Steno says to keep going on past Leopardstown, and then to cut down toward the sea, onto the N11 and down into Bayview. Father Vincent Tyrell, I’m thinking, and sure enough, we get to the church car park and Steno nods me out. He leaves Hutton in the backseat, still singing away to himself, sounds like a Christmas carol to me, but I’ve heard so fucking many the past few weeks I can’t remember which is which. We head into the back porch, there’s a mass on, I look at Steno and he shrugs, and I’m thinking, this cunt would strafe the fucking church now not a bother on him, and then I’m like, calm the fuck down, this is a barman from Tyrellscourt,
not a fucking suicide bomber for Al-Qaeda. I open the door and it’s Father Lyons, home from the missions, and the beady-eyed cunt clocks me instantly, caught rapid, where the fuck were you? I can see he spots me, well, pity about him. Twenty women and three men over seventy in the church, you have to feel sorry for them, sorry for Lyons too, I mean, six masses between them yesterday, and Stephen’s morning these ’oul ones and ’oul fellas are back for more. I know they’re probably lonely and they’ve fuck-all else to be doing, but come on, Jesus knows you love Him by now, He got the message big-time on His birthday, relax there or He might start to think yiz are all laying it on a bit thick.
“We go around to the presbytery, knock away, nothing doing. Steno looks at me like I have the inside story.
“‘Maybe he’s gone to Leopardstown,’ I say.
“‘Maybe he has. Two birds,’ he says.
“I don’t like the sound of that.
“And we’re back in the Range Rover, back up and onto the M50, heading for Leopardstown. The hail and sleet have dwindled to a scuttery rain now, and the air is warming a little, and there’s a crack in the sky that, if it’s not exactly blue, it’s at the silver end of grey, and I can see Steno nodding out the window.
“‘The day is coming together,’ he says. ‘The day is going to happen.’
“F.X. Tyrell has gone ahead with the head man, Brian Rowan, in the last horse box. Always goes with the horses, Rowan says, still in awe, and Steno checks him, is he sure he’s with the program, and Rowan reassures Steno he’s onside, well in there, bought and paid for. Horses’ll be up in the stables with all the lads looking after them, and Tyrell too. We turn off for the course and the Garda checkpoints are already in place, waving punters into the car parks about half a mile from the track. Steno’s given me some kind of official pass he’s got from Rowan and they nod us through. And part of me is, why didn’t I just call a halt, tell the Guards I’ve a madman with a submachine gun in the back, not to mention a madman with no tongue who thinks he’s Lester Piggott? Why don’t I tell them about you, tied to a chair in Tyrellscourt? I could pretend I think nothing bad is gonna happen here, like it’s just a sentimental old debt being paid: Hutton gets to run a prestige race, ten years after everyone thought he disappeared. What a story! But I know that’s not all there is. Maybe it’s that I want to know what happens next. Like it’s their story, and I want to see how they play it out. And maybe it’s because I still don’t like talking to the fucking cops. And maybe there’s a second, just a glimmer, when I roll down the window and show the Guard the pass, and he sees it’s Tyrellscourt stables, and he looks in the back and sees Hutton, and you know what he says?
The Dying Breed Page 27
