The Price of Blood (18 page)

Hardy souls were still playing on the golf course I could see; the brochure assured me there was another course somewhere to the rear of the hotel, which loomed up ahead, white and sprawling, like a château that couldn’t stop growing, with its multiple bow windows and its Italianate campanile. Landscaped gardens and a three-tiered lawn led up to the grand main entrance; signposts pointed the way to the wings and annexes that housed the tennis and squash courts, the spa, the swimming pools and the gymnasium; as I stood on the threshold, I heard the competing roars of a car and a river; the car was a steel-gray Bentley Continental Flying Spur, and it swept its cargo of laughing blondes past the main entrance as if it could spot the checkered flag; the river was the Liffey, which sprang from here and flowed on into Dublin and out to the sea.

The lobby was the usual nightmare mismatch of expensive styles and fittings common to every luxury Irish hotel: We Can Buy What We Like, And We Will, it screamed. Expensively tanned and scented guests wandered about exuding the relaxed ease of the rich; they seemed absurdly vivid and I an impostor, a monochrome man in their Technicolor world. The cute Scottish redhead at reception directed me to a function room jammed with highly excited children and their parents; in the middle, a red-suited Santa Claus was doing his thing. Regina Tyrrell spotted me immediately; I guess since I was the only man in the room not wearing deck shoes or a cardigan, that wasn’t too hard.

The first thing I thought when I saw Regina Tyrrell was how much she looked like Miranda Hart, which is to say, how much she resembled my ex-wife: the same coal-black eyes and hair, the same long legs and rangy frame, the same imperious bearing. She was older, of course, but she didn’t look it, or rather, age to her didn’t look like any kind of burden; she was carrying maybe ten pounds, which showed on her body in a series of pleasant curves and helped to keep her face supple and smooth; she wore a black trouser suit and a square-cut black top. Her hair was cut short rather than piled high; her expression grim and resourceful, as if she’d taken all that life had thrown so far, but didn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. Without a word, she indicated that I should follow her up a flight of stairs to a pale pink office that looked out over the rear of the complex. Before I had a chance to take in the fading view, she sat behind a white desk and began to talk.

"I haven’t spoken to Vincent in thirty years, out of choice. What makes you think I’d want to talk to anyone who’d have anything to do with him?"

Her accent was melodious Dublin in its Sunday best, not lazy or glottal-stopped, not affected; unusual to hear it these days spoken by anyone of status, especially a woman; it sounded intoxicating to my ears.

"I don’t know. Why would you? And yet, here we are."

She turned on a pink-shaded desk lamp and looked past it at me and shook her head.

"She said you’d be cheeky, all right."

"Who did?"

"Miranda."

"I got the impression you two didn’t speak either."

"We don’t. But given the night that was in it…"

She blessed herself, and I noticed the silver cross at her throat.

"Miranda said you were there."

"I found her. And the murderer—at least, I assume it was the murderer—hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out."

"Francis is in shock," she said. "He went up to Dublin this morning to identify the body."

"What else did Miranda tell you?"

"What are you doing for Vincent?"

"He asked me to find…no, that’s not right, he didn’t ask me anything. He gave me a name. Patrick Hutton."

I looked closely at Regina, but there wasn’t any visible reaction. There should at least have been a flicker. I looked around the room. The walls were pale pink, the furniture pink and white, the strawberries-and-cream drapes ruched and tasseled; two gold chandeliers hung from the ceiling; the carpet was white. It was a room decorated by a twelve-year-old girl: all that was missing was the stuffed toys. I looked again at the impressive woman before me. Sometimes I felt I could spend a lifetime trying to work people out until they added up, and at the end they’d still be the strangers they began as.

"Did Miranda not tell you that?" I said.

Regina Tyrrell set her lips in a wry smile.

"Miranda said there were things she couldn’t tell me. She said it might be harmful to the work you were doing. She said any of us could be next. I asked her was the second body that had been found Patrick’s. She said that I should ask you. And she said it all in this hushed voice, as if she was in a crowded bar and the bad guys were listening. As if she was in a movie. Such a drama queen, our Miranda, always was. I think the bit she liked most was ringing me up and then not telling me anything. Her knowing something I didn’t know. She liked that all right. Was it Patrick?"

"They haven’t identified the body," I said. "But it sounds like it could be."

"It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the rest of it."

"That’s why I’m here," I said.

"To ask me questions? To poke your nose into our family affairs? What makes you think we should welcome you with open arms?"

"I’m not used to that kind of welcome. But what Miranda said was true: there seems to be a pattern to the killings, and any of you could be the next victim."

"And what about the Guards? Why aren’t they here?"

"They’re conducting their own investigation. A lot of it would depend on forensics, on what they can deduce from the crime scene. And since they’ve got three to examine, that is probably where the bulk of their focus lies at the moment. They’ll get here presently."

"And how do you know Vincent?"

Every time she spoke his name, it sounded like the twist of a knife in her guts. I explained about growing up in Bayview with Tyrrell as the parish priest, and about Tommy’s unlikely job as sacristan providing the connection between us. At this, she visibly relaxed, as if reassured that I wasn’t acting in some sinister manner on Vincent Tyrrell’s behalf. She got up from her desk and walked to the window.

"It never looks the same, does it, twilight?" she said. "Or maybe it’s that your eyes never quite get used to it. You look, and everything seems unfamiliar, and by the time you’ve adjusted, the light has changed, and what you saw is past, or the moon is down, and everything is equally visible in its glare, and none of it makes sense."

As I joined her, I could see a half-moon popping out like a cymbal crash and shedding its silver everywhere. There was another golf course out there, with dramatic bunkers and water features; below it ran the river; in the distance I could see high walls and bare trees ranged around a neo-Gothic mansion; beyond lay the gallops of Tyrrellscourt stables.

"Maybe that’s what trying to really look at your life is like, look at your own family," she said. "That moment between twilight, when everything is strange and mysterious, and moonlight, when you see everything plain, and nothing stands out: everything is clear and nothing has any meaning."

Maybe I was so struck by her image that I forgot what we were doing, or maybe I had spotted something by the walled house that distracted me; when she next spoke, it was as if to a man who had made his own way to the dining table without waiting for her to lead.

"What I’m saying is, maybe an outsider’s eye is just what we need, Mr. Loy."

She went back to her desk and sat down and turned the light off. Her face in the shadows immediately looked older, gray and tired, her great dark eyes pools, inviting strangers at their own risk.

"Tell me about the family, then. Tell me about the Tyrrells," I said.

"I don’t know about the Tyrrells. But I can tell you about myself," she said. "My mother died giving birth to me. I think that was hard on the boys. I never knew any different, but boys need a mother if they’re to avoid…a certain kind of coldness. Anyway, I grew up here, went to the local school, boarding school in Dublin."

"Is that where you got the accent?"

She grinned.

"I got the accent in Dublin, but not at boarding school. Everyone told me to get rid of it. Maybe that’s why I hung on to it. Too late now."

"I like it a lot."

"Listen to you. Say anything so you would. Say mass if you were let."

She laughed, an uneasy laugh, and it struck me that, beneath the brittle sheen, she was an uneasy woman. Maybe when you sat opposite a detective, only fools and knaves weren’t. Or maybe she had a lot to be uneasy about.

"So this would have been sixties, seventies?"

"Left school in ’74."

"F.X. would have been running the show here by then?"

"For ten years. Francis trained his first winner at nineteen. Won the Gold Cup the following year, ’65. And on and on."

"And what about you? University? London?"

"Nah. I came back here. I missed it like mad. And the horses. I was one of those pony girls. In boarding school up in the Dublin mountains…Jasus, Mother Borgia, that was the mother superior’s name, Mother Borgia, you wouldn’t believe it now, but back then…anyway, I hated the place, all these snobby southside bitches, but there was a riding school nearby, and a couple of local lads who’d sneak me in and sneak horses out…oh, we had such a time of it. I think that’s where I got the accent. And of course, it gave the nuns conniptions, it went against everything they stood for, which wasn’t education at all, it was how to arrange flowers and give a dinner party and get into a sports car without showing your knickers so you could nab some young businessman and make him a fragrant wife. And certainly not be letting him down in front of his boss talking like some common-as-muck Dublin Chrissie. We’ve got over that now, at least. Anyone in this country with a few bob in his pocket’s as good as anyone else."

"And anyone without a few bob?"

"Let them go out and work for it. That’s what the Poles and Latvians and all are doing, and fair play to them. If there’s a generation of Irish too lazy to work, that’s a shame for them, but what are we supposed to do about it? Sponsor them to drink all day and go to the shops in their pajamas?"

"So you came back to Tyrrellscourt, and trained?"

"Not really. You have to be…touched by God to be able for that."

"Touched by God?"

"Laugh if you like," she said. "But it is a kind of vocation. I’ve often watched Francis during the day, inspecting the horses and the lads in the morning before work begins, checking the earth and watching the sky, supervising the feeds, right the way to patrolling the yard at night, listening for a restless horse, the wrong kind of cough, and all in silence: there’s a kind of devotion to it, it’s…I used to think he was like a monk. Only the horses had called him, not God."

"Your brother Vincent said much the same: the horses knew F.X., they didn’t like Vincent at all."

"Good sense they had," she said, the wistful look she had had in talking about F.X. curdling when it came to her other brother.

"What caused the falling-out between you and Vincent?" I said.

Regina simply shook her head. Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to hear it from her. She looked quickly at her watch, and I pressed ahead before I was cut off.

"So you didn’t have a similar vocation?"

"No. The only thing I can compare it to is a musician. The kind who, they make the records, they give the concerts, they have the career, but the only time they’re truly alive is when they’re playing, is in the music. And F.X. was like that, at race meetings, he’d be hiding behind the horses, and when they won, there were no fists in the air, no big shite talk to the crowd like some of the knackers you see masquerading as trainers these days, it was just a quiet nod, the sense that this was as it should be. And I loved to play piano, classical, my favorite thing now, but if you think you can play the piano, and then you hear a Barenboim, a Rubinstein, well if you’re not a total idiot, you understand immediately what you don’t have. And to try would be futile, really. But you want to do something, you believe in what’s being done. So I did what I could. I ran the house for him. I took night courses in bookkeeping so I could keep an eye on the money. I took cookery courses so when owners came to visit, they could bring their wives and children. I made sure the gardens were kept up. And I dressed up and went with him to Cheltenham and Ain-tree and Leopardstown and all, chatting to the Queen Mother and so forth."

"Like a wife."

"It wasn’t unusual where we came from. Eldest son inherits the farm—"

"Youngest becomes a priest, unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for the brother—"

"Not unusual at all."

"She never married."

"Nothing like that," Regina said sharply. "There was more than one fella, over the years. But none of them…I don’t know, unless you’re going to settle for less. And I had all this, I didn’t need any man’s money."

She gestured toward the window, and then around the room.

"This house was in ruins, some ’oul dacency sisters were hanging on for dear life, until they gave up the ghost. We got it for a song in 1970. Francis put the whole thing in my name, I had the idea for all this."

"Well done," I said, and meant it.

"And so that was another thing, you’re a successful woman, you attract gorgeous-looking fellas with expensive tastes and no funds, and you scare off the me-Tarzan types. So what can you do?"

"What did you do when Jackie Tyrrell appeared on the scene?"

Regina sighed and shook her head at that.

"What did I do? I invited her down here, you know. Jackie Lamb. She was in school with me. And she’d been writing to me, all this very flattering stuff, she was working for one of those Irish women’s magazines, wanted to do a feature, sisters are doing it for themselves, all very exciting. So down she comes, and it’s soon very clear she has F.X. in her sights."

"And were you hurt by that?"

"Hurt? What do you mean, hurt? I told you, there was nothing like that. Do you think I was after her?"

"I didn’t mean about her. I meant, hurt that your brother…there must have been a very strong bond between you both. It can’t have been easy to bring another woman into that."