The Price of Blood (21 page)

After a while, he picked himself up and turned to us, his face wet with tears and snot and smeared with dust and blood where he’d torn his forehead. He came toward us then, the beam of the flashlight pointing up from beneath his chin; in its glow, amid the falling dust, he looked like his skull was smoldering; when he took his blindfold off, his tiny blue-black eyes burned like red Christmas berries. He came up close and opened his mouth wide, and showed us exactly why we hadn’t had a word out of him. Like Patrick Hutton, like Don Kennedy, like Jackie Tyrrell, Bomber’s tongue had been cut out. His work done, Bomber smiled, and almost bowed.

As it had begun, so it ended: Bomber picked up his wooden kneeler and put it on his back and made his way down the stairs and out into the night. While he replaced the bars and padlock on the doors, Tommy Owens and I lit cigarettes and smoked them as if they were the eighth sacrament. The moon was down, and you could see across the road to the riverbank. From the upstairs windows too, from the dormitory cells, you would have seen the river flowing, keeping its secrets all the way to Dublin and out into the sea.

"Monasteries, convents, fuckers always arranged it so they’d have themselves a nice view, didn’t they?" Tommy said.

I nodded, hearing Bomber moaning to himself as he fumbled with the locks, and suddenly found myself shaking with rage, my head hot and pounding; I walked down the drive and crossed the road, shouting something at the sky, I don’t know what, nothing like a prayer, and stood by the river until Tommy came out and Bomber locked the gates and gave us a lift back into town. He dropped us off at the Volvo and nodded solemnly to me, as if we had made a deal; I felt like we had too, but the difference was, he seemed to trust me, whereas I was far from sure I could say the same. I held his gaze though, and he gripped my hand and used it to roll up his sleeve, and show me the tattoo he had on his forearm. The runes were familiar to me now; I had already seen them carved on the nightstand in the dormitory cubicle Bomber had singled out; they had been tattooed or carved into each of the murder victims; now here they were on Bomber’s arm: † Ω

"Your tongue," I said. "Who did it to you?"

He grinned, and threw his hands in the air, and pointed at me, as if I should know.

"What does the tattoo stand for?"

He grinned again, and this time flung his arms wide as if to embrace the world around. Then he got back in his rickety vehicle and drove away.

Tommy wanted to set off for Dublin, but I didn’t want to leave before I had more information on Bomber, so we sat in the car and Tommy told me what he knew.

"His name is Terry Folan. Bomber Folan, they called him. I got to know him slightly down here, he used hang around at the fringes of that crowd Leo and Jack Proby ran with. There was smack going around, not through me, I don’t know who was dealing it, Miranda Hart would know. Folan had come through St. Jude’s in the nineties, just after Leo and Hutton, and then he’d been given a start as an apprentice in Tyrrellscourt stables, too. He was given a few rides, he moved up, he was still around when Pa Hutton vanished, the odd ride here and there, and then it all started to fall apart for him, he was drinking, he couldn’t keep the weight off, he was just doing yard work and then not even that. He used to be one of the drunks in McGoldrick’s and then he was barred from there. You’d see him stumbling along the main street, you know, half ten in the morning with a can of Dutch Gold and a rough sleeper’s tan? That was as much as I knew, ’98, ’99 that would have been, I dropped out of sight here then. Paula wanted me home. Those were the days, right Ed?"

Paula was Tommy’s ex-wife, and the divorce had been far from amicable; the
marriage
hadn’t been very amicable in the first place. After years of Paula’s utter disdain at his uselessness, Tommy cheated on her at a party with a drunk woman who Tommy thought was in love with him; he then made the mistake of telling Paula, whereupon she promptly threw him out, and then proceeded to sleep with everyone either of them had ever met, and to make sure everyone else knew about it. When the drunk woman sobered up, she told Tommy that it hadn’t been love, not even lust, just drink.

"Steno filled me in on what happened then, insofar as he knew. Apparently Folan befriended this old scrap-merchant character, Iggy Staples, who lived out of town a couple of miles, he…lived on a dump, was how Steno described it. It’s actually Staples collected scrap but he never really did anything with it, he lived off his pension in a cottage that was falling in on top of him. Anyway, Bomber used to go up there and sleep, there was enough shelter, he’d pull together some kind of shed for himself. And Staples got used to the company, enjoyed it, and when he died, hadn’t he left the place to Bomber."

"And what about the keys to St. Jude’s? Is he the caretaker?"

"It’s not a good question to ask around here," Tommy said. "Even Steno, the first time I asked, he just walks off, didn’t see him for an hour, piano-stops-playing type of thing. There’s a lull in the afternoon, he asks me through to the warehouse, you know the restaurant there, they’re changing over from lunch to dinner. The way he put it, St. Jude’s is a scar on the town? Like, everyone knew what was going on there, but nobody did anything. And there wasn’t just one Bomber Folan, every year there’d be casualties, a lot of them’d go to England, but a lot stayed, and those that went away usually came back, because they weren’t fit for anything, and there they’d be, Tyrrellscourt’s standing army of drunks and drug addicts, of misfits and losers, getting barred from the pubs and shambling round the streets, a living reproach every one to the town’s puffed-up image of itself. Eventually they got St. Jude’s closed down, there was one more scandal…no, I know what it was, your friend did a documentary on it. Your woman, the dykey one."

"Martha O’Connor?"

"That’s right. And all these stories came out, even into the nineties, some of the lay people were abusers—"

"Vincent Tyrrell? He was there in the nineties for a while, when Leo and Hutton were there."

"It wasn’t in the program. I don’t think Father Tyrrell…I mean, he’s a bollocks, but I’d never have put him down for that."

“The dykey one.’"

"What?"

"Is that how we talk?"

"It’s how I talk. I’ve nothing against them. Which is more than they can say for me."

"Tommy."

"All right Ed, Jasus, you’re very fucking Californian sometimes, do you know that?"

"How’d Folan get to be the caretaker, if that’s what he is?"

"Nobody knows. Steno said no application has been made for the property, so nobody even knows who owns it, the Church or the state or what. But that Folan has the keys to the locks, whether he appointed himself to put them on, or whether he’s carrying out duties for the owner, nobody knows."

"And what about the tongue?"

"No one had really seen Folan since Staples died, about five years ago. He’d come down to the town for groceries, and for his dole, but that was it. Then, about two years ago, he kind of presents himself, the head shaved, in the bar in McGoldrick’s, drinking the few pints, not saying a word. At the end of the night, he opens his mouth and shows the whole pub why he’s so quiet. Pleased by the reaction he gets, and away with him. After that, he’s in regularly. I got talking to Steno tonight, told him why you were in town, he said Bomber’s our man. When he came in, he remembered me. He actually can speak, he has enough of his tongue left for that, and to eat with. Anyway, I talked him through the whole thing, Pa Hutton, Leo, immediately he’s nodding, he’s got something to show us."

"And what a show," I said.

"Poor fucker."

"What do people think happened? To the tongue, I mean."

"They think he did it himself."

"I want to see where he lives, Tommy."

Tommy started up the engine.

"It’s on the way back," he said.

Maybe half a mile after the turnoff for the country club, there was a narrow mud boreen indented with car tracks. It curved back toward the town for maybe half a mile, climbing as it went, then dropped suddenly toward the river. Tommy stopped the car before the drop, and we got out. To one side, you could see the golf course sweeping down from the rear of the country club; on the other, there was a steady incline; nestled in the valley between the base of the hill and the river, I saw a couple of mobile homes, old cars and car parts, a mound of assorted scrap metal and wood, a stone cottage with a light burning and the Jeep Terry "Bomber" Folan had been driving. The light from the cottage spilled onto a small fenced-in paddock around which a horse was steadily pacing.

On the journey back, I checked the plates of Regina Tyrrell’s Range Rover with those on the one Tommy had seen leaving Tibradden the night Jackie Tyrrell was murdered. They weren’t a match. I told Tommy that Regina Tyrrell had tried to hire me as her inside man, and that I had offered her him in my place; among other things, that’d give him a chance to check out F. X. Tyrrell’s Range Rover, and see if Miranda Hart was right about Derek Rowan or his son driving the car. Tommy looked taken aback, then flattered, then got all serious and businesslike about it.

Then he said, "I’ll still have to do the four masses tomorrow morning, Ed."

"Maybe the Omega Man will suspend hostilities for Christmas Day," I replied.

Tommy didn’t know whether I was being serious or not. Neither did I. My mind was still reeling at the dumb show Bomber Folan had presented to us. A shrink I went to for a while after my daughter died, until he refused to see me unless I could at least be sober once a week for the hour-long session and I decided that that was not going to be possible, told me that in London during Jacobean times, people used to go to Bedlam to look at the lunatics in the way rich socialites used to swing by Harlem during the jazz age: it was what the smart set did. Eventually playwrights caught on to this, and inserted scenes with lunatics into their plays, in much the same way blackface sequences found their way into Broadway musicals, I suppose. I’d never seen one of those plays, but I thought of them tonight when the man with no tongue simulated anal rape in a red room beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I kept coming back to the fact that Bomber Folan had resurfaced two years ago, around the same time Miranda Hart had Don Kennedy investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, in order to have him declared dead. And now there were three dead bodies, all with close connections to Miranda Hart, all with the same tattoos, all with their tongues cut out: Folan had the tattoo, Folan had no tongue, Folan must at the very least have been known to Miranda Hart, even if it was just a case of sharing the same smack dealer.

Folan had put on a show tonight for my benefit. His parting gesture was to intimate that I should know who was behind all of this. The tattoo, the abuse, the tongue, they all seemed to be connected. If I were Myles Geraghty, I’d put Folan in a cell and beat the shit out of him until he confessed. When I saw his house, I was tempted to go down there and try that tack myself. I had too much information and not enough, the ideal time to take it out on someone weaker than you.

I called Martha O’Connor. She might have brought me too much publicity in the past, but if anyone could be relied upon to know what had happened to whom in which industrial school, she could. Martha was somewhere noisy, getting pissed and having a nice time. I was happy for her, and I said so. Not convincingly enough, however; soon she was giving out to me for being a killjoy and a scold.

"It’s not as if I go out every night, you know," she said. "Or any night, come to think of it."

"I know. I’m sorry. Are you with Fiona Reed?"

"Mind your own business YES and I think she’s really into me," Martha said, or yelled. Fiona Reed was Garda Superintendent in Seafield, and she didn’t like me, but I was convinced if she and Martha made a go of things, it couldn’t do me any harm. "Are you the last man working, Ed Loy? Take a break."

"You’re one to talk."

"If I can do it, you can. Even in the trenches, they stopped shooting for a day or two."

"Yeah, that just occurred to me. About someone else, though."

"The Omega Man?" Martha said, sharp as a tack, and abruptly the party noises faded.

"Jesus, Martha, what did you do, kill everyone?"

"I stepped out of the room. Is it the Omega Man? What do you need?"

"I don’t know what you’re drinking, but I’d ask for my money back, it’s obviously not working."

"That’s funny, Ed. I’ll make a note in my diary to laugh when I’ve time. What can I do?"

"I need to see a documentary you made about St. Jude’s, or that St. Jude’s featured in. The industrial school."

"Yeah, when? Now? Now is not great, but—"

"Martha, you’re on a date."

"We don’t all think with our dicks, Ed Loy."

"I’ll give you that one, for Christmas. Tomorrow sometime. I know it’s Christmas Day—"

"Big swing. St. Jude’s, Tyrrellscourt, Jackie Tyrrell, F. X. Tyrrell, Father Vincent, how does it stack up so far?"

"Is a highly ranked police officer leaking you her best stuff?"

"Not as often as I’d like. What time? She’s going to her mammy’s for dinner, I’m home alone all day."

"Maybe two, two-thirty?"

"The turkey twizzlers are on me."

   IN TOMMY’S KITCHEN there was a turkey and a ham, vegetables and fruit and a Christmas pudding, sauces and mustards, pickles and cold meats, cheese and wine, a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Jameson. Tommy looked at them and shrugged his I’ve-already-said-what-I-had-to-say shrug.

I went upstairs. She was asleep in the box room. More than ever, she reminded me of my wife: how vulnerable a woman was when she slept, how it was then that you saw the little girl in her. I thought of everything Tommy had told me about Miranda Hart tonight, and all I felt was pity, and sadness, and an urgent sense that I could help her, and that she needed me to. I shut the door behind me and made my way out into the night.