The Price of Blood (32 page)

Pa Hutton was miserable, of course: he’d lost his job, and now his woman, his wife, and possibly his child, and what did he have? A spike in his arm, end of story. Leo Halligan tried to straighten him out more than once, but there was nothing you could do with a junkie: if they want to go all the way down to hell, you can either take the trip with them, or let them fall and hope they get such a land they’ll try and climb back up. Leo had the fucking nerve to have a pop at Steno once for feeding Pa the smack; Steno reefed Leo out on that one, told him if he didn’t want to find himself and his playmates another powder room, he could lose the fucking career guidance counselor routine. For a poxy little faggot, he’d always been a self-righteous cunt, right back to St. Jude’s days. Fucker was never done riding some young fella or other, keeping the lads awake at night grunting and fucking whooping, yet he had the fucking gall to object to the way Steno conducted himself.

Steno had no regrets or qualms about the manner in which he had stewarded the younger lads through the hazards of St. Jude’s, and he could have taught Leo and any number of other whores in that school the meaning of self-control: he’d internalized the crucial lesson, which was that you exercise caution and self-discipline at all times. Steno had never played favorites, he’d never had anyone more than once, and he’d always insisted on anonymity: a blindfold properly applied, a willing assistant or two. It wasn’t always pleasant; in fact, there had been times when Steno had wondered whether it was worth the grief. But fuck it: you done one, you done them all; easier that way, from a logic point of view. Easier in your own mind. And what was Leo gonna do about it? Go to the cops? (Steno knew what it stemmed from: Leo had always had a thing for Hutton back in St. Jude’s, and Hutton just didn’t go that way. Well, Steno didn’t take no for an answer at the time: he’d used Father Vincent Tyrrell’s room in the school when it was Hutton’s turn, took him on a kneeler. Hutton didn’t like it, and Steno hadn’t much enjoyed it himself, it had felt like a duty. Anyway, he knew Leo always blamed him for that. But Hutton never suspected him, and Leo had no proof, never had. If there was one thing Steno couldn’t abide, it was any kind of false accusation, no matter what the context.) And Pa Hutton and Bomber Folan didn’t have to come to McGoldrick’s, did they? He knew Leo had been pouring poison in people’s ears about him, but there he was in the bar too. Hypocrisy, some people would call it: Steno said it was just The Way Things Are. Don’t bear a grudge unless it works to your advantage.

So Miranda Hart had run out of bread, and Steno wasn’t gonna give her any more shit for free, and he didn’t find anything else she had to offer appealing; she’d always been a dirtbird, but she’d turned into a total skank on H; the golfers weren’t interested anymore, and she was reduced to blowing drunks for twenty quid in the back lane. That’s what she was doing, in the rain, when someone told Pa Hutton about it and he walked out and caught her sucking off Bomber Folan and went straight for Bomber’s neck. The whole thing was over in seconds. Bomber’s system was trashed by the smack anyway, so he was too weak to fight back; the worst thing about it all was, Miranda Hart kept working away down below while Hutton was strangling Bomber, as if she had lost any lingering sense of reality, and the rain teeming down on it all: that’s the sight that greeted Steno, like some nightmare act from the circus in hell.

Steno had a choice to make, and he made it quickly, with the usual calculation in mind: How will this work best for Steno? Simple answer: clean it up and hold it in reserve; the alternative—the Guards, and charges, and a court case, with all the damage that would be caused to the reputations of McGoldrick’s and the stables, not to mention Steno probably getting caught in the cross fire—was simply out of the question. You didn’t know what caliber of man you were until tested in extreme circumstances. Steno still felt pride at how he had comported himself on that evening. He had instinctively taken leadership positions because he was hardwired to do so.

It had been the work of seconds to gather Folan up—he remembered thinking it was like handling an oversize umbrella—and bundle him in to the walk-in cold room and lock him in one of the individual compartments; they were all padlocked in case the staff got the notion that no one’d miss the odd loin of pork. Steno got hold of that particular key, and insisted on taking full charge of the stocking and maintenance of the cold room thereafter.

Steno realized that this was one of those moments that changed everything, and that if you didn’t want to be led by that moment, you had to be a leader of the change. He got hold of Leo Halligan and Jack Proby and explained that there’d been an accident; he wouldn’t say what had happened, just that the days of the back room were done. Proby was scared enough to do what he was told, which was to get Miranda up to Dublin and make sure she kept her fucking mouth shut. Leo took a little more convincing; eventually Steno just went into the back room and had a quiet word with each of the respectable golfers and married jockeys about what the Guards (and/or their wives and families) would be told if they didn’t clear out right now and never come back. Steno could always clear a bar without raising his voice. That was Leo’s back room business finished.

Pa Hutton was the one who seemed to present the biggest challenge, but as it turned out, he lit on the solution to the problem himself. Himself and Folan hadn’t looked too dissimilar: same blond hair, same whippet build. The eyes were a problem, but tinted lenses would sort that out. And in any case, Iggy Staples was legally blind; he had a bit of vision, but not enough to make out eye color. Hutton, who had always been a dapper dresser, exchanged clothes with the dead man, and went forth to assume the identity of Bomber Folan, and live up on the Staples property, and the word would go out that Hutton had disappeared, and that would lay the whole thing to rest.

Hutton was eager to do it: he was half mad with guilt over Folan’s death in any case, and saw the whole thing as a way to atone for his sins. To each his own, Steno reckoned, at least it meant Hutton was close at hand.

And there it lay for a lot longer than Steno expected. Steno kept in touch with everyone—isolation breeds discontent, and if there was even the slightest danger that anyone was getting the urge to confess, Steno needed to know before they knew it themselves. He tracked how Proby got himself and Miranda into clinics and off drugs, encouraged Proby to get Jackie Tyrrell to employ Miranda Hart, visited Hutton after Staples died to see that all was well, and generally monitored the level of stability surrounding the principals in the incident. And gradually they grew to trust him, he thought, or at least, to rely upon him. And all the time, Steno waited for his opening.

It came when Miranda Hart hired Don Kennedy to investigate Hutton’s disappearance. The first thing Steno knew was when this fucking heap of an ex-cop lolloped into the bar, heaved his fat arse up onto a stool and started asking questions. Steno felt hurt that he hadn’t been consulted, but he knew that his feelings were useful only if he could transform them into something productive. He called Miranda and assured her that all would be well, thereby reminding her that it didn’t have to be. Soon Miranda was ringing him five times a day freaking out about all manner of things Kennedy was digging up. Steno wasn’t sure what those things were, not at first anyway, but they resulted in Kennedy blackmailing Miranda for a couple of years, until they’d hit on the new plan.

He still wasn’t sure he knew all of it—the part about Hutton being Regina’s son wasn’t all of it, he knew that much—but on one level, it didn’t matter: the dead couldn’t blackmail you. But he knew whatever it was had something to do with Hutton and Miranda. Kennedy had gone up to the Staples place and…well, it wasn’t known what was said, but the next thing, Patrick had gone and cut out his own tongue. Steno assessed that one and came up blank, unless you just called him a fucking mental bastard like everyone else: What kind of analysis could you make of a fucker who’d do something like that? But Miranda assured him later that Hutton was sound, and sane enough up there, clean and fit and back in training she said, and Steno had seen the horse, and fair enough, Hutton had his weight down and looked capable enough, and then gradually Miranda presented him with a revised appraisal of Hutton’s and her ambitions: the new plan.

The new plan. Steno had to laugh sometimes at the plan: the symbols, the tongues, the thirty pieces of silver, like one of those movies you watched on DVD, drunk with a pizza. He didn’t know whether it had all been Miranda’s idea, or whether it came from Hutton; the idea had been partly to throw everyone off the scent of what was really happening, but everything they used meant something too, and that appealed to Steno. Miranda had timed it to kick off when Leo got out of jail—she’d been communicating with him when he was inside, Steno believed, playing on his past loyalty to Pa Hutton—in the hope that Leo would join their enterprise. Steno had advised against this, but he was reminded yet again that working with a woman was a hazardous fucking endeavor: she’d sometimes agree completely with what you said and then go out and do the complete fucking opposite, like a monkey or a child. Leo had always been a volatile little fuck, and Steno had had no confidence that Leo would act in concert with them. That shrewd evaluation of the situation turned out to be more than vindicated by subsequent events, not that Miranda Hart had thanked him. But Leo was never gonna be a tout, not even to your man Loy.

Steno still wondered whether he shouldn’t have taken Loy out of the picture that night up in Jackie Tyrrell’s. He conceded privately that he’d been troubled by the idea of killing them both in one go, especially since Loy did not appear to present a clear and present danger—although Steno believed he was, and that he should go down. Steno suspected that he had succumbed to the worst kind of initiative deficit; he had weakly allowed himself to be defined as a hired hand, simply carrying out orders. Steno didn’t need reminders from history to understand just what a cop-out that defense was.

He hadn’t particularly enjoyed cutting out the tongues; at least with Folan’s, and even Kennedy’s, there’d been time, and so the blood wasn’t an issue: dead bodies don’t bleed in any significant way. With Jackie Tyrrell, Loy was on the premises and there were servants around and he’d had to work fast; he’d started on the tongue when she was still warm, and there was a certain amount of mess. It was a bit of a fucking downer, truth be told. He wouldn’t say it had rattled him, but it took all his concentration to set the body up on the ropes and ring the bells, and lay in wait for Loy and
not
kill him, and maybe that was how Steno glossed over what deep down he considered a failure on his part: despite everything, he had stuck firm to his purpose, and acquitted himself with distinction. Spilled milk under the bygone bridge, whatever: he was ready now for what was about to ensue. The beauty-and-the-beast malarkey Miranda had been running with Hutton was nearly done. Brian Rowan, the head man up at Tyrrellscourt, was bought and paid for: he’d soon be assuming a lot more responsibility at the Tyrrellscourt yard.

Jackie Tyrrell’s murder hadn’t been part of Miranda and Hutton’s original plan, but Steno demanded it as the only adequate recompense for his ser vices: Jackie’s riding school and lands were all bequeathed to Miranda; Steno had made sure the papers had been drawn up in advance with Miranda transferring the same bequest to a company he controlled. All that remained was the final spectacular. It was that aspect once again that appealed to Steno: the
art
of it. Provided Beauty and the Beast played their parts correctly, and they would, he’d make sure of that. No, it would be spectacular, it would be public, it would bring Tyrrellscourt to its knees at last—Steno just wished he could sign his name to it. Maybe that was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Not that Steno expected anyone else to understand that.

He looked at Miranda Hart before they got in the Range Rover, and mentally shook his head in despair: her lipstick was crooked, her hair was askew and her eye makeup was asymmetrical. What a fucking downer. It was the problem with democracy, as Steno saw it: some fucking people, no matter what you gave them or did with them, they were never going to get their act together. She smiled at him, and he could see she’d been crying. Was he supposed to feel guilty about that? Well he didn’t. She looked scared. At least that showed judgment on her part. She had good reason to be scared. They all had. If there was an enterprise worth the hazard that didn’t strike fear into your heart, Steno wondered what it might possibly be.

   The door swung open and the cold relentless wind brought, first Tommy Owens, his hands on his head and his right eye bruised, then Miranda Hart, wearing riding boots and a long Barbour jacket and carrying a black Adidas sports grip, and finally Steno, who wore a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat like an Australian and had a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun in one hand. I didn’t check to see what he had in the other. Steno pointed the SMG at me, and I held my hands up and out to be searched. Just as the doorknob had creaked, just before the door opened, I had hidden the Glock 17 I was carrying among the cushions on the sofa. Miranda Hart appeared terrified, her hands shaking as she fumblingly unzipped the grip, her lips trembling as she produced hanks of nylon cord and bags of nylon grip ties and rolls of silver duct tape. Regina Tyrrell stared at what was unfolding before her eyes in astonishment and fear, then made a rush for the door, only to be brought up short by Steno waving the MP5 at her.

"Karen," she cried. "Karen! What have you done with her?"

"Calm, calm, she’s all right, she’s fine," Steno said.

"Where is she?" Regina said.

"She’s locked in her room. Miranda has the key. We’ve left food and drink there for her. It’s just for a short while, until Leopardstown is done. Miranda, why don’t you get things tied up with our friends here?" Steno said. "Take Mr. Loy first, if you would."