Declan Hughes - The Price of Blood

"In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one."

EVERYONE WAS TALKINGabout the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave appeared at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down them. He raised a finger to his lips, then went around the rooms, turned the music off in one and brought the noise level down in the others, then reappeared at the kitchen end of the hall and unlocked the door that led to the converted garage. Dave had wanted this space to be a den, or a home office; Carmel had argued for a family room, or somewhere she could start one of the business ideas she had had but never pursued; eventually it had become a garage with plasterwork: old computers, a canoe, a cutting machine for dressmaking, a swingball set, a turntable, two VCRs, the kids' old schoolbooks, Dave and Carmel's old schoolbooks, you name it. Dave locked the door behind him and found a chair without turning on the light; I sat on a railway trunk in the dark.

"Thanks for coming, Ed," he said in a low, anxious voice.

"I wouldn't have missed it. What's up?"

"Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger, it's just-"

"Sure, I understand. What have you got, Dave?"

"The latest from the postmortem. Hutton's body was frozen. It still hadn't completely thawed out. It means establishing a time of death is much more difficult, maybe impossible. They probably have to mess with entomology, what bugs were frozen when. But that'd take days in normal time: over Christmas in Ireland, it could be March. Both Hutton and Kennedy were killed elsewhere and moved to the scene. Each was strangled by hand: there are scars consistent with fingers digging into the neck; there's some matter that may be fingernail debris, from which DNA might possibly be extracted, in the event that we ever get ourselves a suspect."

"And all of this applies to Jackie Tyrrell as well?"

"Except it seems as if the killer was wearing gloves this time: there are fewer finger tears at the neck. And one more thing. The bags of coins found on Kennedy and Hutton. There was another on Jackie Tyrrell's body. Same kind of bag each time, leather pouch with a drawstring. And there were thirty coins in each, thirty single euro coins. Remember your gospel?"

"Judas. Thirty pieces of silver. That's the last thing anyone remembers Patrick Hutton saying: 'I won't play the Judas for anyone.' And the tongues cut out: Does that mean the betrayal lay in telling someone something? In confessing? Or in not speaking up?"

"Either way, some kind of betrayal."

"And now someone is making people pay for that betrayal."

I thought of Father Vincent Tyrrell kissing me on the mouth this morning. After I'd gotten over the shock, I had thought it seemed at once deliberate and cryptic, a statement I was to interpret-a Judas Kiss?

"We still have no ID on the body, Ed."

"What do they make of the tattoos?"

"They've got hold of a few people from Trinity College, a professor of art history and someone who works in heraldry-they're both writing up reports. But I don't see it that way."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, a serial killer works at random, right? And then he does something to tie it all together, he only kills young women, or gay men, or whatever. And if he uses symbols or leaves tags, it's a kind of taunt to the cops: I'm smarter than you. Come and get me if you think you're good enough."

"Yeah?"

"But in this case, the victims are linked: they're all connected to a horse race in 1997, to a stable, to a town and to a family. So there's a different kind of logic going on. It's like the killer is saying, understand why I'm doing this. I have a plan, and it has a logic, and you better work it out before…"

Before Miranda Hart is murdered, I thought. But the face I summoned up was not Miranda's, but Regina Tyrrell's daughter, Karen: I could see her eyes, one blue, one brown, shimmering in the dark.

"I laid it out for Geraghty, Dave. I gave him enough to connect Kennedy and Jackie Tyrrell, which gives him Hutton-not an ID, but at least the lead."

"He doesn't want to see it that way, Ed. He wants his own serial killer, with biblical quotes and runic symbols. And he has enough evidence tending in that direction to ignore anything that doesn't."

"And he lacks a wise senior colleague he trusts who'd be better able to advise him."

"Something like that."

"What about Vinnie Butler?"

"They're running forensics on his van. He denies everything, including even being at the dump, but you'd expect that. My gut tells me no, but you never can tell with the Butlers."

"Anything on Don Kennedy?"

"There was a team trawling through his home office today. They've sealed it over Christmas, but I've got the key. I'll slip out tomorrow."

"Okay. There's an industrial school in Tyrrellscourt, St. Jude's, I think it figures in this, too. I'm seeing someone tomorrow about it."

"Not your one off the telly? Fuck's sake, Ed-"

"What do you want? She's the expert. And fuck it, you might need the publicity badly this time, when you get the killer and Myles Geraghty insists on taking all the credit."

There was a long silence, and I could hear Dave breathing deeply, as if trying to keep a lid on something. When he spoke, it was in a tremulous, quavering voice, as if he was trying to sound happy about something and not making out too well with it.

"Sadie pegged out in my arms, she's the only one in the house who still believes in Santa. I made a doll's house for her, I was up nights most of November building the fucking thing. I always do November off the booze. Good to have something to do then. Otherwise you start noticing all sorts of stuff you wish you hadn't. But you should have seen her little face tonight, Ed, I swear, looking at them when they sleep…you'd swear there wasn't a thing astray, not a single thing in the world."

Dave did the breathing thing again, then got up and unlocked the door.

"Better leave it awhile before you go."

"Sure," I said. "Thanks, Dave."

I sat in the dark for five or ten minutes, and then I looked out, and saw no one in the hall, and made it to the front door again. I could hear low murmurs from the living room, and I thought I'd make a quick escape, but then I remembered Carmel had taken my coat and put it upstairs, so I went up to get it. As I climbed the stairs, I thought I could hear a noise from the master bedroom. I figured the boys were in there watching TV. I found my coat in one of the boys' bedrooms. I stepped out onto the landing and the door to the master bedroom flew open and Carmel stood there, panting, her hair all mussed up and her lipstick smeared, and I had an intense flash of my mother in a doorway just like this one, in the house in Quarry Fields that was more like this than not; in the room behind my mother was a man putting on his clothes: the man who killed my father. In the room behind Carmel, who was smiling desperately, even though we both knew there were tears in her eyes, was a man adjusting his shirt: Myles Geraghty.

I'd parked around the corner near the hotel, and that's where Carmel caught me up; I could hear her shoes clipping up the road after me; she must have kept her heels on, was the lurid thought, and image, that came unbidden and unwanted into my head. I didn't want to look at her, but she tugged on my shoulder and spun me around. Her eye makeup had melted into two black smears across eyes prickling with what looked like desperation.

"Ed, please don't…it wasn't what you thought…" she said, the words fading in and out of range on the ebb and flow of her emotion.

"Don't dem…all right, Carmel, what was it, then? Are we gonna agree to pretend it wasn't what we know it was? Don't-"