Declan Hughes - The Price of Blood

At Tommy's doorstep, after I'd said I wouldn't come in, and she said it was a sin to waste all that food, that she'd been looking forward to spending the day with me, and I looked at the ground as if that was any kind of answer, and she nodded, and suddenly there was fear in her eyes, real terror, and she looked as if she was about to howl with it.

"I can't tell you any more," she said.

"You know more than you're telling me."

Her eyes welled up with tears, her beautiful eyes.

"I can't…it's not my fault…I'm sorry, but I just can't…"

I shook my stupid head.

"Well, I'm sorry too, but neither can I."

I waited down the road from Tommy's until the taxi arrived to pick her up, and I tailed it until I was sure she was on her way back to Riverside Village. Then I drove to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, and found Tommy in the sacristy and took him through what I thought had happened.

"Who's going to cook our Christmas dinner then?" he said, which was better than "I told you so," but not much.

I called Regina Tyrrell and apologized for not having been in touch, and checked that she still wanted an extra man.

"Do you think we need one?"

"I think you do, yes."

I quoted her a price for Tommy and Regina agreed to it while he looked goggle-eyed at me.

"Time you took yourself seriously," I told him.

"You first," he said.

I gave Tommy the key to my house and asked him to pack some surveillance equipment in the boot of his mother's car before he left for Tyrrellscourt. Then I gave him Leo Halligan's Glock 17. He flashed a look toward the door to the church, then stowed the gun beneath his cassock and nodded gravely to me, as if to say he appreciated the trust I was showing in him. I didn't tell him I had no other option.

When I left the sacristy I saw Vincent Tyrrell watching me from the altar; he seemed insubstantial to me, like a wraith; I wondered if I'd see him alive again.

WHILE I WAITEDon the pier for Proby, I called Jim Morgan, a cardiologist I'd worked with on the Howard case. Once he'd gotten over his dismay at being phoned on Christmas Day, and once we'd established that eyes were not his area, he listened to my description of Karen Tyrrell's eyes, and suggested that it was possibly a condition known as heterochromia, that it was possibly genetic, and that if I wanted to move beyond the possible, I should find an opthalmologist and spoil his Christmas lunch.

Jack Proby was about my age, skinny and tall with boyish floppy hair in a seventies center parting and a seventies mustache to match and a mouth full of teeth that wouldn't've shamed a pony and acne scars on his long face. He stood at the start of the West Pier in a fawn cashmere coat over a navy suit and tan Italian shoes, looking like a hotel lobby was his idea of out in the open. The wind off the sea was cold enough to give me second thoughts too.

"The Royal Seafield know me," Proby said. "We can get in out of this."

The Royal Seafield was a Victorian seafront hotel of indifferent quality, but they did know Jack Proby, and admitted him even though the hotel was open only to residents, which is how I found myself drinking a large Jameson in a bar on Christmas Day, apart from Good Friday the only day of the year you cannot get served a drink in Ireland. Proby drank the same.

"How's it looking for you at Leopardstown tomorrow?" I said.

"What the fuck do you care?" Proby said. "Business, friend." His accent was educated northside, lazy and drawling; his voice was hoarse as a rule: it sounded like someone had cut him. I looked for a scar, but he wore his collar high.

"All right: Are you still tied to the Halligans because of what they've got on your old man?"

"What have they got?"

"Photos of him and Leo Halligan. Photos his family wouldn't like to see. Let alone the great Irish public."

Jack Proby suddenly looked like his collar was a size too small for him; he worked his neck around and blinked his eyes and sniffed.

"What is this? Is this blackmail, friend? 'Cause I tell you, if it is-"

"It isn't. It's tell me what I want to know and don't be a fucking prick."

"Because I know some important people in this town-"

"See, you've won already. The only important people I get to meet hire me to clean up the mess they make because they spent too much time with corrupt moneygrubbing scumbags like you. And afterward, they don't want to know me. The feeling's mutual, mind. Believe me, I've places I'd rather be today and all. Anywhere tops the list."

Proby, calculating I'd got the market in aggressiveness tied up for the moment, nodded his consent, as if to a waiter.

"All right," I said. "To be honest, I don't much care if you're feeding the Halligans tips or if they're feeding you the inside on Tyrrellscourt horses-"

"George Halligan is a legitimate player now, friend, he has horses in half a dozen stables, not just F. X. Tyrrell's."

"That's what makes our system so great, isn't it? Any murdering drug-dealing scum-sucking savage can call himself an entrepreneur and be forgiven. Business washes us all clean. But I'm not one of the ruthless boys in a hurry, impatient to get on with making and building and storing up wealth for the winter months. I'm one of the laggards, the stick-in-the-muds who are always looking back, endlessly worrying about some sticky little detail everyone else is too busy going forward to be bothered with."

Proby looked at me as if the whiskey had gone to my head. Maybe it had. Get a refund if it hadn't. Proby signaled to the waiter for more. I shook my head, but he pointed to himself. He leant forward, all confidential.

"Look, I'm not proud of the life I led for a stretch there, in the late nineties…I ran with a pretty wild crowd…did a bit of this and that…but I swear, I was never a pimp."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Miranda told me. Mind you, she tends to lie."

The waiter brought Proby his second whiskey and he drank half of it back in one, and within seconds, seemed to turn into himself. He was that kind of drinker.

"She's not lying about that. We were both strung out for a while…I came out of a failed marriage, and she, well, there was the whole Patrick Hutton thing, you know? She was still freaking out about all that. But it was, it started off as, just a great time down there, party town, coke, champagne, all this bread, and I was doing some work for the old man, but it was so easy to keep George Halligan sweet. We had enough of the jockeys to spread the fixes to lay it so the betting patterns were never noticed. It was a fucking operation. Coining it. Beautiful, so it was. And then came heroin."

"Whose idea was that?"

"I don't remember. Because I asked myself that, like with some mad fucking bird you wake up with, you know, retrace your steps, locate the fatal moment, don't do this at home, kids. But I can't…eventually it was that ponytail guy who ended up barman in McGoldrick's, unbelievable, only in Tyrrellscourt would a smack dealer be taken on as head barman, what's this his name was?"

"Steno?"

"Steno, the very fellow. Anyway, we got into it, and after a while, you start running low on readies, no matter who you are, drugs cost a lot of bread, so Miranda decides to sell her stuff. I didn't like it, I argued against it, I was supposed to be her boyfriend, for fuck's sake, but…I was out of it anyway. What was I gonna do?"

Proby shrugged and finished his whiskey and immediately waved up two more.

"And why do you think, was there any other reason for her to get into heroin? Apart from it being there?"

"I think…well, I think after the whole thing with the baby, she found it hard to get back on track."

"What baby?"

"She had a kid…I can't really remember the order of events back then…but she had a kid and gave it up for adoption…would it have been before Hutton took off? Or afterward? I think afterward, yeah, that's why she gave it up, because he took off."