Declan Hughes - The Price of Blood

Proby nodded stupidly, already drunk. He beamed as the fresh drinks arrived. I still had half of my first.

"Weird to do something like that in 1997, '98," I said. "Lots of women raising kids on their own then."

"Not Miranda. Not her scene at all," Proby said.

"And you don't know who were the adoptive parents?"

He shook his head, then held a finger up.

"Tell you what I do remember. Who introduced smack to the Tyrrellscourt scene."

"Who?" I said.

"Patrick Hutton!" he said delightedly.

"Patrick Hutton vanished after By Your Leave was put down at Thurles. Before Christmas 1996."

"Oh no. No he didn't. No, he was around, because he was around when the kid was born, except he was smacked out of it then. Wasn't racing, wasn't anything, just…hanging around town for it. And after that he disappeared. Kaput! I don't know if they were still happy families, but I remember the three of them being around. And then it was just Miranda."

Proby nodded, seemingly relieved to have sorted that out. I took out the photograph Miranda had given me and showed it to Proby.

"Patrick Hutton," I said.

"Patrick Hutton," he said. Then he peered at the photograph again.

"Except, that isn't Patrick Hutton."

"I'm sorry."

"That isn't Patrick Hutton. That's the other guy."

"What other guy?" I said, but his name was on my lips, had been from the moment Miranda asked for the photograph back.

"The jockey F.X. got in to replace Hutton. Only he didn't last long. He lost it completely, became a kind of wino. Bomber, they called him."

I could have prompted him, but I waited. He was the kind of drunk whose wits accumulate as the spirit level rises. He studied the photograph again, then lifted his weak face in triumph.

"Terry Folan," he said. "Terry 'Bomber' Folan. One for the road? Come on, it's Christmas."

IN MY CAR,I called Miranda Hart on her mobile and landline and left remorseful messages on each; the trip to Martha O'Connor's place took me past Riverside Village but there was no one home and the Porsche was gone. I stood by my car and swore quietly. If the body I had thought was Patrick Hutton was Bomber Folan-and I had been led to believe that by the photograph Miranda Hart gave me-then there was a good chance Bomber Folan was really Hutton, and either Miranda Hart was in league with him, or she was in his power. Bomber/Hutton was obviously a disturbed individual; if he was responsible for the killings so far, it was clear he had some kind of plan; it was entirely possible Miranda had been drawn into this plan out of fear, either for her own safety, or the safety of someone she prized. Jack Proby had told me Miranda had had a baby, with or without Hutton: that child would be about nine or ten now, and might well look like the girl Regina Tyrrell was raising as her own; I had thought Regina was Miranda's mother, they looked so alike; equally Karen Tyrrell could be Miranda Hart's daughter. Was Bomber/Hutton threatening Miranda's child in order to make her an accomplice to the murders? It was all guesswork at this stage. I called Tommy and left a message on his voice mail asking him to set up surveillance on Bomber Folan/Patrick Hutton when he got established at Tyrrellscourt. Then I got back on the road.

Martha O'Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house on Bachelor's Walk on the North Quays, within sight of O'Connell Bridge. There was an antiques store on the ground floor, and a hotel named after an American military cemetery next door, and African immigrants pushing children in buggies on the streets and on the riverside boardwalk; I wondered if the rare pleasure of having the streets to themselves on Christmas Day compensated for the harsh winds whipping in off the Liffey. An Internet café with cheap dialing rates for Africa and Eastern Europe was open down toward the Ha'penny Bridge. When I left Dublin in the early eighties, this stretch of the quays looked like a disused set from a Hollywood studio, the false fronts of a western ghost town; now it was peopled and dressed and animated; even on Christmas Day, it exuded the kinetic energy of a living city. It was bloody freezing though, and I leant on the bell for far too long until I heard Martha O'Connor's voice.

"Sorry, Messiah on full," she trilled in her Oxford-inflected tones.

Martha O'Connor had silky short hair like an English public schoolboy; her long fringe hung in her eyes, which were free of makeup, as was the rest of her pretty, youthful face; she typically wore what she was wearing today: jeans and a baggy jumper or sweatshirt which covered up as much as it possibly could; big-boned and wide-hipped, she carried more weight than she looked happy with; to my eyes she always carried it off well. I had never been in her apartment before, and admired it as she brought me into the front room whose three great sash windows looked out over the Liffey and south across the city to the snowcapped Dublin mountains; the wall to the rear had been knocked through, as had the kitchen partition, so that the entire floor made one great open-plan living space. The period plasterwork on the high ceilings was intact, but the furniture and decor was spare and modern.

"Good digs," I said. "Can I be your boyfriend?"

"You come with the wrong bits. Have you been drinking already? Jesus Ed Loy, you're falling apart."

"Business. Seriously, how'd a pointy-headed journo like you afford a place like this?"

"I didn't. My mum and dad bought it for a song in the eighties, when it was a total shambles; thinking ahead, I'd just been born; it was left to me when Daddy died in '99, by which time it was already worth ten times more; now …"

Handel's Messiah blared in the background, a melodramatic underscoring of the unspoken truth between us: that both Martha's parents had been murdered, and that I had helped solve the case.

"Just lucky, I suppose," I said, and Martha laughed.

"Well, yes, and it's vitally important for pointy-heads like me to have a nice place to begin with, preferably one you bought before the boom, or even better, with the mortgage paid off. That way, we can bemoan the dreadful property bubble and sneer at everyone's obsession with house prices and cheerlead for a bust in the market so that ordinary people can afford houses in the areas they grew up in and be impeccably liberal and PC about it all at absolutely no cost or risk whatever to ourselves."

"Not just a pointy-head, a self-loathing pointy-head. Is that cooking I smell?"

"It is cooking. I figure the kind of woman who falls for you, or on you, only knows her way to one room in the house, so I thought you might like your lunch."

"I did have a dinner offer, you know. She'd bought the turkey and everything."

"And what happened?"

I shook my head. I couldn't quite keep the brittle ball in the air; it was too soon, and I was too disturbed by what I thought I'd discovered about Miranda and Patrick Hutton. Martha vanished and reappeared with a tumbler of whiskey and a smile.

"Fiona Reed spoke warmly of you when I told her you were coming here."

"I'm sure she did. Was she here?"

"She's just gone. She's here most nights now."

"Listen to you, Anaïs Nin. How warmly did Superintendent Reed speak of me?"

"She said you were a total fucking bollocks who needed to have his legs broken. But I could tell she meant it with affection."

"Is that a diesel thing?"

"We'll do our own jokes, thank you. Me kitchen, you TV. It's all lined up."

St. Jude's was one of three industrial schools Martha looked at in the documentary, which was called Say Nothing . It was the least severe case, in that nobody had actually been killed and anonymously buried there, say, but it wasn't easy viewing. The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves, as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial; harrowing testimony from a man in his midforties who looked about sixty, red-faced and swollen, about the serial abuse he had suffered from the age of five, by religious brothers he named and others he said he never saw; a caption ran underneath his interview saying he had hanged himself before the program was shown; a bland nonapology apology from the archbishop of the diocese with a semolina face and a prissy, sibilant voice, who barely conceded that any abuse had been committed by priests or religious at all, in such a hurry was he to condemn "the wider decline in standards among society as a whole, particularly in the area of chastity"; a wheedling excursion in self-justification and evasion from the minister for something or other, keeping the shit from sticking to the government of the day, probably, that kept insisting, eventually in a rather menacing fashion, that what we had to remember was that these events, terrible though they were, all took place in a different time . The St. Jude's section ended with a bunch of apparently happy boys swarming around the front lawn with the river view, and the announcement that St. Jude's was now being run as a boys' home under the joint control of the departments of education, health, and social welfare.