"The Price of Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Declan)

EIGHT

Dave didn't say a word on the drive back. The sleet had stopped, and when we got out of the car in Quarry Fields, the air was fresh and crisp, and a star-flecked fissure had cleft the sky. The ground was snapping underfoot as we walked up the drive.

I checked my phone. Tommy had sent me a text message, all in capitals: WATCH OUT! LEO'S AFTER YOU! I figured having a high-ranking Garda detective as my guest was a reasonable precaution against anything Leo Halligan might do.

I brewed a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. Dave started by saying that Aidan Coyne, the Guard who'd been on duty at the mortuary, had worked with him at Seafield, that he was a good lad and that he wouldn't breathe a word to anyone about our visit. It was known in Bray station that Dave had served with Don Kennedy, and nobody was very happy about how Dave had been sidelined in the investigation. And there was always resentment when the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation started throwing their weight around with the local force, especially if Myles Geraghty had anything to do with it. Dave had told Aidan a version of the truth: that he wanted to say a few quiet prayers for a fallen comrade.

When the coffee was ready I poured two mugs. I had put the heat on, but Dave was shivering, and he asked if he could have some Jameson in his. That struck me as a good idea, so I had some in mine too. We drank for a while in silence. I knew he was waiting for me to spill all I knew. I was happy enough that we had made a deal. We just needed to check the small print before we took it any further.

"Dave, I'm not looking for a partner here. I want to be free to do things the way I would do them. And if that means withholding information, or taking a risk by following a hunch-"

"Or riding the arse off one of the chief suspects, or all of them; yeah, I know how you work, Ed."

Dave guffawed in what struck me as a rather forced manner, and I pretended to, hoping my laughter would spare my blushes, or his; I'd never heard him make that kind of remark before, and he didn't seem relaxed about having made it. I wondered briefly if Dave had been the one tailing me tonight. Not that Miranda Hart was a suspect. I didn't even know what the case was yet-another reason I didn't want anyone looking over my shoulder.

"Don't worry-you won't have to answer to me. I'll feed you whatever you need, and you can go your own way."

"If I didn't trust you, Dave, I'd think I was being set up. You're not setting me up, are you?"

"Ed, this fucker Geraghty is a bad cop. He's a rotten cop. I don't want to tell you what I know about him, but let's just say anything that can publicly embarrass him, any way I can trip the cunt up, anything to help push him out the door and I'll be happy."

"I don't get it, Dave. What's in it for you? I mean, say we get to the killer, or killers, before the Garda investigation does. We've still got to hand it over. I can't arrest murderers myself. And no one's going to give you credit for conducting some kind of maverick case. Quite the opposite."

"Well, let's say that's my lookout, and leave it at that," Dave said bluntly, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. He laid a spiral bound reporter's pad on the table and looked at me expectantly.

A cat or a fox set the security light on in the back. I stared out at the two bare apple trees in the center of the garden, male and female, their branches nearly touching and never quite. I wondered briefly about Dave and Carmel, then as quickly put them from my mind: they had been rock solid since school, one of those partnerships where you could never see the join-however much Dave tried to portray the marriage as if it were something from the Dark Ages. Carmel was forever asking me around to the house, but the truth was, the warmth and energy and happiness they had built there always left me feeling desolate and bereft. No, those trees were a gloss first off on my parents' ill-fated match, and latterly on the sorry chronicle of my own romantic history.

I didn't tell Dave that Vincent Tyrrell had hired me. But I went through most everything else: the likelihood that Don Kennedy was the PI Miranda Hart had hired at the insurance company's behest to find Patrick Hutton; the fact that Hutton and Leo Halligan had been apprentices together at Tyrrellscourt after their joint stint at St. Jude's reform school (Dave lifted his head from the pad for that one, his eyes wide, especially when he heard that Leo was fresh out of jail); the death of the racehorse By Your Leave; the consequent rift between Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell and its significance in Hutton's disappearance; Hutton's emotional declaration that he wouldn't play the Judas for anyone; the bizarre and formidable force that was Jackie Tyrrell and her insinuation, barely countered by Miranda Hart, that Halligan and Hutton had a sexual relationship; the omega and crucifix tattoos on Patrick Hutton's forearm.

Dave stared at his pad in silence when I had finished. He looked up and shook his head, smiling at first. Then the smile faded from his broad face, and his mouth set, and his eyes hardened and flickered like jewels, and I had a reminder of what it felt like to sit across from him in an interrogation room. It didn't feel very comfortable.

"I went to the scene myself, Ed. I knew Geraghty wouldn't like that, so I didn't tell him. But I went there anyway, and I did what I guess you probably did: I gave the body a quick once-over and then I called it in to Bray station, along with the tip-off about Vinnie Butler. Bad enough a private cop risking the contamination of a crime scene, but a real cop? Why would he do that?"

"I don't know, Dave. Why did he do that?"

"Because he knew that the private cop wasn't really to be trusted. He knew that if the private cop found something really juicy, he'd keep it to himself. And he wanted to find out just what it was the private cop was holding back."

"And did he?"

"There had been a piece of paper-a note, I'd say-in the victim's left trouser pocket. There were still shreds of paper adhering to the pocket fibers, which suggests that it had been freshly removed; there were mild ink stains on the pocket fabric, from which, as with the paper shreds, we might infer that the note had been through the wash with the trousers."

"Do you do this for a living?"

"What was written on the note?"

"The mobile phone number for a bookie who had a pitch at Gowran Park racecourse today."

"Do you know which bookie that was?"

"Not yet. But I still have the number."

"Anything else you want to tell me?"

"I didn't want to tell you that."

"If I told Geraghty you'd interfered with the body-worse, you'd stolen evidence-what do you think he'd do?"

"I have an idea what he'd do with me. What would he do with you?"

"He'd probably blame me for knowing you."

"There you are. Not to mention what he'd do if he was told you had given the scene a surreptitious one-two first."

And there we were. He had me, but I had him. MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, they used to call it when it came to nuclear missiles. Safe as houses, unless one of us actually went mad. Dave wasn't looking completely sane to me. He topped his coffee up with Jameson, laughing gently and nodding in private agreement with himself. Then he clapped his hands and almost winked.

"So what did you make of this Miranda Hart then Ed? Is she a looker, is she?"

It suddenly occurred to me that Dave might have formed as idealized a picture of my single life as I possibly had of his married one. I threw him a look I was more used to getting from him. The look said: Cop yourself on, you tool. It landed right between his eyes and spread crimson across his face.

"All right," I said. "Each man had his tongue cut out. Do we have any other points of comparison?"

"One: they were connected in life, in that Kennedy tried to find Hutton. Must have done a certain amount of digging. Two: they were both killed and mutilated elsewhere, and then cleaned up and deposited where they lay in the past couple of days. Three: they were killed in exactly the same way, strangled by hand and/ or ligature. Four: they were mutilated in the same way, tongue cut out. Five: they each had a small leather bag or purse full of coins."

"Did Kennedy have any tattoos?" I said.

"Not in the obvious places. I didn't get time to search the whole body. Nothing else was found on him."

"What do you make of the tattoos on Hutton's forearm?" I said.

Dave shook his head. He had copied them in his notebook. He opened it to that page, and we studied them in silence for a moment.

†?

"Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet," I said. "From alpha to omega: from beginning to end."

"From life to death."

"And the crucifix represents death."

"And life everlasting."

"What do you make of it?"

"I don't know. A serial killer who's into symbols and whatdoyoucallit, tarot cards and all this? That's grand for American films, Ed. In real life, I'd say it's all my hole."

I almost laughed out loud. That sounded more like the Dave Donnelly I knew, a man who assumed everyone else needed knocking off his perch, and considered himself the man to do it. If he were a T-shirt, it would read: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? That could have accounted for some of the tension between him and Myles Geraghty: they were both cut from the same cloth. Apart from Dave's not being a complete and total prick.

"Still, when was the last time you came across a tongue cut out?" I said. "That's a lot of work, and a lot of mess."

"Not if the victim's dead first. No blood to speak of then."

"But you take my point? Two in the same day? And both strangled too?"

Dave nodded.

"It's not rock solid, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if the MO was used by two different killers. And what is there no such thing as?"

"And the fact that they were dumped within a mile or two of each other-does that not suggest the killer's trying to tell us something?"

"That's the other thing I've never got about those films and all: why the killer wants to tell the cops anything. I mean, if he's happy being a mad fucker who goes around killing people, why would he want the cops anywhere near him?"

"Because it vindicates him as a person. The artistry of his killing spree is mythologized among the community at large, thus validating his ego. He is the superman, the cops humans every whit as petty and puny as his victims."

Dave was giving me the "cop yourself on, you tool" look. I shrugged.

"Hey, this stuff isn't just in the movies. These fuckers are real, and they're out there."

"I know, and it usually goes back to something that happened in childhood. Mammy never bought me a bowwow, boo hoo hoo."

"You know who you sound like, Dave? The man who, after I'd just witnessed a murder-suicide, and been advised that counseling was available to me, told me that what I really needed was a good boot up the arse. Your friend and mine, Myles Geraghty."

Dave reacted as if I'd slapped him; he leapt to his feet and wagged a finger across the table at me, his lips quivering as he attempted to form words and failed, his face red and contorted with rage; then he stormed out of the room. When he came back in a few minutes later, he was shaking his head as if in amazement at the behavior of someone else entirely, our mutual friend with the short temper. He sat and made a show of looking through his notes.

"I'll tell you this much," Dave said. "Myles Geraghty will go a long way out of his way to avoid bringing this within a country mile of F. X. Tyrrell."

"Why so?"

"Are you kidding? The queue to be F.X.'s best friend in the tent at the Galway Races, you should see it. All the politicians and the big rich. This is the man whose horses beat the Queen's, for fuck's sake: this was one of Ireland 's heroes in the dark days when no one had an arse to his trousers: he stuffed the English every Cheltenham, an equestrian IRA man in a morning suit. No one will want Tyrrellscourt anywhere near this."

"And maybe they'll be right. We've got Leo Halligan connected to it, and he's got form in this area, doesn't he?"

"Leo's a bad lad all right. Do you remember him, Ed? He was in our school."

"I know, but he was never there, was he?"

"He was always on the hop all right."

"I remember he went away to reform school for stabbing Christine Doran."

"That was bad."

"He was funny though, wasn't he? He was a brilliant footballer."

"He was a good footballer. He was a brilliant boxer."

"Fly, wasn't he?"

"He went up to welter for a while, but he couldn't keep the weight on."

"It was weird, even though we were all scared of him, everyone kind of liked him, far as I can recall. I did at any rate," I said.

"I wouldn't say 'like.' He wasn't a fucking psycho like Podge, or a slick cunt like George, but yeah, he was…for a dangerous bollocks, he was kind of normal, wasn't he? How did he pull that off?"

"I think, because you didn't feel he was gonna take you out for looking at him."

"Yeah. Mind you, Podge would, and then he'd come after you for sorting Podge out."

"Speaking of which. Did you see the Volvo? The RIP?"

"Was that Leo? Of course, there was all this, when he got out, he was gonna get you for sending Podge down. I'd've thought it would be a relief to them to have him locked away, he was becoming a liability."

"It all comes down to blood with the Halligans."

Dave looked at his watch.

"Time I headed back to the station, see if we've had any calls."

"What's the story with Vinnie Butler?"

"He's a Butler," Dave said, as if that were explanation enough. When I shook my head, he expanded, covering pretty much the same territory Tommy Owens had in his voice mail, if in greater detail: the Butlers were a large extended family scattered around north Wicklow and the Dublin border, into all manner of burglary, extortion, fencing and low-level drug dealing. They also spent a great deal of time feuding with each other over a variety of perceived slights and betrayals, real and imagined, one branch of the family doorstepping another with machetes and shotguns and, most recently, a jar of sulfuric acid: Dave told me the young girl whose face the acid was flung in was fifteen and pregnant; she was burned so badly she lost an eye.

"Geraghty set a couple of his boys on him, but I don't think he was dumping anything more than refuse. State of the body for one thing; Vinnie Butler couldn't keep himself that clean: half an hour in the back of his Transit the corpse would have decomposed. Geraghty's probably pining for the days of the Branch and the Murder Squad, when they'd have fitted up a gouger like Vinnie for this no bother."

The National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had been formed from the ashes of the Garda Special Branch and the Murder Squad, elite outfits that, like many elite units within the Guards, had quickly become corrupt and unmanageable; they had been disbanded, and then after a decent interval, the NBCI was formed. Geraghty and many of his colleagues had been Branch or Squad men; now stewing with resentment, they were tipped into a Bureau they felt was beneath them but loftily consented to dominate. A lot of Dave's problems probably stemmed from the tension between the old elite and new officers keen to make a name for themselves.

At the doorway, Dave turned and looked me in the eye.

"All right, Ed?"

"All right, Dave. You?"

It was as if a shadow passed across his face, or rather, as if I'd been squinting in the sun's glare and was temporarily blinded when it passed behind a cloud: when I could see again, everything had changed. I'd never seen a grown man look so like an anxious, lonely child.

"We're having some people round tomorrow night, Ed. Christmas Eve. Will you come?"

I was worried Dave might cry if I said no.