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

THREE

The broken bicycles and trashed stereo systems were strewn around the laneways and greens of Michael Davitt Gardens, a sure sign Christmas was on its way. Some houses had gigantic inflatable Santas and Rudolphs in their tiny gardens; some had flashing lights on their roofs, or tinsel and spray snow decorations in their windows; some were boarded up with bolts on their electricity meters. The pavements were carpeted with dog shit and broken glass; pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers festooned the gates and boundary walls; old trainers and plastic bottles filled with gravel hung on cords lassoed around telephone wires. There was nothing breathing on the street save for a few sullen dogs.

The two reg plates Leonard had given me were both for white Ford Transit vans; I had already spotted half a dozen on the estate; it was the vehicle of choice for plasterers, roofers, any tradesmen who had to carry a lot of bulky materials around with them, alongside anyone who, strictly speaking, wasn't a qualified tradesman at all, but who fancied his chances quoting low for a building job, completing half or three-quarters of it badly and then doing a bunk, or robbing your house and driving away with all you own, furniture and appliances included. Their drivers cut you off on the roads, and they let their kids ride up front in the cabin without seat belts, let alone car seats; they felt invincible in their white metal crates and drove accordingly. I didn't like white Ford Transit vans and now I was parked four doors away from Vinnie Butler's, trying not to look conspicuous in a forty-two-year-old Volvo with RIP scraped on the hood. I might have been many things, but at least I wasn't the cops.

Kids were drifting onto the streets: soon they'd be all over me, or at least, my car; not for the first time, I questioned the stupidity of driving a conversation piece, particularly when I didn't have any of the lingo: if something went wrong with it, I called Tommy; his telephone number was the extent of my auto know-how. I called Tommy now to see what he knew of the Butlers. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message. Tommy was a reliable guide to the dodgier citizens in south Dublin and north Wicklow, not least because he'd invariably had dodgy business dealings with all of them at one time or another.

I waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour, reading the same headlines over and over in yesterday's Irish Times and trying to ignore the three young lads across the way from me playing street hurling with a tennis ball. That's how I almost missed Vinnie Butler: when the ball smacked off my windshield, I turned to see the lads scarpering around the corner; when I turned back, Vinnie Butler's Transit van was pulling away from the curb. I pulled out after him, drew up behind the van at the junction that led from the estate out onto the main road, and tailed it onto the N11 and south for a few miles until it turned off past Newtown and headed west toward Roundwood.

Pine and fir trees flanked the road like troops massing for battle as we drove into the low winter sun's glare. I kept my distance, and when the white van took a right up a small track with a makeshift signpost reading CHRISTMAS TREES, about a mile or so from the Vartry Reservoir, I kept going until I came to a lay-by maybe three hundred yards farther up the road but still in sight of the turn. I got out of the car, produced a notebook and a pair of Meade 10 x 25 compact binoculars and made a moderate show of casting about as if I were interested in the wildlife, although nothing wheeled across the skies but magpies and sparrows.

About twenty minutes later the van piled out of the turn and I caught a brief glimpse of Vinnie Butler: burly, weathered complexion, tiny eyes, close-cropped brown hair. He tossed a fast-food carton and a soft-drink container and the colorful bag they'd come in out the window, flicked a cigarette butt after, anointed the lot with a gob of spit and hauled the Ford Transit back in the direction it had come.

My phone bleeped: Tommy had left a voice mail. He said, "The Butlers eat their young. They're a tribe of savages, Ed: cross one and ten'll come after you. The women are worse than the men, but it's not always easy to tell them apart. Vinnie is thick as shit, but he's vicious with it. They're caught up in any number of feuds over horses, cars, you name it. They sorted the last one out by burning a young one's face with acid. No amount of money is worth messing with the Butlers. Just walk the fuck away."

After that, I had little option but to check out what Vinnie Butler had been up to in the woods. The track he had exited led up to the edge of another encampment of fir trees, their serried ranks deepening in hue with the fading winter light, and then weaved back and down toward an old corrugated barn and a set of outbuildings; I couldn't see a farmhouse, but the fields ahead were fenced and cows and sheep were grazing; I breathed a tumult of manure and aging hay and fermenting compost; in the nearest field, an old blood bay was munching steadily on damp grass. A half-dozen freshly cut fir trees were propped up by the barn. Maybe Vinnie Butler hadn't come to dump his trash; maybe he had had legitimate business with the farmer; maybe he had come to buy a Christmas tree; after all, he had waited until he got back to the road before he tossed his lunch bag.

I turned and drove slowly back around, stopping when I reached a five-bar gate that opened onto a clearing wide enough to let a van drive through the forest; it was recessed at a sharp angle from the track and concealed by a modest platoon of pines; I had missed it completely on my way up, and I spotted it now only because I was looking for it-and because a white refuse sack clung to one of the trees. I tucked the Volvo behind the pines and climbed over the gate, which was padlocked and chained.

Well-worn tire tracks sparkled bright as metal in the hard earth as I walked through the forest. Pine resin initially chased away the farmyard aroma; after about ten minutes the fresh smell receded; by the time I reached the dump, I'd've cheerfully stuck my head in a compost heap rather than breathe the rank air that surrounded it. A hole about thirty feet in diameter had been dug and the earth banked up the sides; piled high within were bags of domestic waste: rotting food, soiled nappies, detergent and bleach and paint. A halo of flies hovered above the garbage, humming, and there was the rustle and snap of foraging birds and rats; great crows hung in the nearby trees.

On the far side, I could see the gleam of the reservoir water, and was drawn toward it. The edge of the dump was no more than fifteen feet from the shore. The reservoir supplied a substantial portion of the city's water. At least I'd have something for Joe Leonard that no council official or Guard could ignore. I took a few photographs and then climbed up the bank nearest the water to see if I could find some personal traces among the trash: a utility bill or two would be enough to nail at least some of the people involved.

I put on the surgical gloves I always carry and a set of shoe covers I'd packed because I figured the job might get dirty. I waved a scum of flies away and selected the driest-looking bag I could see, which was full of old magazines, and pulled it to one side and uncovered a bag of cast-off clothes, most of them children's; mixed in were a few broken plastic toys and two empty vodka bottles. Beside that I could see the top of a bag of shoes.

I reached down and tugged on the top shoe, thinking as I did, What's the point of this? What are you going to find out from an old shoe? Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the same make I favored; I could tell from the sole, barely worn, the mark still clear: Church's English Shoes. Not the same shoe; I wore black wing tips, this had a buckle, and it was burgundy, a Blenheim, I thought, no, a Beckett, the last thought before my hand tugged on the shoe and what was in the shoe, and what was in the shoe gave against my hand. I flinched and yelled out and snapped my hand back as if I'd just tugged on a live rat, and I tumbled down the banked side of the dump and let gravity take me to the shore of the reservoir. I could hear the water lapping gently, as if that could distract me from what I'd just disturbed: not a rat, a foot, visible from where I stood, a foot attached to a man's corduroy-clad leg, protruding from the mound of garbage and then slowly collapsing, like a guttered-out candle subsiding into a ruined cake.

All I could hear now was my blood pounding out a funeral rhythm in my brain, and through the beats a calm, measured voice that said: "Call the Guards. Wait until they get here. Explain what you were doing. Tell them everything. All will be well." What the voice said made sense, but I didn't listen. It didn't sound like me.

The victim was a well-or at least, expensively-dressed man, unusually lean and wiry, about five foot three, with a weather-beaten face and blond hair, possibly dyed, aged anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. He wore a kind of gentleman-farmer costume: rust-colored corduroys, olive-green sleeveless pullover, small-check shirt, brown wool sport coat. He'd been here-or dead, at any rate-at least two days, but not much longer: rigor had departed the body, but there was no sign of the abdominal staining or distension associated with further putrefaction. And there was no sign so far that the rats or birds had got to him. He'd been strangled, possibly by a ligature and by hand: there was a clear furrow around his neck, but a mess of bruising also; his eyes had been closed and it looked as if his mouth had been cleaned: there were no bloodstains. If I had to guess, I'd've said he'd been murdered elsewhere and the body had been dumped here within the last few hours-or possibly the last few minutes, courtesy of my friend in the white Transit van. I found four further things of note. The first three were a tattoo, a shredded slip of paper that looked like a betting slip and a small leather pouch full of coins. The fourth thing gave me such a fright I found myself back at the water's edge again, gasping for breath, the air cold in my pounding chest.

I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children's clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal contact. I went down and pulled grass and weeds and offered them from my hand; the horse feasted eagerly, steam rising from her coat like breath in the cold air; I inhaled her deep, musky smell, let her old teeth gnaw my outstretched palm, relished every snort and whinny. When I withdrew from the gate, and she realized there was nothing more to come, she wheeled around and took off back to her spot at the bottom of the field, the clump of her hooves on the hard winter grass like mountain thunder, thrilling to the ear.

Still shaken, I drove fast out of the forest of pines and down to the road and back onto the N11 and stopped off at the first pub I came to. It was a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet. A rough-looking Sunday-afternoon crowd of all ages was resentfully half watching an English Premiership game that could have been of little real interest to them, Wigan and Reading, perhaps, or Bolton and Portsmouth, the adults all drunk and surly, the kids bored and restless; the remnants of seasonal turkey-and-ham lunches littered the tables amid the full and empty glasses. It wasn't a very nice place, but I was very glad to be there, among the living.

I ordered a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness and a turkey-and-ham sandwich and found a quiet corner with a view of the car park and no view of a TV screen, and while I drank the whiskey with a little water, I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I had seen. Then I rang Dave Donnelly and told him some of it, including the need to get someone onto Vinnie Butler urgently. I told him it looked like the body had been killed elsewhere, then cleaned up and moved to the scene. I didn't tell him I had moved the body and I didn't tell him I had searched it, although I knew he'd assume I had. I didn't tell him about the tattoo either-he'd find out about that when the crime scene unit examined the body. The tattoo was on the man's left forearm: two symbols recently, and amateurishly, carved; they'd barely scabbed over. One resembled a crucifix, the other looked like the ancient Greek letter omega: †?

Dave went through the motions of reefing me out of it for not staying with the body until the scene had been secured, but his heart didn't seem in it: I guess from his point of view, having me connected with the murder would be an inconvenience. I needed to be free to dig for the scraps he'd need in working the case; in return, he'd feed me what he could, and look the other way when I stepped outside the law, provided I didn't do it in too visible a way. In case I didn't understand the latter point, Dave signed off on it.

"Just don't get that O'Connor woman involved, all right Ed? Thought you had more sense than to trust a fucking journalist."

"Sure about that, Dave? Far as I can remember, the way she wrote you up on the Howard case was one of the main reasons you got your big promotion to the Bureau."

"Your memory's playing tricks with you then, Ed. Knock off the gargle and cop onto yourself, would you?"

You couldn't slam a mobile phone down, but Dave ended the call so abruptly that it felt like that's what he'd done.

The other thing I didn't tell Dave about was the shredded betting slip I'd found stuck inside the corpse's trouser pocket, as if it had been through the wash. I prised it out and bagged it and pieced it together now. It had a mobile number written on it, faded but legible. I rang the number, and a hoarse male voice answered.

"What can I do you for, friend?"

There was a hubbub of voices in the background, and the rasp of a P.A. saying, "Winner all right. Winner all right."

"Was that the last race?" I said.

"That's the last done now, friend," the man said. "All off-course accounts to be settled in the morning."

"Did Fish on Friday place?"

"Did she what?"

He barked out a loud, derisive laugh.

"Best guess is she's still out there, friend. Maybe she'll be home for Christmas. Would you like to bet on it?"

I ended the call. Fish on Friday was one of George Halligan's horses, running at Gowran Park. The dead man had the mobile number of a bookie at the same race meeting in his trouser pocket. And when I'd held his face, back in the forest, his jaw had hung open, and his mouth gaped red down his throat, and I saw the last thing I decided not to tell Detective Inspector Donnelly. His tongue had been cut out.