"So there'd be boys who knew Patrick Hutton?"
"Chances are. Boys who'd say they knew him. Anyone riding in Leopardstown probably won't be there. But you never know, they do what they please, jockeys."
"Tommy, what happened between you and Miranda?"
"What do you mean, Ed?"
"I'm saying, fair enough to ask her about the call to Leo, but there was a real edge between you two. Why?"
Tommy grimaced.
"I'll tell you over a drink."
"Why can't you tell me now?"
"Because you're not going to like it. And when you don't like something, you do better with a drink in your hand."
I pressed him a little further, and when we reached a set of traffic lights, he turned to me and said pretty much the worst thing Tommy could say about anyone.
"Ed, I know her."
THE VILLAGE IS on a slope, and at its top, you can see the Tyrrellscourt gallops stretching out below in two lazy figure-of-eights for the horses' round and straight work. Driving down along the main street was like one of those posed features in a color supplement about "The Subcultures of Our Time": there were new-age crusties and tree huggers with multicolored sweaters and tights and those strange cropped-pate and pigtail haircuts with dogs on strings and petitions to save the whale, and the world; there were older hippies in saris and denim and leather, with mustaches and ponytails and nature shoes and raddled complexions; there were horsey, country types in Barbours and yellow and crimson and lime cords; there were obese white-faced teenage Goths in long leatherette coats and vast black T-shirts and six-inch steel-inlaid wedges; there were the usual complements of cheerful or surly layabouts, faces weather-beaten from standing smoking outside the pub or the betting shop all day; there were clutches of stripe-shirted men with mobile phones and oblong glasses thrusting their entrepreneurial way into the future; there were spiked-fin rugby boys and primped and groomed OMIGOD girls; there were slender, fine-boned blond women from Poland and Lithuania with their crop-headed sinewy men; there were 'oul ones with walking frames and tartan shopping trollies getting the last of the Christmas messages, and 'oul fellas with papers rolled tight beneath their arms, transporting their custom from one pub to another.
It was Christmas Eve in Tyrrellscourt, and everywhere there was tinsel and holly and flashing neon and twinkling fairy lights; last-minute bargains were being bruited from shop doorways, and the queues from the two butchers for turkeys and hams together ran the length of the town. At the bottom of the main drag the road forked in two, and there was a central meeting place with benches and flower beds and a great Christmas tree, and throngs of folk were gathered to gossip and idle and pass the compliments of the season back and forth. An accordion-playing trio from Central Europe was providing musical backing to the festive hordes; as we passed, they finished "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and kicked into "Carolan's Welcome," a traditional tune from the seventheenth-century blind Irish harper. I began to laugh at this point, and Tommy turned to me.
"You know when Yanks say to you, 'Oh, you're so lucky to live in Ireland,' like it's some fucking Celtic theme park full of characters and crack and gargle? And we're like, no, it's just like anywhere else, except with rain? Well, sometimes that's what Tyrrellscourt is like. It's like visiting Ireland for an Irish person."
We braked suddenly as a BMW Estate pulled out of its parking spot, and then Tommy smartly rolled the Volvo into its place and killed the engine. He flipped a half-smoked roll up from his shirt pocket to his mouth, lit it and exhaled with a grin.
"Of course, by half three, the light will be dying, and the freeze will be kicking in, and half the town will be pissed, and the other half will be getting there, and the blood will be up and the knives will be out, and all of this fucking…Brigadoon will just…"
Tommy held his hand out to the color and bustle of the town, and raised it in a parting wave.
"See ya…"
EVERYONE PASSES THROUGH McGoldrick's, Tommy said, so it only seemed right that we did too. It had a traditional frontage and an old mahogany bar with snugs on either side; double doors led through to a larger lounge and restaurant area; at the end of this another set of doors gave onto a vast room that looked like an old warehouse: girders had been painted pillar-box green and floorboards had been waxed and tossed with sawdust and old suitcases and books and vintage bicycles and typewriters were stacked on shelves and in alcoves; lunch was being served from an open kitchen that ran the length of one wall by young staff with the striking looks and excellent manners of Eastern Europeans to tables filled with Christmas Eve revelers, mainly families with supernaturally excited kids. We retreated to the lounge, which seemed to have a more upscale buzz to it, judging by the high-maintenance sheen of its predominantly female clientele. Without even having to look at each other, we found ourselves back in the bar, perched on two bar stools and ordering pints of Guinness and bowls of Irish stew. The graying ponytailed barman, whose name was Steno, gave Tommy a high five and made fun of his short hair and close-shaven face; evidently Tommy had established a minor reputation down here for himself. I wondered if I should tell Steno about Tommy's recent career move to the Church. Better to keep that in reserve, I decided. The bar's customers were on the horsey Barbour side, chomping brown bread and pâté and drinking hot ports and yelping about Leopardstown.
"Later in the day, it all gets a bit…looser," Tommy said.
The foaming half-poured pints sat by the taps to settle, and I nodded to Tommy to get on with it, and he nodded at the pints, so we waited until Steno had topped them up and gave them another couple of minutes and at last set them down in front of us, the swirling brown now solid black, the heads creamy and firm. We tipped them back. I don't know about Tommy's, but mine tasted like the first pint God made.
"All right then, Tommy, I have the drink; now, tell me what you know about Miranda Hart."
Tommy grimaced, then raised his eyebrows to heaven resignedly.
"All right, Ed, but don't go blaming the messenger."
"Just get on with it, will you?"
"Right, I used to come down here a fair bit, '98, '99, things weren't going so well with Paula, better than before they started to go really badly but still, anyway, I was down here, doing, I never told you this, a bit of work for Leo Halligan. Don't get the wrong idea, Ed, only Leo wasn't the maniac everyone thought he was, and no one thought he done that young fella, he was covering up for someone else, or something else, and there was a lot of talk that he was happy to do the time, get himself out of the way. Anyway, I was doing a bit of work for Leo-"
"What kind of work was this, Tommy? For a Halligan brother? Painting and decorating, were you?"
"You were away, Ed, so you missed a lot of…when George and Podge Halligan were getting going back in the nineties, Leo was down here, trying and failing as a jockey. Not as if he was morally opposed to his brothers, he just had a different plan. After that plan didn't work, he hung on down here, and he became a kind of…I don't know, he was like, at the center of a whole bunch of guys, jockeys, a bookie or two, even a few racing journalists."
"At the center of them how?"
"He'd be buying them dinner, drinks, comping them to events, you know, gigs in Dublin. Lining up women. And a little dope, a little blow, a few E's."
"And you were his distribution network for the drugs, yeah?"
"Yeah."