"A brother is loyal or he is nothing. I have no brother."
"Father Vincent suggested I should ask you about close breeding."
I don't know what reaction I was expecting; what I got was a weary shake of the head.
"Father Vincent should stick with his discipline, and let me stick with mine," he said. "Tell my sister I'll be waiting for her."
I found Regina Tyrrell in reception. She whispered to Karen to wait with Uncle Francis, and Karen gave me a little salute somewhere between a nod and a curtsy and made to go; then came back and reached up and kissed my cheek and whispered something in my ear, and half skipped, half danced across to join her uncle, who was standing by the door.
"Great kid," I said. Regina Tyrrell nodded as if that was beyond dispute, and looked at me impatiently, and I gave her my full attention.
"I have a proposition to put to you, Mr. Loy," she said.
"I already have a client," I said. "Your brother Vincent."
"We could pay more."
"He's paying plenty. Besides, I don't know that F. X. Tyrrell took to me."
"F.X. will do as I ask. We have our own security people, of course, but there are so many staff, here, and at the stables, and it would be good to have someone who's on top of the case. Not that I believe our lives are in danger, but…"
"I'm sure the Guards will offer some people."
"That would be good for business. Guards clumping around."
"I can't do it. There is someone…he's a little unorthodox…but I'd trust him with my life. Indeed, on several occasions, I have."
"He'd be under your control," she said.
I nearly laughed at the notion that Tommy could ever come fully under anyone's control.
"That's the general idea," I said. "I'll try and get him to you this evening."
We discussed money, and when she didn't haggle, I got suspicious. I was suspicious anyway.
"Ms. Tyrrell, do you drive a Range Rover?"
"I do, as a matter of fact."
"Could I see it?"
"It's right outside. Francis drove Karen over in it."
"So you don't use it exclusively?"
"I usually do. Francis borrowed it today. His has something up with it."
"He drives one as well?"
Regina nodded, already looking bewildered and a little bored by the questions. She nodded at me to follow her, conferred briefly with a trim blonde in a black trouser suit not unlike Regina 's who was presumably the duty manager and joined F.X. and Karen at the door. The Range Rover was outside and they climbed into it. I copied the number of the UK registration plate into my notebook. When I looked up again, Regina Tyrrell was standing before me, her face uncertain, her eyes wary.
"If you see Miranda…"
"Yes?"
"You will see her, I expect?"
"I expect so."
"And she's safe?"
"I hope so."
"Tell her…tell her…"
The engine of the Range Rover started, and Regina shook her head, and a wave of what could have been irritation at her inability to find the right words, but looked darker than that, looked like pain, rippled across her face. She turned and almost fell into the car, which took off immediately. I followed on foot down the drive.
On the way, I checked my messages. Tommy had left a voice mail saying that he'd met someone who knew Leo and Hutton in St. Jude's, that he was still in McGoldrick's and would I be okay to drive back to Dublin. And I got a message from Joe Leonard, he of the uneasy marriage and the garbage dump on his doorstep: a picture of him and Annalise and the kids with Santa hats on and the legend: Merry Christmas from the Leonards! So maybe I had a satisfied customer somewhere.
I walked back into town thinking about Karen Tyrrell. Ten years ago Regina would have been forty-two or forty-three, reaching the end of her fertility; many single women who get pregnant by accident at that age keep a child they would have aborted ten years previously: some go out with the intention of getting pregnant by an anonymous one-night stand. But nine years ago would also bring us back to the aftermath of Patrick Hutton's disappearance; nine years would be long enough for someone who'd been made pregnant by Patrick Hutton to have his baby, almost a year after his disappearance. That would help to explain Miranda Hart's less than fond tone when she mentioned Regina. It might also go a long way toward accounting for Miranda's self-destructive trawl through Tyrrellscourt in the period after Hutton's disappearance: hard enough for your husband to disappear, but knowing (assuming she did know) that he had impregnated another woman, an older, richer woman whose family had in a sense informally adopted Miranda and Hutton both: that must have felt like betrayal. I won't play the Judas for anyone, Hutton said; perhaps he already had, with Regina Tyrrell, and when Miranda found out, she made sure the Tyrrells got to see the ugly consequences on the streets of their own town. Maybe that accounted for Regina 's dismissive attitude to the marriage: not because she considered Patrick Hutton unworthy of Miranda, but because she had been in love with him herself. I called Dave Donnelly, and a couple of minutes later he called me back.
"Dave, I want you to see if you can get hold of Don Kennedy's case files. He looked into Patrick Hutton's disappearance a couple of years ago, so that Miranda Hart could have him declared dead."
"What am I looking for?"
I thought for a minute.
"Birth cert, baptismal cert, anything official. Hutton seems to have been a man without a past. And anything else that Kennedy turned up…I mean, he cleared the way for the insurance company to sign the house over to Miranda, but any time you do a trawl like that, you always uncover other stuff. Anything, even if it feels like gossip to you."
"Want to explain?"
"Not sure if I can. Just feeling my way."
Dave ended the call, and I kept along the road.
My thoughts turned to my own little girl, and the lie I had told, and how I felt about telling it. It hadn't been about me: it was to spare Karen Tyrrell's feelings. Not that she needed me to. Kids don't live in quite such dread of death as adults do. But it reminded me of the relief I had felt when my daughter was born, that I was no longer the center of my own world, she was. I had moved contentedly away from center stage in my own life. I remember the initial vertigo, and then the thrill, the rush to embrace the natural feeling that a new generation is more important than your own. And the grief of her death was accentuated and prolonged by my revulsion at having to deal with myself and my own feelings: it felt like indulgence, or worse: I made myself sick. A month ago, I wouldn't have told a lie about Lily, even to say she would have been nine, instead of five, let alone that she was alive when her ashes lay scattered in the ocean at Santa Monica under an indifferent sky. But I told it, and I was glad I had, and Karen Tyrrell's kiss on my cheek had made me feel closer to Lily than three years of drinking and fucking and fighting had. I said a prayer, or something like a prayer, offering it up to the clear, starry sky, then slipped and nearly fell on an early frost outside McGoldrick's pub. I righted myself, hand on cold railings, my breath pluming in the freezing air, relieved to be upright with blood in my veins, the living voices from the pub swirling around my head; relieved to be among the living, with the memory of what Karen Tyrrell had whispered still fresh in my ears: Don't look so sad.
Before I went inside I played a hunch. I called the bookie whose mobile number I had found in Hutton's pocket.
"Yes, friend?" came the reply.
"Jack Proby?" I said.
"Who wants to know?"
"Edward Loy. I'm a friend of Miranda Hart's. I'd like to talk to you about a horse called By Your Leave."
"Yeah? What are you, friend, some kind of journalist?"