"St. Jude's," Tommy said.
Bomber, who hadn't spoken and didn't look like starting anytime soon, produced flashlights from a toolbox in the Jeep and gave us one each. He set off up the steps and unlocked a further three padlocks and set aside three iron bands and pushed the door open, and we followed him inside.
We found ourselves in a blue-tiled entrance hall. Bomber used his flashlight to guide our eyes. On the turn of the stairs, the Blessed Virgin Mary stood in matching blue; facing us, Christ hung from the cross, minus a hand but otherwise intact. Bomber set off down a corridor to the left, flashing the light from side to side to illuminate classrooms still filled with desks and blackboards. Cobwebs hung like lace curtains and dust clung to every surface, but the classrooms were intact, as if their occupants had stepped out in a hurry, expecting to return at their leisure. At the end of the corridor Bomber flung open a heavy oak door and waited for us to pass through. We were in a small chapel, with rows of plain wooden pews and, near the altar, individual mahogany chairs with padded seats and matching kneelers. Bomber hoisted one of the kneelers on his shoulder, wheeled around and headed out of the chapel again, turning at the door to indicate that we should follow. I looked to Tommy for some explanation, but he wasn't talking either.
We followed Bomber upstairs past the Blessed Virgin Mary and onto the first floor, where we filed through a spartan dormitory; the beds were separated into small cells by means of wooden partitions; a small locker stood adjacent to each bed, with a chamber pot beneath. Bomber had paused by one of the cells; he shined his flashlight on the side of the locker nearest the bed, where the occupant had carved some hieroglyphics; I crouched down close to see what they were. Bomber stared at me until I nodded to confirm that I had understood what I had seen; then he was up and off, through a communal bathroom and down a carpeted passageway paneled in dark wood. He stopped outside a door, nodded to us and went in.
The first thing I saw was the reproduction of Poussin's Last Supper, one of the paintings Father Vincent Tyrrell had hanging in his Bayview presbytery. Then I took in the thick-pile red carpet, the burgundy-and-gold-flock wallpaper, the luxurious eiderdown on the queen-size bed, the red velvet seat on the mahogany carver chair, the gilt-framed mirror above the marble fireplace, and the image of the Sacred Heart watching it all, although His light had been extinguished. Bomber's light was burning bright: he waved his flashlight and fixed his eyes on us as if to check he had our full attention. We nodded, and then he presented what amounted to a kind of grotesque pantomime. He took a black scarf from his pocket and wrapped it around his eyes, then he took the kneeler and set it down so that it faced the Sacred Heart; this left him with his back to us. He knelt down and rested his elbows on the arm rail of the kneeler and brought his hands together ready for prayer; he raised his flashlight toward the Sacred Heart and brought forth the first sound I had heard him make. I thought he was cawing like a crow, but soon it was clear he was making a sheep's baa. After a bit of this, he clapped his hands together and blessed himself, then bent down until he was on all fours, with his head beneath the kneeler; he brought his hands up to hang from the kneeler's rail, and with his rear end extended toward us, proceeded to squeal and roar and scream, like an animal in pain. He rocked back and forth on the kneeler until it tumbled over and brought his head crashing down on the floor, where he stayed, whimpering now, like a dog that's been beaten too much.
After a while, he picked himself up and turned to us, his face wet with tears and snot and smeared with dust and blood where he'd torn his forehead. He came toward us then, the beam of the flashlight pointing up from beneath his chin; in its glow, amid the falling dust, he looked like his skull was smoldering; when he took his blindfold off, his tiny blue-black eyes burned like red Christmas berries. He came up close and opened his mouth wide, and showed us exactly why we hadn't had a word out of him. Like Patrick Hutton, like Don Kennedy, like Jackie Tyrrell, Bomber's tongue had been cut out. His work done, Bomber smiled, and almost bowed.
As it had begun, so it ended: Bomber picked up his wooden kneeler and put it on his back and made his way down the stairs and out into the night. While he replaced the bars and padlock on the doors, Tommy Owens and I lit cigarettes and smoked them as if they were the eighth sacrament. The moon was down, and you could see across the road to the riverbank. From the upstairs windows too, from the dormitory cells, you would have seen the river flowing, keeping its secrets all the way to Dublin and out into the sea.
"Monasteries, convents, fuckers always arranged it so they'd have themselves a nice view, didn't they?" Tommy said.
I nodded, hearing Bomber moaning to himself as he fumbled with the locks, and suddenly found myself shaking with rage, my head hot and pounding; I walked down the drive and crossed the road, shouting something at the sky, I don't know what, nothing like a prayer, and stood by the river until Tommy came out and Bomber locked the gates and gave us a lift back into town. He dropped us off at the Volvo and nodded solemnly to me, as if we had made a deal; I felt like we had too, but the difference was, he seemed to trust me, whereas I was far from sure I could say the same. I held his gaze though, and he gripped my hand and used it to roll up his sleeve, and show me the tattoo he had on his forearm. The runes were familiar to me now; I had already seen them carved on the nightstand in the dormitory cubicle Bomber had singled out; they had been tattooed or carved into each of the murder victims; now here they were on Bomber's arm: †?
"Your tongue," I said. "Who did it to you?"
He grinned, and threw his hands in the air, and pointed at me, as if I should know.
"What does the tattoo stand for?"
He grinned again, and this time flung his arms wide as if to embrace the world around. Then he got back in his rickety vehicle and drove away.
Tommy wanted to set off for Dublin, but I didn't want to leave before I had more information on Bomber, so we sat in the car and Tommy told me what he knew.
"His name is Terry Folan. Bomber Folan, they called him. I got to know him slightly down here, he used hang around at the fringes of that crowd Leo and Jack Proby ran with. There was smack going around, not through me, I don't know who was dealing it, Miranda Hart would know. Folan had come through St. Jude's in the nineties, just after Leo and Hutton, and then he'd been given a start as an apprentice in Tyrrellscourt stables, too. He was given a few rides, he moved up, he was still around when Pa Hutton vanished, the odd ride here and there, and then it all started to fall apart for him, he was drinking, he couldn't keep the weight off, he was just doing yard work and then not even that. He used to be one of the drunks in McGoldrick's and then he was barred from there. You'd see him stumbling along the main street, you know, half ten in the morning with a can of Dutch Gold and a rough sleeper's tan? That was as much as I knew, '98, '99 that would have been, I dropped out of sight here then. Paula wanted me home. Those were the days, right Ed?"
Paula was Tommy's ex-wife, and the divorce had been far from amicable; the marriage hadn't been very amicable in the first place. After years of Paula's utter disdain at his uselessness, Tommy cheated on her at a party with a drunk woman who Tommy thought was in love with him; he then made the mistake of telling Paula, whereupon she promptly threw him out, and then proceeded to sleep with everyone either of them had ever met, and to make sure everyone else knew about it. When the drunk woman sobered up, she told Tommy that it hadn't been love, not even lust, just drink.
"Steno filled me in on what happened then, insofar as he knew. Apparently Folan befriended this old scrap-merchant character, Iggy Staples, who lived out of town a couple of miles, he…lived on a dump, was how Steno described it. It's actually Staples collected scrap but he never really did anything with it, he lived off his pension in a cottage that was falling in on top of him. Anyway, Bomber used to go up there and sleep, there was enough shelter, he'd pull together some kind of shed for himself. And Staples got used to the company, enjoyed it, and when he died, hadn't he left the place to Bomber."