"And what about the keys to St. Jude's? Is he the caretaker?"
"It's not a good question to ask around here," Tommy said. "Even Steno, the first time I asked, he just walks off, didn't see him for an hour, piano-stops-playing type of thing. There's a lull in the afternoon, he asks me through to the warehouse, you know the restaurant there, they're changing over from lunch to dinner. The way he put it, St. Jude's is a scar on the town? Like, everyone knew what was going on there, but nobody did anything. And there wasn't just one Bomber Folan, every year there'd be casualties, a lot of them'd go to England, but a lot stayed, and those that went away usually came back, because they weren't fit for anything, and there they'd be, Tyrrellscourt's standing army of drunks and drug addicts, of misfits and losers, getting barred from the pubs and shambling round the streets, a living reproach every one to the town's puffed-up image of itself. Eventually they got St. Jude's closed down, there was one more scandal…no, I know what it was, your friend did a documentary on it. Your woman, the dykey one."
"Martha O'Connor?"
"That's right. And all these stories came out, even into the nineties, some of the lay people were abusers-"
"Vincent Tyrrell? He was there in the nineties for a while, when Leo and Hutton were there."
"It wasn't in the program. I don't think Father Tyrrell…I mean, he's a bollocks, but I'd never have put him down for that."
"'The dykey one.'"
"What?"
"Is that how we talk?"
"It's how I talk. I've nothing against them. Which is more than they can say for me."
"Tommy."
"All right Ed, Jasus, you're very fucking Californian sometimes, do you know that?"
"How'd Folan get to be the caretaker, if that's what he is?"
"Nobody knows. Steno said no application has been made for the property, so nobody even knows who owns it, the Church or the state or what. But that Folan has the keys to the locks, whether he appointed himself to put them on, or whether he's carrying out duties for the owner, nobody knows."
"And what about the tongue?"
"No one had really seen Folan since Staples died, about five years ago. He'd come down to the town for groceries, and for his dole, but that was it. Then, about two years ago, he kind of presents himself, the head shaved, in the bar in McGoldrick's, drinking the few pints, not saying a word. At the end of the night, he opens his mouth and shows the whole pub why he's so quiet. Pleased by the reaction he gets, and away with him. After that, he's in regularly. I got talking to Steno tonight, told him why you were in town, he said Bomber's our man. When he came in, he remembered me. He actually can speak, he has enough of his tongue left for that, and to eat with. Anyway, I talked him through the whole thing, Pa Hutton, Leo, immediately he's nodding, he's got something to show us."
"And what a show," I said.
"Poor fucker."
"What do people think happened? To the tongue, I mean."
"They think he did it himself."
"I want to see where he lives, Tommy."
Tommy started up the engine.
"It's on the way back," he said.
Maybe half a mile after the turnoff for the country club, there was a narrow mud boreen indented with car tracks. It curved back toward the town for maybe half a mile, climbing as it went, then dropped suddenly toward the river. Tommy stopped the car before the drop, and we got out. To one side, you could see the golf course sweeping down from the rear of the country club; on the other, there was a steady incline; nestled in the valley between the base of the hill and the river, I saw a couple of mobile homes, old cars and car parts, a mound of assorted scrap metal and wood, a stone cottage with a light burning and the Jeep Terry "Bomber" Folan had been driving. The light from the cottage spilled onto a small fenced-in paddock around which a horse was steadily pacing.
On the journey back, I checked the plates of Regina Tyrrell's Range Rover with those on the one Tommy had seen leaving Tibradden the night Jackie Tyrrell was murdered. They weren't a match. I told Tommy that Regina Tyrrell had tried to hire me as her inside man, and that I had offered her him in my place; among other things, that'd give him a chance to check out F. X. Tyrrell's Range Rover, and see if Miranda Hart was right about Derek Rowan or his son driving the car. Tommy looked taken aback, then flattered, then got all serious and businesslike about it.
Then he said, "I'll still have to do the four masses tomorrow morning, Ed."
"Maybe the Omega Man will suspend hostilities for Christmas Day," I replied.
Tommy didn't know whether I was being serious or not. Neither did I. My mind was still reeling at the dumb show Bomber Folan had presented to us. A shrink I went to for a while after my daughter died, until he refused to see me unless I could at least be sober once a week for the hour-long session and I decided that that was not going to be possible, told me that in London during Jacobean times, people used to go to Bedlam to look at the lunatics in the way rich socialites used to swing by Harlem during the jazz age: it was what the smart set did. Eventually playwrights caught on to this, and inserted scenes with lunatics into their plays, in much the same way blackface sequences found their way into Broadway musicals, I suppose. I'd never seen one of those plays, but I thought of them tonight when the man with no tongue simulated anal rape in a red room beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I kept coming back to the fact that Bomber Folan had resurfaced two years ago, around the same time Miranda Hart had Don Kennedy investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, in order to have him declared dead. And now there were three dead bodies, all with close connections to Miranda Hart, all with the same tattoos, all with their tongues cut out: Folan had the tattoo, Folan had no tongue, Folan must at the very least have been known to Miranda Hart, even if it was just a case of sharing the same smack dealer.
Folan had put on a show tonight for my benefit. His parting gesture was to intimate that I should know who was behind all of this. The tattoo, the abuse, the tongue, they all seemed to be connected. If I were Myles Geraghty, I'd put Folan in a cell and beat the shit out of him until he confessed. When I saw his house, I was tempted to go down there and try that tack myself. I had too much information and not enough, the ideal time to take it out on someone weaker than you.
I called Martha O'Connor. She might have brought me too much publicity in the past, but if anyone could be relied upon to know what had happened to whom in which industrial school, she could. Martha was somewhere noisy, getting pissed and having a nice time. I was happy for her, and I said so. Not convincingly enough, however; soon she was giving out to me for being a killjoy and a scold.
"It's not as if I go out every night, you know," she said. "Or any night, come to think of it."
"I know. I'm sorry. Are you with Fiona Reed?"
"Mind your own business YES and I think she's really into me," Martha said, or yelled. Fiona Reed was Garda Superintendent in Seafield, and she didn't like me, but I was convinced if she and Martha made a go of things, it couldn't do me any harm. "Are you the last man working, Ed Loy? Take a break."
"You're one to talk."
"If I can do it, you can. Even in the trenches, they stopped shooting for a day or two."
"Yeah, that just occurred to me. About someone else, though."