"The Omega Man?" Martha said, sharp as a tack, and abruptly the party noises faded.
"Jesus, Martha, what did you do, kill everyone?"
"I stepped out of the room. Is it the Omega Man? What do you need?"
"I don't know what you're drinking, but I'd ask for my money back, it's obviously not working."
"That's funny, Ed. I'll make a note in my diary to laugh when I've time. What can I do?"
"I need to see a documentary you made about St. Jude's, or that St. Jude's featured in. The industrial school."
"Yeah, when? Now? Now is not great, but-"
"Martha, you're on a date."
"We don't all think with our dicks, Ed Loy."
"I'll give you that one, for Christmas. Tomorrow sometime. I know it's Christmas Day-"
"Big swing. St. Jude's, Tyrrellscourt, Jackie Tyrrell, F. X. Tyrrell, Father Vincent, how does it stack up so far?"
"Is a highly ranked police officer leaking you her best stuff?"
"Not as often as I'd like. What time? She's going to her mammy's for dinner, I'm home alone all day."
"Maybe two, two-thirty?"
"The turkey twizzlers are on me."
IN TOMMY'S KITCHEN there was a turkey and a ham, vegetables and fruit and a Christmas pudding, sauces and mustards, pickles and cold meats, cheese and wine, a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Jameson. Tommy looked at them and shrugged his I've-already-said-what-I-had-to-say shrug.
I went upstairs. She was asleep in the box room. More than ever, she reminded me of my wife: how vulnerable a woman was when she slept, how it was then that you saw the little girl in her. I thought of everything Tommy had told me about Miranda Hart tonight, and all I felt was pity, and sadness, and an urgent sense that I could help her, and that she needed me to. I shut the door behind me and made my way out into the night.
SEVENTEEN
I dropped Tommy off at the church for midnight mass, and headed back up toward Castlehill. Dave lived on a quiet road down from the Castlehill Hotel in a semi-d he bought back when he first graduated from Templemore with the help of some money an aunt of his in America had left him; he couldn't have afforded to buy a third of it on his current salary. I didn't want to go to Dave's party for any number of reasons, chief among them that it would be full of cops who wouldn't want me there, a feeling one or two of them would relish making plain. Another of the reasons I didn't want to go opened the door to me: Myles Geraghty, making himself at home. He clapped me on the shoulder as if we were the best of buddies and let out a loud roar.
"It's Sherlock fuckin' Holmes, lads, as we live and breathe."
"Language please, Detective Geraghty," snapped Carmel, snaking an arm around my waist and tugging me into the house. They continued on their exchange in mime over my head, which Carmel had tucked into her cleavage, which was on full merry-widow duty tonight and stoked with some musky aroma. When she let me up for air, something in her eyes was reckless, almost delusional; maybe she was just another party hostess flying high, but I wondered: Carmel had always had a sexy, flirtatious look that said you'd missed your chance with her, but only just; tonight, it looked like the "only just" had been set aside. She still had a great body, long-legged and rangy, but the dress she wore would have been cut too low and hemmed too high for a twenty-eight-year-old, and her heels put her maybe half a head below me, and I'm six two when I don't slouch. I certainly didn't object to the view, but it's not one I'd have relished in a wife; I saw Dave eyeing her as she danced me toward the kitchen and poured me a glass of lethal-looking punch; he had the fixed, glassy smile of a man whose car has just rolled back off the viewing platform and tumbled into a quarry while he waits for it to explode. Carmel told me I'd missed the prospect she had lined up for me, but that we had to have a good long talk; this having been established, she clipped off to more urgent business: swaying about drawing hungry looks from every man in the place, or so it seemed.
The party had wound down, but the dwindlers were determined to stay until the bitter end, despite the unwritten rule that if you're in another man's house after midnight on Christmas Eve, you'd better have a red suit and a big sack. The Guards had neither; indeed, a Guard I recognized from Seafield with no lips and no manners seemed hell-bent on proving he had no wits either: ranting lachrymosely and aggressively about how Christmas wasn't what it used to be, and of course it never had been, he had to be physically restrained from breaking to Sadie, Dave's angelic five-year-old, who was skipping about in a turquoise-and-lavender tutu with a magic wand, the news that Santa Claus didn't exist. Dave did the physical restraining himself, and he looked to me like he'd have enjoyed doing a lot more of it. The lipless Guard resumed after a brief pause with an ill-tempered, sanity-taxing tirade about how contemporary Christmas songs weren't fit to shine the shoes of the immortal classics of the genre, by titans such as Mud, Wizzard and Gary Glitter.
In the living room, the source of the inferior contemporary sounds, Dave's three boys, who were between ten and fourteen but looked like they'd been fed on beef three times a day since birth, were trying out their rucking and mauling techniques on a couple of Guards who wanted to show what good sports they were to three young female Gardaí who had drunk themselves to the land where the only response to any event is to shriek with laughter. The shrieks only got louder when Dave's eldest lad tried a handoff that was more like a punch, causing a Guard's nose to flow and his temper to fly a long way from where the good sports play.
In the back room, a few older hands were putting on a different kind of show for their juniors, and after sinking the punch and finding some whiskey and hearing the Butler family being discussed, I felt emboldened enough to insinuate myself onto the edge of it.
"They're a blot, a fucking plague all over north Wicklow, and there's nothing you can fucking do with them," a thickset ginger-haired comb-over said.
"Are they all one family?" a spotty young fella said.
Comb-over led the older hands in a burst of hollow laughter.
"You could say that," he said. "Put it this way: Old Man Butler wasn't fussy about where he dipped his wick. He didn't mind if you were his cousin. He didn't mind if you were his sister. He didn't mind if you were his daughter."
"He didn't mind that at all at all," said a skinny cop with a hook nose and floppy gray hair in a side parting.
"Oh, he liked his daughters very much," said Comb-over.
"He liked his granddaughters too," added Hook Nose. The young Guards were appalled and delighted by what was obviously a practiced routine.
"He was an equal-opportunities shagger," Comb-over said.
"'Twas the granddaughters that did for him though," said a crinkle-haired Galway man with a big mustache.
"What, his granddaughters killed him?" a round-faced young smiler said.
"In a manner of speaking," said Comb-over, who smoked a pipe, and would have strung this one out until New Year's if he'd been let.
"One of the daughters caught him with the granddaughter," Hook Nose said. "Not in the act, but in the bedroom, very cozy. She reefed him out of it, sent him home with a flea in his ear. Then the young one, she's what, twelve, thirteen, doesn't she tell her ma her elder sister's been going in the bedroom with Granda for years now. The sister gets home, the ma gets it out of her, she hasn't been riding him, she's just been sucking him off, as if that wasn't as bad. And Ma goes fucking mental."
"There was three Butler sisters in the Michael Davitt," said Mustache.