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"And Vinnie," said Hook Nose.

"Well they were hardly gonna get Vinnie involved, sure wasn't Vinnie as bad as the old man?" said Comb-over.

"So the daughters took the old man down the seafront there in Bray, in and out of any pub or hotel he wasn't barred from, started at the harbor, ended up by the amusements, in full daylight this was, the wintertime, and they filled him full of drink and bullshit, bygones be bygones, nothing to forgive, sure nothing happened anyway. And the women were watching what they drank. And then they set off up the hill a little way and around the cliff path, work up a thirst for more, Da, they said, night falling fast. And when they got to the sheerest drop, little pick of a man at this stage, and two of the women twenty stone each, didn't they pick him up and fuck him down onto the railway tracks."

"And what happened?" said Spotty.

"Into the station with them," said Hook Nose. "They told me Old Man Butler had committed suicide. I asked them why he'd done that, he didn't seem the type, and they said that he'd finally seen the error of his ways, and then they each produced a statement detailing what he had done to them over the years. And what he'd begun to do to their children."

Hook Nose stopped talking, and drained his drink, and Comb-over passed him a bottle of Paddy.

"It didn't make pleasant fucking reading, I can tell you that for nothing," he said.

"You took leave, didn't you?" Mustache said.

"Ah, I needed a holiday anyway."

"But…how do you know they murdered him?" Smiler said.

"Because they were fucking boasting about it all over Bray that night. 'We killed our da, and we'll kill you if you fuck with us.' And Vinnie comes in three days later, the last to fucking know as usual, and he wants to press charges," said Comb-over. "They've told him they did it, they've told half of Wicklow they did it, and the other half know they did it anyway. So we prepare a file, and we send it to the DPP to see if they'll take it to trial, and he comes back with his decision: Not In A Million Years."

"It'd be a grand 'oul story," Hook Nose said, "like in a film or something, only for the fact that the daughters are fucking savages too, and they've raised broods of savages: junkies and dealers and whores. Every night there's joyriding or robbing or fire-setting or some fucking shenanigans up there and it's always the Butlers."

"What do you do though?" Smiler said. "I mean, there's always gonna be families like that on a council estate, families that drag the rest down. And the only sanction you have is to evict them. And then what do you do with all the evicted families?"

"They used to go to England," Mustache said. "That's where Old Man Butler came back from. With three brothers, you know what they were called? Seán, John, and John Junior. And Old Man Butler was called Jack. Fuck's sake like. They all had the same fucking name. Making a show of us in front of the Brits, thick fucking Paddy can't even think to give his kids different names like."

"Seed and breed, seed and breed," Comb-over said.

"When the blood goes bad, it's a hard job to put it right," Mustache said.

"It's the job of generations," Hook Nose said.

"It's not our job lads," Comb-over said.

"But seriously, what do you do?" Smiler had drunk himself earnest. "I mean, if it's one or two families, and you get them out, what do you do with them then?"

"Is this a social ser vices or a waste management problem?" Comb-over said.

"Burn them," said Hook Nose.

"Bury them," said Mustache.

"Recycle them," Spotty chirped, staying up late with the big boys.

They all looked at Smiler.

"I mean, it's just such a tragic set of circumstances," he said, sticking nervously to his guns. "There must be some way make an intervention, to break the cycle, to rehabilitate…some of them, at least," he said. "The children?"

Hook Nose and Mustache looked up at the ceiling and piously intoned the word intervention. Comb-over exhaled a cloud of smoke from his pipe, then leant through it and jerked his chin at Smiler.

"In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one."

***

EVERYONE WAS TALKING about the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave appeared at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down them. He raised a finger to his lips, then went around the rooms, turned the music off in one and brought the noise level down in the others, then reappeared at the kitchen end of the hall and unlocked the door that led to the converted garage. Dave had wanted this space to be a den, or a home office; Carmel had argued for a family room, or somewhere she could start one of the business ideas she had had but never pursued; eventually it had become a garage with plasterwork: old computers, a canoe, a cutting machine for dressmaking, a swingball set, a turntable, two VCRs, the kids' old schoolbooks, Dave and Carmel's old schoolbooks, you name it. Dave locked the door behind him and found a chair without turning on the light; I sat on a railway trunk in the dark.

"Thanks for coming, Ed," he said in a low, anxious voice.

"I wouldn't have missed it. What's up?"

"Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger, it's just-"

"Sure, I understand. What have you got, Dave?"

"The latest from the postmortem. Hutton's body was frozen. It still hadn't completely thawed out. It means establishing a time of death is much more difficult, maybe impossible. They probably have to mess with entomology, what bugs were frozen when. But that'd take days in normal time: over Christmas in Ireland, it could be March. Both Hutton and Kennedy were killed elsewhere and moved to the scene. Each was strangled by hand: there are scars consistent with fingers digging into the neck; there's some matter that may be fingernail debris, from which DNA might possibly be extracted, in the event that we ever get ourselves a suspect."

"And all of this applies to Jackie Tyrrell as well?"

"Except it seems as if the killer was wearing gloves this time: there are fewer finger tears at the neck. And one more thing. The bags of coins found on Kennedy and Hutton. There was another on Jackie Tyrrell's body. Same kind of bag each time, leather pouch with a drawstring. And there were thirty coins in each, thirty single euro coins. Remember your gospel?"

"Judas. Thirty pieces of silver. That's the last thing anyone remembers Patrick Hutton saying: 'I won't play the Judas for anyone.' And the tongues cut out: Does that mean the betrayal lay in telling someone something? In confessing? Or in not speaking up?"

"Either way, some kind of betrayal."

"And now someone is making people pay for that betrayal."

I thought of Father Vincent Tyrrell kissing me on the mouth this morning. After I'd gotten over the shock, I had thought it seemed at once deliberate and cryptic, a statement I was to interpret-a Judas Kiss?

"We still have no ID on the body, Ed."

"What do they make of the tattoos?"

"They've got hold of a few people from Trinity College, a professor of art history and someone who works in heraldry-they're both writing up reports. But I don't see it that way."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, a serial killer works at random, right? And then he does something to tie it all together, he only kills young women, or gay men, or whatever. And if he uses symbols or leaves tags, it's a kind of taunt to the cops: I'm smarter than you. Come and get me if you think you're good enough."

"Yeah?"

"But in this case, the victims are linked: they're all connected to a horse race in 1997, to a stable, to a town and to a family. So there's a different kind of logic going on. It's like the killer is saying, understand why I'm doing this. I have a plan, and it has a logic, and you better work it out before…"