"And that's the reason. She was probably being loyal. She knew what was going on. Leo and F.X., Leo and Seán Proby, too. And Leo got it all on film. Photographs of F.X. and Leo in some position or other. Shots that wouldn't look well on pages three to ten of the Sun during Cheltenham week. So F. X. Tyrrell belonged to the Halligans. Still does, I imagine."
"And so what do you think? Did the Halligans get rid of Hutton for rocking the boat?"
"I don't know. They could have. Not because Leo wanted it, but George might have decided to cut him out. Either way, he had become a liability. So the Halligans gave the word that F.X. could cut him loose."
"So George Halligan controls F. X. Tyrrell?"
"To a certain extent. I mean, the thing about George is, he's not stupid. It's like, if you have a restaurant and you can eat free there. Well, if you go every night, if you bring all your friends, if you take the piss, there's not going to be any restaurant. So George played it cute, a few scores here and there but nothing that's going to make the headlines, or push F. X. Tyrrell over the edge."
"And do you have anything to add to how you parted, you and Hutton?"
"It was…more emphatic than I told you. On my side, I was so fucking pissed off, we could have had it both ways: we knew what Leo had on F.X., and we knew which races were crooked; plus, we had the Halligans offering to make side deals with us. We had an insurance policy, all we had to do was play it smart."
Miranda seemed to wake up in the middle of saying this, wake to the realization that it made her sound like a cheap chivvying little piece of work. Again, to her credit, she held her hands up.
"I imagine this makes me sound pretty bad," she said.
"I imagine you wouldn't make yourself sound like that if it wasn't true."
"It's just, it was hard to draw the line. If a jockey pulls a ride for his own trainer, why is that better than pulling it for a gangster? It's the same thing, just a question of degree. And if you get more money from the gangster, and if your trainer is already in league with him…"
She shrugged, and flicked her hair, and pouted the way she did, and I could feel my heart breaking. I'd built her into a princess, and she was just a tramp on the make. Merry Christmas, Edward Loy.
"Ask me anything else, please. I really want to…to set the record straight, Ed."
She looked at me, unblinking, as if nothing had changed. And maybe nothing had. Maybe Carmel Donnelly was right, and I had fallen for another fucked-up woman I couldn't possibly have, or didn't want in the first place. I still didn't want to believe that. And I tried not to, right up until she heard me ask the next question.
"Did you ever come across a guy called Terry Folan? Bomber, most people call him."
"No," she lied, so quickly I almost didn't hear her. "No, I don't…I don't think so, I…or maybe…Bomber Folan, that rings a bell…"
She said a lot more in that vein, until she arrived at the lie she was happy with: that she vaguely remembered him riding for F.X., and that he could have been around afterward, hanging out with Leo in McGoldrick's. At that stage, I was on my feet. I told her I had to go, I had to meet someone, and she asked me if I'd make it up to Tommy's for the Christmas dinner she was going to cook today, and I said I wouldn't miss it, and she kissed me and held me in the way you would if you loved him, or if you wanted him to love you, and again I tried to believe in her, and got my coat, and just when we were at the door she asked me if I still had the photograph of Patrick Hutton she gave me. It was the only one she had. No, it wasn't that, it was quite special to her, in a way she didn't want to tell me. Or wouldn't. Or hadn't made up yet. I said I didn't have it anymore. I don't know if she believed me, or pretended to believe me. I pretended I didn't care anymore. I left her at Tommy's, looking so beautiful and so forlorn I couldn't bear the sight of her. I think she knew what had happened; she couldn't figure out how. I wasn't sure I could either. I just knew that the next time we met, we'd be on opposite sides. You think you're never going to fall in love with anyone again, and sometimes the only way you know you did is because she's just broken your heart.
At Tommy's doorstep, after I'd said I wouldn't come in, and she said it was a sin to waste all that food, that she'd been looking forward to spending the day with me, and I looked at the ground as if that was any kind of answer, and she nodded, and suddenly there was fear in her eyes, real terror, and she looked as if she was about to howl with it.
"I can't tell you any more," she said.
"You know more than you're telling me."
Her eyes welled up with tears, her beautiful eyes.
"I can't…it's not my fault…I'm sorry, but I just can't…"
I shook my stupid head.
"Well, I'm sorry too, but neither can I."
I waited down the road from Tommy's until the taxi arrived to pick her up, and I tailed it until I was sure she was on her way back to Riverside Village. Then I drove to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, and found Tommy in the sacristy and took him through what I thought had happened.
"Who's going to cook our Christmas dinner then?" he said, which was better than "I told you so," but not much.
I called Regina Tyrrell and apologized for not having been in touch, and checked that she still wanted an extra man.
"Do you think we need one?"
"I think you do, yes."
I quoted her a price for Tommy and Regina agreed to it while he looked goggle-eyed at me.
"Time you took yourself seriously," I told him.
"You first," he said.
I gave Tommy the key to my house and asked him to pack some surveillance equipment in the boot of his mother's car before he left for Tyrrellscourt. Then I gave him Leo Halligan's Glock 17. He flashed a look toward the door to the church, then stowed the gun beneath his cassock and nodded gravely to me, as if to say he appreciated the trust I was showing in him. I didn't tell him I had no other option.
When I left the sacristy I saw Vincent Tyrrell watching me from the altar; he seemed insubstantial to me, like a wraith; I wondered if I'd see him alive again.
WHILE I WAITED on the pier for Proby, I called Jim Morgan, a cardiologist I'd worked with on the Howard case. Once he'd gotten over his dismay at being phoned on Christmas Day, and once we'd established that eyes were not his area, he listened to my description of Karen Tyrrell's eyes, and suggested that it was possibly a condition known as heterochromia, that it was possibly genetic, and that if I wanted to move beyond the possible, I should find an opthalmologist and spoil his Christmas lunch.
Jack Proby was about my age, skinny and tall with boyish floppy hair in a seventies center parting and a seventies mustache to match and a mouth full of teeth that wouldn't've shamed a pony and acne scars on his long face. He stood at the start of the West Pier in a fawn cashmere coat over a navy suit and tan Italian shoes, looking like a hotel lobby was his idea of out in the open. The wind off the sea was cold enough to give me second thoughts too.
"The Royal Seafield know me," Proby said. "We can get in out of this."
The Royal Seafield was a Victorian seafront hotel of indifferent quality, but they did know Jack Proby, and admitted him even though the hotel was open only to residents, which is how I found myself drinking a large Jameson in a bar on Christmas Day, apart from Good Friday the only day of the year you cannot get served a drink in Ireland. Proby drank the same.
"How's it looking for you at Leopardstown tomorrow?" I said.
"What the fuck do you care?" Proby said. "Business, friend." His accent was educated northside, lazy and drawling; his voice was hoarse as a rule: it sounded like someone had cut him. I looked for a scar, but he wore his collar high.