He shook his head.
"Tell me about St. Jude's, Father Tyrrell. You must have known what was going on there. I think I was in your room. The red one, with the Sacred Heart, and the Poussin Last Supper. That's a tasteful atmosphere in which to rape a teenager. Did you do it yourself, or did you let F.X. come in and sample the wares?"
"I'm not going to rise to this."
"What did you think you were going to achieve by digging all this up? What did Miranda Hart promise you? That everything could be buried? Or was it not her idea? Maybe she didn't have any choice in the matter. Yes, that's more like it: Patrick Hutton was back, and he had a plan. I don't know what that plan is. Maybe none of us does. We've seen what the first three installments are, but the rest of it? Who can say?"
"Have you seen him?" Tyrrell asked quietly.
"Yes, I think I have."
"How…how does he look?"
"He looks…like he's suffered a lot. He looks quite mad."
"Mary…Miranda…God help the poor child…she feels loyal to the creature…"
I didn't expect Vincent Tyrrell to astonish me, but spontaneous compassion for a fellow human being was enough to do it.
"There are a lot of questions you could answer," I said. "Is Regina Miranda's mother? Is Karen Tyrrell Miranda's child? Was Patrick Hutton the father of that child?"
"Why is any of that any of your business?"
"I think you know why. And to know and do nothing makes you just as guilty."
Tyrrell ran his fingers over his Leopardstown chart.
"See here, the third race. Francis has Bottle of Red running, she's a fine filly, but her rider will be lucky to make it. Fillies are allowed an extra five pounds over the ten-stone-nine, but Barry Dorgan is a greedy little boy, I remember him from St. Jude's distinctly, round face full of sweets, a smiler and a crybaby. Francis has persisted with Dorgan, but to my mind it's a sentimental attachment that has no place in the game: it's unfair to the punters, it's unfair to the horse and it's unfair to the sport."
"A sentimental attachment."
"Dorgan has a plump wife and two plump babies. I think Francis is simply fond of the boy."
"Like a son."
"Well, perhaps. I wouldn't know about that."
"Neither would he. You don't deny that F. X. Tyrrell had sexual relationships with boys from St. Jude's?"
"I wouldn't deny that he had an unfortunate relationship with young Halligan, which has brought nothing but complications upon his shoulders. I wouldn't deny that. As to the others: I really couldn't say."
"Couldn't or wouldn't?"
"It all amounts to the same thing. It will come out eventually, I have no doubt. Bottle of Red, that would be my strongest tip for St. Stephen's Day. The uncertainty about the rider has seen the odds drift satisfactorily; I'd say you could get it for nine to two, even five to one if you were up early. I imagine you get up early, Edward Loy."
"Patrick Hutton-the man I believe to be Patrick Hutton-gave the strong impression that he had been raped, in that room at St. Jude's-it was your room, wasn't it?"
Tyrrell shrugged and nodded.
"He made it clear he had been blindfolded, that he hadn't seen his rapist."
"Perhaps it wasn't rape. Perhaps it was consensual, and now he's decided to cavort as if it wasn't."
"Cavort?"
"Hutton and young Halligan were…well, they were about to be expelled for indecent conduct. I thought Hutton would fare well in the stables, I thought he had the makings of a jockey. I knew F.X. liked the look of him. And Leo…Leo was part of the deal. For Hutton and, eventually, for Francis. To the ultimate cost of each."
"Two of the care staff at St. Jude's were known abusers."
"Have you been talking to your burly lesbian friend again? No charges were ever laid, no case was ever brought. I've always found it curious, these liberals, they have a very illiberal concept of justice: they seem ready to destroy a person's life on the basis of one accusation."
All of this came from the side of his mouth as he pored over his chart. I had rattled him, but not nearly enough. I put my coat on and joined him at the table.
"When we spoke last, you talked about By Your Leave. Said it was something of a freak. What did you mean by that?"
"I told you to ask someone who knew."
"I did. I asked your brother. He said he'd stick to his discipline and you should stick to yours."
Tyrrell didn't flinch.
"Martha O'Connor-you know, the burly lesbian you're so fond of-her documentary about St. Jude's was halted because nobody wanted to speak ill of F. X. Tyrrell. I don't think anyone has the same sensitivity when it comes to his estranged brother, the Catholic priest. Maybe you are dying of cancer. You're not dead yet. I could make your last days here a misery. Given the degree to which, as far as I'm concerned, you've obstructed this case-Jackie Tyrrell might be alive were it not for you-all because of your bullshit about what you know being told to you in confession."
"But it was," Tyrrell said. "It's not bullshit at all. That part of it is God's truth."
He leant his hands on the chart.
"Very well. See here."
He pointed to Bottle of Red.
"Below the name of every horse, there's a list with the year of foaling, color, sex, and then the name of sire and dam. That's the horse's father and mother. Bottle of Red is by Dark Star out of No Regrets. Now, Francis went through a phase of experimenting with extremely close breeding. That means mating between parents and offspring, or siblings. Siblings are the most volatile in any pedigree breeding, and you have to use the very finest mares and stallions, but even then, it's discounted for everything except genetic research purposes: to breed out abnormalities, say, or uncover hidden gene types."
"And are Dark Star and No Regrets brother and sister?"
"Oh Lord, no. No, Francis has stopped all that. Or it was stopped for him."
"With By Your Leave. A thing of beauty, like a Grecian urn."
"What?"
"You said By Your Leave was all we know on earth, and all we need to know. Keats. 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'"
"I didn't think you'd get that reference."
"Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being."
"That's right, and that's where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it."
"The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?"
"Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination."
CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy's house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.
In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn't have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.