"Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin," I said.
Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.
"You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They're fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail."
"Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?"
"The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail."
Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had BARRINGTON INVESTIGATIONS as its heading.
I began to read.
POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.
1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99
Inteviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner's Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.
SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD'S REPORT
(DOCUMENT I (a)).
I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.
"Did anyone see him?" I said.
"No," he said. "But that doesn't undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too."
"Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?"
"No, actually."
"You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn't get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?"
"In a way."
Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I'd been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn't felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.
"See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it's from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement."
Dave rustled through the paper.
"The payments begin about two years back."
"When he searched for Hutton."
"So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out."
Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn't contain himself; he looked like a children's entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.
"I don't know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn't spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise," Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother's name I expected, Tyrrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not F for female, not Mary, later to be known as Miranda, but M for male: the child was a boy, born on the second of November, 1976, and his Christian names were Patrick Francis.
PART III . ST. STEPHEN'S DAY
FERDINAND: Strangling is a very quiet death.
DUCHESS: I'll tell thee a miracle;
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:
Th' heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery,
As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar;
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy.
– John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi
TWENTY-ONE
I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.
"I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…"
"I'm not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you're welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?"
Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.
"They think I'm working. Emergency shift. It's not unusual."
"And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?"
"No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me."
I couldn't see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn't have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?
"Maybe you should go back there," I said. "You don't want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her."
" Carmel doesn't need me," Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.
"Oh yes she does," I said. "She…she told me she did."
"Last night? And what else did she tell you?"
Some things are more important than who fucked who.
"Dave, whatever's happened between you…you have a woman who wants you. And like any woman, she needs you to pay her some attention. To behave as if you know she's there, and you're as glad of it today as you were twenty years ago."
Dave looked skeptically at me.
"You almost sound as if you'd like to be in my shoes," he said. "Football practice and sleepovers and Friday-night pizza and mass on Sundays and nodding off in front of the TV and watching each other get old."
I looked out the back window at my apple trees, close but never touching; the bare limbs looked like bones in the hard wind. I looked out into the hall, where a pine stood bare and unadorned in a coal scuttle; I had forgotten, or hadn't bothered, to decorate it.
"It would have its compensations," I said.
Dave looked at me in disbelief.
"Anyway, you can't stay. No one with a woman who wants him sleeps here."
He thought about that for a while.
"You don't know what she did…"
I took a chance.
"Do you? Really? Maybe she needed to get your attention so badly…she tried before and failed…maybe it was your last chance…"
"Is that what she said?"
There was fear in his eyes. I shook my head.