"I don't know. She was upset. She wants you. I know what I'd do."
Dave was doing his best to look wounded and noble, but I think he was relieved. We talked about the case for a while, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere; on the doorstep, he looked at me as if, in some crucial way, I'd let him down. If I'd told him to leave his family, would that have suited his image of me better? Now I'd let him believe I envied him, he felt happier about himself. Just to make sure, I asked him to keep his mobile on: I told him I might need him, and I could see he liked the idea that I might. After he drove away, I rang Carmel and told her he was coming home. She started to say a lot of stuff about being sorry and ashamed, but I told her nobody wanted to hear any of that, now or ever, wished her a happy Christmas, hung up and left the house.
THE THREE MEN who took me were under orders not to hurt me; that's why each of them carried a gun. None of them wore sportswear either: with their dark leather jackets and jeans and boots, they could have been construction workers on a stag night; they certainly didn't draw the eye the way Burberry hoodies did. They put me in the back of a Mercedes Estate with blacked-out windows, one on either side, one to drive. When we got to Redlands, which is where I assumed we were going-they could have shot me on the doorstep if they'd wished-I was led to a small bungalow George Halligan had built in the grounds, a three-room den with a pool table, a home cinema system, a bar and an en suite bedroom. What more could a man want? A head butt from Leo Halligan would not have been top of my list; nor would the kicks to the head and body that followed; a cowboy boot to the liver wouldn't have made the backup list; it felt like a week before I could breathe again. Leo was breathing heavily when George called a halt; he was almost out of breath when he stopped. The off-duty construction workers got me upright and propped me in a chair; George presented me with a tumbler of whiskey and sat opposite me; Leo hovered to one side, an elaborate dressing with some kind of metal frame over his nose.
"Compliments of the season," George said in his fifty-a-day rasp. "Sorry about that, Ed, but it sounds like you were asking for it."
"I'm sure I was," I said. "Still, I didn't think Leo was such a girl he'd have to get his brother to hold me down."
Leo came at me so fast he forgot to bring his brain along; he was drawing a blade from his jacket, but before he pulled it free, I smashed my tumbler hard against the metal-framed dressing on his nose and jammed the shattered glass against his throat; the metal jarred the bone out of its setting and blood was flowing from his nose and he was screaming and gurgling, and I was on my feet now, a red mist swirling around my head.
"You see what can happen? You see?" I heard myself shouting. I had lost any sense of where or who I was. I dug the broken glass into Leo's throat. I could see George waving at his henchmen to drop the guns they had pulled. George's mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear what he was saying; it took me a while to realize that that was because I was still shouting.
"You see? When we all live like savages? Blood! You see? You see?"
I could see the panic in George's eyes as he pointed at Leo; the sudden sight of Leo's face covered in blood, of the punctures the glass had made in his throat, of the choking quivering mess of him beneath me brought me to my senses. I signaled George to kick the guns across the floor to me; when he hesitated, I jammed the glass back into Leo's throat until I heard the skitter of metal across the floor; then I let him have Leo, whose injuries looked worse than they were; it was only because I had him lying on his back that he was choking; George sat him forward and gave him a bar cloth to stanch the flow, and one of the construction workers got some ice from the bar and wrapped it in another cloth and passed it to him.
My head was throbbing and there was blood on my face where Leo had opened the eye he had blackened on Bayview Hill and the pain on my right side where he'd caught my liver hurt so bad I felt like crying, and possibly did. But I watched Leo with his face in his hands, whimpering, and George, his prematurely white head bowed over his brother, and the three construction workers, their faces registering as much shock as you could discern through their folds of beer and steroid fat, and I thought: They won't forget this in a fucking hurry. And fool that I was, I felt stupid blood pride in my victory, suppressing the ache that, worse than any physical pain, warned me that maybe the only way the Halligans could properly settle this was to kill me.
I gathered up the guns: two Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer compact. I didn't know what was waiting for me down in Tyrrellscourt, but I figured it wouldn't do any harm to be prepared for it. I popped the Glocks in my coat pockets and kept the Sig trained around the room. George Halligan gave me two looks: one included a nod to Leo and an arched eyebrow, meaning all friends now; that was George's way, but I knew I'd have to watch my back with Leo, and resolved to help put him back behind bars as soon as possible, a resolution that I suspected would find favor with his brother. The second look followed the guns into my pockets.
"I'm going to need them," I said. "I'm going down to Tyrrellscourt."
"That was the main reason we wanted to talk to you, Ed," George said, as if we'd spent the last five minutes chatting about football before getting down to business.
Leo lifted his head, and dabbed his nose: the flow of blood had diminished to a trickle. George leant in and conferred with him in a low voice. Then he looked around and directed the largest of the construction workers, who had a goatee and no neck, to fix three drinks and pass them around. George had caught me like this in the past, so I watched closely to see that the liquid, which turned out to be brandy, was all coming from the one decanter. It was, and when I had a tumbler of it, I waited for George and Leo to drink, and then I did likewise, and we got down to business, Halligan-style.
"We heard you were asking questions," George said.
"Who told you? Jack Proby, I suppose."
Leo and George looked quickly at each other.
"Yeah, Jack called me," George said unconvincingly. "You see, the festival starts tomorrow, and we don't want anything to get the way of…a good day's racing."
"Well, let me put your minds at rest," I said. "I don't give a damn about what deals you have with F. X. Tyrrell or Jack Proby. I don't give a damn which horse wins or doesn't, although I am always in the market for a sure thing. All I care about is that since I started looking for Patrick Hutton, the bodies have been piling up. Far as I'm concerned, if F.X. is shy about who he sleeps with, that's his lookout. And allowing for the fact that I don't like blackmailing, extorting, scum-sucking sociopaths like yourselves on any level you care to mention, you're not my problem. My problem is finding out what happened to Patrick Hutton. Allied to that, I've inherited the problem of who killed Don Kennedy, Jackie Tyrrell and Terry Folan."
"Terry Folan?" Leo said, looking up at me. "Bomber Folan?"
"That's right," I said. "Who'd you think that body on the dump was? Patrick Hutton? Or did you not think anyone else'd find out?"
Leo began to say something, then stopped himself. George looked from his brother to me and back, a Cohiba chafing against his still-dark mustache.
"Anything here I should know about, lads?" he said. We both ignored him.
"It wasn't just you at breakfast with Vincent Tyrrell, was it Leo? Miranda Hart was there too."
Again Leo went to speak, but stopped himself.
"That's why I'm here, is it? In case the inconvenient deaths of three people get in the way of a fucking horse race?"
"And if you go blundering about down there, you could fuck up quite a few fucking horse races, Ed Loy: the last thing we need is the Tyrrell horses being withdrawn because their trainer is up on a charge, Bottle of Red in particular," George barked from a blue cloud of cigar smoke. A descant of coughing followed; Leo winced and flapped a hand in front of his face.