Regina Tyrrell was beginning to shake, the start of what appeared to be a convulsive tide of grief. She reached for my hand and fell to her knees.
"Maybe the others know the worst already. But Karen's only nine years old, for pity's sake."
"Yes," I said. "Young enough to survive it. If we're lucky."
She bent her head over my hands, as if in prayer, as if I had the power to change the past. But all I had, all we both had in common, was the desperate need to hear the truth, and to understand it. I think Regina had felt that need for a long time. And in that moment, maybe she finally chose to act on it. She stopped herself shaking, and breathed hard and deep, and looked up at me.
"All right," she said. "All right then. I dreaded this day. But I think I prayed for it too. It was always too much for one soul to bear."
And then, before she could say another word, the doorknob clicked and the door swung open and the cold relentless wind blew through the room again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Steno didn't really give a fuck about anyone but Steno. When it came down to it, that was all there was: Number One. The rest was bullshit, and he didn't mind saying that, although in truth he had learned over the years to never actually say it to anyone but himself, even if it was what everyone believed, deep down. People couldn't bear the truth, but the truth had never bothered Steno. You didn't have to be brutal about it, and if you weren't a fucking savage, you'd avoid that side of things as much as you could: it was messy, and there was a lot of cleaning up afterward, and broken bones and blood and dead bodies; the whole thing was a bit of a fucking downer. It could get you down-especially if that was all there was to it. Some of the rows he had seen in the bar, over fuck-all, if you broke it up, and Steno always had to, and asked them what it was all about, neither of them could tell you. Waking up the next day with a broken face and for what? That was short term, that was amateur hour, that was no better than a beast in the fields. Because you could brood about the blood, how it would linger in your eye line like the red sparks you see when you close your eyes at night. And sometimes, the eyes of the dead, they'd pin you so they would, you'd wake before dawn with the memory of that last look, the last hope. And to go through that for no reason, for "The fuck are you looking at?"; for "Are you calling me a liar?" No way. Not in this life man.
That's why, if you were going to get involved on that level, you needed the long view. Fair enough, there'd been times when accidents happened, and you just had to get someone from location A to location B where B was a ditch or a dump or a riverbank: that's just day-to-day, that's just business, you can't shirk when that comes around. But if you were ambitious, and Steno was, the long term made the grief worthwhile.
Not to make too much of himself-Steno hated when people did that, you had to put up with it behind the bar day in day out, stable lads who had "really" trained Gold Cup winners, salesmen who "really" ran the companies they worked for, all the drunks and losers who were going to run marathons and write books and get record deals and act in movies and be models and comedians and every fucking thing, and there they fucking were ten, twenty, thirty years later, fatter and redder and still in the fucking pub.
The usual? The usual.
Steno was happy to admit it had all been a happy accident. It was when the Halligans had got their claws into F. X. Tyrrell, and Leo was running his happy band of jockeys and golfers and tooting them up big-time, and young Proby and Miranda Hart were hanging out. Twenty of them in the back room-it was before the Warehouse refurbishment, just a lounge at the back-no one else got in: Private party sir, sorry sir. Aw, again? Private party every night sir.
Steno could see there was something happening there, the cars, the money, the action. There was a whole bunch of women hanging around that time, skinny, expensive-looking women, the kind of women who appear like thin air when there's coke around, kind of like models but not as attractive, kind of like whores but not really into the money. Steno had just started working in McGoldrick's then, and he couldn't remember how many times he had his cock sucked to let some flooze in leopardskin and lace into the back room. Not that a woman knew how to blow you. How would she? Like knows what like likes, it's only common sense. Steno had no great interest in women. No, he had no use for them, that was more like it. Although if he had to, he'd find a use, just like he had with Miranda Hart.
She was up in the shower now, but she was still here, wasn't she? And maybe she had screamed when he'd done her the way he wanted, maybe she'd screamed at first, but she'd stopped screaming. She'd stopped screaming, and she was still here. Because it was worth her while. Because she was using him, too. Just like those coke whores, when he'd got tired of their sloppy fucking lips and he told them what he wanted, the ones who really wanted to make the scene, the ones who really wanted to score, they'd deliver like pros, they'd shut the fuck up and take it. As for the others, crying and blubbering and he hadn't even touched them, amateur fucking hour. He had nothing but contempt for that kind of carry-on. One thing Steno had never done was take what wasn't on offer. Of course, you always had to work the angles to maximize what was offered, or even to make it available at all, but who didn't do that? Or at very least, who didn't want to? And maybe there were people going to their graves crying over not getting what they wanted because they didn't go after it hard enough, but Steno was not one of those people, never had been.
In fairness, it wasn't true to say Steno didn't have a use for women. There was no percentage in being the way Steno was, not in Tyrrellscourt; it was dangerous most places now, not to mention pathetic and embarrassing. What you did was (and Steno couldn't understand how people couldn't get this through their heads, now that air travel had come down in price, and not be going around playgrounds and schools making shows of themselves, or acting the bollocks on the Internet, those days were done) you went to Thailand, or the Philippines-parts of Africa were good, too, or so he'd been told, but Steno thought Africa might be a bit of a fucking downer-and there you were, whatever you wanted, as many, as often, as young. Twice or three times a year-last year, Steno took four trips-and that was you set up for a few months. And if you couldn't be happy with that, what kind of a sick fuck were you anyway? The odd weekend in Amsterdam didn't do any harm either, you could always get what you wanted in Amsterdam.
But you needed a wife, or a girlfriend, or-you could be "gay," but Steno had never liked any of that either, well, he liked some of it, but not the fucking public side, and they were very fucking pushy about it now, everything out in the open. What was the point of that? Steno didn't like anything out in the open. Anyway, in a town like Tyrrellscourt, you needed a wife or a girlfriend so that everyone would just shut the fuck up, and once Steno got his feet under the table at McGoldrick's-it was a skill he had, he had always been able to make people feel comfortable, and relaxed, not just like him, that was no great accomplishment, but want to impress him. Even that cunt Loy the other day, he'd said something about Leopardstown to Steno. Steno could see Loy didn't know one end of a horse from the other, but he was a man, and men always wanted to say something to Steno about Leopardstown, or Croke Park, or Stamford Bridge. That was how he'd got the job, when McGoldrick Senior saw him behind the bar. He could empty the place at closing time without having to raise his voice: people just knew. He didn't know what it was; it was like, some people were good with children.