She grinned in a side-of-the-mouth kind of way and shook her head.
'I run a riding school for Jackie Tyrrell, up in Tibradden. It's a far cry.'
'From what?'
She looked toward the door again, then smiled carefully at me.
'I used to ride, Mr. Loy. I grew up near Tyrrellscourt, I worked in the yard as a girl, I had a few amateur races. I was as good as Patrick. Better, some people thought. Then, after he took off, or disappeared, or whatever the fuck he did…I don't know, it was as if I were to blame. Like I'd been a curse of some kind. Blame the black widow, y'know? F.X. cut me off, and other trainers followed suit. I got a bit of yard work with another trainer, but I wasn't happy doing that anymore. So I kind of drifted off track, in more ways than one…rented this place out and just…let things slide, y'know? Got into a few…situations. And then F.X. and his wife split up, and Jackie called me. I needed to get myself together by then, so I jumped at the chance. Jackie helped me with the house, everything.'
'F. X. Tyrrell's wife. All very cozy.'
'His ex-wife. They parted amicably, there were no children. Why is it so cozy?'
'The person who hired me to find Patrick Hutton was Father Vincent Tyrrell.'
It was as if someone had flicked a switch, or pulled a cord, in Miranda Hart's back: her shoulders slumped and her head dropped and something like a howl came from deep inside her. When she turned her face to me, I saw black eyes stained red and soaked with the black mess her tears had made of her makeup. She was shaking her head now, opening her mouth and trying to get the words out; I could see red lipstick stains on her teeth. Finally, she managed to coordinate palate and lips and tongue long enough to be understood.
'Get out of here,' she said. 'Get the fuck out of here, or I'll call the police.'
FIVE
I sat in the car and tried to work out what I had seen in Miranda Hart's eyes when she heard Vincent Tyrrell's name, the split second before she fell apart on me: what combination of fear, anger, shame or guilt. The tears were real, the emotion convulsive, hysterical even, but Miranda Hart looked like she was capable of putting on quite a show if she put her mind to it. At least, that was what I figured by the end of our encounter, once my entire system had gotten the message loud and clear that she was not in fact my ex- wife.
Next, I listened to the message my ex-wife had left on my phone, and then I did something I hadn't done for maybe three years: I called her, and asked how she was, and how her little boy was doing; I spoke to her like I should have a long time ago. She told me she still felt bad about Lily, our little girl, especially at Christmas, thinking how she might have turned out, and I told her so did I, and she said every year on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Christmas she went to the Third Street Mall and bought all the gifts Santa would have brought and then on the Sunday she went to seven forty-five mass at St. Clement's and donated the toys to the church's Angel Toy Drive for needy children and orphans. She started to cry then, and I sat and listened, and wondered whether remembering our dead child by giving toys to poor kids at Christmas was better than remembering her by getting drunk and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to blame other people for pain that was nobody's but your own. I decided that it was.
We sat on the phone for a long while after that, after she had stopped crying, not saying very much, until she said the call must be costing me a fortune, and I said there was no need to worry, because I was a millionaire, a line we used to use before any of this had happened, and she laughed then, and told me she missed me, and I thought that was a good time to send her my love and wish her a Merry Christmas and end the call.
I sat for another long while then, until I was able to catch my breath, and I could see straight. I wiped my face with a handkerchief and got out of the car and walked along the path by the Dodder River toward Londonbridge Road and smoked a cigarette and breathed in the cold winter air. Every so often I had the sense that I was being followed, but the only people I spotted were shoppers trudging home laden with bags. In any case, if Leo Halligan wanted to take me, he would, and there wasn't an awful lot I could do about it.
When I got back to my car, a taxi was pulling away from outside Miranda Hart's house. I hadn't spotted her getting in, but I didn't have time to think, so I followed it down into Ringsend toward the city. I kept close, reasoning that she might not be in it anyway, and even if she was, she probably wouldn't expect to be followed. In any case, the traffic was so thick that I couldn't afford to let the cab out of my sight. Town was seething with drunks and merrymakers, shoppers and gawkers, young and old spilling off the pavements and jostling in the streets. We passed Trinity College and headed up George's Street and around onto Stephen's Green and in fits and starts rolled along until I saw the cab pull in outside the Shelbourne Hotel. I passed it and looked back to see Miranda Hart, wearing something shiny and black over something shiny and silver, clip up the hotel steps and flash a smile at the doorman. A car horn honked behind me; I cut down Merrion Street and found a parking space on Merrion Square. There was a brusque voice-mail message from Dave Donnelly on my phone, and I called him immediately, ready to take my medicine: I was on bad terms with too many Guards to fall out with Dave; he probably figured out I had examined the body in the woods, and wanted to bawl me out over it.
He didn't.
'Ed, I want to talk to you.'
'Sure, Dave. Harcourt Square?'
Harcourt Square was where the elite National Bureau of Criminal Investigation was based. DI Donnelly wanted to be seen with me there like he wanted to be caught drunk driving.
'That's funny, Ed. I'm still out in fucking Wicklow here. How about your place? When can you make it?'
'I'm on something now, but I don't know how long it'll last.'
'It's seven now. Say eleven?'
'That should be fine. What's it about, Dave?'
'It's about those bodies.'
'What bodies?'
'The one you found, and the one we found earlier.'
'Are they connected?'
'I'll see you at eleven.'
The Shelbourne Hotel was built in 1824 and every so often they closed it and refurbished it and put a bar where a restaurant had been, but it was pretty much the same now as always, except smarter, although there was a tendency, if you got drunk here, to forget where the toilets were. Or so I was told; having left for L.A. when I was eighteen, I had only crossed the door for the first time a few months ago, to confirm to a Southside Lady Who Lunches that her suspicions about her errant husband were well founded. She took the photographs, wrote me a check and told me she'd double it if I joined her in a suite upstairs for the afternoon. Maybe I might have if she hadn't offered to pay; she had gambler's eyes, and a sense of humor, and a good head for drink. Next thing I knew, she had taken her husband for ten million and the family home in Blackrock and she was photographed on the back page of the
I didn't have to look too hard for Miranda Hart; her silver dress blazed like magnesium ribbon amid the deep red and dark wood tones of the Horseshoe Bar. She had piled her dark hair high on her head; her black eyes flickered and her lips were the color of blood. Six foot in heels, she wore her dress calf length and cut high on the thigh; one of her stockings was already laddered. I was trying to get a look at her companions before she saw me, but she was restless, laughing quickly and nodding impatiently and chewing her gum and smoking and drinking and casting her gaze about the bar as if she expected me.
When our eyes met, her face turned to stone for a second and I thought she would start to scream; instead she turned her lamps full on, mouthed 'Darling' at me and beckoned me over with the hand she held her glass in, flicking some of its contents over a fat red-faced man of sixty or so with a wispy strawberry-blond comb-over who affected to find this as hilarious as he appeared to be finding everything else. A well-preserved, shrewd-looking blonde in her fifties turned around to take an appraising look at me as the barman brought me the pint of Guinness
