'See you racing!' he bellowed twice as we were leaving.
When we got out into the night, the rain was falling softly. I opened my coat and turned to Miranda Hart to see if she needed it. She snaked her arms inside it and around my neck and pulled my mouth down onto hers and kissed me; she smelled of oranges and salt; when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the shimmer of the streetlights in the rain. I thought for a second they were stars.
'What happened to your gum?' I said.
Her tongue snaked quickly out of her mouth with a little wad of chewing gum on its tip, then vanished again, to be replaced by a smile.
'Come home with me,' she said. 'And I'll show you how I did it.'
She reached up to my mouth and wiped it with her hand. It came away red with her lipstick, and she waved it in front of me and grinned.
As we walked down Merrion Street to my car, amid weaving groups of happy and belligerent and bedraggled drunks, shiny and sodden in the damp night, I straightened the bills Jackie Tyrrell had crushed into my hand and put them in my wallet. Among them, I found her business card. On one side was printed:
PATRICK AND LEO RODE TOGETHER
SIX
I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her arm and made to leave. She grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed me again.
'I can't stay,' I said.
'I don't want you to stay all night,' she said. 'Just long enough.'
She held on to me with one hand while she worked the key in the lock. It occurred to me that if I was going to stop sleeping with clients, or with women implicated on some level in the cases I worked, now would be the time to start. But I didn't. What's more, I didn't want to. Miranda Hart dragged me into the darkened living room and pushed me onto the couch and fell on top of me; she was wild and ardent at first; then, after a while, there were tears in her eyes, and she said,
'Maybe this is not such a good idea,' and I said,
'Now she tells me,' struggling to get the words out, and then,
'Do you want to stop?' and she said,
'Fuck no, do you?' and I said,
'No I don't,' and she said,
'Come on then. Come on, come on.'
It wasn't how I thought it would be, at once gentler and more passionate; afterward, she cried a little. When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I said, 'Gin,' and she said, 'Good idea.' I'd be late for Dave Donnelly, but I couldn't leave, not just yet. What's more, I didn't want to. We sat in the living room, both on the sofa, half dressed, the light from the kitchen bleeding into the dark, reflecting off the glass doors at the other end that gave onto a small garden. I could see her chewing, and shook my head in wonder. Where did she keep it? It was a gift that passed all understanding.
'Sorry about that,' she said.
'Sorry about what?' I said.
'You know. The make-up-your-fucking-mind, the tears, the all-round crapness. Being messy. Behaving like a girl. I thought I could just…'
I took her hand and held it.
'We all think we can just…and sometimes we can, and sometimes it doesn't work out that way.'
'Just the day, you know? You coming around asking about Patrick…the very day he disappeared. How weird is that?'
'Maybe Father Tyrrell planned it that way.'
Something close to a shudder rippled through her body.
'You were going to tell me. What is it about Vincent Tyrrell that frightens you so?'
She took a gulp of her gin, pulled herself into a corner of the couch, and brought her knees up to her chin.
'He came around here that day. Ten years ago. It wasn't a Sunday, it was the middle of the week. Everything was a bit chaotic here, after the whole By Your Leave thing. A lot of drinking, a lot of…well, I wasn't the most…I could have been a lot more sympathetic to Patrick, put it that way.'
'You thought he'd made a mess of the situation.'
'I thought he'd been unprofessional. I mean, the rules of the game: jockeys do what they're told. And maybe sometimes you'll stretch that, you'll leave it a bit later than you've been told, you'll take an earlier lead, but it's all forgiven if you win. But what Patrick did, to make such a song and dance about stopping a horse, it was really stupid. I mean, what was the point? Everyone knows what racing is like. And it wasn't as if it changed anything.'
'Didn't he ever try to explain himself? To you, at least?'
'No.'
'Miranda, I can't help you if you're keeping something back.'
'I'm not. I swear to God. Look, it wasn't as if we had a big discussion, we didn't work like that. I didn't know I wasn't going to see him again.'
'Was he going to find it hard to get another trainer to take him on?'
'I was worried he might. But I was wrong; he'd been riding well that year, and once the hue and cry had died down, he'd have got another job easily. I was…I was horrible to him, really, put him through a whole guilt trip. I suppose I thought…you know, that Tyrrellscourt has such a reputation, it's been number one for so long, I thought he'd been at the very top and thrown it all away. And what were we, twenty-three or something? It was ridiculous, we were just starting out. And the last time I saw him…'
Her voice faltered and she began to tear up again.
'The last time I saw him was in the morning, I'd made him sleep in the spare room. He'd brought me up a cup of tea, and begged me to talk to him, to forgive him. He said he'd make it all right. I remember, I was lying on my side away from him, and he sounded so sad…so desperate…'
'Can you remember anything he said?'
Miranda took another long drink of gin, this time tipping the glass too far up and spilling it down both sides of her chin.
'Fuck it!' she said. 'Don't laugh at me!'
'You have to be the clumsiest person I've ever met,' I said.
'Patrick used to say that too. He said I'd never make it as a jockey, my body'd never cope with the injuries, I got bruises enough walking around a room.'
She drained her gin and wiped her mouth and passed her glass to me. Her lipstick was smeared all over her mouth like some crazy lady from an old black-and-white movie, Joan Crawford with the sirens howling, and I laughed again, and she glared at me, and I pulled her toward me and put my arms around her, and she punched me a couple of times in the chest and then put her head on my shoulder.
'I was such a cow to him.'
'You didn't know you were never going to see him again,' I said. We sat for a while like that, as if we'd known each other forever, until I began to wonder whether it was Miranda Hart I was embracing, or the ghost of my ex- wife. Maybe Miranda felt the chill; she leapt up and sat by the fire, where the embers were smoldering, and tried to poke and then to blow them back into life. There was red in the turf and she coaxed it into flame and put another couple of sods on top. When she turned around, the flames danced in the silver of her dress, and her dark eyes flashed red and I found that I couldn't breathe.
