The Price of Blood

'You look like you've seen a ghost,' she said. I nodded.

'Someone who hurt you very badly. Someone I remind you of, someone who maybe looks a little like me.'

I nodded again, dumbstruck.

'And now, at last, you're beginning to get over her. That's all right,' she said, smiling. 'I wanted you too.' Then her mouth set hard.

'Now, I think you'd better ask your questions, and go.'

I hadn't touched my gin, and found I needed it badly. I felt like I'd been slapped, and for no good reason, and I didn't like it. Miranda Hart was the kind of woman who could sense your weakest spot and reach straight for it. And she could see I wanted something more than what she had given.

'Jackie Tyrrell told me Patrick and Leo Halligan rode together. What did she mean by that?'

'What do you think she meant?'

'That they were both jockeys who came up together at Tyrrellscourt. That they were lovers. What's the truth?'

'Leo didn't have the talent, or the temperament, to be a jockey. Because he was a fucking lunatic, and not in a good way. But I'm sure you know that, if you know his brothers. He was at a reform school near the stables. St. Jude's. So was Patrick. F.X. made a point of taking a couple of lads from there once they'd done their time, as apprentices. They were set to work in the yard; they both graduated to working the horses in the mornings. They'd be given pieces of work. Patrick took to it; Leo didn't. Leo was too smart. In every sense: too quick, too cunning, so sharp he'd cut himself.'

'Were you there at the same time?'

Miranda nodded.

'I grew up in the village, a couple of miles downriver. I was the daughter of the local publican. The Tyrrellscourt Inn. Adopted, they never made any secret of that. They tried to make a lady out of me, too, but I was up at the stables any chance I got. My mother died when I was twelve, and they thought sending me to an all-girls' boarding school in England would give me a female influence, and encourage me to show willing. Except the school was in Cheltenham. It just meant I got to the Festival every year of my teens. Finally Jackie made a deal with my father: as long as I finished school, I could come and work at the yard. They didn't say I had to pass my A Levels though, and I didn't.'

'Jackie made a deal with your father? Why did she do that?'

'I guess she always looked out for me. She picked me up more than once when I fell. And her and F. X. Tyrrell couldn't have kids-or didn't, I don't know, same difference. I suppose she stood as a kind of mother to me, though it didn't seem that way back then. More like a big sister. We'd go on the tear together, all that. She was a bit trapped down there in Tyrrellscourt, working up the nerve to get out.'

'And were Patrick and Leo lovers?'

She smiled, her eyes glittering, as if to say: Some people might think that an insult, but I'm not one of them. I knew then that I could fall in love with Miranda Hart, if I wasn't careful. And I wasn't, as a rule.

'Were they? I don't know. The school had a reputation that way. And there's a bit of it in every stable. Like a jail, the hours are so long, you've no money, you're confined to camp most of the time, and you don't get enough to eat. All these young boys are dieting all the time, and they're at the horniest time of their lives, and dieting, extreme dieting, can make you absolutely obsessed with sex. It always does me. So. Can't say I'd blame them.'

'Did it have any effect on your marriage? I mean, do you think he was gay?'

'I don't know. I don't think so. He didn't shy away from his…marital duties, as they used to say. But maybe, in another life…put it this way, what age are you, forty, forty-two?'

'Something like that.'

'I bet you had a girlfriend when you were twenty-two, twenty-three, you drank a lot together, or got high, whatever, you laughed and cried, you said you loved each other, you fucked a lot, but even at the time, you knew it probably wasn't forever. Maybe that's the way it was with Patrick and me. We should never have got married, I don't know why we did: to get away from my family, and his lack of one. Maybe that's why. We were so young. And now…you know, we could run into each other on the street, and we probably wouldn't know what to say. So for all I know, he could be anything…'

She grimaced then, and waved a hand in the air, as if conceding that she had merely given one version of many, that there was probably rather more to her marriage than youthful folly, certainly more than she was willing to tell me. She turned her dark head and looked into the fire. A glow of red flickered through her hair, which she suddenly shook forward and then swept back; the shadows and light bounced off the glass doors and played around the room.

'Get us another drink, would you Ed?'

I went through to the kitchen and fixed a gin; we'd been drinking it with lemon juice, which she had made up fresh and leavened with sugar syrup and orange juice. When I brought her the drink, her dismay that I hadn't made myself one was palpable.

'Not thirsty anymore?'

'I can't stay. I told you that.'

She nodded, and turned her gaze back to the fire.

'Do you have a photograph of Patrick?'

She didn't move.

'Miranda, you said earlier you wanted me to find him. If you still mean it-'

She got to her feet and left the room. I looked around at the pictures on the walls, but they were all action or parade-ring photographs of Hutton in full livery; he looked like a jockey, all right, but so did all the others. When Miranda came back with a photo, I glanced quickly at it, long enough to see it was a full face shot, not so long that I began to compare it to the man I had found dead and mutilated on a dump earlier that day. I didn't want to be the bearer of that bad news, not yet.

'Can you remember the name of the private detective you hired to find Patrick?'

'Don…something. Kelly? Kennelly? I can find out.'

'Let me know as soon as you do. Last thing. You said Vincent Tyrrell came to see you the day Patrick disappeared. What happened?'

'He told me Patrick had made a confession. To him, as a priest, the sacrament. And he couldn't, of course, disclose anything he had said. But he was very…it was as if he knew something about me, something I had done, or something about the way I lived…and that whatever it was, I should be ashamed of myself. All his insinuations…like I was, I don't know what, a whore, worse than a whore, some kind of…corrupter…I couldn't really follow it back then. I was angry, I threw him out, what right did he have-but I must have run it through in my head a thousand times since. That whatever had happened to Patrick, the reason he disappeared, it was all my fault, and it was somehow up to me to work out why.'

'And have you?'

Miranda shook her head, aiming for a laugh that came off as a muted wail. She picked up her drink from the mantelpiece. I could hear the ice clinking, her hand was shaking so much.

'There was something about Father Tyrrell…the scorn for me, the contempt in his eyes…it was so belittling. As if I had…yes, he used the word betrayal… as if I had betrayed Patrick somehow. But he wouldn't say how.'

She took a long, steady swallow of gin. Her use of it seemed medical, sacramental.

'The other thing was, he said something like, 'Well, he's better off now,' or 'It's probably for the best.' I thought he was just trying to placate me, because I was screaming at him, you know? I was mad at Patrick anyway, and now he'd made it even worse, setting this creepy fucking priest on me. I mean, confession? Who goes to fucking confession anymore? Old ladies. Children. Nuns. All the people who don't need to, who have no sins worthy of the name. So I really lost it with him. And I chose to remember it as, you know, well, he tried to bully me but I let him have it. And he scuttled off mouthing platitudes, you know, not to worry, all will be well. But that wasn't what happened. He knew Patrick wasn't coming back. And he was basically saying, he's well shot of you.'