The Price of Blood

What happened then took me aback. Maybe because I had gotten to like Jackie Tyrrell, I had somehow forgotten she was involved in the case, and was therefore likely to have something to hide. Maybe it was because my judgment was skewed on account of the booze. Whatever it was, you're always waiting for the shutters to come down, but when they came down for Jackie, I couldn't quite believe it. She nodded, and inclined herself away, and did something tight with her lips that I hadn't seen before.

'I guess he meant, I'd have to talk to F. X. Tyrrell directly.'

'You'll be lucky,' she snapped. 'Why would he talk to you? More likely to have you arrested for trespassing. Of course, there's someone there who'll be only too happy to fill your head full of whatever fairy stories pass for reality in her mind.'

'Who would that be?'

' Regina Tyrrell.'

'F.X.'s sister.'

'That's right. She runs the hotel, and spa, and golf-course complex down there. And she runs Frank, if you're to believe her.'

'Does anyone believe her? Did you?'

Jackie Tyrrell looked at me and there was smarting pain in her eyes, a vulnerability I hadn't seen before.

'Let's just say, the person who felt most amicable of all about my divorce from Frank was Regina.'

Jackie stood up and brushed imaginary lint from her black clothes, all business.

'Wait here. I'll get you a photograph of Frank. And then I'll tell you a thing or two about Regina Tyrrell. You can listen to your little girlfriend's music again, if you like,' she said, handing me a Bose remote control. 'Point it anywhere.'

I clicked the search button back until I located The Isle of the Dead, pressed Repeat to keep it coming, turned up the volume and sat back. That was how I awoke, having spilt tea-colored sidecar all over the white French couch. It took me a while to get my bearings, in fact to get my eyes open and myself upright and in focus. It was about half four, and there was no sign of Jackie Tyrrell, and no photographs. The Isle of the Dead was still playing; something I hadn't noticed before was that this recording had tolling bells on it; they added to the atmosphere. Was there a Rachmaninov piece called The Bells? I couldn't remember. I switched the music off and went out onto the landing, thinking I should check the bedrooms. Maybe Jackie'd just crashed out somewhere. She'd had more to drink than I had, which was saying something. On second thoughts, better not to creep around a strange house late at night; I didn't want to frighten anyone.

As I walked downstairs, I realized the bells I had heard on The Isle of the Dead were still tolling, even though the music had stopped. In the hall, by the left-hand corner behind the Christmas tree, I spied an open door and behind it what looked like a servants' passageway; the sound of the bells seemed to be coming from that direction. I went in and followed down a corridor of blue tiles and ocher walls to the stairwell of what was evidently the bell tower. Right on time, I saw a rope fly up like a slithering beast, and the bell toll again, and down on a rope to meet me came the body of Jackie Tyrrell, hanging by the neck, her legs frozen in a grotesque dance, her eyes bugging, her tongue cut out of her gaping mouth, blood staining her face and her chest. I tried to do something, and may have done it; what, I can't remember: cut her down, or hold her, or breathe life back into her, something that would help deny or assuage the horror of what I had just seen. I recall the impulse, but not the act, for between the two, I felt a blow, and I tumbled into shadow, and then came darkness.

PART II . CHRISTMAS

Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief of priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.

And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.

And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple,

and departed, and went and hanged himself.

And the chief priests took the silver pieces,

and said, It is not lawful for them to put into

the treasury, because it is the price of blood.

– Matthew 27: 3-6

ELEVEN

I tossed and turned on a bed of straw, and the rustle roared in my ears like the sound of the sea from a conch; I was awake but felt asleep, or asleep and dreamed of waking; a door creaked, and the bolt shot back and forth, and then a sound of doors swinging back and forth, crashing like gunfire, and then the bolt run back, the door held fast, creaking, and the rustle of straw again, rustle rustle, and then human voices soft, like straw, no, like paper, whispering, entreating, yielding, the slightest breaths rustling like paper, and the color of paper, white, a blinding white, the sound so crisp in my ears…

I was in a daze when I came to, and even by the time I got to Harcourt Square it was clear I was in no fit state to be questioned, so after a great deal of swabbing and scraping and photographing, I was shunted into a cell and left to sleep off the roil of shock and fear and drunkenness that clung to me like muck sweat to a frightened animal. I didn't think I could sleep after what I had seen, but in fact no sooner had my head hit the hard bunk than I fell into a coma that was interrupted what could have been no more than a couple of hours later by a Guard pushing in a beaker of hot liquid that might have been tea or coffee and could be still for all I know and a toasted waffle clogged with chemical-smelling jam that almost made me throw up as soon as I smelled it, and then, as I kept on smelling it, did. I was on my knees, vomiting steak frites and red wine and whiskey and gin and brandy and lemon juice into a metal toilet with no seat that stank of pine detergent and someone else's piss so that each time I threw up, the air I sucked into my winded lungs was so foul I immediately began to retch again. Eventually, this too passed, and I sat on my bunk, bent over and humming a tuneless drone to myself and trying to reconstruct what had happened between the time I saw the hanging body of Jackie Tyrrell and now.

I'd been out cold, that much I knew; I could feel the hot, tender egg that had been grafted onto the back of my head; the gentlest pressure on it sent my belly lurching out of my mouth. My hands were streaked with mud, or rust, and there were reddish-brown stains on my shirt and streaks on my trousers and on my shoes; it came to me that I was covered in blood, and that that blood could only be Jackie Tyrrell's. I flushed red-hot then, and tears sprang into my eyes, and I jammed my fist into my mouth to stop myself yelling. If only my head wasn't pounding so hard, I could think clearly about what had happened. The only thing I could summon up was music, The Isle of the Dead, its insistent rhythm rolling through my head, and then the bells, the tolling of a bell, and then I flashed on upsetting the sidecar over myself and Jackie Tyrrell's good white couch, and I smelt my shirt and licked my hand and tasted brandy and felt the sweetest of relief and an obscene prayer on my lips: Thanks be to fuck. I knew I was badly in need of a cure, but I didn't think I would get one so soon.

Superintendent Myles Geraghty had found someone to press his brown suit, and someone else to cut his unruly thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, but his gut was still poking out between the flaps of his yellow shirt, if perhaps not quite as far as it had, and his tie looked like he'd eaten his breakfast off it. He seemed in excellent