The Price of Blood

'Okay.'

***

I FOUND TOMMY in the sacristy, brought him up to date with the case, gave him Miranda Hart's address and asked him to pick her up. Before he left, I checked over some recent church history with him.

Father Vincent Tyrrell was sitting at his table with a fountain pen and a lined pad in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, exhaling two blue plumes of smoke into space, or at The Taking of Christ, which was directly ahead of him. I had knocked on the presbytery door and it gave against my fist. I announced myself and he told me to shut the door behind me. He sounded like he wished he had done that in the first place, and turned the key. He didn't look at me when I joined him at the table.

'Of course, Judas had his part to play,' he said. 'Had he not betrayed our Lord, who would have? And if Jesus had not been betrayed, maybe He would never have been taken. And who would have died for our sins then? Who would have been our redemption?'

'Peter did betray him. I'm sure others would have as well. Seems to me there was quite a queue. When powerful people want someone dead, they generally get their way.'

'That is true. Maybe too much is made of Judas, and his blood price. Maybe we're falling for the great-man theory of history.'

'I heard that was back in vogue.'

'Maybe it is. I don't keep up. It's better not to. Stay where you are, and everything comes back to meet you. Provided you wait long enough.'

'This all sounds to me like an Easter sermon, not a Christmas one.'

'You're right, of course. Incarnation, not redemption. The beginning, not the end.'

'On the other hand, we know that the last words Patrick Hutton had to say to anyone-to anyone who's prepared to talk-were something like, 'They won't make me play the Judas.''

Tyrrell brought his steely-blue eyes around to meet me. A faintly appalled smile played around his tiny mouth, as if he had just learnt afresh what fools these mortals be.

'That would have been Miss Miranda Hart who told you that.'

'Yes. But you could have told me that without violating the secrecy of the confessional. You could have told me you visited her that night-after you'd heard Patrick Hutton's confession-and insulted her, impugned her character and generally scared the living daylights out of her. You could tell me about it now.'

'Could she not recall in detail what I told her?' Tyrrell said, as if astonished that his words hadn't seared themselves verbatim on Miranda's brain. 'Well, I don't think I can remember either. I may have spoken abruptly-as I remember it, I may have held her responsible for…well, for some of Patrick's…misfortune. No doubt I was harsh. I believe the young lady…gave as good as she got, that night. I was sent from the house with a flea in my ear.'

'Of course, you knew her before, didn't you? You knew Patrick before. And Leo Halligan, your breakfast companion of yesterday morning.'

Tyrrell smiled in what almost looked like delight.

'Well, I must say I feel vindicated in my choice of sleuth; nothing seems to have slipped past you yet. Am I to take it from the marks on your face that you managed to rendezvous with the unfortunate Leo?'

'You are. And the unfortunate Leo told me to ask you about your years at St. Jude's Industrial School. See I thought he must have got that wrong. I thought you were here all along. But I checked it out with Tommy, and he said no, you'd gone down there for a few years. How did that happen? Did you run into a little trouble up here?'

'Nothing of the sort,' Tyrrell said, his cheek beginning to pulse. 'I went down to Tyrrellscourt, I…it was at the request of Francis…my brother…he wanted masses said in the house regularly, more often than the local priests could manage, or were willing to, and the archbishop at that time was a great racing man, he was reared not far from Tyrrellscourt, and he arranged it that I could serve there, and that if and when things changed, I would find a place again in Bayview.'

My bewilderment must have been obvious.

'It's not unusual at a racing stables where there's a good number of staff for the local priest to come and say mass before big meetings, and bless the horses, and so on. Or at least, it wasn't. And Francis went through a phase of taking this very seriously indeed, and wanted…no exaggeration to say, he wanted his own priest. And for a time, he got one.'

'This was before you two fell out.'

'Yes, this was…this would have appealed to me. I was wearying of parish work, of the pastoral round of wayward youths and despairing women and their shiftless husbands. It had…I suppose it had another kind of pastoral appeal, that of paradise regained. The childhood we had shared, among horses, always horses. I missed the horses most of all.'

'And when would this have been?'

'Much of the nineties: 1990 until '98, I'd say.'

'You were there for the By Your Leave episode then, you were at Tyrrellscourt when Patrick Hutton vanished.'

'Oh yes.'

'But I thought Patrick Hutton came here, made his confession here.'

'I never said that. I said he made his confession to me. But he made it in the chapel at Tyrrellscourt.'

'All right then. Tell me about St. Jude's Industrial School.'

Again the muscles in Vincent Tyrrell's face quivered, again he brought them under his control, all apart from a rogue eyebrow that continued to pulse like an insect caught on a pin.

'It was no longer an industrial school, that's the first canard to shoot down. It had been, well into the eighties, under the Christian Brothers, and a number of…incidents took place there, many of which have now been dealt with by the Residential Schools Redress Board. St. Jude's closed for a short while, and reopened in the nineties as a boys' home, under the joint auspices of the departments of education, health, and social welfare. The Church played no official role there; indeed it was no longer actually called St. Jude's, although that's how everyone in the locality referred to it; as a local priest, I paid the occasional pastoral visit, at the center's request.'

Industrial schools had become part of the folklore of what might be called the secret history of Ireland, which had only in the past twenty years or so begun to be told: unruly, unmanageable children, or simply those whose parents were unable to cope, whether psychologically or financially, were effectively detained in schools controlled by a variety of religious orders who subjected their charges to a catalog of abuses, ranging from the basic contempt and casual disregard that was the lot of the poor anywhere in Ireland in those days, to physical beatings and psychological torture, all the way up to continual and brutal sexual abuse. The religious involved were not all equally culpable, and many had been raised in similarly harsh conditions, but it is impossible to find excuses even for those who claim they knew nothing of what went on; that said, it was a social and a national scandal as much it was a church affair: we were very happy to have someone else to look after the losers and misfits, the weak and the halt, happy to close our eyes and ears to the tales they told, to dismiss them as the hysterical and obscene ravings of a negligible class of people.

'Leo Halligan certainly suggested there was more to it than that.'

'Leo would. Leo has an eye to the main chance. As soon as Leo saw there was money to be made in compensation from abusive clerics, Leo counted up the number of priests he had met in his life and multiplied it by a thousand.'

'But you knew Patrick Hutton there too.'

'I met Patrick there, and then he came across to Tyrrellscourt as an apprentice, the pair of them did.'

'Miranda Hart told me F.X. made a point of taking boys from St. Jude's on as apprentices. Did he rely on you to choose them?'

'Not in every circumstance. But I recommended Patrick and Leo, yes.'

'And would you have been aware of the relationship between them?'

'I was aware that they were friends. What you're suggesting-'