The Price of Blood

seventheenth-century blind Irish harper. I began to laugh at this point, and Tommy turned to me.

'You know when Yanks say to you, 'Oh, you're so lucky to live in Ireland,' like it's some fucking Celtic theme park full of characters and crack and gargle? And we're like, no, it's just like anywhere else, except with rain? Well, sometimes that's what Tyrrellscourt is like. It's like visiting Ireland for an Irish person.'

We braked suddenly as a BMW Estate pulled out of its parking spot, and then Tommy smartly rolled the Volvo into its place and killed the engine. He flipped a half-smoked roll up from his shirt pocket to his mouth, lit it and exhaled with a grin.

'Of course, by half three, the light will be dying, and the freeze will be kicking in, and half the town will be pissed, and the other half will be getting there, and the blood will be up and the knives will be out, and all of this fucking…Brigadoon will just…'

Tommy held his hand out to the color and bustle of the town, and raised it in a parting wave.

'See ya…'

***

EVERYONE PASSES THROUGH McGoldrick's, Tommy said, so it only seemed right that we did too. It had a traditional frontage and an old mahogany bar with snugs on either side; double doors led through to a larger lounge and restaurant area; at the end of this another set of doors gave onto a vast room that looked like an old warehouse: girders had been painted pillar-box green and floorboards had been waxed and tossed with sawdust and old suitcases and books and vintage bicycles and typewriters were stacked on shelves and in alcoves; lunch was being served from an open kitchen that ran the length of one wall by young staff with the striking looks and excellent manners of Eastern Europeans to tables filled with Christmas Eve revelers, mainly families with supernaturally excited kids. We retreated to the lounge, which seemed to have a more upscale buzz to it, judging by the high-maintenance sheen of its predominantly female clientele. Without even having to look at each other, we found ourselves back in the bar, perched on two bar stools and ordering pints of Guinness and bowls of Irish stew. The graying ponytailed barman, whose name was Steno, gave Tommy a high five and made fun of his short hair and close-shaven face; evidently Tommy had established a minor reputation down here for himself. I wondered if I should tell Steno about Tommy's recent career move to the Church. Better to keep that in reserve, I decided. The bar's customers were on the horsey Barbour side, chomping brown bread and pate and drinking hot ports and yelping about Leopardstown.

'Later in the day, it all gets a bit…looser,' Tommy said.

The foaming half-poured pints sat by the taps to settle, and I nodded to Tommy to get on with it, and he nodded at the pints, so we waited until Steno had topped them up and gave them another couple of minutes and at last set them down in front of us, the swirling brown now solid black, the heads creamy and firm. We tipped them back. I don't know about Tommy's, but mine tasted like the first pint God made.

'All right then, Tommy, I have the drink; now, tell me what you know about Miranda Hart.'

Tommy grimaced, then raised his eyebrows to heaven resignedly.

'All right, Ed, but don't go blaming the messenger.'

'Just get on with it, will you?'

'Right, I used to come down here a fair bit, '98, '99, things weren't going so well with Paula, better than before they started to go really badly but still, anyway, I was down here, doing, I never told you this, a bit of work for Leo Halligan. Don't get the wrong idea, Ed, only Leo wasn't the maniac everyone thought he was, and no one thought he done that young fella, he was covering up for someone else, or something else, and there was a lot of talk that he was happy to do the time, get himself out of the way. Anyway, I was doing a bit of work for Leo-'

'What kind of work was this, Tommy? For a Halligan brother? Painting and decorating, were you?'

'You were away, Ed, so you missed a lot of…when George and Podge Halligan were getting going back in the nineties, Leo was down here, trying and failing as a jockey. Not as if he was morally opposed to his brothers, he just had a different plan. After that plan didn't work, he hung on down here, and he became a kind of…I don't know, he was like, at the center of a whole bunch of guys, jockeys, a bookie or two, even a few racing journalists.'

'At the center of them how?'

'He'd be buying them dinner, drinks, comping them to events, you know, gigs in Dublin. Lining up women. And a little dope, a little blow, a few E's.'

'And you were his distribution network for the drugs, yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'And so what was it all about? Was it some kind of charitable work maybe? These horse-racing professionals were all-work-and-no-play merchants and Leo stepped in to modify their work-life balance? Or, having given all their lives, they decided it was time they got something back.'

'You may laugh.'

'Some days, I do little else.'

'Leo may be a Halligan, but being gay is like a passport across the classes. And racing has a fair bit of that as well. So you'd be surprised who you'd've seen down here. And Leo was always setting up the jockeys to go to these charity balls for MS and the Hospice Foundation and whatever, photographs of them in the Sunday Independent with a bunch of orange-faced models. He knew all these guys who trot around after the ladies who lunch and, you know, go with them to all these events their husbands can't be bothered going to anymore. And they're all hoovering up blow any chance they get, so it worked out nicely, all very respectable.'

'Meanwhile.'

'Well, I don't know, I mean, I have no evidence, no proof. But the story was, it was all about race fixing. Leo was working with George at this stage-George has a place in the Algarve, and a lot of the jockeys were flown out there on golfing holidays, they were given presents, sometimes cash, sometimes cars or whatever. George has been running a book for ages for people who can't bet legally, usually because their money isn't clean. So the jockeys were holding up horses mostly, in some cases maybe doping them.'

The Irish stew arrived, and for once, it actually was Irish stew-mutton, potato and onion in a white sauce-and not the brown beef concoction that often masqueraded in its place. I fell on mine in a spasm of lunchtime-after hunger; Tommy peered at his disapprovingly, pushed it to one side and ordered two more pints.

'I need to be back for midnight mass; plenty of time to let these metabolize,' he said.

'What was in it for the journalists and the other bookies? The same?'

'Sure. They knew when to bet, when to lay off. And the journalists could mount a defense of any jockey that made it look too blatant. Every trainer keeps a tame journo or two.'

'Any bookies we know?'

'There was only really the one: Jack Proby. Well, and his old man, Sean, of course. But Jack was the main man, Jack was into everything, Jack-'

Tommy stopped suddenly, and then stared across the gantry at a bottle of Irish Mist, as if it had asked him a question. His face flushed.

'Is this how the girl gets into the picture?'

He nodded, grimacing.

'Spit it out.'

'She was with Proby, but…well, she was doing a lot of coke, and then she got into smack, and…'

'And what?'

'She turned into a total skank, you know? She'd go with anyone. And I think the idea was to pimp her out, because she was a gorgeous-looking woman, but she got too messy for anyone to deal with. Too messy for anyone to pay money for. She got barred out of here, and pretty much everywhere else. And it was really humiliating for her because she was known in the town, you know? Her old man used to run the Tyrrellscourt Arms and all. It was almost as if that was why, you know, because she was known that she was doing it. I mean, she didn't have to. Even on smack, blokes'd queue down the street for a woman like that.'

'What happened to her father?'