tumbled over and brought his head crashing down on the floor, where he stayed, whimpering now, like a dog that's been beaten too much.
After a while, he picked himself up and turned to us, his face wet with tears and snot and smeared with dust and blood where he'd torn his forehead. He came toward us then, the beam of the flashlight pointing up from beneath his chin; in its glow, amid the falling dust, he looked like his skull was smoldering; when he took his blindfold off, his tiny blue-black eyes burned like red Christmas berries. He came up close and opened his mouth wide, and showed us exactly why we hadn't had a word out of him. Like Patrick Hutton, like Don Kennedy, like Jackie Tyrrell, Bomber's tongue had been cut out. His work done, Bomber smiled, and almost bowed.
As it had begun, so it ended: Bomber picked up his wooden kneeler and put it on his back and made his way down the stairs and out into the night. While he replaced the bars and padlock on the doors, Tommy Owens and I lit cigarettes and smoked them as if they were the eighth sacrament. The moon was down, and you could see across the road to the riverbank. From the upstairs windows too, from the dormitory cells, you would have seen the river flowing, keeping its secrets all the way to Dublin and out into the sea.
'Monasteries, convents, fuckers always arranged it so they'd have themselves a nice view, didn't they?' Tommy said.
I nodded, hearing Bomber moaning to himself as he fumbled with the locks, and suddenly found myself shaking with rage, my head hot and pounding; I walked down the drive and crossed the road, shouting something at the sky, I don't know what, nothing like a prayer, and stood by the river until Tommy came out and Bomber locked the gates and gave us a lift back into town. He dropped us off at the Volvo and nodded solemnly to me, as if we had made a deal; I felt like we had too, but the difference was, he seemed to trust me, whereas I was far from sure I could say the same. I held his gaze though, and he gripped my hand and used it to roll up his sleeve, and show me the tattoo he had on his forearm. The runes were familiar to me now; I had already seen them carved on the nightstand in the dormitory cubicle Bomber had singled out; they had been tattooed or carved into each of the murder victims; now here they were on Bomber's arm: †?
'Your tongue,' I said. 'Who did it to you?'
He grinned, and threw his hands in the air, and pointed at me, as if I should know.
'What does the tattoo stand for?'
He grinned again, and this time flung his arms wide as if to embrace the world around. Then he got back in his rickety vehicle and drove away.
Tommy wanted to set off for Dublin, but I didn't want to leave before I had more information on Bomber, so we sat in the car and Tommy told me what he knew.
'His name is Terry Folan. Bomber Folan, they called him. I got to know him slightly down here, he used hang around at the fringes of that crowd Leo and Jack Proby ran with. There was smack going around, not through me, I don't know who was dealing it, Miranda Hart would know. Folan had come through St. Jude's in the nineties, just after Leo and Hutton, and then he'd been given a start as an apprentice in Tyrrellscourt stables, too. He was given a few rides, he moved up, he was still around when Pa Hutton vanished, the odd ride here and there, and then it all started to fall apart for him, he was drinking, he couldn't keep the weight off, he was just doing yard work and then not even that. He used to be one of the drunks in McGoldrick's and then he was barred from there. You'd see him stumbling along the main street, you know, half ten in the morning with a can of Dutch Gold and a rough sleeper's tan? That was as much as I knew, '98, '99 that would have been, I dropped out of sight here then. Paula wanted me home. Those were the days, right Ed?'
Paula was Tommy's ex-wife, and the divorce had been far from amicable; the
'Steno filled me in on what happened then, insofar as he knew. Apparently Folan befriended this old scrap- merchant character, Iggy Staples, who lived out of town a couple of miles, he…lived on a dump, was how Steno described it. It's actually Staples collected scrap but he never really did anything with it, he lived off his pension in a cottage that was falling in on top of him. Anyway, Bomber used to go up there and sleep, there was enough shelter, he'd pull together some kind of shed for himself. And Staples got used to the company, enjoyed it, and when he died, hadn't he left the place to Bomber.'
'And what about the keys to St. Jude's? Is he the caretaker?'
'It's not a good question to ask around here,' Tommy said. 'Even Steno, the first time I asked, he just walks off, didn't see him for an hour, piano-stops-playing type of thing. There's a lull in the afternoon, he asks me through to the warehouse, you know the restaurant there, they're changing over from lunch to dinner. The way he put it, St. Jude's is a scar on the town? Like, everyone knew what was going on there, but nobody did anything. And there wasn't just one Bomber Folan, every year there'd be casualties, a lot of them'd go to England, but a lot stayed, and those that went away usually came back, because they weren't fit for anything, and there they'd be, Tyrrellscourt's standing army of drunks and drug addicts, of misfits and losers, getting barred from the pubs and shambling round the streets, a living reproach every one to the town's puffed-up image of itself. Eventually they got St. Jude's closed down, there was one more scandal…no, I know what it was, your friend did a documentary on it. Your woman, the dykey one.'
'Martha O'Connor?'
'That's right. And all these stories came out, even into the nineties, some of the lay people were abusers-'
'Vincent Tyrrell? He was there in the nineties for a while, when Leo and Hutton were there.'
'It wasn't in the program. I don't think Father Tyrrell…I mean, he's a bollocks, but I'd never have put him down for that.'
''The dykey one.''
'What?'
'Is that how we talk?'
'It's how I talk. I've nothing against them. Which is more than they can say for me.'
'Tommy.'
'All right Ed, Jasus, you're very fucking Californian sometimes, do you know that?'
'How'd Folan get to be the caretaker, if that's what he is?'
'Nobody knows. Steno said no application has been made for the property, so nobody even knows who owns it, the Church or the state or what. But that Folan has the keys to the locks, whether he appointed himself to put them on, or whether he's carrying out duties for the owner, nobody knows.'
'And what about the tongue?'
'No one had really seen Folan since Staples died, about five years ago. He'd come down to the town for groceries, and for his dole, but that was it. Then, about two years ago, he kind of presents himself, the head shaved, in the bar in McGoldrick's, drinking the few pints, not saying a word. At the end of the night, he opens his mouth and shows the whole pub why he's so quiet. Pleased by the reaction he gets, and away with him. After that, he's in regularly. I got talking to Steno tonight, told him why you were in town, he said Bomber's our man. When he came in, he remembered me. He actually can speak, he has enough of his tongue left for that, and to eat with. Anyway, I talked him through the whole thing, Pa Hutton, Leo, immediately he's nodding, he's got something to show us.'
'And what a show,' I said.
'Poor fucker.'
'What do people think happened? To the tongue, I mean.'
'They think he did it himself.'
'I want to see where he lives, Tommy.'
Tommy started up the engine.
'It's on the way back,' he said.
Maybe half a mile after the turnoff for the country club, there was a narrow mud boreen indented with car tracks. It curved back toward the town for maybe half a mile, climbing as it went, then dropped suddenly toward the river. Tommy stopped the car before the drop, and we got out. To one side, you could see the golf course
