'With By Your Leave. A thing of beauty, like a Grecian urn.'
'What?'
'You said By Your Leave was all we know on earth, and all we need to know. Keats. 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.''
'I didn't think you'd get that reference.'
'Of course you did. Anyone of my age would, Keats was on the Leaving Cert English course. That was about a work of art, though, not a living being.'
'That's right, and that's where it should have stayed. But Francis persisted, and to his credit, he created a beautiful, if unstable, compound. By Your Leave was too fragile for what she was asked to do, and everyone knew it.'
'The reason being, she was the offspring of a brother and sister?'
'Not just that. The brother and sister were themselves got of a brother and sister. Two generations against nature. Setting himself up as God. It was an abomination.'
CAMBRIDGE AVENUE WAS tucked in behind the R131 off Pigeon House Road, across from the tip of the North Quay, with big Polish and Russian vessels moored on the docks. Kennedy's house had a view of Ringsend Park, or at least, it would have had were it not for the fact that every cubic inch of the place was packed full of stuff, like a holiday suitcase. There were files, loose-leaf binders, notebooks and briefing documents for all the cases Kennedy had ever worked as a Garda detective. There were more of the same for all the cases Kennedy had worked as a private cop. There were concertina files full of tax forms, bank statements and insurance certificates. That was just the paper.
In the hall there were golf clubs, fishing tackle, gym equipment, tennis, badminton and squash gear, a racing bicycle and a canoe, all new, all unused, some still in their packaging. In the living room there was a Bose home cinema system, Bang & Olufsen stereo components, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an iMac G5 and three Dell laptops, all box fresh and polyethylene-wrapped. There was no room in the kitchen because the tiny floor space was taken up with a new Neff double oven; a giant Smeg fridge sat in the doorway; upstairs there were new beds resting on the old beds, and department store bags full of clothes and shoes on top. Dave sat half in the hall, half in the living room, some kind of ledger or account book with assorted sheaves of paper sticking out of it on his knees; he didn't have much choice unless he wanted to perch on the toilet, and even that had a new bathroom suite shoehorned around it.
'Hold the front page: Don Kennedy was Aladdin,' I said.
Dave looked up, shaking his head, a bemused grin on his face.
'You never know, do you? You just never know about people. They're fighting out in Bray station not to catch this detail.'
'Did he have a sideline as a fence? Or did he just lose his mind?'
'The mind, I think. But he had a budget to lose it on. The soul went first. Blackmail.'
Dave reached back into the cornucopia behind him. Resting on a white Apple carton was a box file marked PATRICK HUTTON. He opened it and handed me a sheaf of photocopied reports on paper that had
I began to read.
POSSIBLE SIGHTINGS: HUTTON, PTK.
1. Sealink Ferry: 11/1/99
Inteviewed: Goughran, Derval (Miss); asserted she saw subject (Hutton, Ptk.) boarding ferry at Rosslare, and again in Mariner's Bar during sailing. Did not see subject disembark. Speculation as to whether subject may have flung himself overboard before vessel docked in Fishguard.
SEE APPENDED COASTGUARD'S REPORT
(DOCUMENT I (a)).
I stopped reading and rustled through the pages. There were another thirty-six possible sightings. I looked up at Dave.
'Did anyone see him?' I said.
'No,' he said. 'But that doesn't undermine the value of the reports. You should learn a lesson from them, instead of running around after trouble like a madman: the value of painstaking and meticulous work documented in full. If you followed that course, you might have a house full of brand-new consumer goods too.'
'Did you notice the quality of gift his godson received increasing in value recently?'
'No, actually.'
'You see. Hoarding. Never a healthy sign. Apart from the fact that he didn't get all this crap for his meticulous documentation, he got it from blackmail. Not to mention his body dumped in a shallow grave in fucking Roundwood. Did he document the blackmail too?'
'In a way.'
Dave pulled bank statements from the ledger he had on his lap. All this time, he had been sitting on a chair in the living-room doorway and I'd been standing above him, wedged between the golf clubs and the canoe; it was an unlikely setup, almost comical if it hadn't felt so stupid. I looked at the statement.
'See: there was an electronic transfer every month, two thousand euros. But no way of knowing who it's from: whoever it is ensured that their name not appear on the statement.'
Dave rustled through the paper.
'The payments begin about two years back.'
'When he searched for Hutton.'
'So it could be your one, Miranda, or one of the Tyrrells. A lot of money for Miranda to be shelling out.'
Dave was trying to hold back, but he couldn't contain himself; he looked like a children's entertainer before the big finale. I was getting a crick in my neck: I wanted to see the rabbit now.
'I don't know what Kennedy asked for, but this is what he had, and whoever worked their way through the files didn't spot it; I think it was an extra copy: it was folded inside another endless report about sightings of people who may have been but probably were not Hutton in disguise,' Dave said, and handed me the copy of a birth certificate. I thought I was one step ahead, which is a way of guaranteeing that life will constantly surprise you. There was the mother's name I expected, Tyrrell, Regina Mary Immaculate; there was no father, sure enough; but then there was the sex: not
PART III . ST. STEPHEN'S DAY
FERDINAND:
DUCHESS:
