I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children's clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal contact. I went down and pulled grass and weeds and offered them from my hand; the horse feasted eagerly, steam rising from her coat like breath in the cold air; I inhaled her deep, musky smell, let her old teeth gnaw my outstretched palm, relished every snort and whinny. When I withdrew from the gate, and she realized there was nothing more to come, she wheeled around and took off back to her spot at the bottom of the field, the clump of her hooves on the hard winter grass like mountain thunder, thrilling to the ear.
Still shaken, I drove fast out of the forest of pines and down to the road and back onto the N11 and stopped off at the first pub I came to. It was a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet. A rough-looking Sunday-afternoon crowd of all ages was resentfully half watching an English Premiership game that could have been of little real interest to them, Wigan and Reading, perhaps, or Bolton and Portsmouth, the adults all drunk and surly, the kids bored and restless; the remnants of seasonal turkey-and-ham lunches littered the tables amid the full and empty glasses. It wasn't a very nice place, but I was very glad to be there, among the living.
I ordered a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness and a turkey-and-ham sandwich and found a quiet corner with a view of the car park and no view of a TV screen, and while I drank the whiskey with a little water, I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I had seen. Then I rang Dave Donnelly and told him some of it, including the need to get someone onto Vinnie Butler urgently. I told him it looked like the body had been killed elsewhere, then cleaned up and moved to the scene. I didn't tell him I had moved the body and I didn't tell him I had searched it, although I knew he'd assume I had. I didn't tell him about the tattoo either-he'd find out about that when the crime scene unit examined the body. The tattoo was on the man's left forearm: two symbols recently, and amateurishly, carved; they'd barely scabbed over. One resembled a crucifix, the other looked like the ancient Greek letter omega: †?
Dave went through the motions of reefing me out of it for not staying with the body until the scene had been secured, but his heart didn't seem in it: I guess from his point of view, having me connected with the murder would be an inconvenience. I needed to be free to dig for the scraps he'd need in working the case; in return, he'd feed me what he could, and look the other way when I stepped outside the law, provided I didn't do it in too visible a way. In case I didn't understand the latter point, Dave signed off on it.
'Just don't get that O'Connor woman involved, all right Ed? Thought you had more sense than to trust a fucking journalist.'
'Sure about that, Dave? Far as I can remember, the way she wrote you up on the Howard case was one of the main reasons you got your big promotion to the Bureau.'
'Your memory's playing tricks with you then, Ed. Knock off the gargle and cop onto yourself, would you?'
You couldn't slam a mobile phone down, but Dave ended the call so abruptly that it felt like that's what he'd done.
The other thing I didn't tell Dave about was the shredded betting slip I'd found stuck inside the corpse's trouser pocket, as if it had been through the wash. I prised it out and bagged it and pieced it together now. It had a mobile number written on it, faded but legible. I rang the number, and a hoarse male voice answered.
'What can I do you for, friend?'
There was a hubbub of voices in the background, and the rasp of a P.A. saying, 'Winner all right. Winner all right.'
'Was that the last race?' I said.
'That's the last done now, friend,' the man said. 'All off-course accounts to be settled in the morning.'
'Did Fish on Friday place?'
'Did she what?'
He barked out a loud, derisive laugh.
'Best guess is she's still out there, friend. Maybe she'll be home for Christmas. Would you like to bet on it?'
I ended the call. Fish on Friday was one of George Halligan's horses, running at Gowran Park. The dead man had the mobile number of a bookie at the same race meeting in his trouser pocket. And when I'd held his face, back in the forest, his jaw had hung open, and his mouth gaped red down his throat, and I saw the last thing I decided not to tell Detective Inspector Donnelly. His tongue had been cut out.
FOUR
I had another large Jameson before I left the pub, but it didn't do a lot to get the chill out of my bones. By the time I reached Michael Davitt Gardens, there were marked and unmarked Garda cars flanking the white Ford Transit van; kids climbed on walls and shinned up lampposts and neighbors stood in their doorways and gardens and watched as the crop-haired driver with the red face was led into a squad car. I drove on and parked around the other side of the estate, across the road from the closed gates of the Leonard house. The blue BMW was still parked outside. I called Joe Leonard on his mobile and he came out and sat in my car and I gave him a potted account of what had happened, up to the arrest of Vinnie Butler. Part of me felt relieved, as if the discovery in the woods had restored pride and dignity to us both: a trivial litter problem had become, or was at least on nodding terms with, a murder case. I don't think Leonard saw it that way.
'If they charge him for murder, will they let the dumping offenses slide?' he said.
I looked to see if he was serious. He was: deadly.
'Probably,' I said.
'Well, in that case, I'll keep the camera rolling, Mr. Loy. You'll keep me posted if there are any developments, won't you?'
I said I would, and he got out of the car and crossed as far as the BMW, stroked the blue hood with his hand, then came back and leaned into my window.
'I know you didn't see us at our best this morning,' he said quietly, blushing and looking back quickly and furtively at the upstairs windows of his house, as if his wife and her mother might appear in one of them to spy on him, characters all in a not terribly comic opera.
'It's just that I…I had a run of bad luck a few years back…a dot-com start-up, and…and we lost our house, repossession, right when the boom was taking off…and, well, it's been hard getting started again…the kids were so young when it happened. And Annalise was pretty angry…still is, really, don't suppose you can blame her, I asked her to trust me…we lost so much. We'd be sitting on a lot of equity now, instead of…'
He gestured around at his surroundings. I made a face intended to suggest that these kinds of things happened (which they did) and that often it was no fault of the person to whom they happened (which it wasn't) and that I was sure nothing but good would come of it eventually (which it might). I caught sight of my expression in the rearview mirror. It didn't reassure me. But Leonard didn't notice, or didn't mind; he simply wanted me to hear him out. I nodded and shrugged in a what-can-you-do sort of way, and he thanked me-for what, I couldn't tell-and straightened up and shook my hand and crossed the road, stopping to stroke the hood of the BMW again as he passed.
