The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page B

in a side-of-the-mouth kind of way and shook her head.
    "I run a riding school for Jackie Tyrrell, up in Tibradden. It’s a far cry."
    "From what?"
    She looked toward the door again, then smiled carefully at me.
    "I used to ride, Mr. Loy. I grew up near Tyrrellscourt, I worked in the yard as a girl, I had a few amateur races. I was as good as Patrick. Better, some people thought. Then, after he took off, or disappeared, or whatever the fuck he did…I don’t know, it was as if I were to blame. Like I’d been a curse of some kind. Blame the black widow, y’know? F.X. cut me off, and other trainers followed suit. I got a bit of yard work with another trainer, but I wasn’t happy doing that anymore. So I kind of drifted off track, in more ways than one…rented this place out and just…let things slide, y’know? Got into a few…situations. And then F.X. and his wife split up, and Jackie called me. I needed to get myself together by then, so I jumped at the chance. Jackie helped me with the house, everything."
    "F. X. Tyrrell’s wife. All very cozy."
    "His ex-wife. They parted amicably, there were no children. Why is it so cozy?"
    "The person who hired me to find Patrick Hutton was Father Vincent Tyrrell."
    It was as if someone had flicked a switch, or pulled a cord, in Miranda Hart’s back: her shoulders slumped and her head dropped and something like a howl came from deep inside her. When she turned her face to me, I saw black eyes stained red and soaked with the black mess her tears had made of her makeup. She was shaking her head now, opening her mouth and trying to get the words out; I could see red lipstick stains on her teeth. Finally, she managed to coordinate palate and lips and tongue long enough to be understood.
    "Get out of here," she said. "Get the fuck out of here, or I’ll call the police."
     
     
     

FIVE
     
     
       I sat in the car and tried to work out what I had seen in Miranda Hart’s eyes when she heard Vincent Tyrrell’s name, the split second before she fell apart on me: what combination of fear, anger, shame or guilt. The tears were real, the emotion convulsive, hysterical even, but Miranda Hart looked like she was capable of putting on quite a show if she put her mind to it. At least, that was what I figured by the end of our encounter, once my entire system had gotten the message loud and clear that she was not in fact my ex-wife.
    Next, I listened to the message my ex-wife had left on my phone, and then I did something I hadn’t done for maybe three years: I called her, and asked how she was, and how her little boy was doing; I spoke to her like I should have a long time ago. She told me she still felt bad about Lily, our little girl, especially at Christmas, thinking how she might have turned out, and I told her so did I, and she said every year on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Christmas she went to the Third Street Mall and bought all the gifts Santa would have brought and then on the Sunday she went to seven forty-five mass at St. Clement’s and donated the toys to the church’s Angel Toy Drive for needy children and orphans. She started to cry then, and I sat and listened, and wondered whether remembering our dead child by giving toys to poor kids at Christmas was better than remembering her by getting drunk and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to blame other people for pain that was nobody’s but your own. I decided that it was.
    We sat on the phone for a long while after that, after she had stopped crying, not saying very much, until she said the call must be costing me a fortune, and I said there was no need to worry, because I was a millionaire, a line we used to use before any of this had happened, and she laughed then, and told me she missed me, and I thought that was a good time to send her my love and wish her a Merry Christmas and end the call.
    I sat for another long while then, until I was able to catch my breath, and I could see straight. I wiped my face