The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online

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.
     
     
       ACCORDING TO FATHER Vincent Tyrrell, Patrick Hutton’s last known address was a town house in Riverside Village, a private estate by the Dodder River in Sandymount. Before I left the pub I had tried the two Patrick Huttons I could find in the phone book. One was a plasterer; the other was the senior executive solicitor at South Dublin County Council. Neither had been a jockey; the plasterer sounded amused at the suggestion, the solicitor mysteriously outraged, as if I’d accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ. Now I was driving north toward the city, the roads clogged with traffic on the last shopping Sunday before Christmas. I crossed the