The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

railway line at the Merrion Gates and took Strand Road for about a mile, then turned off into Sandymount. There was a video store on the green that offered Internet access, so I parked by O’Reilly’s pub and waited in line for the single computer terminal behind two Italian students.
    When it was my turn, I entered Patrick Hutton’s name in a search engine. Amid the university professors, secondary school headmasters and orthopedic surgeons, I found a few references to Patrick Hutton the jockey, chief among them the following short piece in the
Irish Independent
in December 2004.
     
REWARD OFFERED
FOR MISSING JOCKEY
     
    Trainer F. X. Tyrrell is offering ten thousand euro for information about the whereabouts of Patrick Hutton, the Wicklow-born jockey who apparently vanished seven years ago. Hutton, who rode over a dozen winners for Tyrrell during 1996, including the Arkle Chase at Cheltenham on By Your Leave, dropped out of public view days before he was due to ride for Tyrrell at the Leopardstown Christmas Festival, and hasn’t been seen since. Anyone with information should contact Derek Rowan, head man at Tyrrellscourt.
    There was a small black-and-white head shot, but it was difficult to pick out any distinguishing features: like models, with whom they have a lot in common, jockeys all tend to resemble one another at first or even second flush. There were a few contemporary reports of races Hutton had run; the only other item of interest was a short account of a meeting at Thurles in October 1996, where By Your Leave finished last in a field of nine in the third race, and the subsequent inquiry at the Turf Club, where the question of Hutton deliberately stopping the horse was raised, but then dismissed.
    I spent some time trying to find out a bit more about F. X. Tyrrell. There was plenty on his achievements in racing and breeding, but relatively little on the man himself: one marriage, which lasted ten years; no kids; usually accompanied in public by his sister, Regina. Legendarily reluctant to speak to reporters, so little was known about his life away from the track and the stud that it was logical to assume he didn’t have any. I copied down one quote from an interview, the only utterance of his that involved a subordinate clause: "It’s a simple game: it’s all in the breeding, all in the blood. If the bloodlines are right, the animals will be right, provided they’re given the nurture they need. Blood and breed, that’s the beginning and end of it."
    It was dark by the time I got to Riverside Village; the Christmas decorations were more discreet and tasteful than they had been in Michael Davitt Gardens: hardly surprising, as an 800-square-feet three-bed went for nine hundred thousand here in Dublin 4; number 20 had a lighted candle in the window and a holly wreath on the doorknob and a red 1988 Porsche 928 in the drive. My phone rang as I pressed the bell; when I checked the number and saw the 310 area code, I realized it was my ex-wife again. Nine in the morning in West L.A. and she could think of nothing better to do than call me. I felt a momentary stab of panic, but that gave way to the sad knowledge that there was no longer anything between us to panic about, and then to anger at her unwillingness to leave me the fuck alone. And that gave way to genuine panic, because when the door of number 20 opened, there was the dark hair, the pale skin, the great dark eyes, the long legs, the slightly crooked, wide red lips of my ex-wife standing before me.
     
     
       I WAS SITTING on the black leather couch in the living room. I had asked for a whiskey, and was told I could only have one if I drank a cup of hot sweet tea first, so that’s what I was doing while the woman who looked like my ex-wife sat on the black leather chair across from me. Her name was Miranda Hart, and whether she was uneasy or excited at having a strange man in her house, or both, I couldn’t tell; her way of dealing with it to was