TWENTY-FOUR

The piano tones were still wafting from above as I retraced my steps to the entrance hall and climbed the wide wood-paneled stairway to a landing the size of the average house, with couches and easy chairs and occasional tables laid out beneath exposed beams; I could see two corridors, and chose the one I thought the music was drifting from: the acoustics in the house were sound, and I was soon knocking on a dark wood-paneled door.

"Come in," said a woman's voice, and I did, my eyes drawn instantly toward an upright piano from where I assumed the music to be coming, assumed it so strongly that I stared in disbelief at the vacant stool and the covered keyboard, as if I'd been the victim of some devious trompe l'oeil effect. When I came to, I saw Regina Tyrrell on a couch at the foot of her bed; the music came from speakers I couldn't see; I flashed on Jackie Tyrrell's house the night of her murder.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said, her Dublin accent adding to my sense of the incongruous: how had she clung on to it after all these years of the Queen's horses, in this old Anglo setup? Maybe it helped her to recall a time when she was young, and her life spread out before her full of nothing but promise and adventure, a time when dressing in pink and listening to the "Moonlight" Sonata were the motifs of an overture, not an elegy.

There were three matching chairs set in a ring around the couch, which was white and gold and enough like Jackie's to maintain the sense of haunted unease I felt. I sat on one of the chairs, and looked tentatively around the rest of the room, as if fearful of other phantoms lurking there. My fears on that score were in vain. On the evidence of this and her office in the hotel, Regina's visual sense had been set in stone, and brightly colored stone at that, when she was a teenager: pink and white, ruched curtains, satins and silks; she wore pale pink satin pajamas and a matching gown; I wouldn't have been surprised to see stuffed animals on the bed. The music was in a similar vein: the "Moonlight" Sonata had given way to the slow movement from Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto in all its glutinous glory. I think I was with the Musical Powers That Be on that one. In contrast, Regina herself looked hard and shrewd and sanguine; her bloodred lips stained the tips of the cigarettes she smoked, and the glass of gin she drank; if she was at the end of her tether, I wondered how Tommy had noticed.

I sat for a long while without speaking. Regina didn't appear unduly bothered; indeed, she seemed grateful for the company. I looked up at one point to see that the music had brought tears to her eyes, or something had; she dabbed at them with a tissue and sat back as if hoping for more. I could think of nothing to ask except the darkest questions, nothing to consider except the most horrific possibilities. Finally, I just produced the copy of the birth certificate of Patrick Francis, born to Regina Tyrrell on November 2, 1976, and passed it to her. She looked at it, and nodded wearily and sadly, and shrugged.

"Patrick Hutton?" I said, and it was as if a wind had blown through the room, leaving everything apparently still and settled and yet altered irrevocably.

"How did you find out?"

"I didn't. Another detective, Don Kennedy, did. And somebody murdered him, either for that, or for whatever else he discovered."

Regina tipped her head back and looked in the direction of the gold chandelier at the center of the ceiling rose.

"I suppose it explains a lot. Why you mightn't have wanted him as a match for Miranda. On the other hand, it explains nothing. Why you haven't tried to find him. Why you didn't help him more when you could."

"I offered the reward. When Miranda was looking for him. It was in Francis's name, but it was my offer. And what more should I have done? He was taken on as an apprentice, his career was growing fast, if he hadn't been so bloody headstrong-"

"He was raised in an orphanage, worse, a boys' home where there had been serious allegations of abuse-worse than allegations, it had been closed down once already. A home just down the road from here, from your country house, your country club, your exclusive country life."

"I couldn't raise that child. I couldn't raise that child. His father…I couldn't've raised that child."

"Why not? His father…explain."

Nothing from Regina but the ability to meet my eye.

"So you couldn't raise that child. You could have afforded better than St. Jude's, where the kids nobody wanted were dumped."

"It wasn't as bad as it was painted, that place. The boys who came through to the yard, they were good lads, they seemed to have survived all right. I thought it would give the child a spine."

She nodded, as if she had somehow been vindicated by events, then blinked hard and turned away.

"You could have fostered him-"

"And lost him."

"Did you not lose him anyway? What did you gain?"

Regina hugged herself as if the wind was still blowing chill, and shivered.

"What is it, Edward Loy? What do you want, to tear the Tyrrells asunder? If I told you now that we've suffered enough for everything we've done, and it's not over yet, every sin I've committed has been paid for ten times over and will be until the end of time. Would that be enough? Would that make you leave, drop this and go?"

"It's not up to me anymore," I said. "There are people out there…some of them your children…they're angry. They want you to pay more, and to go on paying."

Regina shook her head, scorn in her eyes and in the curl of her lips.

"Children of mine? Who?"

"Patrick Hutton. Miranda Hart."

"She's not my child," Regina said.

"I couldn't help noticing your daughter Karen's eyes. Very unusual. Unless of course she was Patrick Hutton's daughter by Miranda Hart. He had that feature, too, didn't he? Heterochromia, is that what it's called? I suppose it's genetic. Can it be inherited?"

Regina Tyrrell's head was in her hands. I thought she was weeping, and I hoped she was too; if she was, maybe I could stop torturing her like this, and maybe she could think of something that would satisfy me, and bring the whole hateful saga to a close, make it vanish into thin air. She wasn't weeping though. When she sat up, she had something filmy glistening between finger and thumb, and one of her brown eyes was now blue. A tinted lens could give a blue eye the look of a brown. And if it could do it for the mother…

"Yes it can be inherited. Karen Tyrrell is my daughter," she said. "She is my daughter."

"I don't believe you, Regina. I think Karen is Miranda Hart's daughter by Patrick Hutton. And because she was incapable of looking after the child, she gave her to you. And you've brought Karen up as your own, protected her from the truth. But now it's too late, and the truth is crowding in like wind."

Regina got to her feet. Shaking one hand at me, she stretched the other out toward the door and began slowly to gravitate toward it, as if being tugged gently by an invisible cord.

"I think you better leave now, Edward Loy, or I'm going to call the Guards-"

"That's increasingly looking like our safest bet," I said. "You see, Patrick Hutton isn't dead. He's out there, living like a wild man on the old Staples place-"

"That's Bomber Folan."

"That's not Bomber Folan, Bomber Folan was murdered years ago and Patrick Hutton took his place, he kept Folan's body on ice and then made it appear on a dump in Roundwood two days ago. Alone, or with Miranda Hart, and a fellow called Gerald Stenson, Steno, another former inmate of St. Jude's. Between them, they murdered Folan, and the detective Don Kennedy, because whatever he found out when he searched for Hutton two or three years back was not something they wanted revealed. Kennedy was blackmailing someone-maybe Miranda, maybe you, maybe Francis. I don't know. All I do know is, he's not blackmailing anyone anymore. And then they killed Jackie Tyrrell; Tommy saw the car they drove from Jackie's house the night of her murder up at the old Staples place tonight, and all three of them in it: Steno, and your son, Patrick. And your daughter, Miranda."

"She's not my daughter."

"I'll take your word for it. She does look awfully like you."

"She's not my daughter. She can't be."

Rachmaninov gave way to Schubert now, a piano impromptu, the yearning, plaintive one, regret for the life not lived. Regina moved toward me, as if fixing her gaze and holding mine could insulate her from what she feared most.

"She can't be your daughter?"

"Francis promised."

"Francis promised? What had he to do with it?"

"He…I wouldn't stop working…but I couldn't…not have the child…"

"There was another child? A girl? And you wouldn't have an abortion?"

"It was unthinkable. To me. I don't condemn others, but for me…so Francis…when the time came, he arranged the adoption. I went away, you see, there was a place outside Inverness, in Scotland, to avoid the scandal, you could go there, a convent…they would have taken the child, too, but Francis insisted…said he knew the right family…then later on, when Miranda came in here, people used to say, you could be sisters, you could be mother and daughter, Jackie Tyrrell was never done worrying away at it, giggling away at it, all very sophisticated, as if we were some kind of small-town inbreds, and I asked Francis, was there any possibility…No, he said. Emphatic about it. I had to believe him, I had to. I mean…why would he lie?"

"Who was the child's father? The child that…you don't believe was Miranda?"

Regina stared at me, but wouldn't answer.

"Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"

She stared harder, but stayed silent. I felt like she was willing me to understand, imploring me to guess it. Her eyes not matching heightened her beauty and gave her a vulnerability that made me think of Karen Tyrrell; I told myself I had to keep going, for the child's sake, though every word I spoke was like a thorn in Regina Tyrrell's flesh.

"Vincent Tyrrell told me something about close breeding. He said your brother used to be very interested in it. That it was quite controversial, even with horses. He said By Your Leave, the horse that caused all the trouble for the Tyrrell family, was the offspring of two generations of brother and sister pairings."

Regina Tyrrell stared at me, her eyes glistening.

"Vincent Tyrrell met Miranda Hart before he hired me. And then he gave me one man's name-Patrick Hutton-and I've found a whole history of secrets to go with it. Who was Miranda Hart's father? Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"

Still holding my gaze, she began to shake her head.

"Was F.X. the father, Regina? Was Vincent? You were raped, you were abused by your older brother, no wonder you were ashamed, wanted to keep it a secret, it wasn't your fault, no one would ever hold it against you-"

"You cannot say such things. You cannot know such things. Think of the children, what nightmares they'll have if they find out."

I thought of the title of Martha O'Connor's documentary: Say Nothing.

"Think of the nightmares they'll have if they don't. Think of the nightmares some of them are living, or are destined to live. If Patrick and Miranda are brother and sister…and if Karen is their child…"

Regina Tyrrell was beginning to shake, the start of what appeared to be a convulsive tide of grief. She reached for my hand and fell to her knees.

"Maybe the others know the worst already. But Karen's only nine years old, for pity's sake."

"Yes," I said. "Young enough to survive it. If we're lucky."

She bent her head over my hands, as if in prayer, as if I had the power to change the past. But all I had, all we both had in common, was the desperate need to hear the truth, and to understand it. I think Regina had felt that need for a long time. And in that moment, maybe she finally chose to act on it. She stopped herself shaking, and breathed hard and deep, and looked up at me.

"All right," she said. "All right then. I dreaded this day. But I think I prayed for it too. It was always too much for one soul to bear."

And then, before she could say another word, the doorknob clicked and the door swung open and the cold relentless wind blew through the room again.