The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page A

You’re not setting me up, are you?"
    "Ed, this fucker Geraghty is a bad cop. He’s a rotten cop. I don’t want to tell you what I know about him, but let’s just say anything that can publicly embarrass him, any way I can trip the cunt up, anything to help push him out the door and I’ll be happy."
    "I don’t get it, Dave. What’s in it for you? I mean, say we get to the killer, or killers, before the Garda investigation does. We’ve still got to hand it over. I can’t arrest murderers myself. And no one’s going to give you credit for conducting some kind of maverick case. Quite the opposite."
    "Well, let’s say that’s my lookout, and leave it at that," Dave said bluntly, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. He laid a spiral bound reporter’s pad on the table and looked at me expectantly.
    A cat or a fox set the security light on in the back. I stared out at the two bare apple trees in the center of the garden, male and female, their branches nearly touching and never quite. I wondered briefly about Dave and Carmel, then as quickly put them from my mind: they had been rock solid since school, one of those partnerships where you could never see the join—however much Dave tried to portray the marriage as if it were something from the Dark Ages. Carmel was forever asking me around to the house, but the truth was, the warmth and energy and happiness they had built there always left me feeling desolate and bereft. No, those trees were a gloss first off on my parents’ ill-fated match, and latterly on the sorry chronicle of my own romantic history.
    I didn’t tell Dave that Vincent Tyrrell had hired me. But I went through most everything else: the likelihood that Don Kennedy was the PI Miranda Hart had hired at the insurance company’s behest to find Patrick Hutton; the fact that Hutton and Leo Halligan had been apprentices together at Tyrrellscourt after their joint stint at St. Jude’s reform school (Dave lifted his head from the pad for that one, his eyes wide, especially when he heard that Leo was fresh out of jail); the death of the racehorse By Your Leave; the consequent rift between Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell and its significance in Hutton’s disappearance; Hutton’s emotional declaration that he wouldn’t play the Judas for anyone; the bizarre and formidable force that was Jackie Tyrrell and her insinuation, barely countered by Miranda Hart, that Halligan and Hutton had a sexual relationship; the omega and crucifix tattoos on Patrick Hutton’s forearm.
    Dave stared at his pad in silence when I had finished. He looked up and shook his head, smiling at first. Then the smile faded from his broad face, and his mouth set, and his eyes hardened and flickered like jewels, and I had a reminder of what it felt like to sit across from him in an interrogation room. It didn’t feel very comfortable.
    "I went to the scene myself, Ed. I knew Geraghty wouldn’t like that, so I didn’t tell him. But I went there anyway, and I did what I guess you probably did: I gave the body a quick once-over and then I called it in to Bray station, along with the tip-off about Vinnie Butler. Bad enough a private cop risking the contamination of a crime scene, but a real cop? Why would he do that?"
    "I don’t know, Dave. Why did he do that?"
    "Because he knew that the private cop wasn’t really to be trusted. He knew that if the private cop found something really juicy, he’d keep it to himself. And he wanted to find out just what it was the private cop was holding back."
    "And did he?"
    "There had been a piece of paper—a note, I’d say—in the victim’s left trouser pocket. There were still shreds of paper adhering to the pocket fibers, which suggests that it had been freshly removed; there were mild ink stains on the pocket fabric, from which, as with the paper shreds, we might infer that the note had been through the wash with the trousers."
    "Do you do this for a living?"
    "What was written on the