“All right, all right,” he said. “Fuck sake. What do you want?”
“Who told you to warn me off?”
Darren Reilly didn’t answer immediately, so I pulled him off-balance and stamped on his foot, near the ankle, hard. He screamed and fell to the ground and lay there moaning.
“Who told you to warn me off?” I said again.
“Sean Moon,” he said. “Jesus fuck!”
“Sean Moon? Don’t make a clown of me here, Darren.”
“I swear. Paid us an’ all. Like when we were minding the young ones.”
“What young ones?”
“The Howard kids.”
“Sean Moon paid you to mind Emily Howard and Jonathan O’Connor?”
“Sure. Brady organized it with him. We just done what we were told. Take the money and run.”
Reilly wiped some blood from his face and put a tentative hand to his nose. It didn’t look broken to me. Maybe I was losing my touch.
“So David Brady was in charge of it all then?”
“Moon isn’t the gobshite you think he is. Bit of a fucking brain, could’ve gone to Uni an’ all. Two of them working together, looked like to me. They organized the whole blackmail thing with your one’s oul’ fella, Howard.”
“They organized it?”
“Yeah. I think your one was in on it though. I didn’t care one way or the other. They paid us well, is all I know. Even if they wouldn’t let us watch the riding.”
“And who blackmailed Brady into making the porn in the first place?”
“Sorry? Lost me there man,” Darren Reilly said. He worked his foot around in a circle. “At least it’s not broken. I wouldn’t give much for your chances once Wayne gets his nose sorted out, he’s a tendency to bear a grudge, so he does.”
“David Brady was blackmailed into making the porn by someone whose daughter he had sex with when she was underage. Do you know who that was?”
“The dirty fucker. No, I don’t know.”
“I do,” a voice said.
When I turned around to look at Tommy, his head was bowed and he was shaking. He lifted his head and swung an unsteady finger at me, and I was taken aback to see tears in his eyes. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. I went closer, and he spoke into my ear.
“My daughter, Ed,” he said. “Naomi.”
And suddenly, it all made sense. I took the note that had been passed to Jerry Dalton in Seafield Rugby Club out of my pocket and looked at it. Jerry, please see David Brady gets this. That was why the handwriting had looked familiar. Because it was Tommy’s surprisingly elegant hand, not quite copperplate but not far off. The first time I’d had a note from him, aged about nine, it read: You are dead at breaktime. Best joined-up writing in the class. We fought in a ring of shouting boys, huddled against the granite wall at the far end of the schoolyard, and I was winning when Tommy switched positions and sidestepped, and I slapped a right hook into the rough granite and my knuckles exploded in crimson. Smarter than he looked, often smarter than me. Underestimate Tommy Owens at your peril.
Tommy subsided onto the tarp-covered hood of another German saloon at the far end of the garage, a BMW by the shape. I left Darren Reilly and walked across to Tommy.
“Tell me,” I said.
“She stayed over, that time you were on that bar fraud thing in Wicklow. We’d been getting on well, you know, even if her mother has done her best to turn her against me. Not to mention letting her run wild, the mouth on her, fucking this, fucking that, thirteen years old. And makeup, and hair bleached blond, wearing this pink velour tracksuit with ‘Juicy’on her arse, and a black thong sticking up over it, and a tattoo at the base of her spine, you know, a fucking tramp stamp, two bolts of lightning it looked like, pointing down toward her hole, I mean fuck sake, is Paula on drugs letting her get that done? But I said nothing. I mean, she’s doing well at school, she’s a good laugh, and she’s always stuck up for me with Paula. Even when there wasn’t a lot to stick up for.”
I turned to check on Darren Reilly, who looked away quickly; he had come closer to us since Tommy started talking.
“Let’s dump head-the-ball here before you tell me any more, Tommy,” I said.
Tommy tied the scarf around Darren Reilly’s eyes and I opened the door and sat into the Volvo and reversed out. The lights went off, and Tommy and Reilly emerged onto the street, and as Tommy reached up to pull the door down, I saw Reilly tugging at his blindfold, and the scarf fell down around his face, and once he clocked where he was, he pushed the blindfold back over his eyes and tightened it again. Tommy snapped the padlock shut on the aluminum door, as if he hadn’t noticed what Reilly had done. He pushed Reilly in the backseat and I drove back to the Woodpark Inn and Tommy pushed Reilly out of the car and Reilly walked away into the car park swearing several varieties of revenge on us both. Tommy got back in the car beside me, and I drove up onto the dual carriageway and joined the northbound flow of traffic for the city.
“Anyway,” Tommy said, “we’re sittin’ there watchin’ Buffy or something on the telly and there’s a knock at the door, shave-and-a-haircut, ten-bob, like that, y’know, and Naomi’s on her feet in a twinkling, ‘that’s for me, Da,’ and out the door. Some young fella she was expecting, I can hear them in the hall. I’m saying nothing, don’t want to blow it. Anyway, she’s in such a rush to see your man she’s left her phone there on the arm of the couch, one of the camera ones, you know, and there’s all giggling and hissing coming from outside the door, and I just have a quick look at the phone, see who’s ringing her, what’s what. Bit nosy, but…whatever. I’m still her da, amn’t I? Thought I’d say I was thinking of getting one myself if she came back in. And I’m scrolling through the photos. Her friends in school uniforms, spotty young fellas, Paula, my ma, even one of me in there. And then there’s one of Naomi and the Howard young one, and they’re both sucking this lad’s prick. Fuck sake, I nearly threw up, I’m not coddin’ you. And back I go, and there’s more, all riding each other, doing everything, and filming each other doing it, fucking disgusting now, and I can see your man is David Brady. In one of them, he’s winking at the camera while Naomi…ah fuck. Fuck.”
Tommy stopped talking, and I could hear his breath coming deep and slow as he tried to compose himself. The mist had blown up again; the world had shrunk to four streams of traffic, flowing relentlessly to and from the city. I lit two cigarettes and passed one to Tommy; he took it, and the car filled with smoke.
“I heard the front door slam, and she comes back in, all smiles, beautiful, you know, still my little girl. And I thought, just leave it, talk to Paula, don’t…don’t fuck things up here. I mean, I thought that, but how could I not say anything? Thirteen years old, and that fucker smirking like a cunt…anyway, I just blurt it all out, and she goes mental of course, calls me a snooper and a pervert and a scumbag and all this, so she’s storming out, and I say, does Paula know about it? That stopped her in her tracks. ’Cause okay, the tattoo and the clothes and all, but Paula isn’t gonna be impressed by those pictures, not one little bit.”
Tommy’s ex-wife had dyed red hair and coarse good looks and her voracious appetite for men was matched by her utter disdain for them; Paula slept with men before the first date, thus ruling out the likelihood of there ever being one, and endlessly reconfirming her low opinion of the sex. She had made several contemptuous passes at me recently, after hours in a bar full of people with no homes they wanted to go home to; I had evaded her, but with a woman like Paula, in a bar like that, you felt it was only a matter of time. But when she caught a bloke who had moved in with her for a few months putting the moves on Naomi, she stabbed him in the hand with a screwdriver. “I was aiming for his balls,” she told Tommy. The guy went to stay with his brother in Copenhagen, which is probably far enough away, although I would have gone farther.