"We hadn't reached the stables," Tommy said, shamefaced still that he had lost the car. "By the time I got to the entrance, there was no sign of the Land Rover."

"Derek Rowan was head man at Tyrrellscourt ten years ago. He always used import secondhand Land Rovers from England," Miranda said. "I don't know if he's still there. If it's not him, it may be his son, Brian; Derek was training him up."

Miranda Hart's tea bag was beside her cup; she had been smoking, with her gloves still on; Tommy looked on in disgust as she doused her cigarette in the tea bag and dunked the lot in her half-empty cup.

"We'd better get moving," I said. "Christmas Eve. No one will want to talk to us if we don't get down there soon."

"No one will be in a fit state to talk to us," Tommy said.

I began to talk Miranda through the eccentricities of my heating system when Tommy interrupted me.

"Ed, if your one is really under threat, your gaff is not the place to be. The killer knows you're on the case, knocked you unconscious last night; if he's looking for her, your house is going to be the first place he comes."

"You're right. We'll find a hotel-"

"She can stay at my place," Tommy said. "Plenty of room, nobody there, quiet road."

And with instructions not to answer the door to anyone, and an unconcerned look around at what a not very apologetic Tommy accurately described as "the state of the place," she stayed there.

Before we hit the road, Tommy retreated to the car to let us say good-bye. And after we'd kissed, Miranda Hart said, "Please, Ed, promise me, you'll try and understand…no matter what you hear."

And I promised to try.

WE TOOK THE Tallaght exit off the M50 and kept on the bypass until it became the Blessington Road; the hills were white on all sides while the low December sun scorched our eyes; skeletons of forests changed places with ser vice stations and new building developments until we cut off west toward Tyrrellscourt through the open plains of Kildare.

Tyrrellscourt had long been associated with F. X. Tyrrell and his prodigious stable of prizewinning racehorses, and with the Tyrrellscourt stud, the jewel in the crown of the Irish bloodstock industry. More recently, the Tyrrellscourt Country Club, a luxury hotel with golf course, leisure center, gymnasium and spa, had opened, with elaborate fanfare in the press; apartments with life membership of the club were made available at prices in excess of seven figures; all had been snapped up the day they were released. Celebrities flocked to celebrate their weddings there, and an EU gathering of some description had reached its climax with the assorted heads of state stomping around the Tyrrellscourt fairways in a variety of garish leisure wear.

The third thing Tyrrellscourt had become famous for, quite at odds with the first two, was the number of people who went there to disappear. The guitarist of an obscure late sixties English rock band, part of the Canterbury scene, hadn't been seen since, following the breakup of the group, he got on a train at Victoria Station, headed for Brighton; thirty-five years later, following sightings all over the globe and a persistent rumor that he was now an obscure novelist nobody knew anything about either, an English music magazine tracked him down to Tyrrellscourt, where he had been living with his Dutch wife running a candle-making business. The group subsequently re-formed and made quite a lot of money before breaking up for roughly the same reason they had in the first place: because they couldn't stand one another. But this aspect of Tyrrellscourt, its ability to give shelter and succor to a variety of misfits and n'er-do-wells of one kind or another who couldn't cut it in the new thrusting entrepreneurial Ireland, or simply refused to play by the new rules of the game, was particularly vivid given that the shiny happy face of the country club was so often used as a brochure to advertise the extent of the Irish success story. It was a script that could have been designed with Tommy Owens in mind; in fact, it turned out he'd been disappearing down here for years. Maybe they'd been running a bus from Hennessy's bar.

"I won't go on about the country club, except to say they got the fuckin' name right, and the stables is what it is, yeah, but if you want to know what Tyrrellscourt's about, then McGoldrick's is the place to go," Tommy said. "There are others places, Sheehy's and the Big Tree, but McGoldrick's has the best mix. And that's the point, the mix, know I mean? Up in the country club they're all prancing around in their Pringle and Lacoste like the cunts they are, a fucking kindergarten for the nouveau riche whose mammies won't let them play outdoors. And the horsey fuckers have work to do, fair enough, they're at the gallops and so on, and they have a couple of older restaurants they go to, salmon en croûte and Black Forest gateau they're serving, like a fucking geezer theme park, sixties cuisine for the hundred Irish cunts who've been rich since then. But everyone passes through McGoldrick's, not just the people I know: all the jockeys come there, and they're fucking mental bastards. And even middle-class people want some action after a week of golf and spa treatments and Chardonnay. Because everyone knows if you need something extracurricular, McGoldrick's the place to go."

"When you say all the jockeys go there-"

"When they can, when they're not in training, or wasting; they get a night out, they go mad."

"So there'd be boys who knew Patrick Hutton?"

"Chances are. Boys who'd say they knew him. Anyone riding in Leopardstown probably won't be there. But you never know, they do what they please, jockeys."

"Tommy, what happened between you and Miranda?"

"What do you mean, Ed?"

"I'm saying, fair enough to ask her about the call to Leo, but there was a real edge between you two. Why?"

Tommy grimaced.

"I'll tell you over a drink."

"Why can't you tell me now?"

"Because you're not going to like it. And when you don't like something, you do better with a drink in your hand."

I pressed him a little further, and when we reached a set of traffic lights, he turned to me and said pretty much the worst thing Tommy could say about anyone.

"Ed, I know her."

THE VILLAGE IS on a slope, and at its top, you can see the Tyrrellscourt gallops stretching out below in two lazy figure-of-eights for the horses' round and straight work. Driving down along the main street was like one of those posed features in a color supplement about "The Subcultures of Our Time": there were new-age crusties and tree huggers with multicolored sweaters and tights and those strange cropped-pate and pigtail haircuts with dogs on strings and petitions to save the whale, and the world; there were older hippies in saris and denim and leather, with mustaches and ponytails and nature shoes and raddled complexions; there were horsey, country types in Barbours and yellow and crimson and lime cords; there were obese white-faced teenage Goths in long leatherette coats and vast black T-shirts and six-inch steel-inlaid wedges; there were the usual complements of cheerful or surly layabouts, faces weather-beaten from standing smoking outside the pub or the betting shop all day; there were clutches of stripe-shirted men with mobile phones and oblong glasses thrusting their entrepreneurial way into the future; there were spiked-fin rugby boys and primped and groomed OMIGOD girls; there were slender, fine-boned blond women from Poland and Lithuania with their crop-headed sinewy men; there were 'oul ones with walking frames and tartan shopping trollies getting the last of the Christmas messages, and 'oul fellas with papers rolled tight beneath their arms, transporting their custom from one pub to another.