"This is a waste of my time. Maybe Tommy Owens has you thinking I'm some kind of charity case-"

"I told you, Tommy hasn't said a word. Or more accurately, I haven't listened to a single word he says. Even in grief, he does like to prattle. And I assure you, if this were charity, you'd hardly be a deserving beneficiary. Patrick Hutton. He was a jockey. His last known address-known to me, at least-is in the envelope. That's all I can tell you."

"But you know more," I said, suddenly seeing where this was heading.

"Yes, I know more, much more. But what I know was told to me in confession, Ed. You remember the rules about that, don't you?"

I nodded and sat down again. The sanctity of the confessional: the promise that sins confessed to a priest during the sacrament of penance will not be divulged, because of course the priest is merely the channel through which God's reconciling grace flows to the penitent; it is up to God to tell what He has heard, no one else. And God hasn't been talking much of late. Tyrrell stretched a hand toward me and patted the envelope of money on the table between us.

"Well, so do I. And even on the occasions when there are very good reasons to break them-and I fear this is such an occasion-the rules still apply. Maybe one day they won't, maybe one day the liberals' prayers will be answered, and the Church will transform itself as they believe Pope John the Twenty-third intended, and all manner of change will occur: women and homosexuals will dance together on the altars, and teenagers will copulate in the aisle, and obese children will make their first holy communions with giant hosts made of cheese-and-tomato pizza. Maybe one day the Church, like everything else on this rock of ours, will dwindle to a mere machine devoted to making us feel good. But that day will come too late for me. Thanks be to God."

Tyrrell's hand shot out suddenly and seized mine.

"I'm dying, Ed. They said I should do chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, but I don't want any therapy. I don't want to be healed. It's my time. I want to die. But not without setting a few affairs in order. Chief among them Patrick Hutton."

His hand felt like a claw; the bones shone ivory through flesh mottled like stained parchment. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I sat still and stared at his hand until he released mine. He poured another two drinks and passed me one, and held his glass up in a toast to-I don't know, to death by cancer, or to ordering his affairs, or to Patrick Hutton and the secrets Tyrrell and God were keeping.

"You'll take the case?"

"Patrick Hutton was a jockey," I said. "Tommy says you've been tipping him winners. Says you have insider information. How's that?"

"I don't," Tyrrell said. "But people always think I do."

I waited for him to explain. He looked surprised that I needed him to.

"I suppose the time you spent away means there are gaps in your local knowledge, Ed. My brother is F. X. Tyrrell. We don't speak, haven't for many years. But people don't know that, or don't believe it."

Francis Xavier Tyrrell was the trainer of the winning horse I didn't back yesterday, and of most of the winners I hadn't backed in the days before that. He'd been doing it for a long time, and you didn't have to know very much about horse racing to have heard of him: he had been a national figure for decades, stretching back to his first Gold Cup triumphs at Cheltenham in the sixties.

"Must be in the blood then," I said.

"Francis had the true feel for it-I always said Saint Martin of Tours was watching over him; the horses liked him, they didn't know me-and I couldn't stand coming second. Pride has been my besetting sin. It'll see me broken on the wheel one day."

Tyrrell smiled at the prospect of this, and I had a flash of his instructing my class in the seven deadly sins, and what the appropriate punishment for each was: avarice would see us boiled in oil; gluttony and we'd be force-fed rats and snakes; pride would have us broken on a wheel. Father Vincent Tyrrell was quite the young firebrand in those days, his blue eyes bulging with cold fervor, his hands rapping an ominous tattoo on the blackboard as he talked us through the tortures of hell. We were nine years old.

Tyrrell was a fanatic and a bully and a snob, and my rational self despised all this, but part of me insisted on liking him, the part I had no control over, the part that drank whiskey in the morning and took the wrong woman home at night, liked him for his unflinching absorption in what used to be called the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Because increasingly, these were the objects of my own devotions. The difference being, I didn't believe in Heaven.

He raised his glass and we finished our drinks and I stood up and nodded at him.

"How do you know I won't just take the money and tell you I couldn't find him?" I said.

Tyrrell's face clouded momentarily, the muscles quivering as if he were having a slight stroke; he controlled them by what looked like the angry force of his will, and directed his cold, penetrating gaze at me.

"I doubt if your footfall upon the earth is especially heavy as it is, Edward Loy. You would never act like that, never betray the only calling you have. You wouldn't do it out of fear. Profane fear: of the harm that would be done to your reputation. And spiritual fear: that if you acted so out of character, you'd run the risk of disappearing entirely."

The bells began to ring for the next mass. He drew his thin lips into a smile, and I found I couldn't meet his piercing eyes; I nodded at the floor to seal the deal. At the presbytery door he gave me a blessing I didn't ask for. Despite myself, I felt glad of it.

I wanted to ask Tommy some more about Vincent Tyrrell, but he was busy setting up for the next mass: there was a priest home from the African missions who needed minding. I couldn't wait until the mass was over; I was late already for another job. I didn't like to work more than one case at a time, but I didn't like being broke either; I wasn't in a position to turn anyone down. The car park was filling up as I walked toward the racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S that had been my father's, and that Tommy, wearing his mechanic's hat, had done up for me. I was by no means a petrol head, but looking at a roly-poly man and two boys in matching anoraks clustered around the car's bulky hood, I felt a stupid kind of pride. As I drew nearer, and they turned and looked at me and looked quickly away, I understood how stupid: what had caught their attention was not the car, but the damage done: the windscreen wipers had been torn off and laid in the shape of a cross on the hood; beneath them someone had scraped RIP on the hood. The man muttered something about not even church car parks being safe nowadays; I agreed and said that in my day, all we used to do was drink cider here and then break the bottles beneath the tires of the parked cars. He took off quickly after that, hustling his giggling sons into mass. I threw the wipers on the backseat, sat into the car and started the engine. At least it wasn't raining.

Heading south toward the Dublin-Wicklow border, I called George Halligan on his mobile.

"The fuck do you want?"

The tar-and-nicotine rasp was sandpaper harsh: he sounded like an emphysemic wildcat sizing up its prey.

"Nice talking to you too, George. Out and about, are you, taking a walk?"

"A walk? The fuck class of swish cunt d'you think I am? I'm in the parade ring at Gowran Park so I am."

"How'd you get in there, George? Do they not know who you are?"

"I'm here to see Jack of Hearts strut his stuff. Very sleek he looks an' all. And after that, I'll wander across and see him walk away with this little maiden hurdle. And I've Fish on Friday in the last race. What are you doing today, Ed Loy? Dole office not open on a Sunday, is it? Suppose that leaves the pub, if there are any left that'll give you credit. Or you could always stand outside mass with an accordion. If there isn't a Romanian there ahead of you."