"Like a wife."

"It wasn't unusual where we came from. Eldest son inherits the farm-"

"Youngest becomes a priest, unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for the brother-"

"Not unusual at all."

"She never married."

"Nothing like that," Regina said sharply. "There was more than one fella, over the years. But none of them…I don't know, unless you're going to settle for less. And I had all this, I didn't need any man's money."

She gestured toward the window, and then around the room.

"This house was in ruins, some 'oul dacency sisters were hanging on for dear life, until they gave up the ghost. We got it for a song in 1970. Francis put the whole thing in my name, I had the idea for all this."

"Well done," I said, and meant it.

"And so that was another thing, you're a successful woman, you attract gorgeous-looking fellas with expensive tastes and no funds, and you scare off the me-Tarzan types. So what can you do?"

"What did you do when Jackie Tyrrell appeared on the scene?"

Regina sighed and shook her head at that.

"What did I do? I invited her down here, you know. Jackie Lamb. She was in school with me. And she'd been writing to me, all this very flattering stuff, she was working for one of those Irish women's magazines, wanted to do a feature, sisters are doing it for themselves, all very exciting. So down she comes, and it's soon very clear she has F.X. in her sights."

"And were you hurt by that?"

"Hurt? What do you mean, hurt? I told you, there was nothing like that. Do you think I was after her?"

"I didn't mean about her. I meant, hurt that your brother…there must have been a very strong bond between you both. It can't have been easy to bring another woman into that."

Regina Tyrrell looked at her watch again, and lifted her hands up and almost clapped them.

"Four-thirty. Sun over the yardarm. Miranda said you drank."

"I do."

"Don't we all?"

"Does F.X.?"

"Of course he doesn't."

Light spilled from the far end of the room as Regina opened a white wood door that concealed a fridge freezer and produced a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Schweppes tonic. She found glasses and brought the drinks to the desk and we drank in near darkness. I thought of asking her to put the light on, but then found I didn't want to.

"I wouldn't say I was hurt," Regina said. "But it was hard not to feel excluded. I mean, she was at the races instead of me. Literally. And of course, she had the finishing school thing going on, and the magazine and all, these lady writers who were friends of hers up in Dublin, gossip columnists and what have you, giving her great write-ups for the frocks. So yeah. But like I mean, I just moved in down here and let her get on with it. There was a time she was up and down to me three times a day, how does this work, when does Francis like his dinner, all that. Felt like his ma so I did."

"You said F.X. doesn't drink. Jackie Tyrrell said there were a lot of things F.X. didn't do."

"Really. I wouldn't know."

"Because it seems odd on the face of it that they never had children. She said-"

"Yeah. She said that to me too. And says I to her, there are things a sister shouldn't really have to know about her brother, and that's one of them."

"No curiosity?"

"No thank you. Did she tell you all this the night she died?"

"She did. I was the last person who saw her alive. Apart from her killer."

"What did she say about me?"

"She said you run all this, and you run your brother too."

Regina laughed mirthlessly.

"That's the way Jackie saw everything. It was all about control."

"And what is it all about for you?"

The question seemed to catch her unawares. In the pale light I thought I saw something like vulnerability, even fear, cross her face.

"The future. It's all about the future."

I forbore from asking the obvious question-what kind of future could the Tyrrells have when the current generation was too old to provide another?-but I felt it lay heavy in the air between us.

"She also said you were glad when she and Francis got divorced. And that she was going to tell me a thing or two about you," I said.

"And did she?"

"That was the last thing she said to me. The next time I saw her, she was dead."

Regina 's hand went automatically to her throat, and she shuddered, whether in sympathy or out of relief, I couldn't tell.

"What kind of relationship did you have with Miranda Hart?" I said.

Regina shrugged.

"I didn't really get a look-in. Jackie was hugger-mugger there. I liked her as a teenager, she used to haunt the yard, drive the lads wild. In every way. Reminded me a bit of myself at that age. When her mother died, her father sent her off to boarding school in England, and she came back talking like Lady Diana, Jasus, that was something to hear. Jackie kind of adopted her then, bought her clothes and all. Had her show-ponying around the place. I never thought Miranda had what it took to carry that off. Her name is Mary, you know."

"Mary?"

"Yeah. I think she took some stick from the gels in Cheltenham over that, about being a little Irish colleen, holy Mary, all this, so when she got back here for good, she was Miranda, with the yah accent. Jackie bought into the whole thing, and it stuck. 'Course everyone knew she was Paddy Hart the publican's daughter Mary, but if she says that's not who she is anymore, who's to say different?"

Regina 's tone was jaunty and high, as if discussing the amusing caprices of a neighbor's daughter. My next question not only put a stop to that, it retrospectively undermined any gaiety she had supposedly felt at Miranda's adventures.

"And what happened with Patrick Hutton?"

"That was just an unsuitable, a wrong marriage, I told Jackie from the very beginning, she should and could have stopped it, but no, I was being petit bourgeois and lower middle class apparently, the snotty Cork bitch, she thought it was wonderfully brave. I honestly think she pushed it out of spite, because I got Francis to try and intervene. If he's good enough to ride for F. X. Tyrrell, she said, he's good enough to marry a publican's daughter. As if all the Miranda stuff, the airs and graces she'd taught her, was for nothing, or worse, a game to keep herself amused, like the girl was a doll, a toy to be played with. I felt sorry for the child…"

She stopped, and raised her glass, and sighed, as if she'd said too much.

"She was adopted, wasn't she?" I said, in as pointed a manner as I could manage.

"Are you asking me what I think you're asking me?" Regina said.

"She's the image of you," I said.

"No, is the answer," she said. "Fuck's sake, I see the black eye, I'm not surprised, questions like that."

"She had a rough time of it after Hutton disappeared."

"A lot of which she brought on herself," Regina said. "Ah, she lost the place altogether, I don't know what happened to her. Drink, drugs…I suppose you heard she was little better than a prostitute there for a while. It wasn't as if she needed money."

"Did she not? She was renting out her house, I know."

"She inherited the Tyrrellscourt Arms when her father died sure. Ninety-two, was it? And she made a lot of money out of that."

"She sold it to you, didn't she?"

"For a quarter of a million pounds. That was before the boom, when two hundred and fifty thousand would have got you pretty much anything you wanted in Dublin. That little place in Riverside wouldn't have been more than sixty then, if that. I never knew what got into Miranda. She got over it, at least. Jackie gave her work, helped undo some of the harm she'd done."

Regina looked at her watch again.

"Now. Christmas Eve. I have family commitments."

"Just one last thing," I said. "Patrick Hutton. Didn't you ever wonder over the years what had happened?"