"That's increasingly looking like our safest bet," I said. "You see, Patrick Hutton isn't dead. He's out there, living like a wild man on the old Staples place-"

"That's Bomber Folan."

"That's not Bomber Folan, Bomber Folan was murdered years ago and Patrick Hutton took his place, he kept Folan's body on ice and then made it appear on a dump in Roundwood two days ago. Alone, or with Miranda Hart, and a fellow called Gerald Stenson, Steno, another former inmate of St. Jude's. Between them, they murdered Folan, and the detective Don Kennedy, because whatever he found out when he searched for Hutton two or three years back was not something they wanted revealed. Kennedy was blackmailing someone-maybe Miranda, maybe you, maybe Francis. I don't know. All I do know is, he's not blackmailing anyone anymore. And then they killed Jackie Tyrrell; Tommy saw the car they drove from Jackie's house the night of her murder up at the old Staples place tonight, and all three of them in it: Steno, and your son, Patrick. And your daughter, Miranda."

"She's not my daughter."

"I'll take your word for it. She does look awfully like you."

"She's not my daughter. She can't be."

Rachmaninov gave way to Schubert now, a piano impromptu, the yearning, plaintive one, regret for the life not lived. Regina moved toward me, as if fixing her gaze and holding mine could insulate her from what she feared most.

"She can't be your daughter?"

"Francis promised."

"Francis promised? What had he to do with it?"

"He…I wouldn't stop working…but I couldn't…not have the child…"

"There was another child? A girl? And you wouldn't have an abortion?"

"It was unthinkable. To me. I don't condemn others, but for me…so Francis…when the time came, he arranged the adoption. I went away, you see, there was a place outside Inverness, in Scotland, to avoid the scandal, you could go there, a convent…they would have taken the child, too, but Francis insisted…said he knew the right family…then later on, when Miranda came in here, people used to say, you could be sisters, you could be mother and daughter, Jackie Tyrrell was never done worrying away at it, giggling away at it, all very sophisticated, as if we were some kind of small-town inbreds, and I asked Francis, was there any possibility…No, he said. Emphatic about it. I had to believe him, I had to. I mean…why would he lie?"

"Who was the child's father? The child that…you don't believe was Miranda?"

Regina stared at me, but wouldn't answer.

"Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"

She stared harder, but stayed silent. I felt like she was willing me to understand, imploring me to guess it. Her eyes not matching heightened her beauty and gave her a vulnerability that made me think of Karen Tyrrell; I told myself I had to keep going, for the child's sake, though every word I spoke was like a thorn in Regina Tyrrell's flesh.

"Vincent Tyrrell told me something about close breeding. He said your brother used to be very interested in it. That it was quite controversial, even with horses. He said By Your Leave, the horse that caused all the trouble for the Tyrrell family, was the offspring of two generations of brother and sister pairings."

Regina Tyrrell stared at me, her eyes glistening.

"Vincent Tyrrell met Miranda Hart before he hired me. And then he gave me one man's name-Patrick Hutton-and I've found a whole history of secrets to go with it. Who was Miranda Hart's father? Who was Patrick Hutton's father?"

Still holding my gaze, she began to shake her head.

"Was F.X. the father, Regina? Was Vincent? You were raped, you were abused by your older brother, no wonder you were ashamed, wanted to keep it a secret, it wasn't your fault, no one would ever hold it against you-"

"You cannot say such things. You cannot know such things. Think of the children, what nightmares they'll have if they find out."

I thought of the title of Martha O'Connor's documentary: Say Nothing.

"Think of the nightmares they'll have if they don't. Think of the nightmares some of them are living, or are destined to live. If Patrick and Miranda are brother and sister…and if Karen is their child…"

Regina Tyrrell was beginning to shake, the start of what appeared to be a convulsive tide of grief. She reached for my hand and fell to her knees.

"Maybe the others know the worst already. But Karen's only nine years old, for pity's sake."

"Yes," I said. "Young enough to survive it. If we're lucky."

She bent her head over my hands, as if in prayer, as if I had the power to change the past. But all I had, all we both had in common, was the desperate need to hear the truth, and to understand it. I think Regina had felt that need for a long time. And in that moment, maybe she finally chose to act on it. She stopped herself shaking, and breathed hard and deep, and looked up at me.

"All right," she said. "All right then. I dreaded this day. But I think I prayed for it too. It was always too much for one soul to bear."

And then, before she could say another word, the doorknob clicked and the door swung open and the cold relentless wind blew through the room again.

Steno didn't really give a fuck about anyone but Steno. When it came down to it, that was all there was: Number One. The rest was bullshit, and he didn't mind saying that, although in truth he had learned over the years to never actually say it to anyone but himself, even if it was what everyone believed, deep down. People couldn't bear the truth, but the truth had never bothered Steno. You didn't have to be brutal about it, and if you weren't a fucking savage, you'd avoid that side of things as much as you could: it was messy, and there was a lot of cleaning up afterward, and broken bones and blood and dead bodies; the whole thing was a bit of a fucking downer. It could get you down-especially if that was all there was to it. Some of the rows he had seen in the bar, over fuck-all, if you broke it up, and Steno always had to, and asked them what it was all about, neither of them could tell you. Waking up the next day with a broken face and for what? That was short term, that was amateur hour, that was no better than a beast in the fields. Because you could brood about the blood, how it would linger in your eye line like the red sparks you see when you close your eyes at night. And sometimes, the eyes of the dead, they'd pin you so they would, you'd wake before dawn with the memory of that last look, the last hope. And to go through that for no reason, for "The fuck are you looking at?"; for "Are you calling me a liar?" No way. Not in this life man.

That's why, if you were going to get involved on that level, you needed the long view. Fair enough, there'd been times when accidents happened, and you just had to get someone from location A to location B where B was a ditch or a dump or a riverbank: that's just day-to-day, that's just business, you can't shirk when that comes around. But if you were ambitious, and Steno was, the long term made the grief worthwhile.

Not to make too much of himself-Steno hated when people did that, you had to put up with it behind the bar day in day out, stable lads who had "really" trained Gold Cup winners, salesmen who "really" ran the companies they worked for, all the drunks and losers who were going to run marathons and write books and get record deals and act in movies and be models and comedians and every fucking thing, and there they fucking were ten, twenty, thirty years later, fatter and redder and still in the fucking pub.

The usual? The usual.

Steno was happy to admit it had all been a happy accident. It was when the Halligans had got their claws into F. X. Tyrrell, and Leo was running his happy band of jockeys and golfers and tooting them up big-time, and young Proby and Miranda Hart were hanging out. Twenty of them in the back room-it was before the Warehouse refurbishment, just a lounge at the back-no one else got in: Private party sir, sorry sir. Aw, again? Private party every night sir.