Murder on the curragh

FICTION: BRIAN O'CONNOR, 'Irish Times' racing correspondent, makes his crime fiction debut with a gripping murder story set on the Curragh. In this extract, the body of a young stable boy has just been found on a cold and frosty morning

THE ONLY SOUNDS came from crows lazily gliding over the yard to examine the flashing blue lights that still had enough power in the morning gloom to make you blink. But there wasn’t a murmur where there should have been the snorting clatter of keyed-up horses emerging from their night’s sleep and the shouts of frozen lads trying to keep them under control.

After the initial frenzied arrival of police cars and an ambulance, there was an eerily mundane hour when little seemed to happen. The crime scene was sealed off and so was the stable yard. But then things seemed to stand still in the wait for specialists to show up. Rocky, Bailey and myself told a couple of detectives what we’d seen. Rocky said he’d been in the tack room when he thought he heard someone running outside. He figured his ears were playing tricks on him at first but went out to have a look and saw the box door in the alley open. That was when he saw the body, turned on the lights and tried to call the guards. But he’d heard an engine gunning outside the yard as well – like a motorcycle, he said.

I told them how I’d encountered someone on a motorbike who’d tried to run me over.

“What did this person look like, sir?” the detective asked.

“I’d guess he was about my height, but it’s only a guess. He was wearing a helmet so I couldn’t see his face. Apart from that, nothing really – jeans, a leather jacket, boots. It was all so quick.”

“What make of bike was it?”

“It was one of those trackers, like they use for racing on mud.”

He asked me what I was doing around the place so early.

I explained that I had just driven from Dublin. He asked if anyone could verify what time I had left Dublin. I told him there wasn’t but I’d stopped for petrol soon after leaving Sandyford and the people in the station knew me.

“And what were you doing here, sir?”

“I was coming down to ride work. I’m Mrs McFarlane’s jockey. My car skidded and hit the railway bridge so I ran the rest of the way here.”

“So you work here every day?”

“No. I usually just ride out one morning a week, or come for schooling.”

“Schooling?”

“Getting horses to practise their jumping.”

The detective told me to stay around and I assured him I wasn’t going anywhere. It all felt completely unreal. Such things didn’t happen in the middle of the Curragh. The bald, flat plain contained more horses than people, and most of the villains had four legs. Anything to do with horses could be dangerous and sometimes people were killed – but from a flailing leg or a bad fall: this was terribly different.

The staff arriving were met with the full tableau of a crime scene. Bewilderment reigned. I heard someone mention he’d seen Liam Dee’s car crashed on the way to work which reminded me I should do something about it. I got permission to return and deal with it. After phoning the insurance company and a recovery vehicle, I retrieved a bag from the boot and walked back.

“Sorry, sir, you can’t go any farther.”

Even with the peaked cap pulled down over his eyes, the Garda on duty at the stables gates looked very young. Traces of acne peeped painfully over his tight shirt collar. It was true then, I thought. Noticing how young the cops are really is a sign of getting older. Not for the first time recently I wondered how someone else would see me.

It was just bad luck that I was too tall to be automatically nailed as a jockey. Riding over jumps meant the strict Lilliputian demands of the flat game didn’t apply but, even so, being half an inch under six feet was simply the wrong shape for my job. The effort of keeping an infuriatingly lengthening body at a weight well below what it desired was hard work that never ended. Not that I deserved sympathy. It was my choice. In fact, it was no sort of choice.

There wasn’t a time when the idea of riding a racehorse didn’t seem like the most exciting thing in the world to do. It still felt like that most of the time. More than enough reason to keep putting my 34-year-old carcass through the wringer.

“My name is Liam Dee. I’m Mrs McFarlane’s jockey.”

As I spoke, a man dressed in a baggy white jump-suit emerged from the alley and pulled down a face mask. He leaned his head back and breathed out, releasing a long stream of cold, smoky carbon-dioxide towards the sky. He was followed by another similarly dressed man who walked to the back of the ambulance. As I watched, the radio strapped across the guard’s chest crackled to life and he gave my name. A few seconds later it crackled again.

“You can go into the house, sir.”

Bailey McFarlane was sitting in the kitchen, back straight, shoulders wide, an untouched cup of tea in front of her. Even then, the depth of my affection at seeing that familiar figure surprised me. I had always been more outwardly friendly with other people in the yard. In fact, the venom of some of our past rows was still raked over with relish by both friends and rivals. It was hard to blame them. We were easy to cast in cartoon roles; we even did it ourselves.

I sometimes regarded Bailey as loud and uncompromising. She considered me too reserved all of the time. My natural inclination was to look inward. Bailey liked being looked at. The little differences had for a time become so magnified that there were a couple of years where we hadn’t even spoken.

I’d ridden other horses and Bailey employed other jockeys until one day at the races I received a smack on the shoulder and she leaned towards me to whisper: “What you need is a real woman!” That was typical: a big performance hiding all the subtlety underneath.

“Liam. Thank God. Come in,” she said now.

The equally familiar figure of Eamon Dunne, the stables’ head man, emerged into the kitchen from the big dining room. Through the open door I could hear the sound of people talking quietly. I put my hand on Bailey’s arm. She grabbed it and squeezed tightly. Her skin was quite smooth considering how hard she worked in the open air, but the wrinkles still showed all the 57 years she had so defiantly announced on her last birthday. The gesture, though, was enough for me look directly at her. Those vivid blue eyes that could twinkle with mischief and narrow into boiling rage now looked nothing but scared. Our largerthan-life boss was badly rattled.

“Just lying there in the box. Who could have done something like that to Anatoly?”

Anatoly. I didn’t even know his surname. Stable staff changed all the time anyway, but the mix of nationalities made remembering names even harder. It was unusual for any sort of yard on the Curragh not to have at least one person in it from Eastern Europe or South America. Bailey liked dealing with an agency that supplied people from Ukraine; “real horse people” she called them, approvingly. I calculated there must have been at least six of them working in the yard. Quiet, stoical workers who laughed among themselves in their own language and smiled shyly when dealing with anyone else.

“It’s only a few days since he came and told me Bobbie had broken his leg – crying his eyes out, the poor devil.”

Small, thin, blond hair. The only real reason his face stuck in my mind was the huge grin that looked faintly comical because of the big gap between his front teeth. It made him look absurdly young. He couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20 anyway, looked 15, thousands of miles from home, living in a country he probably hadn’t even heard of months before.

Among the four horses he looked after was Bobbie, or Another Rumble as he was known on the racecourse. That was way too much of a mouthful for everyday use, even for those with English as a first language, and Bobbie tripped easily off any tongue. It was hard to affectionately tell a horse called Another Rumble to move his arse while you mucked him out. Every horse has a pet name at home.

Bobbie wasn’t particularly good, but he tried hard and his willingness to work had resulted in a win at Galway the previous autumn. As we came back to the winner’s enclosure, Anatoly had looked up at me with a smile that could have melted an ice-cap as he repeatedly patted the horse’s sweating neck.

The tears he’d cried the previous week must have been bitter indeed. Bailey had phoned me for a chat about the horses in general and then, almost as an afterthought, mentioned that Bobbie had had to be put down after breaking a leg. The almost off-hand delivery only emphasised how much she must have felt the loss. But for Anatoly it would have been worse. He looked after the horse every day, put up with his moods, cared enough to devote his own working life to keeping him happy. Apparently it was just a half-speed canter, the usual morning workout to keep muscles warm and the mind happy. But the kid would have felt the jarring sense of all that powerful rhythm underneath him suddenly turn to shattered bewilderment as Bobbie’s leg snapped. There would have been no option but to end it quickly before the horse endured too much pain.

Nothing else to do except hold the reins, speak gently to his stricken friend and try not to upset him by crying too much. From what Bailey said, the last part had been impossible.

A surge of unexpected bitterness made my mouth taste bad. Just a vague impression of a funny face and a story of tears at the death of a horse. It wasn’t much, was it? That day in Galway had been only another race for me, but it must have been Anatoly’s best day since getting off the plane. I found myself hoping desperately that he had made a much bigger impression on everyone else, that the others had taken the time to get to know him, shown more interest than their self-absorbed bloody jockey.

“Who’s in the dining room?” I asked Eamon.

“The other Ukrainian lads,” he said, sipping a cup of tea.

“Poor bastards.”

Eamon was a short, squat man with thinning hair and a ruddy face that frequently split into a wide grin. Jolly Eamon with his warm heart and kind eyes didn’t usually do vehemence but there was a bitter twist to his mouth that spoke volumes for how the stables’ head man had got to know poor Anatoly better than me.

“Right, let’s do something constructive and try and help them,” Bailey announced in her best no-nonsense tone. It was a long time since she had left public school in England, but her accent remained cut-glass clear, as did her desire to get on with things. She paused before going through the door and took a deep breath.

“Liam, can you come with me?” she asked.

I nodded and followed her into the wood-panelled dining room that couldn’t have changed much since her grandfather had first arrived on the Curragh from India and decided that this old house, with its forbidding stone and warm interior, was the perfect spot to train racehorses. The long table that dominated the room had also made the journey from the sub-continent. As always, there was a shine to it that reflected like a mirror, despite the nicks, scratches and blotches all over the top and the legs which only added to the feel of solidity that the table radiated.

Bailey always joked that the damn thing was too big and one Halloween it was going to end up on the fire. I’d heard that first nearly 15 years earlier but still the table remained. Bailey’s respect for time and place meant that she would have thrown herself on any fire before that table was moved. Right now it was at the centre of a quiet desperation that was palpable as soon as we walked in.

Six figures stood up. One young lad, who couldn’t have been more than 20, was munching a mouthful of bacon sandwich as quickly as he could so as not to be eating in front of Bailey. They were standing almost to attention, six men ranging from just out of their teens to a hard-eyed 30-something in the corner.

When Bailey spoke, I noticed a tremble to her voice I hadn’t heard before.

“Are you all here?”

“Lara is visiting friends in Dublin,” the older man replied. “She worked the last four weekends, so you gave her some days off. She will be back later.”

Called Vaz by everyone in the yard, he spoke with a heavy accent, but his English was good and the others clearly deferred to him. He was too big to ride work and usually remained in the yard mucking out. But Eamon had told me his real value was in breaking-in the young horses.

He said the man was remarkable in how he could almost persuade the nervous youngsters by words alone to permit him onto their backs and to violate their tender mouths with bits of iron and leather. It was a fantastic gift and one that was invaluable to Bailey. A lot of talent in racing had been soured from day one because of a heavy hand.

Vaz spoke again. “We will go back to work now. Anatoly would not like horses to go hungry.”

“There is no question of anyone going hungry,” Bailey said. “The work will be done. But if anyone wants to go back to town and . . .”

“Thank you, but we will be okay.”

They trooped out. Vaz nodded to me. Only after they had closed the kitchen door behind them did I ask Bailey where the local lads were.

“Must be out in the tack room or the feed room. Look, I’m sorry about this but I don’t think I’m up to going out there. Eamon will be fine with the yard. Is there any chance you could carry on without me? Just canters. I spoke to one of the police. He understands the horses have to be taken out and fed and all the rest of it. They can’t seal off the whole place.”

“Yeah, that’s no problem. You’ve had a terrible morning. Why don’t you go back to bed for a while?”

“No, it’s not that. I guess I’m just shaky about having to deal with all that’s going to come now – the police and the papers and everything. God, it’ll be terrible.”

“It won’t be great. But we’ll get through it. Everyone will pitch in.”

“He was such a lovely young lad, Liam. And some bastard does that to him!” She suddenly sobbed. Her shoulders heaved and grief took over. I put my arm around her.

“And you,” she said. “You were lucky. He might have done the same to you. Dear God, what are we dealing with here? Did you get any look at him?”

“No. It’s like I told the detective. It was all a bit of blur, just a helmet and a jacket and then a boot. But . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. You go and lie down.”

I gave her a hug. It was weird: we’d probably had more physical contact between us that morning than in all the years we’d known each other. I tried to come up with something appropriate to say but failed. Not that it mattered. What did anything matter with a young boy lying dead outside?

Bloodline,by Brian O'Connor, is published this week by Poolbeg Press, €15.99.