Jackie waved a hand at me.

"I'll order, unless you have some particular preference." She said preference in the sense of "disease."

"Go ahead," I said.

The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, "Just pour," at the wine waiter.

I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn't had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.

"You're very tall for a writer," she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.

"How far are you into your book?" she said.

"I'm nearly finished," I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn't have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you were finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn't a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.

"Well in that case, it's too late for us to tell you anything, isn't it? You must know it all by now."

"Well, actually, it's at this stage-when I think I know it all-that's when meeting the experts is really useful. Now I know what questions to ask."

Jackie drank half a glass of Sancerre in one and stared at me deadpan.

"Ask me then. The questions. Now you know it all. Go on."

A hush fell around the table, and I could see Seán Proby and Miranda Hart looking excited, as if Jackie Tyrrell were the Queen and she'd just put me on the spot.

"Do you breed, Jackie?" I said.

"Not as a rule, but with you, I'd make an exception," she said, and blew me a kiss. She sat back and poked Seán Proby in the ribs, and he dutifully exploded with laughter again. I looked at Miranda Hart, who leant in and said quickly and quietly, "They were at Gowran Park, they've been going since lunchtime."

The starters came, and we ate in silence. Jackie put her face down and shoveled onion soup and bread into it. At length she resurfaced, flush-cheeked and panting. Little beads of sweat dotted her mysteriously unlined brow, and frosted the tiny soft hairs above her upper lip.

"I don't breed anymore," she announced. "I used to look after that side of things for Frank. The Tyrrellscourt Stud. Still going strong. I've a good eye for a horse still, though. I'll go on a trip with him, when he's buying. As long as he's buying."

"No one is allowed to call F. X. Tyrrell Frank except Jackie," said Seán Proby, the first coherent utterance he had made in my hearing.

"Well, no one does, at any rate, "Jackie said. "Maybe no one wants to."

"How was Gowran today?" Miranda said to Proby.

"Not bad," Proby said. "Nothing like a small country meeting. Jack was working, of course; I was merely Mrs. Tyrrell's lunch companion. But we did all right."

"The bookies always do," snapped Jackie.

"The Tyrrell horses underperformed nicely," Miranda said.

Jackie smiled thinly at this.

"Leopardstown's the main event," she said. "The ground was too firm today anyway."

"Did Jack of Hearts place?" I said.

"Won the first by four lengths at six to one. Held up well," Proby said.

"Why the interest?" Jackie said. I had the impression she was playing with me.

"It just caught my eye."

"I thought it might be because of its owner. You know who owns it, of course."

"Do I?"

"I think you do, Edward Loy. After all, when you're not writing books about horse racing in Ireland, which I would say is all of the time, you hire yourself out as a private detective. And a while back you had a hand in putting away Podge Halligan, the drug dealer, also the brother of George Halligan, who owns Jack of Hearts. Miranda, why did you think it necessary to fabricate an absurd identity for Mr. Loy? A writer, of all things. Everyone knows writers are all badly dressed overweight cantankerous faux-humble alcoholics with a chip on each shoulder and a grudge against the world. And that's just the women."

Miranda looked like a schoolgirl hauled before the head mistress; she stared at her plate in silence, her face burning.

"It was my idea," I said.

"And gallant too. Tall and gallant. We don't see many of you round here anymore. You're not gay, are you?"

Seán Proby shook his head.

"Absolutely not," he said.

"Seán's my gaydar when it comes to men. Are you working, Ed Loy?"

"He's looking for Patrick," Miranda said, her voice thick with emotion. She choked back what might have been a sob, then muttered an apology and fled to the loo. The waiter came and took our plates. I watched Jackie Tyrrell closely, but her expression was blank; she gave nothing away. When the table had been cleared, and Seán Proby had gone outside for a smoke, she smiled keenly at me.

"You know about Patrick Hutton and the Halligans?" she said.

I shook my head.

"Patrick and Leo-" she began, and then stopped as cutlery arrived for the main course. She repeated the names when the waiter had gone, her eyes dancing, then stopped again as Miranda came back to the table, eye makeup freshly and thickly applied.

"I'll tell him about that myself, Jackie, if it's all right with you," Miranda said, quite sharply to my ears.

"But of course, my darling, of course," Jackie said, all charm.

"He was my husband, and I think I'm best placed to know what's important and what's just rumor and innuendo, don't you?"

Jackie Tyrrell gave Miranda Hart what looked to me to be a very fond, warm smile, and leant across and touched her hand.

"I do," she said softly. "And you are. Nobody but you."

Miranda blushed again, and nodded; in removing her hand from Jackie's, she managed to upset a full glass of white wine over both of us; by the time we had that cleared up, the main courses had arrived. I ate steak frîtes with béarnaise sauce, washed down with two slow glasses of red. I could drink a lot, and generally did, but I had no head for wine; in any case, I wanted to study these people at the periphery of the Tyrrell family closely: there was history between them, and I'd need my wits about me to pick up on it.

As we ate, Seán Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary's Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn't racing at all, he sniffed.

Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt's premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O'Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.

She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school's worth.

"No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their '06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding's an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing's wasted on them."