The Color of Blood Read online

  “So they opened the door,” I prompted. Like many lonely people, when he had a chance to speak he was eager to take full advantage of the opportunity by cramming in as many digressions and editorials as he could.

  “The wife opened the door, Audrey her name was-and there was this lad in an anorak with a balaclava on, and he must have stabbed her there and then, straight through the heart, two or three times, nice clean job, very little blood, forcing her back into the hall and kicking the door shut behind him. From what he told us, the husband came out next and tried to save the wife, getting in front of her. He got slashes to the hands for his trouble, and a wound on his right side. The lad forced him back into the cupboard under the stairs and locked the door, then he went through the front rooms and filled a bag with silverware and ornaments. That was it really. Oh, and all O’Connor’s rugby medals, mounted on a board.”

  “That was it? No jewelry, no safe?”

  “He didn’t stay around long enough. Don’t know why. Only thing we could think, he was put off because the O’Connors’ ten-year-old daughter woke up and came down the stairs.”

  “So Casey could kill a woman no bother, balked at killing a man and bungled the robbery rather than harm a ten-year-old girl? He couldn’t even tie her up?”

  “That was all we could come up with, son.”

  “Did the girl say anything?”

  “She tried to call us, after Casey had left. But he cut the phone lines. She had to go out, in her nightdress, smeared in her mother’s blood, because of course she tried to wake her mammy up, across the road and get the neighbors to ring the Guards. God love her.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then, nothing: no witnesses, no leads, nothing. And a month or so later we found young Casey dead at the wheel of a stolen car. Drove off the harbor wall at Bayview. At the deepest part. He’d been missing all that time. And in the boot of the car, all the stuff that had been stolen from the O’Connor home. Apart from the rugby medals, they never showed up.”

  “Very neat.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “Autopsy? Was he dead before he hit the water?”

  “Postmortem putrefaction had been speeded up too much for any satisfactory examination to be carried out.”

  “Very neat part two. And you got the glory.”

  “All tied up in a nice neat bow. Stepped up to inspector. End of story.”

  “And was it the end of the story? Or was there more that got brushed under the carpet?”

  McArdle pressed his lips shut, plumped up his bird’s-nest eyebrows and looked at me through grey eyes that still glowed with quiet menace. That must have been a pretty intimidating look back in the day.

  “You did what you had to do. Open-and-shut. No sense bringing in a lot of for-instances. Especially not given the people involved. And it was only later that you really began to wonder about them.”

  “For instance?”

  McArdle lit another cigarette, hummed along briefly to the piercingly loud theme tune of a sitcom from a neighboring apartment, then stared at his hand and began counting off on his fingers.

  “For instance, Stephen Casey was a pupil at Castlehill College and was in Sandra Howard’s French class, where he was considered a favorite of hers. Where some of his classmates thought there was more than a teacher-pupil relationship between them.

  “For instance, Dr. Rock was a part-time senior rugby coach at Castlehill, and Stephen Casey was prop forward on the first team.

  “For instance, Sandra and Dr. Rock, who survived the attack that saw his wife slaughtered with relatively and mysteriously minor injuries, wed a mere two years later.

  “For instance, Stephen Casey was the son of a single mother named Eileen who had been a servant for Dr. John Howard and family up in Rowan House until the doctor’s death; the Howards paid for Casey’s education.

  “For instance, after Stephen Casey’s death, his mother Eileen, a servant as I say, suddenly had the money to buy a house in Woodpark, and married shortly after.”

  Having used up the fingers and thumb of one hand, he made it into a fist and drove it into the palm of its twin, showering cigarette ash above us like funereal confetti. Then he stood up and went to a cupboard and took a bottle of Jameson and two glasses and brought them to the table.

  “I usually have my first around about now,” he said. “Will you join me?”

  It was twenty-five past twelve, but I nodded immediately: my heart was pounding and adrenaline was coursing through me, my brain racing at the implications of what McArdle had just told me.

  “Dave D told me you were a sound man for the gargle,” he said approvingly.

  He had poured two straight shots, and we both lowered them in one. McArdle leaned across the table then, his dark eyes flaring red and watery.

  “See now, son, what I told you there. I don’t even know if there’s anything to it. Compared to some of the things I seen. Say nothing, isn’t that right? They should’ve had it embroidered on the uniform.”

  He poured another for himself, picked up a remote control handset and pointed it at a wide-screen television, flicking through the channels until it arrived at an old western starring James Stewart, one of those fifties ones where his face looks twisted with hatred and fear, haunted by the past, by what he did, or failed to do. He turned the volume up so that it dampened out the spectral manifestations from the neighboring souls.

  “Ah, the bold Jimmy. This is me now. Good luck there, son. God bless.”

  I got up and went to the door, then thought of something.

  “Just one last thing. The ten-year-old girl who saw her mother killed. Do you remember her name?”

  McArdle frowned, muted the sound on the TV.

  “Say again, son?”

  I repeated the question.

  “Mary, I think. No. Marie? No, Martha. Martha O’Connor. She does be on the television now, sometimes, making documentaries, sticking it to the Church and all. Fine big girl. Mouth on her. Writes for some paper or other, I don’t know, I just get them for the telly these days. But that was her name all right, Martha O’Connor.”

  Thirteen

  I BOUGHT AN EVENING HERALD AT A SET OF TRAFFIC lights coming out of Tallaght from a vendor weaving between the lanes. Its headline didn’t need much deciphering: Above shots of Jessica Howard, Shane Howard and David Brady blared the words “Deadly Triangle?” The phrase was prime tabloidese, as banal as it came, yet it set off a geometrical ricochet in my head, resonating across twenty years to the deadly triangle that haunted Dan McArdle to this day. I tried to remember what I had seen in Sandra Howard’s eyes the first time I mentioned Stephen Casey’s name: fear, or grief, or deception; I wondered whether she had acted on her attraction for me to quash her own sad memories, or whether she had fucked me on the stairs to tame me and draw my sting, whether, having run the Howard family for twenty years, she thought she could run me too. And I wondered, at some base level I didn’t much like thinking about, which of those motives I found the greater turn-on.

  Nearing Seafield, the Jameson started setting off chemical explosions in my stomach. I parked below the Seafront Plaza, got a roast beef and pickle bagel and a bottle of beer and took them back to the car. Fog was rolling in now; I couldn’t see either of the great piers, let alone the water in the bay. I made some calls between bites: leaving a message for Martha O’Connor at her newspaper to call me on the subject of Dr. John Howard; and asking David Manuel to check in with me once he had spoken to Emily Howard. There was a message from Denis Finnegan waiting when I hung up: Shane Howard had been released. I drove through Bayview and up the hill by the harbor and parked a little way down from the surgery. I navigated the narrow road with difficulty; there were two Mercedes S-Series saloons and a BMW parked outside. Irish people loved announcing their newfound prosperity through bigger and wider cars; it was a pity they hadn’t spent a few shillings building roads for the cars to fit on, or wondered whether, if th
ey wanted to live in old houses on quaint, windy roads, they should consider sizing their cars accordingly.

  I walked up between the borders of rowan trees. Their gleaming berries seemed swollen, fit to burst. Before I knocked, Anita opened the door, her face rigid with fear; the red gems in her ring seemed a link with the berries, and I felt I followed them rather than her, the stones glowing, arterial, blood the sunken trigger to it all. At reception, Denis Finnegan appeared, and I began to reel slightly at the parallel to the previous morning’s events. I showed him the cover of the Evening Herald, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “It says a file is being prepared for the DPP,” I said.

  “They’re in no position to press for a prosecution. They can place him at both scenes, but there is no physical evidence so far, and, despite tabloid tittle-tattle, no motive, and therefore, in my opinion, from the Latin, fuck-all case,” Finnegan said. “I’m afraid Shane-”

  Shane Howard emerged from his office. He wore a tweed jacket and brown cords that looked like he had slept in them; his face, drawn and pale, announced that he hadn’t slept at all.

  “Speak of the devil!” Denis Finnegan announced brightly, as if Howard’s appearance was a delightful if unexpected surprise; his face registered irritation.

  “Come in, Mr. Loy. Denis, wait here.”

  “Shane, I think it would be prudent if I were in the room-”

  “Denis, you’re giving me a pain in the hole. I trust Loy. Come in, man.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to talk outside. In the back garden?”

  “Oh yeah?” Shane Howard said dubiously.

  “Walls have ears,” I said. He smiled and tapped his nose.

  “Right you be. Just find a coat.”

  Shane Howard went into his office. Denis Finnegan came close to me.

  “I take it what Shane tells you doesn’t find its way into the ear of a certain Detective Inspector in Seafield,” he said.

  “Take it how you want,” I said. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

  Finnegan’s face lost composure momentarily, and a flash of dark rage creased his brow and glowed in his bulging little eyes. I pulled away from him as Shane Howard emerged from his office wearing a tan suede car coat.

  “Let’s go then,” he said.

  I followed him downstairs through the stone-floored kitchen and out into the garden. He shut the back door behind us, turned to me and laughed.

  “Dinny’s face! Fucking priceless. Seen too much of that bollocks the last twenty-four hours.”

  “I’m sure he’s only trying to look out for you.”

  “Are you? I’m not so fuckin’ sure, not so fuckin’ sure at all.”

  “What do you mean? Do you think he’s more interested in Rowan House, in your mother’s will?”

  Howard looked at me in astonishment. His large face had a tendency to pantomime his emotions: anger, surprise, amusement, all vivid as a cartoon character.

  “How’d you know about the will?”

  “That’s why he was here yesterday morning. He thought you wanted me to spy on Jessica, get something on her to maybe coax her into accepting less of a settlement. I told him the truth: I didn’t know anything about the will.”

  “Rowan House all comes to me. And you know something, I wish it didn’t. Sandra’s being very good about it, but I know how I’d feel if it all went to her.”

  “Why don’t you split it then, yourself?”

  “That’s what I might do, you know? I mean, how many houses can you live in? Jaysus.”

  “Did Jessica have a plan for it?”

  “She thought it should be razed to the ground, build apartments and houses there. Yield a fortune in this climate.”

  “And Sandra disagreed?”

  “We all know she wants to build a fourth tower. That’s the dream. And the only place for it is where the house is. I just wanted to avoid the whole issue, to be honest, I wouldn’t discuss it with anyone.”

  Howard turned to me suddenly.

  “Listen, I didn’t kill them, all right? David Brady, Jessica. I didn’t kill either of them. Not saying I didn’t want to. Not even saying I wouldn’t have if I’d caught them together, if it had been true. But someone got to them first. I swear that’s the truth.”

  “Tell me what happened. You bolted out of the surgery like a madman.”

  “Someone called me-”

  “Man, woman?”

  “Couldn’t tell. Low voice, but light. Odd.”

  “As if they were trying to disguise it?”

  “Could have been. Tell the truth, what they said put out of my mind any thought of the way it was said.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Your wife’s sleeping with David Brady. She’s at his flat right now.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “What I was supposed to do, I suppose. Someone’s played me for a right cunt in all this-”

  “What did you do?”

  “Got in the car. Blemmed round to Brady’s place. Up in the lift. And there he was, brains on the floor, great fucking knife in the chest.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  Howard exhaled, a massive sound, like a sleeping horse in the still night.

  “Nothing. I was upset. I made a run for it. And then…like I told you. Wandered around Castlehill forest. So on. Got to Rowan House.”

  “Did you not worry about Jessica’s safety? Ring and see if she was okay?”

  “I should have. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just panicked, you know? I couldn’t think straight.”

  “But the person who called you-they were trying to put you in the frame, right?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Who do you think killed David Brady?”

  “I don’t know. Now I know what he got up to with Emily, I think I could have killed him myself.”

  “Could Emily have done it?”

  Howard shook his head.

  “Not the girl I know.”

  But, as we were finding out, that left a lot of room for maneuver.

  “Who killed your wife, Shane?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  We had reached the ornamental pond. I looked at the stones embedded in its walls.

  “Do you know about those?” I said. “Bloodstones?”

  “Ah, that’s that oul’ crystals shite. Sandra put them in.”

  “Sandra? Not Jessica?”

  “No. Sure Jessica wouldn’t spend a night in the surgery after we were married. She thought it was creepy. She insisted on the new house.”

  “So this garden-”

  “When I opened the surgery, Sandra had the pool set in. Mid-eighties, after the old man died. Said it was some kind of memorial.”

  “To whom?”

  “The old man, I assumed. Truth? I was playing rugby and trying to get established, get some patients, I didn’t have the time to worry. In other words, I didn’t give a shite.”

  “And the stones?”

  “I told you, it’s some kind of New Age malarkey. Sandra was big into it. There was a while there, they’d all be going on about it, crystals with healing powers, and aromatherapy and all this. Terrible shite. In the chair, had to argue a few around, the women of course, how this or that natural healing gemstone or potion was all well and good but the old local would still be her best bet if she didn’t want to pass out with the fucking pain.”

  “Sandra told me Jessica had been sexually abused as a child. And Emily wears rings on her fingers with these bloodstones. They’re supposed to make the wearer invisible. That’s what people who’ve been abused say: either they feel invisible, like they’re not real, or they wish they could feel that way.”

  Shane Howard’s face had shifted completely: his reddening face was a mask of aggression, mouth and eyes bulging, like the second-row he had been, hurtling into a maul. I braced myself and kept on talking.

  “What are you
saying?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m asking: the apparent lack of sexual inhibition, the full-on exhibitionist relationship with David Brady, the casual sex with her cousin, the precarious emotional and psychological state your daughter is in: is there a possibility she was abused too?”

  Shane Howard came at me big but slow, full of rage but with no strategy; his arms were spread out and flailing at my head; I ducked and grabbed his left forearm as he slapped my head with his right; I bent his left at the elbow and drove it hard behind his back and up, fast and hard until he dropped to his knees and tried to scream but couldn’t, he was in such pain, held it just before the break.

  “I’ve had just about as much as I can take on this case; I’ve been slapped and bitten and pistol-whipped, and all because I’m trying to help you and your fucking family, so don’t think about coming at me again, because you’re too slow and you’re too old and I’ll have you, do you understand? DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  He grunted a yes.

  “Are you going to try and answer my questions?”

  He nodded. I released his arm and shoved him away. He half walked, half ran to the rowan tree border and hung on one of the trees, shaking a hail of bloodred berries through the cold misty air, then turned, head bowed, massaging his left arm and shoulder. I looked back at the house, and saw Denis Finnegan’s face looming out from an upstairs window; we locked eyes briefly, and then he vanished like steam on a pane. Shane Howard loped back toward me, grinning, like we had just clashed on the rugby field, and he wanted to reassure me there were no hard feelings.

  “Fair play. Lost it, understandable enough. Know you’re only doing your job.”

  “Answer the question please.”

  “Jessica abused, I never heard that. She never told me that. Why she’d tell Sandra and not me I don’t know, unless it was one of those women’s things. I mean, I knew she started early, thirteen or fourteen. She was always boasting about what she’d got up to as a teenager. And maybe that was an example for Emily. Started her off early too, the way her mother used to talk about…men, sex, all that. Pushed her into all this stuff she was doing with Brady, films and so forth. But in terms of…well, I never laid a finger on the child. And if someone else did…”