The Color of Blood Read online

  Howard shook his head, his body quivering with anger and unhappiness at the thought. I put a hand on his shoulder to signal that line of questioning was over. I was as relieved as he was. I believed him when he said he hadn’t killed his wife, or David Brady. And I thought he was telling the truth about Emily, at least as far as he knew it. Before I had a chance to say anything else, he produced an envelope and handed it to me. Inside was a sheet of white A4 paper, on which was typed:

  In sympathy for your time of trouble, we extended the time allowed to you to pay the fifty grand. But we still have the film, so be outside the main door of St. Anthony’s Church in Seafield at six with the money in a shopping bag. No cops-and that means Ed Loy. Or watch your little girl become a worldwide porn star!

  “How did this arrive?”

  “By hand, just like the last one. Anita said it came this morning. She didn’t see anyone.”

  There were only two possible candidates stupid or reckless enough to keep pushing a blackmail attempt on a murder suspect; I thought it was the Reillys; I hoped it wasn’t Tommy; either way, I felt I could handle it.

  “Right. This is all right. Provided you can stay out of jail. It’s about three now. Can you get the cash?”

  “I arranged it the day before yesterday; it’s ready to be collected today.”

  “All right. Take it out, and we’ll make a plan. The bad news is, I don’t think these people are the real threat. The good news is, I think we can take them down.”

  Howard nodded, eager to play an active part to protect his daughter.

  “Just remember though, I don’t care about the money,” he said. “I just want to help my little girl.”

  “Well, you just might start to care about the money when they ask for it once a week. But I’ll figure something out on that side of it too.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. It hurt.

  “There’s one other thing,” I said. “Sandra told me about Stephen Casey. Who he was, what he did. It’s very sad. I can understand why none of you wanted to dredge that particular memory up. It’s just that I’m worried about his mother. Eileen, I think her name was. Sandra told me she was in service at Rowan House, then she left to get married.”

  “Why are you worried about Stephen Casey’s mother?” Shane Howard asked. His voice was careful and clear, and I was conscious that he was very wary of the subject.

  “I think she might have something to do with all this. Just a hunch. That she might blame you-the Howards-for her son’s death.”

  “That’s…why would she?”

  “Chances are she doesn’t. I’d just like to make sure. Eliminate her from my inquiries, as your friends the Guards say.”

  Howard almost smiled at that.

  “I don’t really know much. As I say, I had the rugby, and the practice…it was one of those times, Sandra ran the show. What do I remember? She wasn’t bad-looking, say that. Very upset about the son, we all were, tragic for her. And then she got married…she moved to Woodpark, somewhere…Pearse something, Drive or Villas or whatever, everything’s called Pearse there. Married to a bloke she’d been going out with a while, once got a backer on his motorbike, what was his name?”

  Like an old vinyl record, I seemed to hear Shane Howard’s next words in my head split seconds before he spoke them, like a ghostly premonition of worse to come, or the dead-bolt realization that, deep down, you knew the worst all along.

  “Dalton, chap’s name was. Some kind of nickname, don’t remember that. His second name though was definitely Dalton.”

  Fourteen

  SANDRA HOWARD RANG; HER VOICE WAS HIGH AND urgent.

  “Ed, Emily’s gone. I went down to the clinic to take care of a few things, and when I got back she had gone.”

  “Is there any sign of forced entry, or of a struggle?”

  “No. Oh my God, she’s been kidnapped again.”

  “I don’t think so. Shane has just had another ransom demand. It just used the film as a threat. Why risk taking her when they have the film as a bargaining chip?”

  “You’re right, I suppose.”

  “She probably just wants some time to herself,” I said, wishing I were as confident as I sounded. When I ended the call, I had to go through it all again with Shane; by the time I had him reassured that Emily was in no danger, I was convinced she was.

  Denis Finnegan was gone when we got back inside the house. I asked Shane Howard to use a mobile phone with an earpiece and to wear a hat so that I could contact him when he was waiting outside the church with a bag full of money. He said he didn’t have a shopping bag, so I looked around and finally found a silver and blue bag advertising some drug company’s latest product. Then I asked him to give Anita the rest of the day off so I could follow her. He was offended that I didn’t trust her; I reassured him that I didn’t trust anyone, including him, that not trusting anyone was my job. He thought I was being funny. I wish I had been. I didn’t tell him I thought she looked far too frightened to be trusted, or that she bore a striking resemblance to the blonde in the porn film with his nephew Jonathan. Shane Howard told me Anita had come into work today driving a blue ’98 reg Fiat Punto-he hadn’t noticed the car before-but he wasn’t sure where she lived or what her second name was. I waited in my car while he found her address in his files; by that time she had taken off, and I was on her tail. I hoped I wouldn’t have to follow her all the way to the North Circular Road, as that’s where Shane Howard said Anita Kravchenko’s flat was. I didn’t. She went through Bayview and along Rathdown Road straight onto upper Seafield Road, then took the third exit off the roundabout by the DIY retail park, straight down into the Woodpark Estate. I was hanging back, keeping my distance, but I misjudged the roundabout; two buses crunched in front of me, and a stream of traffic followed them, and by the time I’d reached Woodpark, I’d lost her. I drove around for a while, aware it was most likely a futile exercise; trying to find a nineties reg Punto in a council estate was like trying to find someone in a grey and navy tracksuit, or a girl with snow blond hair, for that matter; I was on my third car and my fourth blond when I decided to give up. And then I saw a small terrace tucked away in a corner between the church and the high wall the council had built to placate the residents of the adjacent, nonlocal authority houses, and I glimpsed a flash of blond hair and a blue car, and I pulled into the church car park and got out and walked across to the sycamores and beech trees and the low three-bar metal fence that marked the boundary between church and houses, and slipped among them and saw Anita Kravchenko knock on the front door of a two-up two-down grey pebbledash midterrace house, and look over her shoulder as a man opened the door and smiled in what looked like surprise and Anita looked in my direction and I tucked my head in behind the broad fungus-flecked beech trunk, and then looked out again to see her talking intensely to the man in the doorway, the man I had last seen in the Woodpark Inn, singing about Blood on the Wind. Jerry Dalton, who was the right age to be Eileen Casey’s second son, the right age to be Stephen Casey’s half brother, the right age to return and claim his inheritance. He stepped aside and looked at the traffic and the cars in the car park and Anita went into the house and someone else approached the door and spoke to Dalton. Dalton half turned and said something over his shoulder, and the person moved fully into the doorway to continue the conversation. She had dyed her hair black, and she looked very pale, but there was no question that it was Emily Howard.

  I walked back through the churchyard. An early-evening mass had finished, and a straggle of old ladies was emerging, the fleet helping the lame down the church steps; they grabbed their shopping trolleys or their walking frames and trundled off unsteadily into the falling night. A board mounted in the porch told me it was the Church of the Immaculate Conception, that the parish priest-and the only priest-was Father James Massey, and that tonight there would be Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in an all-night vigil leading into dawn mass on All Souls’ Day. Years ago, a parish this size would hav
e had two or three priests; now they were probably doing well to have one to themselves. I went around to the side chapel entrance at the rear of the church and knocked on the sacristy door. It pushed open under my hand, and I went in; to my right was a small office area with a desk and chairs and a filing area; ahead, stretching around the corner I could see Formica counters, a sink and shelves with church ornaments and hangings.

  “Father Massey?” I said.

  A tall, stooped, balding man of about seventy appeared, drying his hands and face on a towel. He had removed his vestments and was wearing the black shirt priests favored for day wear; without the clerical collar it looked incomplete, and so did he.

  “What is it?” he asked, his voice sibilant, slightly high.

  “I was wondering if you remembered a parishioner of yours, she would have had a son here maybe twenty years ago. Eileen Dalton, her name was. She may have been married here too. Her maiden name was Casey.”

  “It wasn’t, but no matter. Yes, I remember her. What connection have you with her?”

  His manner wasn’t unfriendly, just direct, guarded, maybe even protective.

  “My name is Edward Loy. I’m a private detective, working for the Howard family. Eileen Casey was the mother of a boy who was thought to have murdered Audrey O’Connor, the first wife of Sandra Howard’s husband Richard. Eileen was in service with the Howards at that time. Stephen Casey then was believed to have killed himself. Not long after, Eileen was in a position to buy a house in Woodpark, where she married a man called Dalton.”

  “And what do you want to know?”

  “Where Eileen Casey, or Dalton, is now. And what she can tell me about her son.”

  Father Massey looked at me appraisingly.

  “When you say you’re working for the Howards…”

  “It means Sandra Howard is paying me. But I’m bound by the laws of the land. Her money doesn’t buy her family a free ride.”

  “Because I saw the awful news about Jessica Howard on the television last night. Are you saying what happened twenty years ago has something to do with that?”

  “I’m almost certain that it does. I don’t know how yet. But anything you can tell me could be vital.”

  Father Massey turned and disappeared from sight. When he returned, he had put his collar on and a black jacket over his shirt; he carried two heavy, leather-bound books under his arm. He laid them out on the desk and opened one to December 1985.

  “This is the marriage register entry: you can see here, December twelve, Eileen Mary Harvey married Brian Patrick Dalton, their signatures there.”

  He passed me the marriage register and opened the second book and quickly found the page he was looking for.

  “Now, here it is, after what we are no longer allowed to call a positively indecent gap, twenty-eight March 1986, a son christened Jeremiah John Dalton.”

  He passed me the second volume. I took it, glanced at it and set it down.

  “That was very easy,” I said. “If all information was that simple to obtain, I’d be out of a job.”

  Massey’s wan face warmed to pink.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I come in out of the blue asking about a marriage and a christening from twenty years ago and you just happen to have the registers at hand and find the entries in seconds. Surely you can’t remember everyone you marry, every child you christen, off the top of your head.”

  Massey had flushed red now. He turned his face away from me, and when he spoke, his light voice wavered.

  “Ah but poor Eileen was a special case. None of us could forget Eileen.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because young Dalton ran out on her a month before the baby was born. And a month after the birth, Eileen herself couldn’t take any more. She left the baby in the porch you entered, then slipped back home, sealed up the kitchen, turned the oven on and gassed herself. The strain of it all, the son dying, the young husband leaving, she may have been depressed after the birth…God only knows what darkness haunts one of His children when they feel driven to take that decision.”

  Massey turned to me, and I saw that there were tears running down his smooth, unlined face.

  “Such a beautiful girl…too beautiful, now, too trusting, too quick to sit on a handsome lad’s knee, too much life in her, more than she could manage, and no one she could trust to help her cultivate it, help it grow. Such beauty…such a waste.”

  He shook his head and wiped his face with a large white handkerchief.

  “Forgive me. You’re absolutely right, there are people I married last year and I would probably not recognize them if they walked through that door this minute. But you couldn’t forget Eileen Dalton.”

  “What happened to the child?”

  “Oh, the Howards took care of everything. They paid for the funeral, such flowers, and they arranged adoption for the child with a family they knew.”

  “How’d they manage that? I mean, didn’t they have to go through some kind of agency?”

  “In theory. In practice, John Howard was chair of the board of the Adoption Authority, and two of the board members were ex-students of his, and another was the chaplain at the Howard Medical Center, and the adoptive father was a senior colleague of Howard’s, so the whole thing went through on a hush-hush little nod. A nice respectable family the baby went to though, a very good family.”

  There was something sardonic about the way Massey said this, which, combined with the obvious affection he had had for Eileen Dalton, made me like him immensely.

  “Did they take the house too?”

  “Oh no. The Dalton fellow’s name was on the deeds, you see. And there was no mortgage. After a while, the council boarded it up; kids were having cider parties and all sorts up there. It’s only this last eighteen months it’s been done up; I heard it was sold, and the new owner has rented it out. Which I suppose means Dalton was out there all along, the blackguard.”

  “The house,” I said. “Is it the second in the terrace just past the church?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Pearse Terrace. How did you know? But you’re a detective, I forgot. I suppose you dug it up, Mr. Loy.”

  I rose to leave, and he gathered the registers together.

  “By the way, you were absolutely right about something else too,” he said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “Deducing that I had shown these books to someone recently.”

  “Was it a young man, slim build, long black hair, good-looking?”

  Father Massey laughed and said, “Oh dear me no, I’m afraid not,” in almost a camp way. “Quite the opposite, old and red and fat. Solicitor for the Howard family, he said he was. Nice person, just not at all easy on the eye. I’m sure you know him. Denis Finnegan.”

  In the churchyard, there was someone standing by my Volvo. As I got closer, I saw that it was Jerry Dalton, and that he was putting something beneath my windscreen wipers. I walked a little slower then, trying to creep up on him, but the blare of a car horn alerted him to the danger; he looked back at me, then bolted for the road; I chased him, but he had too much of a lead, and twenty years, on me; Anita was waiting across the road in the Punto; Jerry Dalton got in beside her and they took off. No sign of Emily. I jumped the three-bar fence and knocked on the door of the Dalton house, once, twice, three times. No reply. I opened the letterbox and shouted through it.

  “Emily? Emily, it’s Ed Loy.”

  “Go away.”

  “Emily, your father’s worried about you. Sandra too. I’m just checking that you’re okay.”

  “My mother’s just been murdered and the cops think my dad did it; of course I’m okay.”

  “Can you open the door? Can I talk to you?”

  “No. Please, just leave me alone.”

  “We have to believe Shane is innocent.”

  “Why? I’d’ve killed her if I were him. They hated each other.”

  “I don’t know that t
hat’s true.”

  “Who the hell are you? What do you know about any of it?”

  “As much as you’ll tell me. I know about Stephen Casey, and Eileen Dalton being Jerry’s mother. I know you and Jerry are trying to get to the bottom of it all. That’s what I want too. But I need your help.”

  There was a long silence, and then the sound of sobbing.

  “Emily?”

  “All right. I’ll ring Daddy. But please don’t tell him where I am, I just need some time alone. I’m safe here.”

  The sobbing continued. I let the letterbox close.

  I walked back to my car, picked the envelope from the windscreen and put it in my pocket; I didn’t have time for it now. Shane Howard was going to be outside St. Anthony’s Church at six with a bag of cash, and I needed a partner if I was going to track whoever was going to make the grab.

  The fact Tommy Owens went to great lengths to hide-you could say he’d dedicated his entire life’s work to its concealment, if the phrase “life’s work” was one you could fit alongside Tommy with a straight face-was that his mother was a teacher, his family owned their own semidetached house, and, while his father had drunk himself to death by the age of forty-three, he was an alcoholic civil servant, not some drunken laborer. In other words, Tommy grew up lower middle class, or what passed for it in Ireland in those days (it didn’t always have much to do with money). But from the word go, Tommy wanted to be with the kids who were trouble, with the troubled kids, and his teachers went from telling him that they expected much better to eventually being relieved that his behavior wasn’t a lot worse. Everyone liked to say there was no real harm in Tommy, but that wasn’t true; he did his fair share of things to other kids that, looking back, were as vicious and mean as it comes; so did I; so did a lot of us. But Tommy always did stuff that seemed guaranteed to backfire, to land him in even greater trouble: when it comes to the various working definitions of a loser, Tommy Owens fit the bill in this regard: you always felt that, deep down, Tommy wanted to get caught. Not a man you needed on your side in a crisis. On the other hand, I hadn’t made enough friends since I’d been back to have many-all right, any-alternatives. Except for a few Guards, and they weren’t what I needed for a ransom grab, or, after last night, for anything else right now.