The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Read online

  The escalators were coated with rust and sand and what could have been mud, or shit, or blood, maybe all three. They led to the passenger boarding deck, with access doors that opened onto thin air, thirty feet above the water; a second set of escalators, even filthier than the first and stenciled with wet footprints, led down to a partly covered L-shaped dock recessed at the rear of the harbor. The open side looked out at the west pier curving into the bay; the other side, dark and dank beneath a corrugated iron roof, was where repairs had presumably been carried out, or where a second ferry might have docked. A line of buoys blocked access to any craft that might wish to explore it. I shouted out Tommy’s name, and heard nothing but my own voice back, hard and metallic. There was a rusting ladder attached to the wall at the corner of the L shape, and I climbed down as far as the waterline. The dock was supported by steel girders encased in concrete; beneath it, Colm Hyland’s wine-colored motor launch was tied to a ladder rung; further in, three weathered rowing boats were tethered together and moored to steel rings fixed to the girders; they rose and fell in the swell of the tide. The contents of the three boats were concealed beneath tarpaulins.

  “Tommy? Tommy, it’s Ed, Ed Loy.”

  There was no reply. I thought I heard a thumping or a kicking, but that could have been the slap of the water against the boat hulls.

  “Tommy?”

  This time the sound was unmistakable, five steady knocks on wood, accompanied by a low moaning. I tugged on Hyland’s boat and sat into it and untied the rope that secured it and angled myself toward the rowing boats and pushed off beneath the dock. It was only a few yards, using my hands to pass between girders and keeping my head low, and I floated alongside the first boat and grabbed hold of the side and lifted the tarpaulin. There were oars in it, and white plastic containers of what could have been oil or water. I tied Hyland’s boat to it and climbed aboard and leaned across and hauled the other tarpaulins away: in a second boat there were life belts and fishing kit; in the third, Tommy Owens lay, his trousers round his knees, gagged and bound at wrist and ankle with ropes that were tied to the oarlocks of the boat. I took the gag off and used Colm Hyland’s knife to cut the ropes. There were knife cuts around his badly bruised thighs and buttocks and blood around his genitals; he had soiled himself, and reeked of urine and feces; the gag was stained with blood and semen. Once I’d freed him, he sat up, flexed his wrists, grabbed the side of the boat and vomited into the sea. He dropped over the side and submerged himself completely, then surfaced and clung there, moving his legs in the water. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t know what to say to him, so I looked out toward the bay, where the Holyhead ferry was approaching. When I looked back at Tommy, he had tears streaming down his face. There was a bottle of water in Hyland’s boat. I passed it to Tommy, and he drank as much as he could, and poured the rest over his head. He began to cry harder, shock working through his body in great heaving sobs.

  We stayed like that a long while, and would have stayed longer if Colm Hyland hadn’t had such a hard head, because here he was now, hanging off the ladder to see where his boat was. I didn’t use the outboard motor before because I didn’t know how; now there wasn’t much of a choice. I was looking for a switch to flick, or a cord to pull, and Hyland was in the water, swimming the few yards toward us, and I figured the engine must need a key, but suddenly it didn’t matter what it needed because Tommy Owens was standing up in the rowing boat with an oar in his hands, Tommy Owens back from the dead, his eyes all fire and blood, and he swung the paddle hard against Colm Hyland’s forehead, and I had to grab the oar to stop him from doing it again, because the first blow had sent Hyland under. When he surfaced, he was out cold, and I had to grab him quickly by the collar before he went down for a second time. Tommy didn’t want to help me but I didn’t want another dead man on my conscience, no matter what he’d done; I wouldn’t let Hyland go, and eventually Tommy pitched in, and we got Hyland onto his boat and tied it up. He was breathing, and I put him in the recovery position, and Tommy tied his legs and hands and tossed the outboard engine over the side. We left him there by the old ferry dock, the Halligans’ deadly boatman, sleeping in the dark.

  Twenty

  I UNTIED ONE OF THE ROWING BOATS AND CHANNELED IT out from beneath the dock and rowed toward the mouth of the harbor. Tommy sat astern of me and trailed a hand in the water, his sodden clothes dripping, his wet hair blowing back in the first breeze there had been for days.

  “It was grand up until last night,” he said, suddenly, astonishingly, as ever capable of saying the thing you least expected. He said nothing more for a while. We came out of the harbor in our rowing boat, and were immediately rocked by the wash from the incoming ferry. Children up on deck waved to us. The first yachts of the morning were appearing in the bay. I felt like the last survivor of some savage tribe, escaped at last from his cave, dazzled and bewildered by the cold glare of civilization.

  I narrowed my focus, concentrated on getting as far away from the old ferry-house as we could. When I next checked our position, we were drawing level with the Royal Seafield, and Tommy had begun to talk.

  “It was the night they trashed your house. I was in the garage, giving your oul’ fella’s tools a once-over. Good equipment, but in a shockin’ state. They came and got me. I told them where I thought the Glock was, but you’d moved it. They found it in the rental car though. Anyway, they took me and brought me down to the old ferry-house, and it was grand, you know? Said they had to keep me out of the way. Podge was all smiles about the Glock, which I didn’t trust, but still, he didn’t come near me, not then. And it was grand, really, I mean, not great since I was bein’ kept against my will, but they kept bringin’ pizza and beer and all, and initially, I was up in the ferry-house, wasn’t chained up or anything, just locked in. Big Hyland was looking after me. Decent enough bloke, I thought.”

  “Which is why you tried to kill him,” I said.

  “Hyland could have stopped it. He just let it happen.”

  “Podge Halligan? Was it Podge, Tommy?”

  Tommy flushed, and instantly there were tears in his eyes again; he twisted his face into a fierce smile to hold them back, and nodded.

  “How could Hyland have stopped Podge? The guy’s out of control, a fucking savage.”

  Tommy looked at my face as if he hadn’t noticed before.

  “You have a run-in with him too?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought I’d cut him up pretty badly,” I said.

  “He had bandages around his chest and his shoulder all right. But that explains…he kept saying, ‘I won’t let your little friend off this easy.’”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “Fuck’s sake! They’re just supposed to be dealers and blaggers, not the, not the fucking SS,” he said.

  He looked out to sea, his lips trembling, his gaunt features creasing in tight folds as his jaw worked to master his emotions. The ferry had maneuvered its stately progress past the mouth of the harbor, and we churned about in its wake, heading south.

  “Tell me about Peter Dawson the night you met him in the High Tide, Tommy.”

  “I told you. I gave him some money from George Halligan. Had a drink. His mobile rang, he said he had to go, asked me to wait and tell Linda he’d been called away. So I did, end of story.”

  “This thing of George Halligan giving Peter the money. I mean, I know Peter was in a bad way financially, I’ve seen his bank records, but how? What was he spending it all on?”

  “Horses. He was gambling with George Halligan. Ran up huge debts, kept trying to pay them off, couldn’t, so he let George in on the whole golf club development thing instead. It started off as Peter trying to impress the oul’ fella, ’cause John Dawson was a great man for the ponies. Ended as another rich kid’s mess.”

  “All right, back to the High Tide: anything about Peter you can remember that night, anything strange or unusual, or just a detail that sticks in your mind?”

 
“He had a blue plastic bag with him. You know, the kind they have in small newsagents and sweet shops. I remember thinking it looked weird, ’cause he was all collar and tie, Mr. Business, should have had a briefcase or something, but no, this plastic bag full of…”

  “Full of what?”

  “I thought at first newspapers, like that madman who’s always riding the DART with, you know, two plastic bags full of all the papers, but it looked like photographs, and old envelopes, the big ones, and cardboard folders, the kind they used to put photographs in.”

  “Very good. Anything else?”

  “He was nervous. Excited nervous, acting the gobshite. I remember the last thing he said, he said, ‘Make sure and tell Linda I’ve business with Lady Linda.’ I was like, yeah, sure I’m gonna tell her that.”

  “‘Business with Lady Linda?’ Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “Yeah. No, you’re right, actually, it was business on Lady Linda.”

  “And did you tell her?”

  “I did in me shite. What am I gonna say, Oh, your husband says he can’t see you now, but don’t worry, he’ll give you the ride later?”

  Tommy pursed his lips, and I remembered, despite the seeming chaos and abandon that surrounded him, what a puritan, what a hippie roundhead he had always been.

  “The Lady Linda is the name of his boat.”

  Tommy’s bloodshot eyes widened.

  “Fuck,” he said. “That means he must’ve gone out there.”

  “He met MacLiam, brought him on board. Maybe our friend Hyland helped him. Sail about with the good councillor, get him all relaxed, hopefully he’ll prove amenable. And then who was waiting there? Podge and friends?”

  “And they killed him there?”

  “They fed him enough smack to kill him, or he OD’d by accident and they did nothing to help. Then tossed the body over the side. But that’s all just what we think. We’d need a witness to know for sure.”

  We let the likelihood of finding a witness willing to testify to a murder Podge Halligan had a hand in mock us in silence for a while. We were level with the Royal Seafield, and I wondered briefly whether Colm Hyland could be forced to testify, then, remembering how hard his head was, dismissed it out of hand.

  “Podge never offered me the gun, you know?” Tommy said, his hair falling in his eyes, his expression as close to sheepish as it ever got.

  “Say again,” I said.

  “The Glock. He never offered it to me. I just took it out of Podge’s gaff. And the clip. I knew there was something goin’ on. I was at the party, you know? They were all still up to ninety about it, so they were. Sayin’ things and then shushing each other, whispering, giggling, all this; they were like a pack of girls talking about young fellas. Anyway, I was pissed off being their fucking errand boy, oh very good Tommy keep the change you crippledy prick you. Hopalong, some of them called me. All very smart. And I knew you were back, with your ma an’ all. And Podge told me, just leave the gear upstairs in his bedroom. And I needed a piss, Podge’s en suite bathroom, a fucking black bath an’ all, black toilet, black sink, gold taps, fuck sake, the bad cunt. Anyway, there’s the gun lyin’ on top of the cistern. Checked the clip, two shots missing. So I thought, I’ll take it and give it to you and see what you can come up with, see who’s fucking smart then.”

  “Just because they called you names?”

  Tommy’s eyes flashed with anger.

  “If I’d known what Podge was gonna do, I’d have piled downstairs and emptied it up his fat hole,” he said.

  He was breathing heavily, and his body went into something like a spasm.

  “But you didn’t know that then, did you?”

  Tommy waited until he stopped shaking. It took a while.

  “Podge and George were having a lot of rows, on account of George wanting to go legit, pay Podge off. They’d’ve been having even more if George knew what Podge was planning.”

  “And what was that?”

  “To team up with Larry Knight out in Charnwood and start dealin’ H all round the Southside, down the coast as far as Wicklow, Wexford even. That’s his plan now, anyway. What he originally wanted was to have me picking up the smack for him in Birmingham. Build up a connection, a regular route. Only I said no. He was furious, started makin’ all these threats, my daughter’s safety, all this. I told him I’d tell George what he was up to if he didn’t back off. He said he didn’t care what George thought, but he did. Still, you never know what Podge is gonna fuckin’ do. So I took the gun, so I’d have something on him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, Tommy?”

  “Ah, I didn’t wanna make it too easy for you, man, you know?”

  And Tommy grinned. A little sheepishly, but it was a recognizable grin.

  “And maybe I didn’t want to tell you any more about how in I was with the Halligans.”

  It wasn’t quite an apology, but it would have to do.

  “Anyway, something got Podge riled up last night, he came storming in and, and…well, you saw what he did to me. I thought he was going to kill me when he was finished. Most of me wanted him to. But he said he’d keep me around. In case you kept sticking your nose in, he said.”

  “What, that he’d use the threat of killing you as a way of warning me off?”

  “Yeah. And he said he’d keep me around also because—said this as he was zipping himself up—because he didn’t realize before how much he liked me,” Tommy said, his voice breaking. He began to shiver now, and a rattling sound came from his chest.

  We had gone the length of the Seafront Plaza, and I turned the boat toward the shore. There was an old beach house a canoeing club used to own with a patch of stony strand in front of it. I ran the boat up as far as I could, and we both stepped out in the shallows.

  Tommy sat on the beach and tossed pebbles into the sea, and I went up onto Seafield Road. I passed three women’s clothes shops, a fancy deli, two restaurants and an art gallery before I located a men’s shop around the corner from a Mercedes dealership. It sold preppy-looking stuff at preppy-looking prices, no item of which Tommy Owens would normally have worn in a million years. I picked out a pair of beige chinos, a pale blue button-down shirt, a blue blazer and a pair of brown deck shoes. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror—my trouser leg ripped, my suit spattered with brine and blood and sand, my shoes soaked—I figured the assistant would think I was buying clothes for myself; the assistant, meanwhile, seemed untroubled by thought of any kind; beneath an electric shock of highlighted hair, his eyes never budged from his mobile phone, which was fielding text messages at a frantic rate; the only thing he looked at was my money.

  “I’m not wearing those fucking things. I’ll look like an accountant on his yacht,” Tommy said when I handed the bags to him.

  “Clothes, Tommy. They’re the latest craze. They won’t let you on the ferry without them,” I said.

  Because, once we had established that, while there were many things Tommy wanted to do to Podge Halligan, pressing rape charges was not among them, the plan we agreed was that Tommy should jump the Holyhead ferry and keep out of sight for a few days. So Tommy put the preppy outfit on with a full-body shudder, as if he was being made to wear his soiled clothes again. He looked like several things when he was dressed; an accountant on his yacht was not one of them. We walked along the coast road to the new ferry terminal. Cloud was seeping across the sky like foam. The breeze was building, and there was a lick of cold in it, the first hint that summer wouldn’t last forever. I bought Tommy a return ticket and gave him a wedge of cash from Barbara Dawson’s brown envelope, then I watched as he limped through to the departures lounge. It came to me then what he looked like: a boy who’d been bought his first grown-up clothes. They didn’t suit him, didn’t really fit him, usually made him look as lost and confused as Tommy looked, but what they said, emphatically, was: the old life is on its way out, to be replaced by the new. It may not be as much fun, or even
fun at all, but it’s inevitable; it doesn’t fit yet, but it will. I thought that, and then Tommy turned and threw a few hard-man shapes in my direction, and grinned like he had just gotten away with something, and all he looked like was the latest version of the old joke: What do you call Tommy Owens in a blazer? The defendant. And when it came to Tommy, it wasn’t much of a joke. Still, he’d be safe from the reach of Podge Halligan, and out of my way for a while.

  I sat into the Volvo and thought of Linda. It was still only eight-fifteen, and the roads were busy now with the morning rush. I figured she’d sleep until ten at least, and I had one last stop to make. I knew Peter Dawson had visited Fagan’s Villas; I wanted to see if he’d ever spoken to Mrs. Burke, and if so, what she might have told him about the old days.

  But if he’d been there, what they’d said had gone to the grave with the pair of them. A hearse was outside the corner house, and as I got out of the car, two burly gray-suited men carried a stretcher with a black body bag on it. They opened a trunk that lay beneath the main body of the hearse, pulled a rail out, positioned the stretcher upon it, slid the rail back in and shut the door. A woman of about thirty-five stood crying in Mrs. Burke’s lovingly tended garden. She watched as the hearse pulled away. No one was standing at their gates, or on the pavement, the way they would have been in the old days. The few who passed on their way to catch the DART, or to the shops, turned their faces away, as if it would have been in bad taste to notice, or to reach out a hand in comfort. But the bereaved need all the help they can get, and, smiling as if that was my only intention, I walked up to the gate.

  “Miss Burke? I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The woman looked at me in surprise, then smiled and nodded. Her thick dyed auburn hair looked the way hair looks when it’s been up all night: like an exotic plant, or a modern sculpture. She came down to the gate, her broad, open face stricken with shock, her round hazel eyes kind and warm.