The Colour of Blood Read online

  “That’s work. I’ve another client who wants to view the house. I need to go now. Shane can take you through anything else you need.”

  I looked at her, unable to conceal the astonishment I felt.

  “What?” she said.

  “You sure you’re not too busy to be bothered with all of this?” I said. “Your ex-husband-to-be passed me over to you because he wouldn’t keep his patients waiting; now you want me to go because you can’t postpone an appointment.”

  “It’s work—”

  “What are you, chasing the mortgage here, two houses on the top of Bayview Hill?” I said. “I’m being paid to find your daughter, so I have to take it seriously; it would be nice if her mother did as well. Maybe you’re right, she’s just letting off some steam, going through a wild phase to shock you all. But if she’s not – if she’s been kidnapped, and raped, and abused and degraded, and is trapped somewhere, frightened and alone – it would be nice when I find her if I could say with confidence that you’re worried about her; nice if you could promise to be here for her if she needs you.”

  Jessica Howard reddened with anger and started to shout.

  “How dare you? Who the hell do you think you are, that you can talk to me like that? I run my own business, it took me time and energy and goodwill to build up, I’ve worked bloody hard, I can’t just jeopardize it all for the sake of…”

  Shock spread across her face as she realized what she had been about to say, hung there for seconds in the quivering O of her lips and the horrified stare of her eyes and the now all-too-visible lines in her brow, and then dispersed with the tears she began to shed.

  “I need to see Emily’s room,” I said quickly. It was exhausting trying to keep up with her shifts in mood, and not a little unnerving. I needed some space to remember what her behaviour reminded me of.

  Through sobs, she directed me down the hall to the last door on the left. It looked like she was going to accompany me, and I was about to reassure her that there was no need when her phone rang again and she composed herself and wheeled about and headed toward the living room, laughing brightly, back in business.

  Emily’s room hadn’t been painted black or scarlet; she didn’t have a pentagram on her floor or a coke spoon in her jewelry box; there were no whips in her underwear drawer, no vodka in her desk. But you could tell the occupant of the room was someone in the process of change. The furniture was antique French, white-stained with gilt trim; the bed was brass, the bedclothes plain white. A desk sat by a window with a sea view that would have been spectacular if you could have seen through the mist, which was deepening. On the desk was the outline in dust of a laptop computer and a white telephone without caller ID. There were lecture notes and textbooks in pathology, anatomy and microbiology; no diaries or personal notebooks. There was a CD player and a few CDs: Britney, Christina and a clutch of boy bands quaked before Deicide, Sepultura, Slayer and System of a Down. On the bookshelves, brightly coloured chick lit squared off against the two Naomis, Wolf and Klein, and a handful of volumes by Alice Miller, the psychotherapist who reckons we’re all abused children one way or another, and it’s all our parents’ fault. There were dictionaries of mythology and phrase and fable, and several books about the supposed properties and applications of crystals. Her wardrobe and chest of drawers told the same story her father had: three-quarters of the clothes were preppy suburban, then suddenly there were red satin dresses, leather jackets, fishnet stockings, spike-heeled boots. In her jewelry box, there were little gold chains and charm bracelets and a few swimming medals; on her dressing table mirror hung an array of Gothic crosses, chains, beaded and jewelled necklaces and bracelets. I picked up a silver wristband that had greenish stones with red flecks. They looked like smaller versions of those I had seen set into the walls of the garden pond. Against the light, the red in each stone looked like veins in a tiny green skull.

  Under the bed, I found a beautifully made dollhouse: it had castellations and a turret and a tower. The back doors opened to reveal the usual furniture and a random assortment of toy figures; neither side of the roof opened. The house stood on a broad wooden base; to the front there was a drive lined with plastic trees; at the rear there was a lawn sloping down to a circular pond; the perimeter of the pond was made of tiny pebbles glued together. A fine coat of dust clung to it like age; I guess it hadn’t been played with for a long time.

  I went through every item of clothing that had a pocket, but there were no scraps of paper or tickets; there was nothing else under the bed, no boxes of letters or mementos or photographs. I flicked through the pages of the books, but all that fell out, from the very oldest, were dried autumn leaves. Had Emily taken everything with her that bore a personal trace, or had she simply not kept any of it to begin with? I heard Jessica Howard calling my name. I did the only other thing I could think of: I pressed “redial” on the telephone.

  After a dozen rings, a male voice answered. “Woodpark Inn?”

  I thought for a few seconds.

  “Hello?”

  “Have you a late extension tonight?” I said.

  “Halloween party, ten till two, battle of the bands, tickets twenty euros,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said, and hung up. The Woodpark Inn. Not Emily Howard’s style, I would have thought. But then, what would I know? As much as anyone, it seemed.

  In the living room, Jessica Howard sat at the table, her hands folded across her breast, her head slightly bowed, her crossed legs tucked beneath her chair. She looked exhausted, about ten years older than the woman who had greeted me. The way she sat seemed intended to minimize her body space, and I remembered at last what she reminded me of: the swings between sexual exhibitionism and physical awkwardness, between rage and carelessness, cold objectivity and tears. She reminded me of the lost girls I tried to rescue from San Fernando Valley porn sets, or rather, the way they’d be in twenty years’ time, eyes still bright but hard, souls cold as the dead.

  She brightened up when she saw me, and pointed to a sheet of paper on the table.

  “David Brady was Emily’s boyfriend for two years. This is his address and mobile number. Here’s a photograph of the two of them together. Absolute ride, I certainly would have, thighs to die for. The guy she’s going out with now is called Jerry… blank, I’m sorry. He was a barman at the rugby club, not sure if he still is. Oh yes, and his band is called – what’s the other name for Calvary? You know, where Christ was crucified?”

  “Golgotha,” I said.

  “That’s right. His band is called The Golgotha Pyre.”

  A smile creased up through her beautiful, sad face.

  “You can only imagine what they sound like.”

  She got a bag and an umbrella and saw me to the door. Outside, as she was locking up, I thought of the Alice Miller books.

  “Jessica, was Emily in therapy of any kind?”

  “No. At least, not that I know of. But I wouldn’t be surprised if… no, actually, Shane wouldn’t have kept that from me. No, she wasn’t.”

  “Are you?”

  Her slender figure crooked against the cold rain that had started to fall, Jessica Howard flashed a grin at me as she walked toward her car.

  “I’m beyond therapy, Ed,” she said, without turning around. “I’m out the other side.”

  She got in the Porsche, pointed it down the hill and vanished into the mist.

  I walked back up to my car. I drove a racing green ’65 Volvo 122S. It had been my father’s, and although we had never seen eye to eye, I somehow felt driving it was keeping faith with his memory, though I’d be hard put if called upon to explain exactly what I thought that meant. Beneath the windscreen wiper someone had left a white envelope, which was now damp with rain. I pulled it out, sat into the car and opened it. Inside was a mass card. The name on it was Stephen Casey, and the date of the requiem mass was set as All Souls’ Day, 1985. All Souls’ Day was November 2, two days from now. I put the card in my jacket pocke
t. Before I had a chance to turn the car, a black Mercedes the width of the road swept past me, with Shane Howard at the wheel.

  Chapter Three

  TOMMY OWENS HAD GIVEN UP BOOZE AND DOPE and coke and E because he was broke because he couldn’t hold down a job because of all the booze and dope and coke and E he’d been doing, and his ex refused to let him see his daughter until he cleaned up. Being sober all the time wasn’t easy for Tommy, and Tommy being sober wasn’t easy for me either, since he’d asked me to act informally as his sponsor. I explained that, since I had no intention of stopping drinking, that mightn’t be the wisest idea, but he insisted, maintaining that having to put up with some sanctimonious bastard thrilled with himself for having given up booze would drive him to drink. In practice, it didn’t mean a lot more than my letting Tommy hang out at my house, sleep on my floor and generally make himself at home whenever it suited him, as well as helping him out of whatever scrapes he inevitably found himself in. All of which I’d been doing anyway. The new development was Tommy wanting to be involved with the cases I worked, to talk them through and offer me advice. At first I resisted this because my work was complicated enough, and depended a lot on instinct and intuition, capacities that were easy to undermine, especially if exposed to the chaos of Tommy’s mind. Not to mention client confidentiality. But his thinning, wispy hair and tufty straggle of beard weren’t the only ways in which Tommy resembled a beady old lady: he knew everyone in Seafield, Bayview and Castlehill and outlying areas, and everything about them, always had, since we were kids, who lived where and who lived there before them; who was rising, who falling, everyone’s business but his own. So when I checked my phone and found three messages from Tommy asking what the deal was with Shane Howard, I called him and gave him the bare skeleton – it was always a fine line, because I had the persistent suspicion if he heard something juicy enough, he’d trade it in for a night in the pub and a gram of coke. Not this time though. Immediately he heard David Brady’s name and the word “porn,” he said I should meet him at once at my house in Quarry Fields.

  Although I had grown up in the house, I hadn’t been back in it long enough to get used to calling it mine, despite a hefty standing order on my bank account reminding me that I was the only one paying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn’t live to see. A fifties semidetached, it had seen better days, and I had done nothing to the exterior to improve it, other than have the side garage demolished and a gated wall built to connect the back line of the house to the perimeter. The earth had been turned where the concrete was lifted, and I scattered some grass seed for want of any better idea of what to do with a space I still considered haunted. Tommy was outraged, and accused me of wanting “a businessman’s lawn, like a fuckin’ snooker table”; he had worked for my father once, and restored the Volvo in the garage, so he felt he had a claim on the space. He got busy with paving stones, cobbles, recycled tiles and anything else he could steal from the day labouring jobs he occasionally worked, laying them in a loose path and planting herbs and heathers in the gaps between them. The hedge at the front of the house was of holly, yew and cypress; Tommy flanked the path with these, adding bay to give richness; the result was a secluded, tranquil path running south toward a gate of spiked black palings that let in the afternoon light. It was a good job, and I was grateful to him.

  Inside, I had done little other than sand, stain and varnish the floorboards and paint the walls and ceilings white. I didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but I bought a brown leather couch long enough to pass out drunk on without waking with a deformed spine. Tommy Owens was sitting on the couch now with two remote controls in his hands. I sat beside him and reached out a hand and he passed me the DVD remote.

  “Why d’you still wear your wedding ring, Ed?” Tommy said.

  It was a good question, one I’d been asking myself. My marriage had fallen apart after my daughter Lily died, days short of her second birthday; I have the vaguest memory of signing divorce papers, drunk, like everything else I did in the aftermath. My ex-wife had recently been in contact with me for the first time since then. She wanted to be the one to tell me that she was getting married to the man she had gone out with before she met me, the man she had never entirely gotten over or indeed separated from while we were married, although of course I didn’t know about that until it was too late. She wanted me to know that she would soon have this man’s child, and she wanted me to hear it from her, not someone else. I thought it unlikely in the extreme that anyone who knew me in L.A. would ever mention my ex-wife to me again, but maybe she was acting out of sensitivity. Maybe she wanted to tell me that she grieved too for what we had had, for what had been lost. It didn’t feel that way, however. The way it felt was that she had held our shared past, our child, our history, held it aloft in one hand, and then set fire to it, and she wanted to make sure that I had seen the flames. I didn’t say that though. I wished her luck, and hung up before I said anything else, before she could hear the bitterness and anger in my voice, the grief that had never entirely abated, and that felt sometimes like it never would. I still wore my wedding ring because I didn’t want to forget the flames that burned me, or the past that binds.

  “Saves me beating them off with a stick,” I said. Tommy rolled his eyes.

  I’m not sure if there are ideal conditions to watch porn, but sober before midday doesn’t even come close. On the screen, a blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties was going at it with a pale, blond-haired bloke about the same age or younger on someone’s living room floor. The woman wore a black satin eye mask, the man wore black wraparound shades. I looked at the photographs of Emily’s threesome. It looked like the same guy in the film. Something about the blonde looked familiar too. They were joined by a plumpish dark-haired woman wearing a lot of complicated black underwear, most of which she left on. There was no attempt at a story, no dialogue other than moans and groans; the camera work was shaky and amateurish and there was no lighting, so the action was enveloped in shadow and murk.

  “Tommy, where are we going here?” I said.

  “Hold on, hold on.”

  Scowling, for Tommy had always been puritanical about anything to do with sex, he fast-forwarded until the scene cut to one where the threesome were shot against two full-length mirrors.

  “Now, there.”

  He froze the disc. Visible in one of the mirrors was the handheld camera, and the forearm, of the cameraman. On his wrist, the man wore an identity bracelet with a series of letters and numbers in relief where a name would usually go.

  “That’s David Brady,” Tommy said.

  “How can you tell?” I said.

  “What can you see?”

  “2 J S 2,” I said. “What’s that?”

  “2JS2. When David Brady was at Castlehill, the school won the Junior Cup two years running, and then the Senior Cup the same. David Brady was the only one to play on all four teams.”

  “Rugby, Tommy? It’ll be golf next.”

  “Fuck off. There’s practically a fuckin’ shrine to the guy in the Castle Inn sure.”

  “Since when do you go to the Castle Inn? Thought that was rugby all the way.”

  “I get around man. I get around.”

  I showed Tommy the photographs, and he quickly matched the skinny guy with the one in the film by means of an eagle tattoo on his left shoulder blade.

  “The background’s the same too, carpet, cushions, sofa,” Tommy said, nodding seriously, thoughtfully, like we were partners. I wasn’t ungrateful for his help, but still.

  “Where did you get this, Tommy?”

  “This what?” he lied. His eyes flashed quickly to his end of the couch and back. Old Pokerface.

  “This porno DVD we’re watching. Where did you get it?”

  I got up and stood over him. I could see his green canvas backpack tucked away on the floor by the side of the couch. Tommy held my gaze, tapping with his right hand on the arm of the couch.


  “I just picked it up, you know man?”

  An I-can’t-think-of-a-lie lie.

  “In actual fact, David Brady gave it to me himself,” Tommy said hopefully.

  In actual fact. I hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of using that expression. I made a move toward the bag. His right hand formed a fist, and he brought his left shoulder around, as if to say he was ready. I nodded and moved in just slowly enough to give him time to get out of the way. He got, sliding to his left with a hangdog expression on his flushed face.

  There were about two hundred DVDs in cardboard sleeves, each one with the legend “Threesome Porno” written on it in Tommy’s surprisingly polished hand. Tommy wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was starting to get angry. I turned off the television and removed the disc from the DVD player and shut off the power and none of it made me feel any calmer.

  “Tommy. Explain this to me,” I said.

  “It’s nothing man, I’m just holding it, know I mean?”

  The accent thickened the more he stalled, as if the right blend would be truly impenetrable.

  “You’re going to sell them for what, a tenner a go? Two grand, door to door on the estates, in the right pubs. And what do you keep?”

  “Three-quarters.”

  “Bullshit. Two euro in ten.”

  “Five.”

  Spots of anger erupted all over Tommy’s taut rodent face.

  “It’s all right for you, you have all these rich cunts paying you all the time,” he said.

  “Yes, being paid money for work I do, it’s called my job.”

  “Well how come I don’t have a job? Been clean three months now and I still can’t get regular work.”

  What could I say? That it was going to take more than three months’ sobriety to convince garage owners to take a chance on a man who had proved himself a legendary fuck-up in substance abuse, work-rate and time-keeping terms? Not to mention everyone’s aversion to employing a former associate of the Halligan organized crime gang.