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

  “And now you’re doing it here? Dagg there says you told him Peter Dawson is missing. Why didn’t Linda Dawson come to us with it?”

  “That’s what I told her to do. But you know yourself, Dave, grown man disappears for what, five days now, it’s not exactly priority police business, is it?”

  “And how did you get involved in this anyway?”

  “After the funeral, up at the Bayview. Everyone else went home. Linda stayed and got drunk. She needed someone to look after her. She begged me to look for Peter. She was very upset. Eventually, I said okay.”

  “You could’ve done without all that yesterday.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  There was a silence. We both looked down the hill to the sea. The high-speed ferry was powering briskly out of the harbor, sending great waves of surf billowing across toward Seafield Promenade.

  “You don’t have a license to operate as a private detective here, Ed.”

  “I didn’t know I needed one. Look, if you want me to tell Linda you’ve warned me off, fine. I could do without all this today as well,” I said.

  Dave looked at me again. He ran a hand along the bristles of his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “It’d be something to do, though. Take your mind off the funeral and everything.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Were you any good at it? You know, out in L.A.?”

  “I made a living.”

  “And you’d turn anything you found out over to me?”

  “Can’t arrest anyone myself.”

  “If you step on any other copper’s toes, I don’t know you.”

  “And I don’t know you, Dave.”

  I had known Dave Donnelly all my life. We were in primary school together, and if the whole class had been asked back then how we’d all end up, the one person we’d’ve got right was Dave. He wasn’t the cleverest, or the funniest, or the best at football, he just had a quiet authority, that Captain of the School quality that made you anxious for him to approve of you.

  Dave laughed, took a last drag on his smoke and tossed it away.

  “Come in and have a look at this, Ed. This is a good one.” He headed toward the town hall door, and I followed, signaling to Rory Dagg that I’d catch up with him in a minute. Busy on his mobile phone, Dagg waved me on.

  Nodding to the uniform on duty in the foyer, Dave gave me a hard hat and we took the lift down. The doors opened and Dave stepped out onto a scaffolding gantry, part of an interlocking grid of walkways that crisscrossed the entire basement. All the walls and partitions had been knocked down, leaving one vast room. The floor above was being supported by great steel girders. “They’re excavating. Lowering the foundations,” Dave said. “Ceilings too low down here, or structural damage or something. But they’ve been ripping up the concrete, and look what they’ve found.”

  In the center of the room, about eight feet below us, a police medical team were gathered around a steel gurney, gingerly rubbing clumps of concrete from a partially clothed corpse. A police photographer took snaps, and fingerprint and forensic teams dusted and swabbed, but their presence seemed incongruous. It looked less like a crime scene than an archaeological dig.

  “It’s male,” said Dave. “Buried in the foundations, so it goes back to what, ’81, ’82. Earlier, maybe. Came out of a huge slab of concrete intact, like a fossil. And his clothes have been preserved. That’s as much as we know…”

  “Dental records?”

  “Or false teeth. And we find who was on the missing persons list at the time. Million to one we identify him at all. Mind you, the pressure’ll be on. This is the kind of shit the press love.”

  I looked down at the corpse again, a tattered scarecrow caked in gray dust and gravel. Another of the missing. Maybe it was my father. The dates would fit. Maybe if I stared at him hard enough, he might give up his secrets. And maybe it was just another bundle of dry old bones.

  “I wonder if Dawson carried out the original construction,” I said.

  “They didn’t. I’m not sure who did, but your man Dagg out there has been tut-tutting over the state of the original job. Said it was real cowboy stuff.”

  “Shit, Rory Dagg. I’d better go and talk to him. Thanks for letting me see this, Dave.”

  “All right, Ed. Take it handy now.”

  I left Dave climbing down a ladder to join the team gathered around the body. Descending to the dead to shorten the odds from a million to one.

  Rory Dagg was outside sending a text to someone on his mobile phone. When he saw me, he picked up his silver laptop and a transparent plastic tubular case containing what looked like architect’s plans and began to move toward the main gates.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you, Mr. Dagg,” I said.

  “Walk with me, will you?” he said, his voice a quiet drawl, his manner easy and efficient. “I’ve another site to check in on, and all this has made me late. Donnelly didn’t give you any idea when they’d finish up, did he?”

  “He didn’t. But I can’t see it taking too long. Twenty years in a concrete block probably doesn’t leave too much work for forensics,” I said, affecting an insouciance toward the freshly exhumed corpse I certainly didn’t feel.

  We headed up the main street toward the old town hall, that is to say, McDonald’s. Dagg’s phone beeped, and he read an incoming text as he walked. He was in his mid-forties, had the wiry build of a swimmer and the high color of a drinker; he wore his graying curly hair short. He looked like a civil engineer, or a university lecturer; in fact, as he told me, he had been both, but had set up in project management when the building boom started because there was money to be made, “and I knew the job. My father was a foreman for Dawson’s years ago.”

  “Is he retired now?” I said.

  “He’s dead these ten years. Are you working with the police, Mr. Loy?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I’m investigating the disappearance of Peter Dawson, on behalf of his wife, Linda.”

  Dagg looked up from a text he was composing.

  “I didn’t know he’d disappeared. I saw him only the other day.”

  “Peter was supposed to meet his wife in the High Tide, just after he’d finished with you. You’re one of the last people we know to have seen him. What business did he have with you?”

  Dagg sent his text, put his mobile in his jacket pocket and shrugged.

  “The usual, I suppose. He came on-site and asked his questions about budget overruns and unforeseen expenses. Each of the site supervisors said his piece. Then he rolled off a bunch of bills to pay for nixers. Last week it was a sparks and a couple of chippies we had to call out when some genius kango-hammered through a fuseboard. The odd unofficial bonus, site security, because tools kept walking. That was it, I think.”

  “Was that the usual? I mean, it sounds a bit hands-on for a financial controller.”

  “Yeah. Well, truth be told, Peter Dawson isn’t really the financial controller. The real work is done by Hanly Boyle, they’ve been Dawson’s accountants since the beginning. Peter’s title is what you might call an honorific—you know, because he’s the boss’s son.”

  “That must be humiliating for him.”

  “I don’t think it was initially. Easy money, free house, his boat, a beautiful wife: we should all be so humiliated. But in the last few months, he’s seemed less and less satisfied.”

  “Was there anything out of the ordinary about him that day?”

  Dagg thrust his chin forward and grimaced in thought.

  “He was actually quite—not distracted, preoccupied. Energized. As if he was excited about something. And once we were done, he was off, you know, all business.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Cream chinos, white shirt, navy sports jacket. It’s his uniform.”

  Dagg’s phone rang. He found it and checked the number that flashed up on the face. “Sorry, I have to take this,” he said, and then barked into the phone, “I said sit outside his
office, not ring his office…that’s ’cause they’re liars, they say the permits are in the post, but they never are…all right, once more with feeling: GO TO COUNTY HALL, SIT OUTSIDE JIM KEARNEY’S OFFICE, DO NOT COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE THE PERMITS.”

  Dagg looked at me, still glaring, then raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes and grinned. We had reached his car, a black ’94 Volvo Estate, parked down a laneway leading to an old terrace of small redbrick cottages.

  “I know,” he said, “I should have a brand-new four-wheel drive with bull bars and all the rest. But they’re hell to park. And they make you look like a gobshite.”

  He loaded his stuff onto the backseat, then looked over the roof of the car at me. “I don’t like spoiled rich kids, Mr. Loy. And maybe it’s not his fault, but that’s what Peter is. He doesn’t understand work, or money, or responsibility. He plays at his life. How he holds on to that wife of his, I’ll never understand.”

  “Sounds like you’d like to hold on to Linda Dawson yourself,” I said, my tone light.

  “I’m married with three kids,” Dagg said, without indicating whether that was a reason for or against an interest in Linda. He didn’t sound like the most content of family men.

  Dagg looked at his watch.

  “I’ve really got to go,” he said.

  “One last thing. The refurbishment at the town hall. Do you know who did the original work?”

  “Whoever they were, they deserve to be in jail. That’s partly why we’re here, there are structural fissures that…the whole place could have caved in by now.”

  “Can you remember the name of the builder?”

  “Not offhand. But I have the plans back in the office, I can find out for you.”

  We exchanged mobile numbers and I walked back down the hill. As I reached the slip lane for the town hall, I was nearly run over by Dave Donnelly’s unmarked blue car. It screeched past me into traffic and swerved around the corner toward Bayview.

  Six

  THE BARMAN IN THE HIGH TIDE SAID HE WASN’T WORKING last Friday, but one of the girls who had been was due on in twenty minutes. I ordered a bottle of beer and drank it at the bar. The High Tide was two stories above the Seafront Plaza, and had been decorated in a bland modern style, with large abstract daubs on the eggshell walls and coffee and cream tones in the soft leather furniture and polished granite fittings. At four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, there were three jowly, balding suits drinking brandy, two overdressed women in their forties with a bottle of white wine and a bunch of fancy carrier bags, and a party of women in their twenties clutching pints of lager and bottles of alcopops and making a lot of noise. After they had sung “Happy Birthday” for the ninth time, replete with obscene variations, the barman had a word with them, and after they had sung it a further five times, they tottered out in a cloud of hilarity, heels clicking and phones beeping, their shouting voices echoing back up the metal stairs as they crashed out onto the street.

  A church bell began to toll, and I walked over to the side windows and looked up toward St. Anthony’s. A hearse was pulling into the churchyard, and a crowd of people parted to let it pass. I wondered whether the concrete corpse in the town hall would ever be taken to a church, ever be given a name and blessed before it was returned to the earth.

  I was about to ask for a Jameson when a short, plumpish girl with blond highlights and too much orange makeup on her pretty face told me her name was Jenny, and that the barman said I wanted to talk to her. I showed her the photograph of Peter Dawson and asked if she remembered seeing him.

  “Not really,” Jenny said. “Friday at six? I mean, the place is black at that hour.”

  She looked again at the photograph, and shook her head. I ordered the Jameson, a double with water. When she brought it, she said, “He wasn’t with your man with the limp, was he?”

  “Maybe. What did your man with the limp look like?” I said.

  “Bit of a mess, to be honest with you. He had a combat jacket on, real scruffy like, not a designer one or anything. Long hair, a little goatee. Bit of a shambles, bit of a dope-head.”

  “And the limp?”

  “Ah it was desperate, poor fella. One of those, you’d think at first he was puttin’ it on, know what I mean?”

  Tommy Owens. The T on the list. I drank half the whiskey neat. It seared the back of my throat and filled my nose with its sweet smoke.

  “And he was with the man in the picture?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t swear to it. But he was a smart-looking, business kind of guy. Big head of curly hair, yeah. I remember thinkin’, they’re an odd couple. Are they cousins, or gay or somethin’?”

  “Well, they’re not cousins anyway. What happened then?”

  “I don’t know, it was black in here like I said, I was runnin’ around like a blue-arsed fly. Next time I noticed, the guy in the photo had gone, and Scruffy was there with this woman, well out of his league I’d’ve thought.”

  “What did the woman look like?”

  “Honey blonde, hair piled high, expensive-lookin’ black clothes. I mean, she was old, must’ve been at least forty, but she looked well on it. Discreet. Tasteful. Most people in here with money, they wear it on their backs, know what I mean like?”

  Linda.

  “And were they here long?”

  “I didn’t see them again. I had a smoke break at seven, when I came back on they were gone. Or she was gone, anyway. I was lookin’ out for her. I was gonna ask her where she got her hair done.”

  I paid for the Jameson with a ten, drank the rest mixed with water and left the change as a tip. Coming out onto the Seafront Plaza, I looked out across the sea toward Bayview Point. There was some kind of commotion down on the promenade, with a crowd gathered, and what looked like flashing lights. I headed that way, and pushed across the grass through the summer throng of joggers, dog walkers and ice-cream eaters. A horde of rubberneckers had gathered behind the bandstand around the second set of white and blue police tape I’d seen that day. There to secure the scene were two uniformed Guards. One looked like he was taking witness statements from about half a dozen people. The other was my blabbermouth friend from the town hall, the Guard with no lips. I marched straight toward him, tapping my mobile phone.

  “Detective Sergeant Donnelly,” I said, nodding meaningfully.

  He threw a glance to his rear, looked at me uneasily, then nodded and lifted the tape to let me through. The tape sealed off the center point of the promenade, where a set of stone steps leads down to the sea. There’s a lower walk beneath the promenade, which gets drenched by the waves at high tide. The tide was turning now, and it was on this lower walk that the burly figure of Dave Donnelly stood, inspecting the body of a man sodden and distended by the sea. I was halfway down the steps when a woman in a charcoal gray suit appeared from the other side of the walk and blocked my passage.

  “Sir, this is a crime scene, you’ve no business here, please leave the area,” she said.

  She was about five five, with short red hair and piercing green eyes; her body was slender but powerful-looking, like a tennis player’s. Dave Donnelly turned around.

  “Move back up the steps, sir, now. Now!”

  I did as I was told. Dave joined us on the upper promenade, an expression of incredulity on his open face.

  “Loy? What do you think you’re doing here?” said Dave.

  The only thing I could think of was the truth.

  “The Guard on duty let me through, so I thought I’d come down and have a look. Body just wash up?”

  The redhead had been staring at me; now she turned to Dave with a grin of derision.

  “You know this clown, Detective?”

  “I used to,” Dave said.

  The redhead’s name was Detective Inspector Fiona Reed. Dave explained briefly who I was. Fiona Reed didn’t look impressed.

  “You realize you risked contaminating a crime scene? If you have the experience D.S. Donnelly says you have, you should kn
ow better,” she said.

  “That body looked like it went in the sea a few days ago,” I said. “Thousands of folk would have walked back and forth along upper and lower promenades since, the weather we’ve had. No forensics to speak of, I’d say, except on the body itself.”

  Behind D.I. Reed’s back, Dave Donnelly was rolling his eyes.

  Reed put her hand on my forearm and squeezed. She had quite a grip.

  “Don’t be a smart aleck, Loy. Especially when you know fine well you’ve just behaved like a prick. And don’t think because you used to be friends with Dave, you can tag along after him.”

  She tightened her grip on my arm, then released it. Dave was trying to suppress a grin. He wasn’t trying very hard.

  “Now get out of here, and let the real detectives do their work.”

  I did my best to look abashed. It wasn’t difficult. My arm felt like someone had closed a door on it.

  “I’ll see him to the tape, D.I. Reed,” Dave said.

  She looked at him, then back at me, shook her head once and walked away. Dave set off toward the lipless Guard. I followed.

  “You’re some fuckin’ eejit, Ed,” Dave said. “You don’t want to make an enemy of Fiona Reed.”

  “I know I don’t,” I said.

  “You just have,” Dave said.

  “Have you an ID on the body, Dave?” I said.

  “It’s not Peter Dawson anyway.”

  “Does that mean you know who it is?”

  We reached the tape. The lipless Guard didn’t like me any more than D.I. Reed did, but at least he kept his hands to himself. The police photographer had arrived, along with the forensic team I had seen earlier at the town hall. Behind them a tall, raven-haired woman in a long black dress was being led along by a female Guard. The woman wore dark glasses, and as she approached the promenade, she stumbled, and laid her hand on the Guard’s shoulder for support.

  “That’s Mrs. Williamson. I better get back,” said Dave, turning to go.

  “Dave? Would it help if I said please?”