The Color of Blood Read online

  I WENT THROUGH A DOOR THAT LED DOWN TO THE FRONT of the new house and stood outside and smoked a cigarette. There was a sloping garden and a gravel drive that seemed to lead down to the road, and I wondered why Sandra Howard had not approached the house this way. But since I was already wondering whether anything she had told me was the truth, it didn’t seem the most pressing detail. I wondered also whether I should feel pleased with myself that I had caught her in a lie, thereby breaking the spell she had cast over me, or dismayed by my easy susceptibility to a beautiful woman who paid me some attention. Maybe it was Jessica Howard who had got under my skin; maybe it was her daughter’s lurid adventures in pornography. Male lust is a tenacious and comical affliction, immune as it can sometimes be to feelings of compassion or understanding; at times it reduces us all to the lunatic in that Italian movie, sitting in a tree hollering “I want a woman.”

  I checked my phone and found that Dave Donnelly had called again. I walked down the drive a pace, intending to ring him, when I spotted a circular pool halfway down the garden. Security lights lit the grass as I approached it, and I realized it was a match for the pool in the back garden of Emily’s dollhouse. It was bigger than the one in Shane Howard’s back garden, and less ornate: a low, roughly packed granite wall, maybe three feet of water, a rough sandy bed. No marble, no crystal gems, no sense of it being a memorial or a deliberate feature. I looked back up the hill: the turrets and castellations of Rowan House loomed up behind the new extension, ghostly in the mist, like a phantom castle from a gothic romance.

  When I walked back up to the house, Denis Finnegan and Shane Howard were in the living room with Sandra. Shane was attempting to fix himself a drink he evidently didn’t need; when he saw me he came across and wrapped his arms around me, pinning my hands to my sides, and lifted me off the floor in an embrace. He smelled of whiskey and of rain.

  “You found her! You boy ya! You found my princess!” he roared. His voice was hoarse, ragged with emotion; he looked like he’d been crying. He set me down and batted me on the shoulders with his forearms; I raised my hands to prevent him picking me up again.

  “Have you seen her?” I said.

  “I looked in,” he said. “She’s woozy. Sandra had a doctor in to give her something. Best to sleep it all off.”

  Shane nodded then, as if his daughter’s difficulties could be dispensed with like a hangover, and went back to his drink. Denis Finnegan raised his eyebrows and beamed conspiratorially at me; Sandra looked anxiously around at us all.

  “Where did you get to today, Shane?” I said. “We were all trying to get hold of you.”

  Shane thrust his chin out and shrugged, like a bored and dismissive primate.

  “Just needed to get some air, you know? After talking to you, got rattled. Couldn’t sit still. Drove around a bit, parked up near the old pine forest on Castlehill. Turned the old phone off, so I wouldn’t be waiting. The waiting is the worst. Tramped around there for a while. Stopped off for a few drinks, little place in the mountains. Then turned the phone back on and got the good word.”

  Shane delivered all this in a burly rugby-club drawl that brooked no further interrogation. Maybe that was all he had done. And maybe I was bought and paid for. But I wasn’t going to be treated like the help.

  “This case is not closed yet, and for as long as it runs, I’ll need access to you at any moment; I don’t want you to vanish like that again, do you hear me?” I said. “That’s if you care a damn about your daughter’s safety.”

  Shane was ready to blow at that, but I didn’t give him an opening. Instead, I gave him what I had given Sandra: the sexual relationship between Emily and Jonathan, the two porn films and David Brady’s involvement with them, the threat of blackmail over underage sex leading to Emily’s part in the extortion attempt on Shane Howard, the uncertainty over just who was behind it all, the murder of David Brady. I left out the detail of my having been in David Brady’s apartment, and I left out Tommy Owens and Brock Taylor; I gave them everything else.

  Shane Howard had been on his feet when I recounted the history of his daughter’s sexual relationship with her cousin, his hands balling into fists, his eyes blurring with rage; but the news of David Brady’s murder hit him the hardest. Sandra went to him and wrapped her arms around his great shoulders and pulled his head to her breast and they subsided to the floor, Sandra whispering to her little brother and stroking his sand-colored hair. It was touching and pathetic, a grotesque pietà that was moving and disturbing. It was a pity there wasn’t a fourth tower, the Howard Psychiatric Hospital; then the entire family could walk down the hill and check themselves in. I realized then that I wanted, as much as anything else, to understand this family in their houses on the tops of hills, to uncover their secrets, to see the Howards plain. Once I had admitted that to myself, I knew that there was no way on earth I was stepping off this train until the end.

  Denis Finnegan stood by the fire in a black chalk-stripe suit and a canary yellow and royal blue striped tie with a face that seemed to have attained a deeper shade of red as the day wore on. With a scotch in his hand, he looked like a clubman from a bygone age.

  “Sandra has advised me of her intention to retain you on the family’s behalf,” he said.

  “The problem is blackmail, and it hasn’t gone away just because we’ve got Emily back,” I said. “In a way, her absence was never the problem, seeing as it was voluntary. Chances are, whoever’s behind this has copies of the films and photographs that can be rolled out again. Not to mention testimony and photographic evidence of underage sex. Chances are also, this individual won’t be content with fifty grand the next time.”

  “Do you have an individual in mind?” Denis Finnegan said.

  “It’s too early to say.”

  Finnegan checked his watch and turned the TV on; it was nine o’clock, and the main evening news on RTE was just starting. David Brady was the first item in the bulletin, with an exterior shot of the body being wheeled on a gurney through the entrance to the Waterfront apartments. There was some archive footage of one of his schools cups performances; Shane Howard detached himself from his sister after this and took himself off to a corner by the window, where he sat on the floor and looked alternately out at the night and down at the floor, his great head tipping between his bent knees.

  “I’ll need to talk to Emily again tonight,” I said to Sandra.

  “She may already be asleep,” Sandra said. “Dr. Hoyle gave her something.”

  “Then I’d better see her now,” I said.

  I followed her down the white corridor to Emily’s room. She knocked on the door, then opened it cautiously. The bedside light was still on.

  “Emily? Emily, it’s Sandra. Ed Loy needs to talk to you again.”

  Emily moaned and grunted a little, then said, “Okay.”

  Sandra went in and I followed. She sat down in a chair in the corner of the room, and I stayed where I was and shook my head. She looked at me quizzically, and I shrugged. She got up and said, “Emily, I’m going to leave Ed here. I’ll be outside.”

  Emily didn’t say anything until Sandra left. Then she said, “I suppose she looks sexy, but she’s a nun, deep down. Deep deep down, she’s a nun.” Her voice was a Valium blur. “Do you like sexy nuns, Ted?”

  “Ed,” I said. “I’m not sure if I would. I don’t think I’ve ever met one, but then again, I’ve never been in the habit of checking nuns out for their sex appeal.”

  Emily considered this for longer than it deserved. Free of makeup, her eyes were red and swollen; blue veins lined her pale face.

  “Well, maybe you should,” she said. “Her and Denis don’t live together anymore. Maybe she wants a man who doesn’t have a head like a boiled ham. A man like you, Ted.”

  “I’m not in the market for marriage.”

  “Neither is anyone in this family, haven’t you noticed?”

  “I need to ask you a little more about the threesome you had with David Brad
y after the rugby-club party, about the underage girl. Did you get her name?”

  “No names, that’s the way to do it. Except, if they turn out to be thirteen, it obviously isn’t the way to do it.”

  “You must have called her something.”

  “Called her c’mere. Called her c’mon. Called her see ya.”

  “What was she like? Older than her age, obviously, was she clever, educated, what class was she?”

  “She was smart. A smarty-pants. She made us laugh. And her accent was middle middle, could have been anything, working class reaching, upper middle relaxing, hard to know. Snow blond porn hair though, makeup a bit on the skang side, but not a pram face.”

  “What about her father? How did that happen? Did he approach David Brady directly, or did the girl do it?”

  Emily pulled the covers over her face.

  “Why don’t you ask him, Ted?”

  “Ask who?”

  “David, of course. Ask him what happened.”

  I didn’t know if it was the Valium, or if she was affecting some kind of mental confusion, or if she was genuinely disturbed, but I felt I couldn’t take the time to find out; the Howards seemed to be falling apart, and I was going to have to work hard and fast to stop the entire family from going under. I pulled the duvet cover away from Emily’s face.

  “David Brady’s dead. You know that. Stop messing around and tell me what else you know.”

  Emily flinched, as if the narcotics of shock and tranquilizer were wearing off and grief was finally seeping through.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that David knew either. Jerry Dalton must have known. He told David…he was the go-between, I suppose you’d say. He told David what the threat was, what he had to do.”

  “Jerry Dalton…is that your new boyfriend?”

  “My new boyfriend? Jerry Dalton’s not my…who told you Jerry was my boyfriend?”

  “Your mother.”

  “What the fuck would that fucking whore know? What does she care who I’m going out with, except to shove her tits in his face and try and fuck him like she does with every man she meets?”

  Emily’s eyes were spilling tears; her face was twisted with bitterness and grief, red raw and swollen ugly. She looked better than she had all day.

  “But you know Jerry Dalton.”

  “He’s a barman in SRC. Seafield Rugby Club? And he’s in my class at college. And he has this metal band. Everyone knows Jerry. He’s a really nice guy. A friend. At least, I thought so, but if he’s hooked up with whoever is doing all this-is it the same guy who killed DB?”

  “Could be.”

  Jessica Howard had called Brady an absolute ride, and said she certainly would have.

  “Emily, might there have been anything going on between your mother and David Brady?”

  She shook her head but didn’t look very convinced.

  “Is that why you broke up with him, Emily? Because he was having an affair with your mother?”

  “No, Jesus…whatever was going on…and I’m not saying anything was, but whatever…the whole thing with DB just got to be too much…too much E, too much porn…just too fucking…greedy…it wasn’t about love at all anymore, if it ever had been; it was just about us gorging ourselves…too fucking gross.”

  She put her head in her hands and a convulsion of weeping surged through her, like a great wave. When it had crashed, she tipped her head back and shook it, as if she could dispel grief the way a dog shakes off salt water. I plowed on, trying to get as much as possible from her before she went under for the night.

  “Sandra told me she fixed up some therapy for you. Do you still go?”

  Emily looked at me cagily, then smiled.

  “I do go. I go to Dr. Dave. Who says, I’m not a doctor, and don’t call me Dave.”

  “What does he call himself? And where does he live?”

  “David Manuel. He works from his house in Rathgar. But there’s no point. He won’t talk to you.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk to him. Isn’t that the idea?”

  I smiled at Emily, but she didn’t smile back. She had laced her fingers and was working her rings together, grinding the stones in an insistent rhythm. They were the same stones I had seen on a bracelet in her room, the same green-hued, red-flecked stones that were inlaid in the pool in Shane Howard’s back garden.

  “Nice rings,” I said. “What jewel is it?”

  “Bloodstone,” she said.

  “Bloodstone? What’s that?”

  “Heliotrope is its other name. Bloodstone sounds better. It’s a mythological stone, Ted. It possesses magical properties. Man.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly twinkling, as if aware of the hippy-dippy nature of what she was saying, but willing herself-and me-to roll with it. Suddenly, I saw all her intelligence and wit being used in aid of herself for once. At last, I found myself liking her enormously. I smiled back, and she scrunched up her face as if she was embarrassed, and unused to people liking her for herself, or at all.

  “Aunt Sandra gave me them, years ago. They say…‘they say’…they never say who they are, but…they say if you soak the bloodstone in a certain kind of water, for a certain amount of time…it can turn the clouds the color of blood. The other thing is better though…they say…if you clasp it in the right way, it can make you completely invisible.”

  And with that, Emily slid back down in the bed and pulled the cover right over her face, but not quite so fast that I didn’t see a quiver in her lips, a glisten in her eyes, the bloodless pall of fear in her cheeks. I stood there a moment, and she poked one hand above the covers, just far enough to show the rings, and gave me a little kid’s closed-hand wave.

  Sleep well, I thought. Whatever the hell it is, it seems to be coming down hardest on you.

  I shut the light out before I left.

  In the living room, Sandra and Shane Howard and Denis Finnegan were sitting around the big table, talking in murmurs; they went quiet and looked up at me as I approached. Sandra made an expectant face, as if waiting for a report. I nodded to her in reassurance. Then I took the mass card out of my pocket and laid it open on the table, and said “Who was Stephen Casey?” There was a satisfying reaction: Shane’s jaw fell open, and Denis flashed an urgent look at Sandra, who was staring at the table. Each of them knew. None of them would answer. I leant my hands on the table. I didn’t have to fake it.

  “You people are living in a dream if you think I can do anything for you,” I said. “I found Emily without your help; keeping her safe-and your precious family’s reputation intact-isn’t going to be as easy. A case like this, it tends to shine its light into corners you thought would never be exposed. But if you’re hell-bent on keeping all your secrets, fine, just be prepared to take your chances with blackmail, maybe even jail time for Emily. Let me know what you decide-I can’t hang around-and neither will our good friends the Guards.”

  Eight

  I WAS HALFWAY ACROSS THE WHITE ROTUNDA OF ROWAN House when Sandra Howard caught up with me. She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me around, and I shook her hand away. She looked at me as if I had slapped her.

  “What gives you the right to talk to us like that? Who the fuck do you think you are?” she said. She stepped in and raised her hand to slap me. I caught her wrist and held it.

  “I thought I could trust you,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to.”

  I let her wrist go. She held her hand in space for a moment, then reached for the back of my head, and her eyes widened and her lips parted as she pulled herself close to me and pushed her face at mine, and her smell was all salt earth and spice, and I could feel the blood in my chest, in my throat, and we were kissing, her hands in my hair, pressing my mouth to hers, her tongue on mine. She put my hand on her breast, and ran hers between my legs; we were pulling at each other’s clothes, biting each other’s lips. “Come on,” she said, and maybe she had a room in mind, but we didn’t get further than the stairs; she t
urned on the wide steps and pushed me down and lowered herself on me with a moan, and we fucked beneath a portrait of Dr. John Howard, and our cries echoed around the hall like memories, and when we finished, her eyes were wet on my brow.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She shook her head and put a finger to my lips and smiled.

  “I’m sorry, Ed. I’m sorry Shane has drawn you into all this. Drawn you in here.”

  She wouldn’t say any more. We fixed ourselves up and stood in the hall, not looking one another in the eye. I had a metallic taste in my mouth; I drew my knuckle across my lips and it came away smeared with blood; Sandra laughed and did the same. It was the kind of sex you spend your life dreaming about and doing your best to avoid, the kind that, even if you almost always regret it, makes you feel like you’re truly alive. There was a sound from across the hall, as if someone was approaching; when no one came, I thought it more likely that someone had been watching, then slipped away.

  Sandra came out with me to my car. The mist seemed to have cleared a little, at least enough to make out bonfires south toward the mountains; the damp night air was thick with smoke. Sandra leant against the roof.

  “You don’t have to know everything, Ed,” she said. “What happened twenty years ago may not be relevant today.”

  “You thought it was in the case of Jessica. You think it is for Jonathan and Dr. Rock.”

  “And what, we should share everything with you and let you decide what’s important?”

  “That’s right,” I said, smiling because she was, smiles as steady and false as masks.

  “And what does that make you? More father confessor than detective.”

  “Call it what you will,” I said. “I’ll find it out anyway. What happened here didn’t start last week, and it’s not going to stop overnight. All you can do is slow it down. Once it’s begun, you can’t stop it. Unless you want to sacrifice Emily and Jonathan. Because they’re the ones who are suffering for your silence.”

  This time I let the slap come. Sandra Howard hit me full across the face, and stared at me, trembling, blinking back tears, and then turned and walked back up the steps and inside the pale granite castle and closed the great doors of Rowan House behind her.