The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI)

by Declan Hughes

  Hyland got in the van with Blue Cap and the other man, who no longer had his bags or the water. The white van pulled away. I waited a few minutes, then dropped to the ground and made my way to the ferry-house door. When the security guard appeared, I asked him was this where I could get a boat to Holyhead. He directed me to the new ferry terminal. I thanked him, and walked back the way I came. The insignia on his uniform was the same as on the security gates that enclosed Linda Dawson’s house: George Halligan’s company, Immunicate.

  If you know what you’re doing, it’s not too difficult to work your way through the pine forest on the coast side of Castlehill, climb the hill of scrub and gorse and scale the relatively brief stretch of quarry that leads up to Linda Dawson’s house. It’s not as if you have to climb the whole thing, after all, just the last fifty feet. You’d probably be better off with climbing boots, a hammer and some pegs for the quarry ascent itself, but if you find yourself halfway up without the gear, it may be easier to keep climbing than to come back down. And there are enough footholds and handholds in the cliff face to do it too, although you might want to know where they are in advance, rather than casting around for them when you’re two hundred feet off the ground. Still, once you make it up, there’s a barbed wire fence that isn’t much of a trial, provided you haven’t cut or callused your hands too badly on the climb. There’s just another couple of hundred hardscrabble feet to go, and then if you can force your way through a hedge that’s mostly hawthorn and holly, though there is a bit of laurel if you can find it, you’re in Linda Dawson’s back garden and you haven’t breached the security system and Immunicate don’t know you’re there.

  Of course, being in the back garden isn’t much use when it’s Peter Dawson’s study you need, and even if you can pick a lock or smash a window to get in, chances are you’ll set the house alarm off, so you won’t have too much time. But maybe you won’t need too much: your police source has confirmed that Peter Dawson’s computer was left unexamined, so it’s the work of minutes to gather up the G4’s white globe-shaped CPU, find a spare set of car keys hanging on the hook in the kitchen and a security gate keypad in the hall cupboard and be out of sight by the time the Immunicate van arrives, even managing to avoid being spotted by Linda’s pudgy, sunburned neighbor as you go.

  Then you just want to keep out of sight until the van leaves, open the gates and drive Linda’s red Audi convertible quickly up the hill. The van is out of sight by now, of course, but you play your hunch—you’re always playing hunches, that’s the business you’re in, and you’ll stay in business provided they pay off every now and then—and this time, it pays off, because you get to the top of Castlehill just in time to see the Immunicate van disappear behind the great black metal gates to John and Barbara Dawson’s house.

  Fifteen

  THE WORST OF A CATHOLIC FUNERAL ISN’T THE DAY itself, it’s the night before, the removal of the remains; grief that has been a private wound goes on display for the first time; the wound is still raw, and there’s no telling what the air will do to it. When I stood by my mother’s coffin in this church a few days ago, that line in the Nicene Creed about “the living and the dead” kept repeating in my brain, like it was the only distinction that mattered anymore, and the air and light rushed round my head like I was adrift on a storm-tossed sea.

  Now Linda Dawson stood by her husband’s coffin, adrift in her own storm; her color was high, and when I filed past the front pew, she looked like she’d been sedated; as I mumbled my condolences, she stared at me without a flicker of recognition. Barbara Dawson thanked me for coming; her eyes seemed engorged, her teeth had aubergine lipstick stains on them; she looked more than half mad. John Dawson, in navy suit and crisp white shirt, gripped my forearm with a liver-spotted hand; his rose-mottled cheeks were moist; his mouth fell open in apparent delight.

  “Edward Loy,” he said, as if I were the very man he needed to see. “Edward Loy,” he said again, and repeated my name until his wife took his hand back and gently nudged my elbow to move me on. I looked back to see Linda looking in my direction; the blankness in her eyes hadn’t altered, but I felt at least she knew I was there.

  The center aisle was choked with people queuing to pay their respects: locals, many of whom had been at my mother’s funeral, but also a bunch of very well-dressed high-end types I assumed were the golden circle of developers and builders, and maybe more than a handful of rubberneckers come to catch a glimpse of the famously reclusive John Dawson. He had looked older than his years, I thought, old in a way that has little to do with years: his clothes hung from his bones, his brow was heavily ridged, his small eyes looked exhausted, their light nearly expired. Maybe he was ill, or maybe life hadn’t delivered what it had promised; either way, no one who knew John Dawson all those years ago would have expected him to end up looking like this.

  I waited outside the church until the family appeared, but it was pointless; Barbara Dawson wasted no time in bundling Linda into the back of a black limousine. John Dawson, head now covered by a black fedora, looked around him blankly; before anyone thought to approach him, Barbara was by his side, guiding him into the safety of the car. She followed him, and the doors sealed them in; the tinted windows added to the appearance of perfect darkness; the car waited until the hearse moved off, then it followed silently, a black shadow in the glare.

  I met Dave Donnelly in the churchyard and suggested a pint in Hennessy’s.

  “That’d look good, wouldn’t it? And a joint round the back after,” he said, and made a noise that sounded like laughter, but not very much.

  “We need to talk, Dave. Now.”

  “I’ll see you in the Gut in ten minutes, all right?” Dave said, and strode off.

  The Gut had been our childhood’s secret place: three great oaks marked its corners, forming a great triangular riot of bramble and thistle, of hawthorn, fern and marauding fungus, bounded by the railway tracks on one side and the garden walls of newly built housing estates on the other two. You had to cram in through a hole in a hedge to get there, or brave the shards of glass embedded in the wall that ran by the railway, but once you were in, anything could happen. First cigarettes, first beers, first joints, first kisses, too many fights to count; Tommy Owens and I lost our virginity here when we were fourteen to two hard-faced Seafield girls who warned us afterward that if we told anyone, their brothers’d come up and cut our balls off, which, combined with the joylessness of the event itself, made us feel like we’d lost our virginity but not really; I later found out that that’s how it goes for pretty much everyone, even if you don’t do it against the stump of a tree. Charlie Halpin’s brother hanged himself from the oldest of the three oaks when he was seventeen, and Marko Henderson’s brother Barreller did something involving masks and small children, the details of which I was never sure about, but which ended up with him doing five years in jail; when Tommy came to L.A., he’d just been to Barreller’s funeral; Barreller soaked himself in petrol and lit a match. Where? In the Gut, of course. Tommy told me it was called the Gut because it was a perfect midpoint between Castlehill and the sea. And because all the poisons in the area ran through here, waiting to be converted or destroyed, although I think that was Tommy’s own private interpretation.

  I expected there to be nothing remaining of the Gut; maybe a bramble struggling for purchase in the flower bed of some semidetached lawn, but there it was, in all its shabby, untrammeled glory. A wall of ash and elder had been planted around the perimeter, and had grown to hide most of the houses from view.

  “Ah, you wouldn’t be romantic about it if you lived here,” said Dave Donnelly, kicking the charred remains of a fire out of his way. Dave had never hung around the Gut back then. He was always captaining the hurling team, or training with the rowing club, or taking the scouts on hikes. He plucked a bramble off his trouser leg, and brushed poppy seeds from his sleeve.

  “Every couple of weeks there’s a cider party or a knife fight or a fire out of control
or some fucking shenanigans up here,” he said.

  “I can’t believe they haven’t built on it,” I said. “I mean, it’s hardly an area of outstanding natural beauty, is it?”

  “There’s a dispute between two old boys over who owns it. They’ve been locked in battle for twenty-odd years. And as long as it goes on, neither will lift a finger to do anything about it, and no one else can either.”

  Dave stood in the shade of the younger oak, batting a caustic mist of pollen, hornets, and midges away with a huge red hand.

  I sat on a tree stump—maybe the same stump, I couldn’t remember—leaned the black watch tartan duffel bag I’d carried from the car on the ground beside it and lit a cigarette. I didn’t always smoke, and some biological quirk meant I could go for long periods without, but I always seemed to need one after being in a church. Dave shook his head when I offered him one.

  “Jaysus, state of your hands, Ed. That’s not from the rosebush yesterday, is it?”

  There were sores and lacerations on each finger to the knuckle, and abraded skin on the palms of my hands and on my wrists; I looked like I had eczema.

  “Climbing up Castlehill Quarry. And a barbed wire fence.”

  “Right. Some kind of sponsored thing, was it?”

  “That’s right, in aid of the Garda Benevolent Fund.”

  Dave grinned, but the grin faded like steam on a mirror. He made to speak, then stopped himself; he seemed to be having difficulties getting started. Plunge right in there, Loy.

  “So any sign of the gun, Dave?”

  “The story is, it must still be in there. There’s no way anyone could have gotten it out of the Technical Bureau, security is too tight. No sign of a break-in. So it’s all some kind of administrative cock-up.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “I think it’s very convenient. It suits people who want Peter Dawson’s death to just go away.”

  “Barbara Dawson told me she believes Peter killed himself. She claims Superintendent Casey agrees with her. What’s all that about?”

  Dave shook his head.

  “Casey’s doing what he’s always done when he’s got a case he wants to bury: he’ll let it slide until the trail’s gone cold, then he’ll dump it on the coroner and get an open verdict, death by misadventure, or some such.”

  “But does he think Peter committed suicide? I mean, who moved the body onto the boat?”

  “He has enough from the postmortem to say it could be suicide. And now, no pesky gun to get in the way. But sure, even if Peter killed himself, where did he do it, and who cleaned up afterward? That’s what we should be asking. But Casey doesn’t want to go there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who do you think moved the body onto the boat?”

  “Tommy Owens said the gun came from Podge Halligan. I’d say the Halligans have got to look favorite.”

  “And that’s just what Casey wants to avoid—making any link between John Dawson and the Halligans. There’s to be no gangland connection in this case: that’s official.”

  “Despite the fact Immunicate runs security for Dawson Construction?”

  “Immunicate runs security for lots of people, Ed.”

  “So he’s just going to block a potential murder investigation?”

  “Oh, we’re still to chase down Tommy Owens. But we’ll end up ruling him out: no motive, no eyewitness, and the print on the weapon is a partial. If we had a weapon, that is.”

  “So what, Dave, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son may have been murdered by gangsters. And the Garda superintendent in charge of the investigation doesn’t want an investigation. Talk to me here.”

  “The important thing—the only thing that matters—is keeping the Dawsons happy.”

  Dave rolled the great muscles in his neck and shoulders, then turned away and looked up toward Castlehill. The sun was setting now; flanked by two cranes, the wooden cross at the top of the hill seemed to glow. I’d forgotten the cross was there; it was the first time I’d seen it since I’d got back; it had been erected to celebrate some huge Catholic jamboree back in the fifties, when there wasn’t much to do, and certainly little to celebrate. There was no chill in the shade now; the rain had made it more humid, not less. Dave mopped his brow with the back of his hand.

  “And the Dawsons are happy with a suicide verdict. Can you imagine that? They’re happier to think he killed himself than that someone murdered him. And we’re happy to go along with it.”

  “Is Casey connected to Dawson?”

  “What, in some golden circle kind of way? I don’t know. But John Dawson made a lot of friends over the years—not just the Jack Parlands who’ve been found out, but a lot more who haven’t. And these fuckers like to please each other without having to be asked, you know what I mean? At the low end, it’s a wad of cash. With the big boys, it’s a lot more subtle. Being known as sound, as reliable. They never even have to meet, it’s all understood—one good turn knocks onto another, the right words in the right ears, and suddenly there’s an assistant Garda commissionership up for grabs.”

  “You could leak it to the press.”

  “What kind of a fuckin’ thick do you take me for, Ed? There may be many things Casey is useless at: police work and man-management for a start. But getting good write-ups in the papers is his speciality, and he keeps enough journalists sweet to root out anyone who pulled a stunt like that. And there’s me back directing traffic and signing dog licenses.”

  I waved my cigarette before my face to ward away the midges. Sweat was matting my hair and gathering at my throat, stinging the cuts Dessie Delaney had left there.

  “Do you know a guy name of Colm Hyland, Dave? Boatman down the Royal Seafield? Because I think he’s the link. I think he helped the Halligans get the body onto the boat.”

  I told Dave about seeing Hyland in Hennessy’s with George Halligan and about his rendezvous with Blue Cap down at the old ferry-house.

  “Who were the supplies for?”

  “The Immunicate guy minding the place, I guess. What’s he minding it for, is the question. Was Peter Dawson killed there? It’s not far from where his boat was moored. And here’s the other thing, I saw an Immunicate van running directly into John and Barbara Dawson’s house.”

  I filled Dave in on my trip to Linda’s house, and gave him the duffel bag with Peter’s computer hard drive in it.

  “What did you do with Linda’s car?” Dave said. For a moment I thought he was going to haul me in for stealing it.

  “It’s by the coast side of the pine forest, where I parked the Volvo. Can you have Peter Dawson’s hard drive analyzed, Dave?”

  “One of the computer lads will rush it through for me. I got him off a speeding thing there, he owes me a favor. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “There’s a document called ‘twimc’—to whom it may concern, I think it is. It was modified, but after Peter’s death. But whoever did it didn’t put the document in the trash. I’m no technohead, but if the content of it could be retrieved, it might be something.”

  “I’ll get Shane onto it tonight. Should have something on the bank and phone records in the morning. Would have had it today, there’s just too many listening ears around the station, Casey’s spies. What’s the story on MacLiam?”

  “He was in deep to Podge Halligan: gambling and drugs. The heroin wasn’t coming directly from Podge though. The autopsy said what?”

  “The heroin killed him, most likely.”

  “And what, he was shooting up on the harbor wall, so when he OD’d, he just tumbled into the sea? That’s convenient. What about the money?”

  “Unmarked bills. No witnesses, no signs of struggle—certainly not after five days in the water. Toxicology reports can take months. Same story: they’ll cruise it out to an inquest. Then death by misadventure. Or an open verdict.”

  Dave took the duffel bag, looked me up and down and shook his head. He made to move off, then turned ba
ck, his broad face grim with unease.

  “Thing I was going to tell you, remember the concrete corpse we found in the town hall? He was shot five times. So we’ve just got a report back from the lab. According to the ballistics report, they’re Parabellum nine-millimeter rounds from a Glock 17—an identical match for the slugs they found in Peter Dawson, and shot from the same gun—just twenty-odd years in the difference.”

  It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas.

  “I know…look, we didn’t say anything the other day, but I know there’s a chance that could be your oul’ fella. And the fact that, well, he used to be in business with Dawson, and now the same slugs that kill Dawson’s son are found in this corpse, well, I’m not saying it makes any sense yet, but—if it is your da—it’s got to be more than a coincidence.”

  Especially if you don’t believe in coincidence.

  “We got no match from dental records. Never had any for your da. The missing persons database from twenty years ago is in rag order anyway. We have a jacket though, with a label from a tailor in Capel Street. We may be able to trace who it was made for, get an ID that way. Ed? You don’t remember if your da used a tailor, do you? Fitzhugh’s, it was called.”

  I seemed to have been robbed of the power of speech. The wooden cross above Castlehill looked starker now against the paling sky, suddenly flimsy next to the cranes that dwarfed it. The sweat had turned cold on my back, and I was close to shivering. I looked at Dave and shook my head. He brought one of his huge hands up and gave my bicep a squeeze.

  “Look after yourself, Ed,” he said. “I’ll pay Colm Hyland a visit, see what I can raise. I’ll be in touch.”

  Dave Donnelly strode off across the Gut and pushed out through a gap between two hawthorns, swearing. From my jacket pocket I took the photograph of my father and John Dawson that I’d found on Peter’s boat and looked at the two young men, their pints raised to the future.