The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI)

by Declan Hughes

  Podge seemed to deflate all of a sudden. His head drooped, his chin rested on his chest. He kept talking, mumbling to himself. Then, just as abruptly, he perked up again.

  “Just ’cause George wants to carry on like some kind of business cunt doesn’t mean I do. Me own plans. Not some fuckin’…like I’m his fuckin’ waiter. ‘George said…George wants’…what about me, eh? What about my plans?”

  Podge Halligan’s upper body was shaking, rippling with tension. He pivoted and made a surging run up to the far end of the shed, like a fireman plunging into a burning building. I braced my left leg on the floor, ready once more to make a dive for the spade. Podge returned with four cans of lager and passed them around. Nose Ring and Blue Cap cheered and high-fived each other and opened their cans and drank. Dessie Delaney sat on the stone floor hunched up in a ball, leaning against one of the broad wooden legs of the workbench, dabbing at his nose; he pushed the can he was given to one side.

  “Waiting for something to drink to, Dessimond? Proper order. Let’s do this fucker once and for all, eh?”

  Podge Halligan was too quick for me. He flung his beer can at my head; by the time I had slapped it out of the way and wiped the beer from my face, he had scooped up the spade and pressed it into Blue Cap’s hands. Then he stepped onto the back of the sofa and unhooked the scythe from the wall. I sprang up and looked around for a weapon, but Blue Cap blocked my path with the spade; now Podge began to close me into the corner, slicing the air with the scythe. His eyes were clear and wide and full of light; his grinning lips were swollen with the prospect of blood.

  “Harvesttime. Don’t fear the reaper, isn’t that right, Dessie? Never used a scythe before. Still. Think it might be one of those things you pick up along the way.”

  There was a sound from further down the shed.

  “Podge,” said Dessie Delaney.

  “Fuck away off now or you’re next, Dessie,” Podge said. Drool ran down his chin. He swung the blade of the scythe again; it sounded like death in my ears.

  “Podge, it’s your one,” said Delaney. “It’s the Dawson girl.”

  I saw the flash of Linda’s golden hair between Podge’s head and Blue Cap’s baseball hat. What was she doing here? Where were we, anyway? This shed was fifty years old, at least; the Halligans’ houses had been built ten years ago.

  “Ed, is that you?” she said.

  Linda’s voice sounded sluggish, affectless: sedated.

  Podge slipped the scythe beneath his left arm and turned back toward Linda.

  “Have you made a wrong turn, love?” he said. “Lads, see that Mrs. Dawson here gets back up to the house.”

  Nose Ring made a move toward Linda; Dessie Delaney stood up but didn’t budge; he stared from Podge to me and back.

  It was all the time I needed. I gripped the workbench with my right hand for ballast, braced back and hit Podge right side on, mid-chest, with both feet. He tumbled onto the sofa, the scythe still tucked beneath his left armpit, and screamed. Blue Cap stared at Podge openmouthed; the blade had cut into his chest, and the point into his shoulder. There was a lot of blood. Podge got onto his knees and tried to work the scythe loose; each way he moved it was worse than the last; he was screaming in pain. Blue Cap was still absorbed in Podge’s agony; I kicked him in the balls and took the spade off him, then kicked him twice in the head when he was down. Linda was standing in the middle of the room, her eyes cloudy with medication; it was hard to tell how much she was taking in. Nose Ring made a move toward Linda, then a move toward me, then he grabbed the sledgehammer that lay beside the motor mower. He didn’t have the upper-body strength to wield it properly, so he came at me holding it high on the shaft. He would need to get in close to use it; with the spade handle at full extension, I jabbed him in the face until he fell, then hit him on the head with the flat of the blade. Podge was still screaming; in between screams, he swore he’d have me executed, but the scythe had him hooked; he wasn’t going anywhere without medical help.

  With his mobile in his hand, Dessie Delaney nodded at me and looked toward the door.

  “Go on,” he mouthed silently.

  “All right, Podge, we’ll get someone for you now,” he said out loud.

  I threatened Delaney with the spade, to make it look right, crooked an arm around Linda’s waist and backed us both toward the door.

  “I want that fucker’s head,” Podge screamed.

  I grabbed Linda’s hand and we plunged through the door toward the fading light.

  Eighteen

  WE CAME SKIDDING OUT ONTO FINE, CORAL-COLORED gravel, and I ran the outside bolt on the shed door. A dense copse of beech trees faced us, and beyond, a baize green lawn sloped out of view.

  Linda reached a hand up and gently stroked my left cheek, then drew the knuckle of her forefinger across my mouth.

  “You okay to run?” she said, and smiled.

  I nodded, and tried to ask her something, anything, but she stopped my lips with her fingers, and shook her head.

  “Talk later. Follow me, Edward Loy,” she said.

  There was a wild glow in her eyes, as if it was all a great game. She set off at a run across the lawn, and I tried to keep up with her. We were in the grounds of a very large house, high above the sea. The lawn was set in tiers, leading down to a great granite wall encrusted with ivy and topped with jagged shards of glass. Linda leapt the tiers without breaking stride, reached the wall and hooked right along a gravel path; she was wearing a white summer dress with red roses and black leaves printed on it and flat black shoes; her lean brown legs moved with an athlete’s efficient grace. Each time my left leg hit the ground a jarring pain shot through my side and exploded behind my left eye. I halted by the wall to stanch a fresh jet of blood from my nose. Looking back, I could hear commotion from the house; lights were flashing, and I could see men running down toward the shed and fanning out across the lawn. Linda reached a hedge of tightly packed red and green laurel and hawthorn trees that must have been twelve feet high; she turned, beckoned to me and then disappeared into it. I made it to the trees, but the gap Linda had passed through seemed too narrow; I pressed sideways between the tangled branches of two laurel trees that were close enough to be one. Halfway in I got stuck, but Linda urged me on; by lowering my head, sucking in my gut and pushing hard with my hip, I managed to force my way through with just an average set of scrapes and tears; on the other side, a hawthorn branch snapped back and smacked me in the eye, but it was the left eye, so no fresh harm done.

  We found ourselves in an unkempt wilderness of thistle and bramble, with dark pools of stagnant water bordered by dock leaves and clumps of nettles. Voices and shouts came from behind us; they sounded as if they were on the other side of the trees. The granite wall still ran to our left, and, having checked that I was still in one piece, Linda took off at speed once more; she ran bare-legged through thistles and nettles, taking care to avoid the marshy ground, until she reached a point where the wall had collapsed and formed a rudimentary stile. We climbed over the shattered granite and broken glass and sank down onto a soft incline of dead ferns and pine needles. A few feet farther down and it was dark under cover of a pine forest; farther down again and I could see fluttering ribbons of grayish blue in the distance, and I knew where I was and where we had been: this was Castlehill, and the pine forest that led down to the sea at Bayview, and the house in whose grounds I had been imprisoned belonged to John Dawson.

  We worked our way down the forest for about a hundred feet or so, then clambered onto a steeper ridge of gorse and scrub and dropped the last few feet to a cliffside path. Another ridge of gorse and ferns led down to the road, then another to the railway, and below that a sheer drop to the water. Night had fallen, and the moon loomed above the glistening slate gray sea. Linda turned around and looked at me for the first time since we’d gotten away.

  “Oh, Ed,” she said. “You came for me.”

  She pulled me close, and pressed her face to mine; I cou
ld feel her tears damp on my neck. When she looked up at me, her face was smeared red; I made to rub it off, but she shook her head, and kissed me; her tongue darted into my mouth and caressed my broken teeth, my torn gums; it hurt, but it was worth it. She looked up at me again and smiled; her lips were black with blood, like the rose leaves on her dress.

  “Where can we go?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure what’s happened yet.”

  There was a sound above us, a crackle of gorse, a rustle in the ferns. A rat or a rabbit, maybe. Maybe not. Linda’s eyes flickered with excitement and fear.

  “Ed, we have to keep moving. Where can we go?”

  “We’re not far from your house.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. Come on,” I said.

  We ran along the cliff path about a quarter of a mile, until it turned inland and we reached the base of the quarry. Linda blocked my path.

  “What do we do now, scale the quarry face with our bare hands?”

  “It can be done,” I said.

  “Don’t you think they’ll be watching my house?” Linda said.

  “We’re not going to your house. Come on.”

  And I tramped down the mud path that led to the road, hoping Linda’s red Audi would still be there. It was. I started to explain how it got there, but she interrupted me.

  “Have you got the keys?” said Linda.

  I checked my pockets: phone, keys, wallet, change, even the twenty grand in its brown envelope, all there. Maybe Podge preferred to rob people after he had murdered them.

  I gave Linda the keys. She opened the car, turned to me and burst into tears.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  “Oh, Ed, it’s not all right,” Linda said. “It’s never going to be all right again.”

  She looked up toward the quarry.

  “We’ve got to get out of here. They’re probably searching for us now.”

  “What’s Podge Halligan doing in John Dawson’s house, Linda?”

  “I’ll tell you everything once we’re on our way. Can you drive? I’m still whacked out on whatever shit they were feeding me,” she said. “And I’ve been drinking all the time. Can you see properly?”

  “One eye’s fine,” I said. “But I’ve got to get home, get cleaned up.”

  “We can’t. They’ll be watching your place too.”

  “I can’t go anywhere else. Look at the state of me.”

  “I’ll get you fixed up. Come on.”

  We sat into the car and I drove down to Bayview and pulled over behind the trees at the back of the public sports field.

  Linda had an assortment of makeup bags scattered around the car. She found some cotton wool in one, took a half-full bottle of Stoli Limon from the glove compartment and cleaned me up. The vodka stung like hell, but it felt good: like every trace of the Halligans was being wiped from my face. Linda laughed each time I winced.

  “You’re fine,” she said. “The eye will be grand, and I don’t think this gash needs stitching, it’ll knit together itself. Don’t think you’ll need a doctor. A dentist, maybe.”

  She passed me the bottle, and I rinsed my mouth and spat blood and crumbs of teeth into the street. The pain was suddenly excruciating, and I knocked back a hefty slug of vodka to chase it away.

  “A dentist, definitely,” she said. “In the meantime…”

  She found a pack of Nurofen Plus in a silver-sequined bag and handed me four. I washed them down with another slug and passed her the bottle. She took a long drink, and wet her glistening lips with her tongue. I could smell her again, deep inside, that tang of grapefruit and summer sweat and smoke. She took my hand and placed it on her breast; I could feel the rise and fall of her breath, the rustle of her dress as she shifted in her seat and moved her legs apart, her tongue hot as she whispered in my ear.

  We drove south and west, past lead mines and through dense pine forests until we were in the mountains. We climbed as high as we could, on roads where gorse and ferns gave way to marsh and shallow bog, and parked in the shadow of the communications masts that dotted the summit of the highest peak. We started kissing in the car, tearing at each other’s clothes, hoarse with silent lust, but it was too hot and too cramped, so we got out and I sat on the car hood and Linda sat above me. I could see the lights of the city beneath us, see them over Linda’s shoulder as she moved with me in the night, sense them pulsing in the haze as I came inside her and she cried out and I held her bright head close to mine. We stayed like that for a while, for as long as we could, until a white van blazed past, with the horn honking and its loutish occupants yelling cheerful obscenities out the windows. We dressed and lit cigarettes and smoked them in the precarious still of the night. Linda didn’t want to talk at first, and I didn’t want to force her, didn’t want to dispel whatever it was we had summoned up, so we sat on the hood and looked out at the city below, at the glowing channels of heat and light that coursed through its arteries like blood.

  When Linda began to speak, it was in a low, steady voice.

  “It didn’t feel like I’d been kidnapped,” she said. “I mean, it was right that I should be with the Dawsons, after Peter’s body was found. And I needed the downers, God knows, Barbara has a pet doctor who gives her anything she wants, he was feeding me them with a spoon. But it went from Valium to something stronger, I don’t know what. And I ended up in a total fog. So it wasn’t as if they had to lock me up or anything. Though there always seemed to be someone around, someone watching. And then that evening, there wasn’t. I walked out of the house, and I got some air, and I heard sounds from the outbuildings, and I pushed open the shed door, and there you were.”

  We drove to a hotel Linda knew, where sympathetic staff seemed used to her arriving at unusual hours with unfamiliar men; a dapper manager with a camp Dublin manner called Val took her aside and they embraced and commiserated; soon they were laughing, and Val was casting appraising looks at me. I pulled the lapels of my coat over my bloodied shirt as we rode the elevator. Linda said Val would see to it that a clean one was sent up. Food was sent up too: steak sandwiches and tiger prawn salads with Thai dressing and bottles of ice-cold Staropramen. It was a nice setup, so I felt an overpowering need to fuck it up.

  “Come here often?” I said, almost wincing at how pinched and unpleasant my voice suddenly sounded.

  “I come here when I want to,” Linda said. “Or at least, I did, when my husband was alive.”

  “But you didn’t bring him here, did you?”

  “No, I brought other men here, Ed. That was then. Now could be something else. That depends on you, as much as me.”

  She looked at me straight, unashamed of who’d she’d been, ready for who she might become. At forty-three, I’d be lucky to find anyone else with half what she had. I couldn’t hold her gaze, and turned away, and muttered something about a shower.

  I stood under the hottest water I could bear for as long as I could stand, until my body had begun to forget what had been done to it. Then I ran it cold until my head felt numb and the throbbing in my temple had almost abated.

  Linda was on the phone when I came out of the bathroom.

  “Could we have some vodka? Stoli, or Absolut, and a jug of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice? And some ice and lemons, room 146. Dawson, thanks.”

  I took a long hit on what remained of my beer, and Linda began to talk.

  “They don’t let Podge in the house. But they let George in the house. George Halligan, chatting to Barbara Dawson, helping himself to John’s scotch, walking around as if he owns the place. For all I know, he does. And Podge and his pack of savages lurking around the grounds, sitting in their vans smoking and barking at each other.”

  “What are they doing up there, Linda?” I said. “What are the Dawsons doing with the Halligans?”

  “It started with Peter, I think. Because Peter needed help. And instead of asking his father, he asked George Hall
igan. John Dawson owns the golf club lands. And he presented it to Peter as a gift. Well, he meant it as a gift, but it ended up being a test.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think John felt sorry for Peter: the way he tried so hard to impress him. John tried to let him know he didn’t have to, but of course, Barbara made it very clear she thought he was a failure, not a patch on his father. That’s why John wanted Peter to have the golf club lands. So he could make his mark. Barbara wasn’t supposed to know about it, but she found out. And she said that this was his last chance, that if Peter didn’t come good this time, she was finished with him.”

  “Meaning what? That he’d have no job? Or that she wouldn’t see him again?”

  “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Barbara always argued like it was the last throw of the dice. She’d cry, or rage, slam doors, the whole Joan Crawford routine. Sometimes she’d turn the tables and apologize to Peter, beg his forgiveness. That was even scarier. But soon enough she’d be sniping at him again. So it could have meant anything. But Peter took it seriously: he was going to do it this time.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. It was his last chance. And I think…I know…that he hoped it would give us one last chance too.”

  “Would it have? Or were you too close to his father for that ever to have worked?”

  Linda’s lip quivered in hurt surprise, and I thought she was going to cry. She looked at me as if I had betrayed her. I had, but that had started when I took her money, and then fell in love with her, and then made myself believe I could do both.

  “I saw his car on its way to meet you the night they found Peter’s body. You were dressed for…”

  “Yes, Ed? Dressed for action, is that what you thought? Not so evolved after all, are you, you can form the thought but you don’t have the spine to say the words.”