The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI)

by Declan Hughes

  “And then I rang the police anonymously, but waited around so they’d catch me? Whoever texted me was trying to set me up for the murder.”

  “Or maybe you took a gamble,” Geraghty said. “Maybe you banked on getting away with it because it looked so like a frame-up. Maybe you were too fucking smart for your own good, Mr. Big Shot Private Dick from Los Angeles.”

  I looked at him. He held my gaze and flung it right back at me, his face glowing with a grin in which derision and devilment mingled. He was good at this.

  “I’m going to ask you to surrender your passport while our investigation is under way,” D.I. O’Sullivan said.

  “Indefinitely?”

  “I don’t mean the investigation to last indefinitely. We can review it when we’ve made some progress.”

  “Sure, why not?” I said. D.S. Geraghty stood, smiling and stretching his arms, as if we’d just played a hard-fought game of squash and now it was done with and we were all friends again. Then he made a gun of his fist, index finger extended, and pointed it at me.

  “Don’t forget, you’ll have to apply for a license to the Private Security Authority soon enough,” he said. “I’d say they’ll be very particular about who they’ll want in the private detective business. Very particular indeed.”

  And using his middle finger to pull the trigger, he shot me in the face.

  The custody officer gave me back my mobile. A uniformed Guard had driven the 122S from Linda’s house; now he was going to follow me home to collect my passport. We went out together to the car park. It was raining, and we ran to our cars. Dave Donnelly was sitting in the passenger seat of the Volvo. He handed me a brown A4 envelope.

  “Phone records. All right, Ed?”

  “I think so. Thanks. You? You don’t resent the outsiders barging all over your patch?”

  “At least we’ll see some action now,” he said. “And Casey’s going to end up in the shite when it comes out he was trying to block any murder inquiry into the deaths of Peter Dawson and Seosamh MacLiam.”

  “I suppose it’s beyond even him to make out how Linda Dawson strangled herself.”

  Dave looked at me.

  “You spent the night with her. Something there, was there?”

  “Don’t want to talk about it,” I grunted, and shook my head.

  “Sorry all the same,” Dave said, relieved we didn’t have to do any more of that.

  “If Casey does end up going, it could work out well for me: Reed could step up, and I could take her job. D.I. at last, not before fucking time, but I won’t resent it ’cause I should’ve had it five years ago.”

  The rain was coming down in sheets. I wondered about the windshield wipers: the kind of feature that mightn’t work so well on an old car, the kind of detail Tommy might easily have neglected. I switched them on, and realized I had been unfair to the car and to Tommy: they clacked like knitting needles but they did the job. I filled Dave in on the interview with O’Sullivan and Geraghty, and told him they knew I was dealing directly with him. But I didn’t tell him about the Halligans’ hold over the Dawsons, or about finding Tommy and getting him out of the country; I suggested he have a look around the old ferry-house and left it at that.

  The Guard who was to follow me flashed his headlights from across the car park. I told Dave I’d better be off, and he nodded, but didn’t move.

  “Ed, I don’t know if this is good news or bad—because I can imagine you’d like to get the whole thing wrapped up one way or another, but—anyway, we got an ID on our concrete corpse, Fitzhugh’s tailor in Capel Street has records that go back thirty years. It wasn’t your da, our party had an address off the South Circular. His name was Kenneth Courtney.”

  Twenty-two

  I GAVE THE GUARD MY PASSPORT AND WATCHED HIM drive away, then I stood in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. It spumed on the rotting sills, it flashed in sparkles off the flagstone path and drenched the parched grass; it washed the hard green fruit on the apple trees clean of a long dry season’s dust. As a child, I always believed that the male and female trees would grow together, that their branches would touch one day. It didn’t seem likely anymore. Linda’s scent felt stronger on me now: the grapefruit tang, the damp musk, the intoxicating sweet salt reek of her. I kept turning to greet her; the idea that she would not come again wouldn’t lodge in my blood. Finally I went out in the rain and stood between the apple trees until I could smell nothing but the softening earth and the drenched stone. It took a long time.

  I went back inside the house. I had a hot shower and dressed. The sky was darkening; even though it was only four o’clock, it felt like a November afternoon. There was nowhere to sit but the stairs, so I sat there and worked my way through Peter Dawson’s telephone records. Two things caught my eye: one was a mobile call to George Halligan’s number at 21.57 on Friday night, the night Peter was last seen alive. The call to George Halligan was the last call Peter Dawson made. The second thing was a number sequence: 3459 showed up as the last four digits of an 086 mobile number Peter called several times over the last couple of months, the last time a couple of nights before he died. I checked it against the numbers I had collected on my mobile, but it didn’t match them. Then I looked at the legend scrawled on the back of the torn photograph of my father and John Dawson:

  ma Courtney

  3459

  I called the number and went straight through to voice mail: a youngish-sounding woman with a broad Dublin accent identified herself as Gemma and asked me to leave my name and number, which I did. As I hung up, I could hear my heartbeat. If this wasn’t a break, it was close to it. But this case wouldn’t break by itself. I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes now, which above all meant keeping out of the Halligans’ way. Twice I had handed them the advantage; twice they had punished me for it. Third time would be for keeps.

  I checked my mobile to see if I had missed any calls, and found I had inadvertently turned it off. I switched it on and locked it. I was waiting for Gemma Courtney’s call, but sitting by the phone isn’t good for the soul. Using the landline, I got a number for a waste disposal firm from directory inquiries and ordered a Dumpster to dispose of all the trashed furniture that was piled in the garage; rain like this wasn’t going to do a car manufactured in 1965 much good. I was assembling a bag of clothes that needed cleaning when my mobile rang. It was a woman, just not the woman I hoped it would be.

  “Ed Loy? It’s Caroline Dagg here, you remember, Rory Dagg’s wife?”

  I did remember, but she sounded like a different woman: chipper, brisk, resolute.

  “Mr. Loy?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Rory wants to talk to you, Mr. Loy. He’s remembered something he thinks could be helpful.”

  “About his dead uncle, is it?” I said.

  “It is about his uncle, yes, and the sooner you know about it the better.”

  I said I was free now, and told her where I lived; she said they’d come over straightaway. I drove to the cleaners on Seafield Road and left in a bag of laundry. I picked up some whiskey and beer in the off-license, and some cold food in the fancy delicatessen. On the way back, my mobile rang again, this time to tell me I had two messages in my mailbox.

  Message number one: “Ed Loy, this is Gemma Courtney, I’m free tonight nine until midnight, love to see you then, ring me back to arrange a time.”

  Message number two: “Ed, what can I say about Podge, something must be done, no hard feelings, wanted to invite you to a breakfast at the Royal Seafield in the morning—I have a feeling the council will make the right decision tonight, and we’ll be celebrating in style tomorrow—and don’t worry, Podge won’t be there. Come along and I’ll make it up to you, big-time.”

  When I pulled into the drive, I saw Caroline Dagg’s silver SUV parked on the curb. Dagg held a golf umbrella over his wife for the short walk into the house. We crowded into the living room and stood around in an awkward triangle while I explained about the furni
ture. Rory Dagg pitched his look somewhere between sheepish and shifty; he hung his head and let his wife do the talking. Caroline Dagg, in a navy suit and candy pink lip gloss and eye shadow, spoke her overenunciated words through a fixed smile that made me feel like she was telling me off.

  “Rory is—well, I’m not going to speak for my husband, Mr. Loy, except to say, I think Rory wants to tell you—There I go again!”

  She laughed a tinkling, mirthless little laugh. Rory Dagg stared at the threadbare carpet.

  “Except to say, Rory was mistaken about his uncle being dead, he is in fact alive, and Rory…actually, Rory knows where he is, in a nursing home, isn’t that right, Rory?”

  Dagg grunted.

  “The poor man. And I think what Rory wants to say most especially, because the whole point is that you make a clean breast of it, it’s a public program after all, a declaration of intent to the world—and this is why he probably had some trouble coming clean about his uncle, about his background, because—Rory?”

  She looked toward him, smiling and nodding and gesturing with her hands, like a teacher coaxing a recalcitrant child to apologize. Dagg’s gaze remained fixed on the floor, but his shaking hands balled themselves into fists.

  “I’ll let him tell you himself. Nothing to be ashamed of, perfectly treatable. So! There you have it! Now, I have children to collect from a girlfriend who won’t be a girlfriend for much longer if she has to put up with my three on top of her two, so I’ll just leave you boys alone to talk things through, shall I?”

  Rory Dagg would not meet his wife’s worried eyes. Her forced brightness hung in the air between them like smoke. She flashed her eyes at me, eyebrows raised, as if her husband had joined the gardener in the ranks of those sent to try her inexhaustible patience, then gave me a very brave smile and left.

  Dagg didn’t move until he heard the SUV kick into life. He turned to the window and watched his wife sail off in the rain, high above the ground in her silver chariot. Then he looked up at me, his face a mixture of anger and embarrassment.

  “We’ve decided I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “Apparently that’s easier than deciding we just don’t like each other anymore.”

  “Would you like a drink then?” I said.

  “Fucking sure I would,” he said.

  We had glasses of Jameson and chased them with bottles of Guinness. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything that day—they’d given me some kind of rubber chicken and mushy chips combination in Seafield Garda Station, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. I ate a sun-dried tomato, fresh basil and Parmesan pizza, some chicken wings in black bean sauce and a tub of avocado, tomato and red onion salad. It tasted good, which was just as well, as it had cost more than the booze. Rory Dagg didn’t want any food; he poured another whiskey and had to stop himself knocking it back in one. Maybe he was an alcoholic; I didn’t care: I wasn’t his social worker, or his shrink. Maybe I’d be an alcoholic if I were married to Caroline Dagg. Maybe I was one anyway. Who gave a fuck? Things could be worse; we could be dead; we would be soon. I joined Dagg in a second whiskey, and began to feel calmer and clearer about everything. Dagg started to say something about how his wife had changed since she gave up her job to look after the kids full-time, how her horizons had narrowed, how she needed something or other to stimulate her, but I wasn’t listening; I was enjoying the bursting illusion of insight that the whiskey gave me. It wouldn’t last, but while it did, it gave the world a pattern and a coherence, an order that made me feel my task was simple, and its accomplishment inevitable. I tuned in when Dagg began to talk about his uncle.

  “I wrote down the address of the nursing home,” Dagg said, handing me a sheet of lined paper.

  “You’d better come with me,” I said. “They may not let me see him otherwise.”

  “I’ve never been to visit him,” Dagg said. He flushed, and reached for the whiskey bottle with a shaking hand. My hand got there first. An alcoholic was one thing, but a sloppy drunk was no use to me. I handed him another Guinness instead.

  “I’ve paid his nursing home bills. But I don’t have to see him. That’s above and beyond. After what he put my father through.”

  “What was that? Forging his signature on your father’s daybooks for the town hall construction job?”

  Dagg looked at me as if he was still weighing whether he’d talk. I wondered whether I should have made his wife stay. Then he turned his head away and nodded briefly.

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “The signatures in the general daybooks vary a good deal within a certain pattern—that chimes with the way most people sign their names. But the signatures on the town hall daybook are all identical, and they’re identical to the signatures on your father’s framed plans. It makes sense that he’d be more careful over those, since they were going on display. But why should one daybook diverge so substantially from all the others? Because the signatures in it were forged—careful copies, deliberately done. Maybe if it had been just one or two, it would have been a brilliant forgery.”

  Rory Dagg gave a quick, sour smile.

  “A brilliant forger is not one of the things Jack Dagg was. A brilliant housebreaker, a brilliant extortionist, a brilliant pickpocket—none of those either. He was good at lying though. And he had a real talent for taking advantage of my father’s generosity.”

  “By impersonating him, was it?”

  “Jack had money troubles all the time, spent it like water, gambled or drank it away. In the early days, when my dad was a general laborer, he’d let Jack stand in for him the odd day, if he was desperate for cash. Then as Dad moved up the scale, got his skills, did his exams, he’d still have to find Jack work. Jack didn’t have the qualifications or the abilities, but when it came to bossing people around, he could always get away with it—he had a lot of swagger, a lot of front—more than the old man, actually—not to mention the common touch, so when Dad was foreman, Jack could slip in and earn a few days’ drinking money. But the town hall job was different.”

  “Why? Because he let his brother do it all?”

  “For one. And he wasn’t happy about it. I told you before, he went into a depression because I failed my exams and gave up on his big plans for me to be an architect. Well, that was just part of it. The rest was fallout from the town hall. He never spoke to Jack again, wouldn’t acknowledge him in the street.”

  “What happened? Could your uncle have blackmailed him in some way?”

  “I don’t know. It could have been as much John Dawson’s fault. I mean, he left Dawson’s there and then, having worked with them for years. He wouldn’t tell me. And to be honest, part of me wanted to put it behind me, you know, all this brothers falling out and not speaking to one another for years is from the ark, isn’t it, it’s real old Irish tribal bullshit. At least, that’s how I saw it. Then I got a call about a year ago. Jack Dagg, destitute, no health insurance, no other family—he had a wife and kids in England at one stage, but he left them long ago, and I’ve no idea where they are—anyway, ‘Big Jack’ Dagg has leukemia, he’s asking me to help him. He needs palliative care, a nursing home, whatever. My first instinct was, Not my problem. But…well, it’s blood, isn’t it? I mean, he has nobody else. He’s my father’s brother. You can’t just walk away.”

  “Did you ask him about the town hall, what happened there?”

  “I tried. He said no one who’d grown up in Fagan’s Villas expected life to be easy. He said he did what he had to do and no more. He said he’d never been a fucking tout and wasn’t going to start now. And if I didn’t like that, I could fuck off.”

  “And you still helped him?”

  Dagg shrugged, as if he was embarrassed.

  “Like I said, he’d no one else. And I suppose a part of me thought, maybe he’d tell me eventually.”

  “Why did your wife have to force you to come here then?”

  “Because a bigger part of me thought, I don’t want to know, just let the old fucker die
and that’s the past done and good riddance.”

  I nodded. I could understand that at least.

  “But then the nursing home rang last night. Sister Ursula. Uncle Jack’ll be dead in a matter of days. Hasn’t asked for me, but she thought I’d like to see him. And Caroline starts in, Of course you must, it’ll bring you ‘closure,’ all this. And I started to drink. And she won’t shut up, about talking to you again, about my drinking, so on. And there’s some shouting. The kids are there, getting upset. I go out, drink some more, come back, wake everyone up, do some more shouting, break some stuff, pass out on the living room floor, everyone’s crying. And now I’m an alcoholic and I’m joining a twelve-step program, or I can get out of the house.”

  I looked at him now, drink sweat beading on his brow, eyes boiling red, hands still shaking. I’d been hasty in dismissing Caroline Dagg’s opinions, just because her manner got on my nerves, or because the last thing I wanted to hear was the notion that simply because a great deal of your life would be unbearable without booze, it meant you were an alcoholic. But I didn’t have time to think about that now.

  “Let’s go and see your uncle,” I said.

  Twenty-three

  ST. BONAVENTURE’S NURSING HOME WAS A LARGE VICTORIAN redbrick villa set in a quiet square on the west side of Seafield. Neo-Gothic in style, with its turrets and stained glass windows, its conical towers and spires, it looked in the rain like a haunted house from a child’s storybook. A stone carving above the front door showed angels guiding a three-masted ship through stormy seas. Sister Ursula was an angular, brisk, gleaming woman in her sixties in a blue-gray uniform that looked like a nurse’s; her gray and white headdress and the silver crucifix around her neck displayed her other allegiance. She led us up a great staircase to the first floor, and along a wood-paneled corridor to Jack Dagg’s room, and brought a still-reluctant Dagg in to see his uncle. I walked back to the stairwell and waited. The stained glass window that lit the stairs on this floor depicted the ninth station of the cross, the third fall; the window at the turn of the stairs had shown the fourth station, the meeting with the Virgin; I wondered if there was a logic to their placement, or if they were scattered about this house of the dying at random. I heard a woman crying, and the sound of a television commentating on a horse race, and the sibilant colloquy of two elderly women hissing about oncologists and tests and a blessed release.