The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  I looked at a pretty girl with long blond hair and too much orange makeup and fussy designer clothes and intelligent eyes blurred with boredom and premature cynicism. There were fifty-year-old women all over the city traipsing from beauty parlour to hairdresser to designer store trying to maintain that look. At least Emily’d had the spirit to tear it up.

  “Once she did the hair, we didn’t know what to expect next: a pierced nose, a tattoo, God knows. She dropped all the girls she’d been to school with, girls she’d known all her life, girls whose parents are our friends. Her boyfriend since fifth year, David Brady, had just made the Seafield first fifteen, smashing guy, one of the best fullback prospects in the country, good career ahead – and she dumps him for one of the club barmen, he’s in her class at college, some scrawny clown who plays in a band. Broken up about it, poor David was. Then she started staying out, night after night, wouldn’t tell us where.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No. I don’t know. Drink maybe. Hangovers. She spent enough time in that bed. But she’s nineteen, half of them get sleeping sickness that age. Seems to go to all her premed lectures.”

  “She’s doing medicine?”

  Howard gestured to the portrait above the fireplace with a wry smile.

  “She’s going to make her grandfather proud. He didn’t think dentists were top drawer. At last, a doctor in the family.”

  “How long has Emily been gone?”

  “This is Wednesday. I haven’t seen her since last Friday. The photographs arrived yesterday.”

  “And do you think she’s in on this?”

  “She’s always had everything she wanted. No girl could have been better looked after.”

  “Maybe she’s tired of being looked after. Maybe she’s decided it’s time she looked after herself.”

  Howard shook his head.

  “No, I… she has seemed angry at us… but I don’t believe she would do this. Not unless she was being forced in some way.”

  “Why was your daughter angry, Mr. Howard?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. She had no cause to be. No cause.”

  Howard shook his head, his damp brown eyes gaping, seemingly bewildered at the thought that his daughter might not be his best friend for life, or that at nineteen she might want her own life, rather than the one he had fashioned for her.

  “Will you find her?”

  “Mr. Howard, why haven’t you taken this to the Guards?” I said.

  “Because I don’t want any more people knowing about this than have to. In my experience, once the Guards know about something, so does everyone else. I can depend on you to be discreet, I assume.”

  I said nothing. My job was getting people to tell me their secrets, not swearing them to secrecy. Discretion rarely came with the territory.

  “Anyway, if I send the Guards after her, I have little chance of winning her back.”

  “Maybe she’s a bit old for her father to win her back,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he agreed wistfully, staring again at the photograph of his daughter as a six-year-old, as if that was the image of her that had taken permanent root in his mind. “But she’s never going to be old enough to have her body splashed across the Internet like a cheap whore.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  There was a knock on the door, and Anita appeared.

  “Dr. Howard, there are six in the waiting room. And Miss O’Kelly is… well, you know how she gets.” A phenomenally loud over-elocuted female voice could be heard bellowing something about consumer choice and the need for a patients’ charter.

  “It’s not her fault,” Howard said. “I’ve kept them waiting. Thank you, Anita. Give me a minute.” The receptionist shut the door behind her. Howard stood up.

  “Mr. Loy, I have patients to treat. If there’s anything else—”

  “I’ll need phone numbers for Emily’s boyfriends and friends, past and present, I’ll need to look at her room—”

  “I was about to say. My wife is waiting in the house. She’ll fill you in on all that.”

  “I’ll need to know immediately they call, and what they say. I’ll need your mobile number to key into my phone, so I’ll know when you call. And I’ll need a check.”

  I told him how much I wanted, and he said I should invoice him, and I said I preferred to get paid up front, and he asked would I settle for half, and I asked him if that’s how he ran his own business, and he said that was completely different, and by this stage Miss O’Kelly’s fluting cries were loud enough to be heard through the closed door, so Howard wrote the check, smiling, as if he found the little people’s need for money quaint and amusing, and flung it at me, just so I’d remember how completely different we were. He went out to rescue his patients, and as I heard his loud mechanical laugh defuse Miss O’Kelly’s ire and I got down on my knees to retrieve the check from under the desk where it had fallen, I wondered, not for the first time, why it was that the richer the people who hired me, the more reluctant they seemed to pay me. Maybe it was an attempt on their part to recapture the control they felt they had lost by revealing so much about themselves. Or maybe it was just that they hadn’t become that rich by parting easily with their money.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN SHANE HOWARD SAID HIS WIFE was waiting in the house, it turned out he didn’t mean the house we were in: that was only used as a dental surgery these days. Anita directed me downstairs through a stone-floored kitchen piled with boxes of drug company samples and calendars and laundered white tunics and out into a sodden, half-wild back garden. Through the thickening mist, I walked along another damp cobbled path flanked by rowan trees until I came to a dark green marble pond about fifteen feet in diameter. The low walls formed a hexagon, and each side and angle was inlaid with a greenish crystal flecked with red the size of a child’s fist. Orange and yellow leaves floated on the surface of the cloudy water. The whole thing looked beautiful and grave and strange, like a memorial without a dedication, and I wondered what its purpose was, what puzzle it was asking me to solve. Then I reflected that a downside of my job was the habit of searching for mysteries where there were none; sometimes a pond is just a pond.

  At the bottom of the garden a tongue-and-groove door in a whitewashed roughcast stone wall opened into the garden of what Anita had rather loftily called “Howard residence.” (Anita had also scrupulously avoided mentioning Mrs. Howard by name.) Howard residence was a seventies-style L-shaped dormer bungalow with great floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The garden was tended to within an inch of its life, with snooker table lawns and tightly sheared borders of bay and box. At the front of the house, a black Porsche lurked on the gravel drive, sleek and feline; the garden there dropped steeply to another white stone wall, shielded by a row of mature eucalyptus; a hundred feet below the wall, the railway tracks vanished into a tunnel; beyond that, a shroud of grey where the sea spread out toward the sky. What sounded like gunshots snapped in the damp air, and then the crackle and hiss of fireworks sparkled through the gloom, and I remembered it was Halloween. I rang the doorbell and Jessica Howard answered it and led me into a room the depth of the house with walls of glass back and front.

  Jessica Howard was maybe a little too blond for her age, and the skirt of her dark suit was maybe a little too short, and another woman mightn’t have worn heels so high or a top cut so low or perfume so musky, not this early in the morning, or at all, but another woman might have looked tarty, or cheap, or desperate, and Jessica Howard didn’t: she looked bold and direct and careless. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me at first; then again, I wasn’t another woman. While she made coffee I looked around the room, which was sparsely furnished with a couple of long couches and a round glass table with four metal chairs. On the walls, there were framed posters advertising theatrical productions: Juno and the Paycock at the Abbey, An Ideal Husband at the Gate, Shopping and Fucking at the Project. Above the fireplace, two photographs hung: one showed a younger version of
Mrs. Howard in Restoration costume with cleavage fit to bust; in the other, she sat naked on a rug with her back to the camera, her head turned around to smile, heavy-lidded, into the lens. Between them, a portrait of the lady in pop art oils, big-haired and glowing like a trophy bride. I began to see where at least some of Emily’s anger might have come from.

  Jessica Howard brought a tray with a pot of coffee, a jug of hot milk and two mugs to the table, and I joined her there. She offered me a cigarette, which I gladly accepted, poured coffee, which I took black, blew a fine jet of smoke toward the ceiling and smiled at me. I shifted in my seat and said, “Mrs. Howard—”

  “Jessica. Call me Jessica. And I can call you Ed, can’t I?”

  I said she could. Her blue eyes flickered, as if registering a victory, and I noticed how cold they were; the sex that animated every curve of her body didn’t seem to touch her soul.

  “Well, Ed, did my husband manage to tell you anything of worth – in between banging on his desk and shouting his head off?”

  “He gave me the basic outline,” I said, laying the photographs and the note on the table between us. She leafed through the shots, shaking her head and sighing heavily, but her dismay seemed more aesthetic than maternal.

  “That hair is such a mistake,” she said. “Not to mention the tattoo and the piercings. Emily has a good body and fine features, but she seems determined to make the worst of herself. Still, if these photos do end up on the Internet, the consolation is, no one will ever recognize her.”

  “Provided she reverts to being an orange-faced south county Dublin blonde,” I said. “Maybe she’s frightened no one will ever distinguish her either.”

  “Not everyone can stand out from the crowd,” Jessica Howard said. “Now, what do you need from me? I have to show a house later this morning.”

  “I thought you were an actress.”

  “So did I. Not enough people agreed. Of course, when theatrical fashion swings toward the more homely type, one begins to feel foolish for having hung on to one’s looks. And sometimes, sleeping with all one’s directors can be as bad for one’s career as sleeping with none of them. But that’s the way it goes. And selling houses in the current market is like catching money in a bag – not a comparison one could ever make with working in the theatre.”

  She smiled and passed the photographs of her daughter back to me, taking care to brush her hand against mine as she did so. She licked her lips and widened her eyes in a “what are we going to do next?” kind of way. I tried not to take her flirting personally, but I was the only man in the room, and I was a man, and I still hadn’t had any gin.

  “You don’t seem too anxious about what’s happened to your daughter, Mrs. Howard,” I said. Jessica Howard didn’t exactly roll her eyes, but she came close.

  “Do you know what’s actually happened to Emily? I don’t,” she said. “Shane wants to keep treating her like a child. She’s nineteen years old, for Christ’s sake. When I was nineteen, I was living in Paris with my boyfriend, I’d had an affair with a married man, an abortion, I’d taken cocaine, acid, heroin, I’d had any number of threesomes,” she boasted, gesturing dismissively toward the photographs of her daughter, as if they presented some kind of threat, as if mother and daughter were rivals. Maybe they were.

  “And would you wish all of that for your daughter?” I said. My voice rang pinched and priggish in my ears, but I intended the reproof.

  “What I’d wish for her is that she’d get out into the world and live. And it looks like, at last, that’s what she’s doing.”

  “Your husband believes she’s being held against her will, that she was forced to have sex on camera – that’s abduction and rape, Mrs. Howard.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second. I think this is some scheme the girl’s dreamt up to squeeze more money out of Shane. And to give him two fingers as well, let him know she’s not Daddy’s little girl anymore. That’s what I would do if I were she.”

  “Why would Emily need to blackmail your husband? Surely he’s always given her whatever she wants?”

  “Only as long as she does what he wants. That’s the Howard family motto: do what we want and we’ll tolerate you. The code of the Howards.”

  She drew hard on her cigarette and exhaled in a long sigh of rancour and discontent.

  “They wanted me to give up my career when we had Emily. Sandra, and the mother. Said it was unfair to the baby, and to Shane, who had his rugby and was building the surgery and needed support at home.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said Shane wouldn’t have married some frau whose only ambition was to raise his children and keep his house, and I had no intention of turning into one. In retrospect, I think that’s precisely what Shane did want. But he didn’t get it. His mother hated me. Always had, hated me even more then. Wouldn’t even come to see me on stage, not once in twelve years.”

  “And the father was some kind of famous doctor?”

  Jessica Howard rolled her eyes and said “Ye-ah” with two syllables, like a character in an American sitcom.

  “Dr. John Howard. Professor of Gynaecology and Obstetrics at UCD, Master of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital, Knight of Columbanus, senator, adviser to four successive ministers for health, the power behind the Howard Maternity Centre, where the sons and daughters of the comfortable are born, the Howard Clinic, where they go for repairs, and the Howard Nursing Home, where they die. Famous enough for you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “It’s refreshing there’s someone who doesn’t know the Howard legend, chapter and verse.”

  “I lived in L.A. for twenty years.”

  “Well, if you didn’t know what a great man he was, you’d quickly learn: his children keep his memory alive like he was a saint; they practically light candles to him.”

  “And Shane’s sister, Sandra, is she a doctor too? It tends to run in families.”

  “A doctor? Sandra Howard was a teacher,” Jessica Howard said, using “teacher” in the sense of “failure.” Her voice had darkened, curdled with bitterness and smoke.

  “She was deputy headmistress at Castlehill College. The youngest deputy headmistress in the country, no doubt you heard about that in L.A., her mother certainly regarded it as of international importance. Now she runs the whole medical setup, all the clinics and trusts and funds and chairs and so on. The keeper of the Howard flame.”

  A foghorn sounded in the bay, harsh and prolonged. Jessica Howard looked out toward the gloom and shuddered. It was such a theatrical gesture that I almost laughed out loud, but something – a flash of rage, then a dark shadow in her cold eyes – made me stop. I didn’t know what the shadow meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but it was no laughing matter. When she spoke again, it was in a completely different register, as if she had conceded her facade had been too brittle for the situation.

  “I’m not an uncaring mother, or indifferent to my daughter’s safety. On the contrary – it’s because I care that I want her to break free, to gain her independence. I don’t want her in thrall to the Howards, you see.”

  “You make them sound like a cult.”

  “Sometimes I think they are. The confidence and security of believing you’re part of a natural elite, that your family has some great mission to accomplish, that you’re entitled, by reason of your birth – all that is pretty seductive. Certainly seduced me. The power, the prestige, the charm of the Howards. But the way they want to control people’s lives – it didn’t succeed with me, so now they’re trying with Emily.”

  “When you say ‘they’—”

  “Oh, the mother played her part before she died, but Sandra and Shane, mainly – they speak as one voice, usually Sandra’s. Don’t get me wrong, Sandra is in many ways a great lady, and she’s had her share of troubles: her first husband died, and she had to look after her awful mother on top of her own kids. It’s just weird when it feels like the man you married’s a stand-in for his sister. Eventually
, it’s beyond weird.”

  “So what are you saying, it was Sandra’s idea that Emily should do medicine, she’d be carrying on the family line, so to speak?”

  “You pay attention, Ed. It’s rare in a man, almost unheard of in an Irishman. Yes, despite the fact neither of Sandra’s kids is going to be a doctor, the burden of family destiny came to rest on Emily’s shoulders.”

  “Against her will?”

  “I thought so. She seemed happy enough, but she always did. She liked to please, she was a dutiful daughter, that was the role she played. And now that’s exploded, hasn’t it? The centre wouldn’t hold. I should have protected her. I should have been there more.”

  She slumped in her chair, suddenly looking awkward and ungainly, like an adolescent herself, exhausted by the passions that surged through her without warning.

  I shook my head.

  “We don’t know. Maybe your daughter is as angry and resentful as you say. Maybe she engineered all of this. Or maybe she’s being held against her will. We need to find her, and find out from her what she wants.”

  “If it means being returned to her father—”

  “She’s nineteen years old, Mrs. Howard, as you pointed out. She’s free to go wherever she pleases. Is her father really such a monster?”

  “No. No, of course not. I just think what Emily needs now more than anything is her independence—”

  “And what do you mean, ‘returned to her father’? Do you not live together anymore?”

  “I don’t know that that’s any of your business. But no, is the answer. We’re in the process of separating. Solicitors are drawing up papers. All that good stuff.”

  So Denis Finnegan had more than one reason to be concerned about Jessica Howard’s highly spirited personality. I watched her now, talking into a mobile phone whose insistent ring had rescued her from any further interrogation. As she spoke, her shoulders eased back and her chin lifted, as if her relief at escaping the demands of her family was warming her blood. She closed the call and shook her hair back and moved her teeth against her pouting lips, like a Thoroughbred in the show ring.