The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “You’re getting a few days a week on building sites.”

  “Ah yeah, they put me with the Poles and the fuckin’ Latvians on piss money man. I mean, fair play, nice lads an’ all, even if I don’t know what the fuck they’re going on about half the time, but it’s easier for them, they don’t understand they’re being ripped off. I do.”

  “Anyway, that’s not the point, the deal was, nothing dodgy if you’re hanging out here. I already have Dave Donnelly’s new sergeant popping in often enough to keep tabs on me. I don’t need any shit, Tommy.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about this. Not really. I mean, it’s not like dealing, is it?”

  “Homemade porn for sale door to door? It’s a church fund-raiser. Tommy, who did you get these from?”

  Tommy looked like the bold child he had never entirely stopped being. It wasn’t a good look on a man in his forties. But what he said took me aback.

  “Brock Taylor.”

  “Brock Taylor? The guy who owns the Woodpark Inn?”

  “Yeah. That shook you, didn’t it?”

  Brian Taylor – nicknamed Brock (the Irish for badger) because of the lock of naturally growing white hair that flared in the midst of his luxuriant black bouffant – led a gang out of the north inner city in the nineties that pulled three of the biggest bank and security van jobs the country had seen. There was no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and none of his gang would give evidence against him. And he did himself no harm by continually lobbing hefty checks at local charities. Eventually, the Criminal Assets Bureau confiscated half a dozen houses and two pubs from him because he had no explanation for how he had paid for them; although they were worth a total of 5 million, Taylor’s sole declared income for the period was 80 pounds a week in social welfare. But no one ever got to his bank accounts. He did eighteen months for intimidation of a witness, then came out, spent a few quiet years laundering all his remaining cash through two betting shops and an amusement arcade and watching the value of the properties he had managed to hold on to soar, then emerged suddenly, living in a house in Fitzwilliam Square and as the new owner of the Woodpark Inn, a sprawling “car park pub” that stood at the junction of Seafield, Castlehill and the once notorious Woodpark Estate. He’d been busy with his chequebook as well, to drug rehab and homeless centres, charities for sick and disabled children and so on, and a couple of tame journalists had been enlisted to build a Robin Hood antihero image: the hood with the heart of gold who only did what, let’s face it, we’d all do given a chance: take back some of the money the banks robbed from us over the years. As a result, and because he was a hail-fellow-well-met type of guy and because he seemed to lack entirely the whiff of cordite, he was being made welcome in all sorts of places you wouldn’t have expected before, including Seafield Rugby Club, whose grounds lay adjacent to Woodpark.

  Tommy looked at me with a defiant smile.

  “All right, you took me by surprise, well done. What’s Brock Taylor doing peddling amateur porn?”

  He shook his head, his expression contracting into its usual pasty combination of suspicion and anxiety.

  “I think he’s after Brady in some way. I don’t know how. He told me to take the DVDs, but to wait for the word before I started hawking them. Said if I sold any before that, he’d want to talk to me.”

  “Did he mention Brady by name?”

  “No. It was all, a certain party this, a certain party that.”

  “And was there a deadline? A cutoff point, after which you could go ahead?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  I could hear him say it, but there was a reverberation, a kind of psychic echo to it, as if I had heard it many times before. As of course I had: not this specific detail, but the connection, the way on a case, nothing is accidental, everything forms a pattern, and what you thought you were looking for marks only the first step along the path. Tomorrow was Thursday; the deadline for Shane Howard to pay his daughters’ kidnappers the ransom was midday Thursday; now a porn movie directed by her ex-boyfriend was ready to flood onto the market after that time – if the ransom wasn’t paid? Or despite that?

  Not the detail, but the connection.

  “He did say, one of the places to sell was outside Castlehill College. Which is where David Brady went to school. So that maybe says there’s some kind of threat going on.”

  “And how did he hook up with you?”

  “You mean, me being such a fucking loser an’ all?”

  “If the cap fits. What I meant was, Brock having his own boys to do the necessary.”

  “I don’t know that he does. Or at least, not on the street, you know? He doesn’t want to be associated with any of that now. He’s a member of Seafield Rugby Club and the Castlehill Lions Club and the fund-raising committee to buy a new dialysis machine for St. Anthony’s and all this.”

  “And it didn’t occur to you to wonder about the wisdom of working for Brock Taylor? Did you not learn your lesson with Podge Halligan?”

  “Ed, nobody knows what Brock is up to. I mean, he never dealt drugs, he’s not robbing, he owns the pub and a few houses and apartments scattered around. That’s all he looks like he’s doing, property development.”

  “And a little hard-core porn.”

  “All right, I don’t know why he called me, and I didn’t expect him to be into all this.”

  Tommy gestured disgustedly at the TV and his bag of DVDs.

  “He said there was some kind of underage scene going on, and he was trying to get to the people behind it.”

  “Child porn?”

  “Not children, young teenagers. Thirteen, fourteen.”

  “Your daughter’s age.”

  “I’m not the only one with a daughter. So I thought, if that’s what’s going on, and if Brady’s involved, and if Brock is after him – for whatever reason – and he can’t get the evidence, and he wants to shame him around town, and there’s a few bob in it for me, why not?”

  I looked at Tommy, who was lying about at least some of it, of course, but who had worked himself into believing that he had told the whole truth and nothing but. The problem was, it didn’t add up.

  “Shane Howard told me David Brady was one of the most promising fullbacks in the country. What’s he doing still playing club rugby for Seafield? The best players are all professional now, why isn’t he playing for Leinster, or any of the Celtic League sides? And what’s he doing making hard-core porn films and… I mean, if he shot the photographs of Emily, we have to assume he’s in on the blackmail attempt as well.”

  Tommy looked at me and shrugged.

  “That’s where you’d earn your money, by doing your job. Boss.”

  If he had grinned, I might have slapped him, but his face was a mask of earnest and diligent apprenticeship. I gathered the DVDs together and put them in a paper carrier bag.

  “I hope you’re being straight with me, Tommy. Because this is serious business, and if you’re fucking around, I won’t take it lightly.”

  “On the level man, on the level,” Tommy said, as usual looking far from. “I swear on my daughter, on Naomi man.”

  And held my gaze, and I felt he understood how serious it was, and I knew if anything had meaning for him, it was his child, and I believed him.

  We all make mistakes.

  Chapter Four

  DAVID BRADY HAD AN ADDRESS in the Seafield Waterfront Apartments. I stood outside the security door to the complex with my car keys in one hand and my phone in my ear, nodding and saying “absolutely” and “no problem” and “Monday at the latest” until a short man with his hair gelled into the spiky fin that for some reason was the current style of choice for young male estate agents appeared in the lobby, a sheaf of apartment specifications under his arm. The Waterfront had sold off the plans eighteen months before; now that the complex was finally open, half the apartments were on the market again as investors sold up for sixty or seventy grand more than they had paid. I pointed at the door, still
nodding into the phone, and Spiky Fin, who I noticed had acne, and possibly short trousers, opened it and extended an apartment spec to me. I waved my keys at him, too busy by far, and slipped around to the elevators.

  As the elevator rose, I inspected myself in the mirrored walls. I wore a black suit, a white shirt and black shoes. I wore a black overcoat in deference to the season. I had a black knit tie in my pocket, but it was rarely necessary these days. I had fallen into dressing like this partly by accident: I got off the plane from L.A. in a black suit and the airline promptly lost the rest of my luggage. I couldn’t think of anything else to wear, so I simply bought more of the same. It meant I rarely had trouble with a doorman, a maître d’ or a corporate PA, quite the opposite in fact. And if it also meant in certain situations I was a shade conspicuous, well, that can work to your advantage too, provided you don’t mind leading with your chin. After an October off the booze and working hard at the gym, I was a few pounds below fighting weight, loose-limbed and ready for action. I went for a reassuring smile. Then a look of reliable authority. Neither worked. The darkness in my eyes and the drawn clefts in my cheeks seemed to anticipate what I would find in David Brady’s apartment. I was trying to sell my reflection an impression of life, but it was no good. I was calling on death, and my face knew it before I did.

  I knocked on the door and it gave against my fist; it had been left on the latch. The apartment was eight floors up and looked out over Seafield Harbour through one wall of glass; if the mist hadn’t been so thick, you’d have seen right across the bay to Howth; as it was, you could see about as much as David Brady, who was lying on his tiled kitchen floor with a halo of blood around his head and a Sabatier carving knife stuck in his chest. He had been stabbed a number of times in the stomach and chest, and the back of his head looked like it had been smashed repeatedly on the glazed terra-cotta tiles. I took a pair of surgical gloves from my coat pocket, put them on and gave the body a quick once-over. Brady’s flesh was still warm to the touch, even around the hands: there was no visible lividity, no evidence of early rigor in the eyelids or the jaw; he could have been killed ten minutes ago.

  I looked at the photograph Jessica Howard had given me, of Emily and her boyfriend David Brady. It must have been after a match; Brady jubilant, red-faced and mud-smeared in a striped rugby shirt; Emily, all blond highlights and orange tan, gazing adoringly at her prince. My tongue felt swollen and dry in my mouth, and sweat suddenly sparked in my hair and on my brow. I crossed to the glass wall and slid the balcony door open and stepped out into the clammy cold air. Petrol fumes mingled with the salt tang from the sea; behind the roar of buses and trucks, a foghorn sounded, a dark bass note of mourning beneath the traffic’s metallic clamour.

  I went back in and began to search the apartment. The living room/kitchen/dining area was one open-plan space; off the kitchen ran a short passage with doors to a small bathroom and the only bedroom. Neither of the porn shoots had taken place here. There was a white G5 iMac on a desk in the living room. I booted it up and went into the bedroom. There were two televisions; the one in the bedroom was cabled for PlayStation, and games lay in piles on the floor. There were other gadgets: Game Boys and mp3 players, and a mini hi-fi system on the ledge behind the bed; no sign of camera equipment. There was nothing else of interest, except to note that David Brady had a mirror on the ceiling over his bed and a bunch of sex toys and a stack of porn DVDs in his bedside locker. A man who brought his work home with him.

  None of the porn was homemade; the DVD collection outside was all store-bought, action adventures and teen comedies, horror and sports. There didn’t appear to be any books in the apartment at all. I sat in front of the computer and searched for any file containing the words “emily,” “howard,” “threesome” or “porn.” As I did, I heard sirens outside. There was a folder with some photographs of Emily as she used to look; that was all. I tried searching for Brian Taylor under his own name and the nickname “Brock” – nothing. I opened Entourage and sorted the “Sent Items” folder by “Attachments” – and finally came up with it. It was called “emho” and it had been sent as an attachment to the e-mail address “maul@2ndphase.ie.” There was nothing in the subject line or body of the mail to indicate who it was being sent to. I found the original “emho” and opened it. Inside were the photographs of Emily’s threesome. I gave the rest of the room a quick trawl to see if there was anything I had missed. The sirens reached a crescendo and stopped. I looked out quickly over the balcony. Two white Garda cars with blue and yellow markings were outside. I didn’t have much time. I deleted the e-mail, then deleted the contents of the Deleted Items folder, trashed the “emho” folder, emptied the trash and shut the Mac down. I finished back at David Brady’s body for one last look. He had patch pockets on his shirt, but they were soaked in blood; the pockets to his low-slung jeans were easier to get to; one had a handful of change, which was no use; the other had a mobile phone, which was. The light by the side of the elevator showed the Guards were on the fourth floor; I reckoned there’d be four of them, two in the lift, a uniform to watch the foyer, another for the fire stairs; I jammed the apartment door wide open and made it to the stairs as the elevator left seven. There was no sign of a Guard on eight or seven; I flashed a look over the balcony and saw him about a third of the way up; I went down to six and ducked inside. I summoned the elevator and went down to the first floor, then got off, sent it down, and made for the stairs again. The Guard above me had vanished: checking one of the upper floors, I guessed. On the ground floor, I took a squint through the small window into the foyer. The uniform, a blonde with hair cropped short and long legs, was looking into the empty lift. She looked toward the fire door and I pulled back. I didn’t want to go through the back exit into the yard in case it tripped the alarms. I looked back: the elevator doors were closing, the uniform presumably inside. I kept my head down and pushed fast through the door and along the foyer onto the street.

  I sat on a stool in the Anchor bar for a while going through the text messages on David Brady’s phone and savouring my first alcohol in a month. Strictly speaking, I should have waited until midnight, but since I had never before interfered with and altered a crime scene, or tampered with and stolen vital evidence, I figured I was entitled to an early drink. Two actually, a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness. The Anchor was its usual hushed, devotional lunchtime self. No food was served, or even contemplated; men did their dreaming and praying over pints and shorts, working their newspapers like beads; Silent John, the barman, kept a gruff distance. Hard to blame him: the Anchor was full of people who started drinking at ten thirty in the morning; when I wasn’t working, I was sometimes one of them; why would a barman want to be friends with a bunch of alcoholics? On the other hand, why run a pub like the Anchor if you didn’t want to spend your life among drunks?

  It didn’t take me long to find the message I was looking for: 452 Pearse Avenue, Honeypark, plain and simple. Not a rugby-playing address, but not far from Seafield Rugby Club. I thought about David Brady, dead at twenty, and wondered what had taken him from the Waterfront Apartments to Honeypark Estate, and finished my drinks and went to see if I could find out.

  Honeypark and Woodpark are sprawling local authority estates on the southern borders of Castlehill and Seafield. Woodpark dates back to the forties, and many of the houses have been bought out by their tenants and subsequently sold on to young middle-class families; most have been through the three generations they say it takes for a council estate to be tamed. Although it still has an edge, the estate no longer possesses the fearsome reputation it had in my youth, when news that the Woodpark lads were on the prowl gave the dullest of evenings out a sense of danger, often realized. That honour now belongs to Honeypark, built during the eighties in the expansive grounds of a tumbledown Anglo-Irish “Big House” south across the main road. Someone told me they took all the tenants who’d been evicted for antisocial behaviour for ten miles around and dumped them in the
improbably named Honeypark. The buses had stopped going in early on, not only because they’d attack and rob the drivers, but because they’d tear down the bus stops and attack the buses with them. You could find any drugs you liked in Honeypark, but no one wanted to go in there to get them, so the dealers drifted up into Woodpark in grey hoodies and Burberry baseball caps, frightening the mothers with the three-wheel buggies and the old ladies with the two-wheel shopping trolleys alike. It’s not as bad as it used to be either, but no one could say Honeypark had been tamed.

  I stopped off at the Woodpark Inn to check the list of bands scheduled to play there that night. Workers from the nearby industrial estates and retail warehouses were sitting down to soup and sandwiches and carvery lunches; balloons that looked like Halloween pumpkins and luminous plastic skeletons hung above their heads. The smell of food made me queasy; I wanted another drink, but I had work to do first. I found the posters advertising the night’s lineup: The Golgotha Pyre, Emily Howard’s boyfriend Jerry’s band, were third on the bill.

  I walked back out into the mist and fading light and drove down into the sprawl of Honeypark. Every house had been painted white twenty years ago, and very few of them had been painted since, so the whole estate had an eerie sheen to it; dirty and wan, and furled in white cloud, it resembled a grimy snowdrift. Pearse Avenue was a long, meandering road that twisted and forked like a maze; I got lost two or three times until I took my bearings from the three sets of lads who were building bonfires on the paltry scraps of green the council had allocated for the tenants’ recreation and parked not far from the biggest of the three. The boys building it were excited, throwing the occasional banger at each other as they piled car tires and burst mattresses on top of packing crates and builders’ pallets. Pearse Avenue curved in a horseshoe oval on the far side of the green, and 452 was the centre house of the five houses that made up the oval. As I put my hand on the gate, someone threw a banger that exploded a few feet away from me. I twisted my head, startled by the explosion, and heard the baying laughter of the boys who had thrown it; when I turned back, there was a short fat man with greasy black hair and a black tracksuit and heavy black shoes standing in the doorway of 452, flanked by two lads of about twenty in grey hooded tops and grey track pants, one tall and bulky, one short and slight. The hoodies started to approach me. It looked like I was in the right place. I preferred not to carry a gun, but I was wondering whether I should have overcome my scruples for Honeypark’s sake. On the other hand, these boys did not exactly look officer class. I vaulted the gate, reached in my breast pocket and pulled out an ID card. No one reached for a weapon when it looked like that’s what I might have been doing.