The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “I told you, that’s confidential—”

  “Not all of it may be. Not all of it has to be. You’re not a doctor or a priest; you’re not bound by any real laws, after all. And they’re both in danger, you know, Emily and Jonathan.”

  “In danger? Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Loy?”

  “Maybe just a little. I’m certainly scared on their behalf. And I don’t scare so easily. They’d both be in jail if I told the Guards what I know. Can I come and visit you now?”

  “Now? I have people here, I can’t just… no, that’s out of the question.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “I have a client at nine.”

  “I’ll be at your door at eight.”

  I ended the call before he could object.

  The Woodpark Inn had a bar with lino on the floor and tables and chairs laid out and some unspeakable celebrity talent show at maximum volume on the television and fluorescent lights glaring and a dartboard and fifty or so people who wouldn’t see fifty again drinking pints and whiskey and lemonades and arduously not smoking. They looked like they’d been coming here all their lives, and they probably had. The lounge was relatively quiet: couples with nothing to say to each other and subdued groups of ill-assorted women in their forties sat beneath the skeletons and pumpkin balloons like adults in their children’s bedrooms, wondering how they’d grown too old to enjoy the action but not old enough to feel relaxed about missing it. There was no sign of Sean Moon, or the Reillys, or Brock Taylor. The action – the Halloween Battle of the Bands – was taking place in a hall that must originally have housed dances, maybe bingo nights. The bouncer had a shaved head and a big black moustache; he looked at me and smiled and said “Too old” in an Eastern European accent. I said, “Record company.” He inclined his head toward the racket that was emerging, looked back at me in a sceptical kind of way, then shrugged elaborately, as if human folly was beyond his control, and let me pass.

  I paid twenty euro to a bored-looking girl in white baggy sportswear with lacquered hair tied tight in a topknot and went inside. The bouncer was right: I was too old. The hall was full of Goth kids and surfpunk kids, metal kids and indie kids, kids who were trying to look like all of the foregoing and failing, groomed and styled OMIGOD girls in party frocks and burly-looking rugby boys with their hair gelled into fins. There were a few older faces, casualties from the culture wars, the type you see at rock gigs everywhere – plump, bikerish alcoholic women with purple hair and tattoos, tiny wrinkled men with dirty grey ponytails – but basically, it was a room full of kids, and I was a forty-three-year-old man in a suit among them. I felt pretty sleazy, but then, I’d been feeling pretty sleazy the whole day, ever since Shane Howard had shown me pornographic pictures of his daughter and, amidst the pity and indignation I felt on Emily’s behalf, I hadn’t been able entirely to suppress the rather less noble feeling of lust, or subsequently to banish the lurid images from my heated brain. I got a pint of Guinness at the bar and found out from an elfin barmaid with enormous eyes and short plum-coloured hair whom I also let believe I was from a record company that The Golgotha Pyre wouldn’t be on for a while. The band on stage were dressed in ruffles and lace and floppy white shirts and wore a lot of makeup; I couldn’t work out if they were impersonating the new romantic bands from the early eighties or the current wave of bands who impersonated them. I finished my drink and got a second; the barmaid pointed Jerry Dalton out to me across the hall, and told me they’d already had a lot of interest, but that no one had done a deal yet, and that whoever signed them was going to be very lucky; her great eyes glowed with passion as she spoke, as if she were more than a little in love with Dalton herself; I asked her if she knew if Emily Howard was Dalton’s girlfriend, and she shook her head and smiled pityingly at my middle-aged literal-mindedness, and said all she cared about was the music.

  Jerry Dalton was tall and lean with a dark mop of wavy black hair that came to his shoulders and a goatee that failed to disguise the clean line of his lantern jaw; he wore a black T-shirt with GOLGOTHA PYRE written on it in letters of flame, black jeans and black boots with thick metallic soles. An inverted crucifix hung around his neck, and he wore a lot of rings and bracelets with skulls and serpents’ heads on them. He was standing at a tall circular bar table with a bottle of Budvar talking to a faintly insane-looking guy with very long ginger blond hair cut in a fringe and black-rimmed glasses, who vanished when I introduced myself.

  “A private detective? Whoa, deadly,” said Jerry Dalton. “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to ask you about your girlfriend, Emily Howard.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Is she not? I thought she was.”

  “You thought… what business is it of yours anyway?”

  “Emily went missing. Someone was blackmailing her father. I found her. She said you were the connection through which the blackmail threat came to David Brady. Now Emily is home, and David Brady is dead, and I want to find out who’s behind it all.”

  Jerry Dalton looked stunned.

  “David Brady is dead? Dead how?”

  “He was murdered. Beaten, then stabbed; whoever did it wanted to make sure. So, Jerry, on whose behalf were you giving David instructions? Brock Taylor?”

  Dalton drank some beer and shook his head.

  “Brock Taylor? I don’t think so. I don’t know, to be honest.”

  “How could you not know? Emily said you were the go-between.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true. I work part-time at Seafield Rugby Club, yeah? Well, I come on shift last weekend – Friday night, about ten to seven. And Barnesy, Tony Barnes, the manager, tells me there’s a letter waiting for me behind the bar. I open it, and there’s a sealed envelope inside, and a note asking me to make sure David Brady gets it.”

  “What kind of note?”

  “Handwritten. No signature. I still have it, I think.”

  He pulled up a long black leather coat from the floor, searched in the pockets and came up with a fistful of paper; amidst receipts, flyers and ticket stubs he found a folded piece of grimy cream notepaper. I unfolded it. In a neat hand that looked strangely familiar, in ink, was written:

  Jerry, please see David Brady gets this.

  “Did Barnesy say who left it?”

  “He didn’t see.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “There was a match that night. David Brady was in after, with all the rugby guys, big night on the beer. I gave him the envelope, a little while later he came back up and asked me if I knew who dropped it in. He was pretty agitated, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean, you suppose?”

  Dalton put the flat of his hand against his mouth, as if he was about to say something against his better judgement, then lifted it above his head.

  “Well, David wasn’t the most… don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he was kind of an abrasive guy, you know? And he had a lot of people who’d laugh at his jokes, which were usually at someone else’s expense… and he was pretty aggressive with the bar staff, he’d stand at the bar, wouldn’t speak, would expect you to know what he drank, then when you gave him his drink, he’d go: ‘And the guys?’ So you were also supposed to know what they drank, and if you didn’t, he could be pretty obnoxious… ah, it sounds a bit petty, all I’m saying is, I don’t remember registering whether he was freaked out about the letter in particular, ’cause his general manner was so hostile, I kind of let it flow past me, you know?”

  “Tell me about Emily. You’re in her class in college?”

  “Yeah. We met up about a month back. Freshers’ week, all the new kids. We went out, hung around, couple of times, I was into it, she was casual, I didn’t push it. We’d’ve seen more of each other if it was up to me. But she’s not the kind of girl you boss around.”

  “You were out to her house?”

  “I met her mother. She’s pretty full on.”

  “Tell me what you know
about Brock Taylor.”

  Dalton looked around him uneasily.

  “I don’t mean his record, we all know that. Just current form.”

  “He owns this place, but he’s not here much. He’s around Seafield Rugby Club a fair bit. In a suit, being a hale and hearty rugger kind of guy when he’s not quite born to it. But he’s getting his feet under the table there ’cause he has so much bread, which he’s happy to donate to their building fund and so on. So whatever he did in the past is forgiven, or forgotten.”

  “What about the Reillys? Have you seen them around?”

  “Around SRC? They’re officially barred. You see them in the car park, dispensing their wares.”

  “Coke?”

  “And E, a little dope. Mostly coke. As if the guys needed any assistance in being obnoxious.”

  “David Brady a good client of theirs?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s why his game was for shit. Brady was the only one would bring the Reillys right into the club. No one would say a word to DB.”

  The band on stage finished in a synthesizer crescendo. Applause drifted across the room in gusts. The lights came up harsh and unforgiving on even the youngest faces. Jerry Dalton stood up.

  “We’re on next, Mr. Loy. But if there’s anything else, get in touch with me. I really like Emily, and I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  I took his phone number. The ginger guy with the fringe was on stage, assaulting a drum kit. I guess that helped explain his insane look. Jerry Dalton picked up his coat and gave me his hand. I gestured to the cross hanging upside down from his neck.

  “What’s that about?” I said.

  He fingered the cross, looked around the room and made a sweeping pass with his hand.

  “It’s all about hypocrisy, Mr. Loy,” he said.

  I wasn’t about to argue with that.

  The Guinness was good, so I had another pint and waited for the band to start. The Golgotha Pyre were a metal trio. Jerry played guitar and sang and a guy with a ZZ Top beard wearing a black overcoat played bass with his back to the audience. They sounded like seventies heavy metal and nineties grunge, very doomy and tortured, and they could play a bit; they had songs called things like “Lake of Fire” and “Judgement Day” and “Blood on the Wind.” At first they made me smile, but soon they just made me feel old. I had lost the facility for listening to music when my daughter died; so far it hadn’t returned; when it did, I doubted whether heavy metal would be the form it took. But they were sincere, and Dalton’s voice was at the lower end of the balls-in-a-vise scale. When I finished my drink and left, there were kids headbanging into the speaker bins.

  I came out through a different door to the one I had entered by, and the air seemed suddenly to intensify the strength of the beer I had drunk, so that I had trouble getting my bearings in the vast wraparound car park. It was still overcast, starless in the black, but the mist had lifted, and my eyes kept getting snared by a spider’s web of fireworks in the sky and bonfires in the hills. The Reillys came quietly, just as I spotted my car, the bulky one behind me to grab my arms and pin them, the smaller one walking quickly up, sniffing and panting and pushing the blue-grey Sig Sauer pistol to my chest and pulling the trigger before I saw a thing. There were cracks in the sky, and bangs from afar, but nothing from the gun, just a series of clicks, each one deafening to my ears.

  The gun must have jammed. Small Reilly lifted the Sig to my eyes and grinned, his vivid blue eyes gleaming, and said: “Keep out of the David Brady thing, righ’?” and slashed me down the right side of my face with the blade front of the gun barrel. I felt a smart of pain as Small Reilly raised the Sig again and brought it round to my left. I ran Big Reilly into the car behind me, braced back against him, swung my legs up and kicked Small Reilly full in the chest, heels out, so he went over and his head hit the tarmac with a smack. I came down hard on top of Big Reilly and heard the gun skittering beneath a car and elbowed Big Reilly a couple of times in the stomach. I was on my feet now, and blood was coursing down my face; I could feel it hot in the fold between my neck and collarbone. Big Reilly was coming at me now with a knife. Small Reilly was still on the ground, fumbling to get up, one hand on his head.

  “Shank the cunt, Wayne,” he spat. “He’s out of fuckin’ order man.”

  Wayne may have been trying to do just that; he was swiping, slashing the air, jabbing at me; or maybe he was just trying to get to his brother; I should have just backed off and let him get away if that’s what he wanted to do, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do; I wiped the blood off my face with the palm of my right hand and I blocked Wayne’s path between two cars, and he lunged at me, and I sidestepped and grabbed his blade wrist with my bloody right hand and twisted it behind his back, up and up until he dropped the knife, and slapped his face down on the hood of the parked car, once, twice and again, until it was a bloody mess, and smashed his blade hand on the hood, once, twice and again, and smashed it some more so he couldn’t hold a blade in it any time soon, or ever, and flung him at his brother, who still hadn’t made it up, and the two went down in a heap and I picked up the knife and moved in, wiping another flush of blood off my face, a roar like the beating of wings in my ears, ready to keep going, to shank the Reillys myself, to atone for the shame of having been caught unawares; even if they hadn’t meant to kill me, they could have, and I wouldn’t have them thinking they could try it again; and then I heard a voice.

  “Fuck sake Ed, you don’t want to kill the fucking Reillys. That’d only give them ideas above their station.”

  Chapter Nine

  TOMMY OWENS, IN AN OLIVE GREEN SNORKEL COAT and a black fleece hat, with the Reilly brothers’ gun in his hand, looking like I hadn’t seen him in a long long while: grinning, head bobbing with adrenaline, or speed, probably both, all of a swagger, ready for the fray.

  I walked over to Tommy and took the gun. It was the compact Sig, the P225, barely more than seven inches in length, grey-blue and slick with my blood. As I trained it on the Reillys, it weighed surprisingly light in my hand.

  “Besides,” continued Tommy, “as a gun, it makes a good set of brass knucks.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Check the magazine,” he said.

  The Sig was chambered for 9mm Parabellum, the magazine was eight-shot, and it was empty. The Reillys had come to throw a scare into me, not kill me. Now I was going to find out why.

  Tommy looked at my face.

  “You’re gonna need stitches for that, Ed,” he said.

  “What are you doing here, Tommy?”

  “I’ll tell you after. Sketch, sketch.”

  I looked around. A few punters were watching from the pub door. It was only a matter of time before we’d have bouncers on the scene, and then cops. I took a clean handkerchief from my jacket and pressed it to my face to stanch the blood flow.

  “I want to talk to the Reillys.”

  “Talk to Darren, he’s a slimy little cunt, but he’s the brains. Such as they are. Anyway, Wayne’s fucked, isn’t he?”

  Tommy took the knife from me and advanced on the Reillys as he said this, separating them with a few flashes of the blade. Darren Reilly looked dazed from the crack his head had taken, still winded from the blow to the chest; Wayne crouched against a car, his good hand cradling his wounded one, clutching both to his bloodied face, as if afraid it might fall off if he released them.

  “Stay down, all right?” Tommy said to Wayne.

  “You won’t have Loy with you next time,” Wayne Reilly honked through his fingers. Tommy aimed a kick at him, and Wayne cowered beneath the car. Tommy reached inside Darren Reilly’s grey hoodie, grabbed him by the hair and dragged him squealing toward me.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said, looking toward the pub door, where more people had begun to gather. “Car?” he said to me.

  I pointed toward the old Volvo, and Tommy led Darren Reilly toward it. Tommy’s limp was still there – his ankle had been stomped to shreds back
when we were kids – but his energy had changed; now it resembled the kind of go he’d had when we were in our teens, and every trip to shoplift or rob an orchard or a bike or hot-wire a car had been led by Tommy Owens, with me his willing accomplice. I’d thought disappointment and failure had sucked that kind of verve out of him long since, but here he was, bundling Darren Reilly into the backseat of a car and taking his phone away from him and tying a scarf around his eyes: alive and kicking.

  “Down at the corner of Pearse Drive and Pearse Rise, Ed,” Tommy whispered in my ear. “There’s a place there that’s just the job.”

  The place was a lockup garage on the outskirts of the Woodpark Estate; two metal up-and-over doors were chained and padlocked; graffiti said FUCK THE POLICE and HONEYPARK RULES and MARIA AND CHRISTY 4 EVER.

  Tommy produced a bunch of maybe a hundred keys and passed it to me.

  “Right-hand door should be good, Ed. One of them fits, can’t remember which. I’ll mind young Darren here.”

  After trying a dozen or so keys, I found one to open the door. There was a space directly inside. I got back in the car and drove it in. Tommy got out and shut the door and flicked a switch and fluorescent lights came on. My face had started bleeding again, but slower this time; I refolded the handkerchief and used it as a pressure pad. There were three other cars in the garage, all covered with tarpaulins; the rear of the concrete building had aluminium doors that matched those we’d entered through. There was an office partition with fibreglass windows and dusty, empty shelves; the desk and chair within were tattered and filthy. I looked at Tommy for an explanation.

  “Garage owner in town. Used to do a little work for him, fitting up hot cars. He has lockups all over, moves the motors between them, so if one is raided, there’s no connection made with the others. I made copies of the keys when I was doing a job for him. Checked this one the other day, it had a free space. Always come in handy.”

  I nodded. Had Tommy gone back into the hot car business? Had he ever left? Catching Tommy in a lie was as difficult as it had ever been, particularly since he often wasn’t sure himself, trusting in the one true faith of Make It Up As You Go Along.