The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  By the time I reached the ground, the sound of sirens filled the air, but they didn’t drown out the grief of Manuel’s family, who had all been watching from below; his distraught wife clutched her teenage daughter and a younger girl; two teenage boys were caught between the need to go to their father’s ruined body and the natural human urge to turn away; quickly, the ambulance men intervened, and then the fire service were running hoses through the house, and the family’s agony was buffered by official intervention. A fireman tried to get me to stay at the scene, but I slipped away and drifted in among the neighbours and the ghouls as the Guards arrived. It would be useful to know who Manuel’s last client had been, but I couldn’t ask his wife; it was probable she didn’t even know. All I knew was that Manuel was going to tell me what he had learned from Emily Howard, and now he was dead. It was hard not to believe those two facts were connected.

  I caught sight of myself in the rearview and almost drove off the road; my face was blackened by smoke, my hair frosted with white ash; I looked like a photo negative of myself. I pulled in at a hotel in Donnybrook, walked quickly through the lobby to the bathroom and gave myself a wash and a brushup. It was twelve ten, and I’d been on the road since six this morning; I told myself it was time to pack it in for the night. I walked back across the lobby with every intention of listening to myself. But the bar was still open, with an extension for something they described as the “Halloween Festival” – not just a night but an endless weekend – and I decided any man who’d just seen what I’d seen deserved a drink. The bar was thronged with people who looked like they’d been at a party for too long and needed to go home, but had forgotten where they lived. My type of crowd. I sat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee, then, when it arrived, asked for a double Jameson as if it were an afterthought. I put sugar in the coffee and added the whiskey and drank the whole thing in three drafts. It burned my throat and warmed up my gut and made me feel half alive again. I was doing 50 percent better than David Manuel. The voice in my head reminded me that I should go home, that a night’s sleep and everything would look, would even be, different. I pondered this, and all I could come up with were the facts: that there was a killer on the loose, that he or she had just killed again, that everyone I was working for: Sandra Howard, Shane Howard, Emily Howard, Jonathan O’Connor, Denis Finnegan, each of them was in danger of being the next victim. Equally, any of them – more than one – might be the killer. I was the only one who knew the extent of the connections and how they all joined together – to the extent that I did. The killer didn’t show any sign of stopping. That meant I couldn’t either. Maybe I could catch a quick nap, like the two old boys at the all-night Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament across in Woodpark. Maybe even that was unwise: neither of them looked like he was certain to wake up. I checked my phone to see if Martha O’Connor had called or texted with the information I’d asked her for. The phone I picked out of my pocket wasn’t my phone though; it was David Brady’s. I had checked the text messages before; I ordered another coffee and worked through the Received Calls and Dialled Numbers lists, comparing them to the numbers I had on my phone for the principals in the case. Several of the incoming calls were listed as “no number.” There had been calls made to and received from Emily in the days leading up to the murder; I noted Emily’s number, which came up with her name and which I didn’t have. I thought of ringing her, but it was close to one now, and I didn’t want to wake her if she was asleep. I sent her a text message hoping she was well and asking to speak to her as soon as I could.

  I felt like I was getting nowhere; I couldn’t imagine what it would prove if David had rung anyone on my list. The green Jameson bottle behind the bar was flaunting its red crest at me again, and I was starting to give it the eye back. I thought of Tommy then, and how he had discovered the truth about his daughter Naomi by scrolling through the photographs on her phone. I wasn’t used to a phone that doubled as a camera, although it struck me that it would be quite useful, particularly for all that lovely divorce work that paid the bills and left me feeling so morally uplifted and optimistic for the human race afterwards. I navigated from the menu to the picture gallery, opened the first folder and scrolled through the images. They were what I had been expecting: a series of women, including Emily and Maria Kravchenko, in sexual poses; there were a fair few of Brady and “the guys,” either in action on the rugby field or hoisting pints in what I now recognized as Seafield Rugby Club bar. Some images combined elements of both, though in a mildish form: girls flashing their tits for the guys, the guys flashing their bits for the girls. I experienced the kind of boredom and despair you normally associate with reality TV, and while one hand clicked faster through the images, the other was flexing itself in readiness for another shot of whiskey. So I was distracted, and three shots past the shot I wanted, and had to track back, and momentarily clicked myself out of the image gallery, and ended up having to start from the beginning and track through each image again, but finally I got to the shot I had begun to think I had imagined. There it was, two men and a boy having a pint together in the rugby club: Brock Taylor, Denis Finnegan and Jonathan O’Connor. Brock Taylor, who once worked for my da, and now had men shot to death for little or nothing, in Dublin, the city that shrank as you stared at it, until eventually, no matter who they were and what they had done, somehow, it all came back to you.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  DENIS FINNEGAN’S OFFICES WERE IN MOUNTJOY SQUARE, about as far from the river on the northside of the city as Fitzwilliam Square was on the south. Before I left Dublin twenty-five years ago, you would have ended the comparison there: while there had been some major demolition and deterioration among the Georgian houses on the south side, not least on the adjoining Fitzwilliam Street, Fitzwilliam Square itself had survived relatively intact, whereas Mountjoy Square had been gutted, often without the demolished houses being replaced; vacant sites and derelict houses made it look like a cross between a bomb site and Skid Row. But the gold rush had changed the fabric of the city, for better or worse: Mountjoy Square fell firmly into the former category, with the gaps having been mostly filled either with restored originals or plausible facsimiles; it now looked like a square again, and tonight, high above the river, its park dense with shedding trees, the ashes already skeletal, in the swirling fog as a church bell struck one, it gave the impression simultaneously of being absolutely real in the concrete here and now, and an illusory dreamscape from the past, an ethereal evocation of times and lives now dead and done, as if whatever actions I might take, whatever my striving, it would be to the same end.

  Finnegan’s house was on the north side of the square. He was as good as his word: hale and hearty, if a little drunk, he greeted me enthusiastically and led me up the stairs to a second-floor sitting room that overlooked the square and much of the city. The room was painted dark green, with a cream ceiling and a rich amber carpet; a gold chandelier with tulip bulbs hung from an ornate centrepiece; a turf fire seethed in the grate. Over chalk-stripe trousers, shirt and bow tie, he wore a peculiar-looking burgundy velvet smoking jacket brocaded in a faintly Turkish manner that looked like it had last seen use in a comic opera. He offered me a range of things from a groaning drinks table by one of the big sash windows; all I wanted was a bottle of Guinness, which was good for keeping the alcohol in the blood steady while not really counting as a drink. But since Finnegan was oiling himself with a ten-year-old Macallan, which may have had something to do with his face glowing a shade or two brighter than his jacket, I asked for one as well, and commandeered the bottle on the pretext of reading the label. I had such a number of things to charge Finnegan with that it was hard to know where to start, but I didn’t think asking him how many people in total he reckoned he had murdered was a great icebreaker. And the only one I was confident he had killed was Richard O’Connor, and that would be impossible to prove. But since I’d last seen Finnegan in south Dublin, indeed, looking like an exemplar of that zone, there was
a time-honoured city-sensitive way of kicking things off.

  “So Denis, you’re here on the northside. What’s that about?”

  “I made a little money in the eighties. These houses were tumbling down at the time, it was a civic disgrace. But it did mean you could pick one up for a song. I had it restored, over time – living on one floor while another was overrun with builders. And of course, I based my practice here.”

  “During the eighties, the early eighties, while you were teaching in Castlehill School?”

  “It would have been after that, about 1985.”

  “You left in 1985? And what, you went back to university?”

  “Oh no. I had already taken a degree and so forth, I just had to complete my apprenticeship. There weren’t many of us who hung around. But I had location on my side. Back then, before we had what the newspapers insist on referring to as ‘gangland,’ we just had a clutch of ordinary decent criminals. And the bulk of them came from within a stone’s throw of my door. Although, having represented many of the gentlemen concerned, I shouldn’t have considered it in the leastwise prudent to throw a stone at any of them.”

  “You must have known them all at that time,” I said. “Lar and Shea Temple, the Flannery brothers, Brock Taylor.”

  Finnegan nodded, as if we were reminiscing about some glorious rugby heroes of the past.

  “Oh yes, Brian in particular. I brokered the settlement with the Criminal Assets Bureau on his behalf. Brian’s done well.”

  “He’s done very well. House on Fitzwilliam Square, The Woodpark Inn, and he seems to be buying up half of the surrounding area.”

  “Yes.” Finnegan nodded. His face had contracted into that Oriental rictus smile again.

  “Why do you think he’s doing that? In that area particularly?”

  “I wouldn’t really know. I suppose there’s council stock there still to be had relatively cheaply, he estimates that it’s the coming area, just on the Castlehill/Seafield border after all.”

  “And he’s quite the man in Seafield Rugby Club as well.”

  “Is that right?” Finnegan said.

  “Is that right? Sure you know that’s right, aren’t you to be found there regularly? You and Jonathan? Sharing a drink with Brock?”

  Finnegan put his drink down on a small mahogany side table and repositioned himself in his seat, uncrossing his legs and planting his tiny feet side by side on the amber carpet.

  “Mr. Loy, I’m not entirely sure where, as our American friends might say, you’re going here. The fact is, I represent many people. Outside of that, I live my own life. Brian Taylor, since he seems to have become the focus of your current inquiries – although at some point in the dim and distant past, I did understand you to be working on behalf of Shane Howard, but who am I to tell a man how to do his job? – Brian Taylor appears to be a reformed character. If it turns out that he is not, I will hear about it soon enough, in the form of a phone call. Until then, what he does is beyond my control. The fact that he has chosen to move in circles, some of which are congruent with mine, is unusual but not illegal; I don’t normally enjoy the society of my clients out of office hours. But then, few of Brian’s coevals share his urge to… ‘better himself.’”

  “Do you think it’s a bit crass of him, Denis? A bit embarrassing? Do you and the rest of the car-coat brigade up the rugby club find yourselves sniggering into your scotches at the presumption of the fellow?”

  Finnegan’s head swivelled around, and his chin jutted forward, like a man in a pub ready for a fight.

  “I’m a Northside boy myself, as a matter of fact. O’Connell’s, then a scholarship to Belvedere. I didn’t cycle up the Liffey on a fucking bicycle. I earned every penny.”

  The accent had coarsened a little, but only a little; over the years, the polish had worked its way deep into the grain of Denis Finnegan.

  “So you and Brock go back, do you? Back to Blessington Street?”

  “I came from Wellington Street.”

  “Near neighbours then.”

  “We weren’t friends.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so. Brock’s initial ideas for bettering himself were a little more short term than yours. But they seem to have worked out. Fitzwilliam Square still more fashionable than Mountjoy.”

  “Once again, Mr. Loy, and while it is a continuing pleasure to talk to you, of course, I must ask—”

  “It’s interesting, where people came from. And how they get where they’re going. I didn’t exactly start out with a silver spoon either. My father never really made a go of things. But for a while he ran a motor garage, quite near Woodpark. And the funny thing is, he had a fellow there working for him, name of Brian Dalton. Do you know who that was?”

  Finnegan’s face was perfectly still.

  “I think… and I could be wrong… that he and Brian Taylor are the same,” I said.

  “And if they are…?”

  “Well, I wonder if it’s interesting. Since a while later he married the Howard family’s heavily pregnant housemaid, and they moved into a house in Woodpark. And then he seems to have disappeared, and she was thought to have drowned herself.”

  “And the child?”

  “And the child was adopted. So you see, there are connections to be made. It would be extremely interesting to know what his proper name was, Taylor or Dalton. Someone who knew him back in the day should know that, at least. Then again, maybe you’re right, maybe it’s not that interesting at all. Why don’t we talk about property again? It’s still the conversational topic of choice in Dublin, isn’t it? And it’s what you chose to speak to me about when we first met – can it only have been two days ago? It feels like much longer.”

  “It certainly does. Can I get you another drink?”

  “Here, allow me.”

  I took our glasses and the Macallan to the drinks table and, seeing my reflection in the window, checked to see if Finnegan was watching. He was staring into the fire, and it was the work of a moment to snap the top of the GHB bottle, drop a capful and a bit into Finnegan’s glass and replace the bottle in my pocket. As I poured the whisky and added water, I stared out the big sash window. The shutters were open, and I noted again how the windows diminished in size as the floors rose, how this one was smaller than the ground-floor window had been in Fitzwilliam Square. The congruence between Finnegan and Taylor, near neighbours as kids in a rough end of town, now residents of two of the city’s great squares, was setting off flares in my brain. The light from each revealed another stop on the map; I was counting on reaching my destination before the night was out.

  “What I’m interested in is the will Shane and Sandra’s mother left. Remember, you were talking about it yesterday? You felt Jessica Howard was going to prove troublesome.”

  Finnegan turned and looked at me as if he was surprised I was still here.

  “And why should that be of any moment, Mr. Loy?”

  “Because it gives several people a motive for wanting her out of the way. As you reminded me, I’m working on behalf of Shane Howard, and if he’s not the only one who might have profited from his wife’s death, well, all the better for him.”

  I gave Denis Finnegan his drink and sat down across from him.

  “I spoke to the Guards in Seafield about this myself.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Mary Howard stipulated in her will that Rowan House was to go to Shane and Shane alone.”

  “Yes, but Shane and Sandra were locked in a dispute over what to do about the bequest. Shane told me he wished it had been split.”

  “Well, in practical terms, Shane was behaving as if it had been.”

  “What does that mean? That he agreed with the plan to build the fourth tower?”

  Finnegan looked into his glass and made a face. I took a drink of mine and smiled. He shook his head.

  “Did you mix the whisky with mineral water?”

  I nodded, and Finnegan clicked his tongue.

  �
�An unforgivable solecism, Mr. Loy. An excess of sodium. Still, a sin to waste it.”

  He took a good belt of his drink and sat back.

  “I think au fond Shane was on Sandra’s side, yes. I think he favoured that option. A centre for private psychiatric care. It would be the final piece of the jigsaw. But Shane was caught between Sandra and Jessica’s plan for a residential development. And since Jessica and Shane were about to separate, and presumably to divorce, you might say she was keen to maximize her settlement before she left.”

  “Why do you believe Shane would have supported the plan to build the final tower? He sounded at best neutral to me.”

  “He knew Sandra wanted it. Shane has always been keen to see Sandra protected, ever since they were children. To make sure she wasn’t hurt. To make sure she got what she wanted. What she deserved.”