The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  Finnegan was shaking his head.

  “I didn’t know he was a diabetic,” he said. He appealed to Sandra. “I swear I didn’t.”

  Sandra wouldn’t look at her husband’s face.

  “I spoke to the doctor who admitted him. He remembers you. He’ll be happy to make a complaint to the Guards.”

  Finnegan got to his feet.

  “I don’t have to stay here and be subjected to this—”

  Shane Howard pushed him back into his chair.

  “Yes you do, Dinny, yes you fucking do.”

  “Along with the medals in Finnegan’s house, I found one other item,” I said, and produced the silver ID bracelet from my pocket. Again I gave it to Sandra for inspection. She let loose a howl of pain and sank to the floor.

  “What does it say?” a shrill voice asked. It was Jonathan O’Connor, in black coat and baseball hat and wraparound shades. I didn’t know how long he had been in the room. Long enough, it looked like. Jonathan crossed the room toward his mother, who held out her arms in an embrace he avoided. He took the bracelet and examined it.

  “It says ‘Diabetes Type 1,’” I said. “If your father had been wearing it—”

  “He took it off for the game,” Finnegan said. “He took it off whenever we played sevens. He was in his gear when we went to the hospital.”

  “How do you have his bracelet then? Where did you get it? Why did you keep it?”

  “I had nothing but respect and admiration for Rock O’Connor,” Finnegan said. “He was my friend, he was everything to me.”

  Jonathan laughed, a forced, mirthless sound like static from a badly tuned radio.

  “Your friend? Yes, but who are you?” Jonathan said. “You’re not who you claimed to be at all. You’re a fraud, a fabrication. You’re not fit to be a part of this family.”

  “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the Howards’ sake. For Sandra’s sake.”

  Finnegan’s voice was thick with a sincerity I’d never heard in it before. He looked pleadingly at Sandra, and I saw the Northside boy he’d been, and the dream that had sustained him, and the ties of history and of blood that had laid him low.

  “You killed her husband,” Jonathan said, his voice shrill with excitement. “You killed my father. If that was for the Howards’ sake, then so is this.”

  I still don’t know if Jonathan was too quick for me, or if I just stood back and let it happen. Both, perhaps. He had been inching toward Finnegan gradually, and Finnegan had risen to his feet again, and then Jonathan was upon him. The blade whipped out of his coat and sparkled in the drear and then buried itself in Denis Finnegan’s chest, twice, three times, straight in the heart. By the time the Sig was in my hand, Finnegan was as good as dead. Jonathan sprang back, still holding the knife; I waved the gun at him, and he tossed the bloody weapon on the floor. The knife was a Sabatier, the same as the knife that had killed David Brady; the method was the same as that used to murder Jessica Howard; the knife was probably the second of the two I had found missing in Denis Finnegan’s kitchen. I wondered whether Finnegan was Jonathan’s fourth victim. But the knife used to kill Jessica had not been found.

  And then Shane Howard crouched by the body, and felt for a pulse, and turned to me and shook his head. It reminded me that he had a medical training, that he would have known there is very little blood when someone was stabbed through the heart, that the bleeding was largely internal. He wouldn’t have asked where his wife’s blood was. He would have known.

  Jonathan stepped back from us all and pulled his shades off; his eyes blazed with what could have been fear but looked like triumph. He cast around for his mother, but she was hanging one-handed on the mantelpiece now, her breath coming in quick bursts, her worn face drained of life, of hope.

  “He killed my father,” Jonathan cried, as if there had been no other route open to him. “He was nothing. Nothing but scum.”

  He seemed exhilarated, almost gleeful. What I had thought was weakness in his eyes now looked like something else: a delirium of violence, a killing rage.

  “How many others did you kill, Jonathan?” I said.

  “No one,” he said, unable to suppress the grin that spread across his face.

  “What did you say to Shane Howard when you rang him on Halloween morning? What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t ring him.”

  “I have phone records that say you did.”

  “You couldn’t, my phone is—”

  “Untraceable, I know. And now I know for sure you made that call. You told him his wife was having an affair with David Brady, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You’d already killed Brady by then. And you must have thought you were clever dodging the CCTV camera in the lobby. But there’s a camera across the road, and it’s got footage of the Reillys and their accomplice. That’s you, Jonathan.”

  Jonathan shook his head.

  “And after that, you went around to Jessica Howard, whom you also rang that morning, you went around and stabbed her to death too. Just the way you stabbed Denis Finnegan, straight through the heart. And then you went back to Honeypark, took a shower, dumped your clothes in the house, just the way you tried to make out Emily had had a shower and dumped her bloody clothes there – which is why you set fire to the place yesterday. Now this is what I think you were doing, Jonathan. You were working with Denis Finnegan, listening to his plans, the great Howard name, the construction of the fourth tower, the grandiose achievements that separate the likes of you, great men, from the likes of the rest of us, the little people who don’t have any castles or towers in our names, or portraits of ourselves on every wall. Denis knew all about the blackmail scheme involving the porn film – David Brady had sent it to him by e-mail attachment, so he may have felt it was a way of persuading Shane Howard to play ball on the development front. But then the Reillys were involved with their crude demands for cash, and the whole thing just became too much grief. Finnegan told Brady, and Brady tried to back out – but the Reillys weren’t having that. This was their chance for some long-term income, blackmailing Shane Howard. So between you and Wayne and Darren, the plot was hatched to get rid of David Brady. You didn’t like him anyway, did you Jonny? All the things Emily did with him. It should’ve been you, shouldn’t it?”

  Jonathan was very still, his eyes blank now, his mouth set.

  “Why you killed Jessica Howard is clearer, I think. She was actively opposed to the plan to build the fourth tower; she wanted to redevelop the site for apartments and town houses. That was bad for Denis, because with Jessica involved, there was no way he could bring Brock Taylor on board. And it was bad for you: apartments full of dreadful little people sullying the Howard name. So you went around there and you killed her. And you tried to set Shane Howard up for both murders.”

  I was looking at Shane as I spoke. He couldn’t meet my eye.

  “No, you’re completely wrong,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t kill Jessica.”

  “But you did kill David Brady. And you did kill David Manuel. I found Emily’s laptop last night, in your room in Finnegan’s Mountjoy Square house. I thought at first Emily had been e-mailing David Manuel. But how could she, she didn’t have her computer. No, Jonathan, pretending to be Emily, negotiated an emergency late-night appointment with Manuel last night. Manuel knew too much, and wanted Emily to go to the cops. Jonathan went there, overpowered Manuel and set fire to his room. Manuel fell to his death, horribly burnt.”

  Jonathan looked to his mother one last time; she seemed to be fading before our eyes, like a plant wilting for lack of water and light; she shook her head at him and turned away. He attempted a laugh, but it didn’t catch. His eyes burned with hatred; he looked like a trapped and wounded animal.

  “I did my best for us,” he said. “But the only other person who gave a damn was Denis, and he should never have been allowed across the door. Now you can all go to hell.”

  He bolted across the room
and out the door. I thought Shane Howard might try and stop him, but he didn’t. Neither did I. I put the gun back in my pocket and called Dave Donnelly and told him what had happened and who I thought was responsible and where to come.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, EMILY HOWARD AND JERRY DALTON APPEARED. Emily had the dollhouse under her arm and an excited, urgent look in her eye. She made straight for me but Denis Finnegan’s body brought her to a halt; she screamed at the sight of the dead man and shook her head in disbelief. I led her to a sofa and calmed her down and filled her in quickly on what had taken place. I left her sitting very still with the dollhouse on her lap and tears in her eyes, whatever she had been about to tell me lost to shock.

  Sandra stared at Jerry Dalton blankly; when Shane and Emily explained who he was, she nodded. “Welcome to the family,” she said, with a dark smile on her face that failed to leaven the curse. I wanted to spare her any more pain. But we weren’t done yet.

  “Jessica’s parents have arrived in the country. They’re staying at the Radisson,” I said to Sandra. “Her father, the one who isn’t a dead alcoholic actor, and her mother, who didn’t die of ovarian cancer.”

  She looked at me as if she had hoped I’d let her off this, at least, as if what we’d been to each other should count for something. It did, but I couldn’t let her see that. Not until it was all finished. Maybe not even then. She winced, as if I had hit her, then nodded, walked from the fireplace to the nearest window and began to open the heavy green velvet curtains.

  “Shut out the lights,” she said.

  Jerry Dalton went around the room and turned all the lamps off. A cold light spilled in from outside, the deep blue before dawn on a clear day, the first for a long time. There were smears of pink in the sky; the three towers loomed ahead; below them, the dark city, asleep by the bay.

  “I was first,” Sandra said. “And that made me feel important. I was thirteen, and he came to my room not long after I’d started my periods. It was exciting… we’d go for drives, and secret walks, and he’d always take me to rugby matches, and of course it was very exciting having secrets from everyone, Mother especially… I felt the others were such babies then… I don’t remember what I thought about the sex… it was messy, I remember thinking, and it seemed silly too, and then frightening when Father got so serious and intense about it all… but I can’t remember actually feeling anything, or rather I felt so many different things… love, fear, disloyalty, the thrill of the forbidden… that it was hard to unravel them from each other. I suppose that’s why it’s been an issue for me later… not that I didn’t enjoy it, I liked lots of things about it, but I don’t think I really felt anything, or enough… except with Stephen. Even if he was seventeen, we shouldn’t have been together. That was so intense. But maybe it was because it was forbidden, because I knew deep down it was wrong…

  “Anyway, it ended with Father after two years. It got awful fairly quickly. I thought at first we might run away, that he might be mine, not Mother’s. But of course, when you realize… when I realized what it was… all it could ever be… well, then it just became disgusting. At first he’d bring me presents, new clothes, books, records… but then it became more about Mother not finding out than anything else… so after a while, he just left money under the pillow… I wasn’t even sure what a whore was yet, but I felt like one… so I just wouldn’t let him anymore. Well, that was all right, he didn’t force me… and then one night… Shane, I’m going to talk about this, is that okay?”

  “Just keep going,” Shane Howard said.

  “I heard screams from Shane’s room. I ran in, and there he was, trying to do Shane… from behind, you know. I just… I screamed and flung myself at him and beat him and clawed and scratched until he ran off… and I stayed with Shane until morning. And that went on for months. Nothing sexual, we never… I… and I know, Shane, I know you thought I was protecting you, and maybe that was part of it. But honestly, I was jealous, if he wasn’t going to have me, he shouldn’t have you… I felt I had been slighted, that when I sent him away, he should have come back with a better offer, he should have taken me off on a white charger… I know that didn’t make any sense… it probably wasn’t even fair… but he started it… Then Marian, who was precocious even by nowadays standards, had breasts and her first period at eleven… and… and I was fifteen… and I just pretended nothing was happening… even though it was obvious, an eleven-year-old wearing makeup, eye shadow, lipstick… and yet she was still such a child, in thrall to the whole princess story, the sleeping beauty, the kiss from a prince… but I knew…”

  “I knew too,” Shane said.

  “And we did nothing. I don’t know what I thought. Or maybe a part of me thought, I had to put up with it, why shouldn’t she? Maybe that’s what a very cold, cruel part of me thought.”

  I looked around the room. Emily’s face was a blizzard of tears. Jerry Dalton knelt by her, holding her hand. Shane had gone back to staring at the floor.

  “And then Marian was suddenly, mysteriously ‘ill’… except she wasn’t. We knew she wasn’t, we all knew she was pregnant. We knew it from the way Mother was so unhappy, the way she’d cry herself to sleep at night… the way she couldn’t look at Father anymore, and the way he couldn’t look at anyone… the way no one was allowed to see Marian, or if we were, she wasn’t allowed to say anything to us… we knew she was pregnant and we… and I was jealous… and I blamed her… and it seemed like such a special fuss was being made of her, I wished it was me. We never… well, I never saw the baby… I don’t even know what happened, it was never spoken of… was it stillborn?”

  “Eileen Casey thought she heard a baby cry one night,” I said.

  “Did she?” Sandra said. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? For a baby to have been born into the world… into this house… and for there to be no trace of it left… it’s about as bad as it could be… and we never spoke of it… never… who knows, did they give it away, or murder it, or what? We never knew.”

  “They gave it away,” Shane said. “That’s what I always reckoned, to one of the adoption agencies, or to a home, or some such. That’s why Marian… that’s why she couldn’t…”

  “That must be right,” Sandra said. “That’s why she… because she couldn’t. She couldn’t face life without the baby, so she walked into the pool in her nightdress holding the heaviest rock she could find, and laid the rock on her chest, and lay down in the water and couldn’t get up… at least that’s how she was when I found her, that’s how I imagined she did it… Oh God forgive us, she was just a little girl, and we did nothing…”

  Sandra began to cry then. Great, wrenching, ugly-sounding sobs filled the room. She made a harsh “mmmm” sound in her throat and in her mouth to make herself stop.

  “Keep going, to the end. The only thing we did… Mother gathered Shane and me together, on the day of the funeral, and said, ‘Marian’s room is to be kept like it was the day she left us. It will be cleaned, but it must never be altered, as long as you live in this house. Do you understand?’ And so it never has been, not a jot has been changed or taken from it to this day.

  “So what I did then, I completely denied everything that had happened. I think it took me a few years. I think teaching was my way of not following in my father’s footsteps. But I helped to nurse him…”

  “Along with Eileen Casey.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She told me he didn’t rape her.”

  “Well, that makes everything all right then,” Sandra said. “After his death… and maybe it was in getting to know Dr. Rock… in seeing, for the first time, a future… I don’t know, it was as if I decided everything had been the opposite of what it was, everything had been perfectly fine… if not for our sake, for the sake of the children we had, that they would never know about it, or be affected by it… but I suppose all I was doing was living a lie, and making them live one too, crippling them under the weight of it.
God, what have I done to my little boy?”

  She wept again. I wanted to go to her, to hold her, to tell her what I didn’t believe, that it would be all right, that we could be together. I took a step in her direction, and she turned from the window and looked at me, looked through me, and I knew that what we had had, whatever we had had, was gone, gone and best forgotten. I hadn’t been straight with her, and she couldn’t be straight with me; now she looked right through me and I looked right back, and she passed along to where her brother was sitting. She sat on the floor between his outstretched knees, and he slid down off the couch and cradled her in his great arms, just as she had done with him the night Emily was found, the night David Brady and Jessica Howard were murdered, just as she had been doing with him for years; now the years seemed to fall away until they were like children again in their haunted house, waiting out the dark.

  Outside, the pink was filling up the sky, slices of grapefruit and salmon frothing one against the other. The sun rose over the bay like a fat blood orange. At long last, after a long long night, on All Souls’ Day, some light.