The Color of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “Is that what Emily has been talking to you about?”

  “As I said, I need to speak to Emily. If she agrees to what I ask…is it to you or the Guards I should talk?”

  “Talk to me. I’m not just a cop. The Guards only care about the killer.”

  “And what do you care about, Mr. Loy?”

  “Oh, I care about the killer too. But most of all, I care about the truth.”

  I didn’t know what to make of David Manuel. On the one hand, he sounded like a columnist for a Sunday newspaper, with his elaborate theories and historical justifications for why the Irish are the most unhappy nation on earth; on the other, he seemed like he wanted to help, and genuinely concerned about Emily Howard. I had some more coffee in Ranelagh in one of those uncomfortable little shops with tiny metal tables and chairs and high stools all packed too close together. None of the serving staff was Irish. David Manuel might have said something in our collective psyche prevented us from working in cafés, a postcolonial superiority complex that didn’t permit us to wait on people without being obnoxious to them, perhaps. Whatever the reason, it was all to the good; the European staff was friendly and pleasant and didn’t make you feel you were burdening them with your custom, or detaining them from more important pursuits like text-messaging their friends and rolling their eyes. I leafed through the rest of the papers. Two things caught my eye: one was a follow-up item about a recent report into clerical child sex abuse in a rural diocese. It highlighted the way in which, time after time, when the original allegations had been made against priests who had turned out to be guilty of abuse, the local communities had automatically closed ranks-with the priest, and against the accusers, ostracizing them within their own villages for daring to speak out. The other was an article about obstetricians and gynecologists who had worked over the years in hospitals bound by a Catholic code of ethics, and detailed a number of incidents in which obstetricians had performed hysterectomies on women who might have had complications with future pregnancies; sterilization was against the Catholic “ethos” and so removing the womb was seen as preferable. It also outlined a practice called symphysiotomy, which involved cracking and widening the pelvis of women who might require repeat cesarean sections. I couldn’t work out if or why cesarean sections were against the Catholic “ethos” in themselves, but they were considered high-risk procedures in the past; the fear seemed to be that women, rather than take the risks, might employ some form of artificial contraception, or undergo sterilization. In practice, symphysiotomies gave women crippling bone injuries and permanent bowel and bladder problems; those who gave birth to further children were often left bedridden. Again, these barbarities were prescribed by the Church, but enforced enthusiastically by its many willing lay helpers.

  Across the road, a mass was giving out; All Saints’ Day was a holy day of obligation, but that didn’t carry the force it had in former times; even though it was early enough for workers to attend, none of the people streaming out of the church was under sixty; most looked eighty. Maybe the good old days were coming to an end at last.

  The article about medical practices named several obstetricians, most of them either dead or struck off; the list of names included Dr. John Howard. The other name I noted was the writer’s: Martha O’Connor.

  Dave Donnelly phoned as I was driving south, and told me to meet him in the car park of the Castlehill Hotel. I parked beneath the aching trees and crunched across the gravel, through horse chestnut shells and sycamore mulch, to his blue, unmarked car. I got in the passenger side, Dave flexing his massive neck right and left to make sure no one was looking. Then he turned on me.

  “You’re some bollocks, Ed. You know what that kind of shit looks? Like you think you can do as you please because I’ll protect you. Telling a DS to fuck off. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “I’m sorry. I was tired.”

  “Don’t think Fiona Reed hasn’t heard either. The word’s gone out. That’s everyone gunning for you, Ed, any excuse, speeding, drunk and disorderly, vagrancy-”

  “Vagrancy?”

  “Yeah. Walking while Loy. I’m telling you, you better have something to offer in all this, or you’re fucked. And I can do nothing. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. And they’re having the CCTV footage enhanced, so you’re probably fucked anyway. You were there, weren’t you?”

  Instead of answering, I gave Dave everything I could on the Emily Howard kidnap. When I finished, he said, “Were you at David Brady’s place? Did you interfere with a crime scene?”

  “How’s it looking with Shane Howard?”

  Dave looked at me hard, then waved a meaty hand in the air and snorted like a horse bothered by flies he knows he’s bigger than but has to put up with.

  “The killer was someone she knew,” he said.

  “Or someone she was showing the house to-she was going to get close to strangers too, especially if they were men.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Her phone calls. I spoke to her about half-ten yesterday morning.”

  “You were one of the last people to see her alive.”

  “She took at least two business calls while I was there, at least by her manner I assume they were business.”

  “Her phone wasn’t at the scene. We’re waiting on the service provider to give us the details. Anything else?”

  “Classy move, sticking Jessica Howard beside the Martin woman in the papers today.”

  “Fiona Reed’s call.”

  “So Howard’s the prime suspect then.”

  “Of course he fucking is. Why? Because he’s the husband.”

  I once worked a case in L.A. for a husband the Hollywood cops were convinced had killed his wife who had been photographed in San Francisco’s Chinatown signing a business deal at the moment his wife had been shot dead: neighbors heard the shots, and heard a car screeching away minutes afterward, so the TOD was firm. The detective in charge of the case explained to me that even if the husband had been photographed signing a business deal in China, they’d still make him their prime suspect. When I asked him why, he told me if I’d ever been married, I’d understand the guy with most reason to kill his wife is always the husband. As it turned out, my client was guilty; he had killed his wife that morning and hired a petty hood to fire a gun in the air and drive away at the moment he was establishing his alibi. But someone had spotted the driver, and as soon as the cops caught him, he gave the guy up. Moral of the story, for the cops at any rate, and I was more of a cop than I was anything else: it’s always the husband, even when it can’t be.

  “We know Jessica Howard liked to play away. She was a regular in the Sunday papers sure, in some nightclub with some racing driver or footballer. Maybe she pushed Howard too far. Maybe David Brady was the last straw, his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That’s not right, is it? His blood is up, he has to do it. He’s over to Brady’s flat, does him, then charges back up to Castlehill and kills his wife.”

  “You haven’t enough, have you?”

  “That would be an operational matter.”

  “In other words, no.”

  “In other words, fuck away out of the car before someone spots me talking to you,” Dave growled.

  “Anything on Stephen Casey?” I said.

  He handed me a three-by-five index card with a name and number on it.

  “That’s the man who worked the case.”

  “What case?”

  “You can find out. Now get out of the car.”

  I shut the car door, and Dave started the engine. As he was about to pull away, I leaned in the passenger window.

  “Dave, get Brady’s hard drive on his computers analyzed. His e-mails, who he sent attachments to.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it. Look for homemade porn films, and follow who he sent them to.”

  “Ed, were you there? You were fucking there, weren’t you?”

  “Thanks, Dave,” I said, and meant it. “I’ll give you what I
get as soon as I can.”

  “I can’t keep looking out for you if you’re hell-bent on behaving like a cunt,” Dave said, and drove away without meeting my eye.

  Twelve

  I WALKED QUICKLY BACK TO MY CAR BENEATH THE LOWERING sky. My first idea was to brace Sean Moon. I drove slowly through Woodpark. Waiting at the lights by the Woodpark Inn, I saw Jonathan O’Connor crossing the main road and entering the car park toward the lounge. He wore a long black crombie overcoat and a black baseball hat, and he walked with a swagger I hadn’t seen in him before.

  I drove on down into Honeypark as the mist was blowing in again. At least, mist was what I thought it was at first. Then I amended it to fog, thick and grey, belching across the sky. I passed the three massive bonfire sites, two of which were still smoking; some of the houses nearest the bonfires had blown-out windows; a couple had scorched walls and melted drainage pipes. The fog was gusting through the air, dark, almost black, and there was a heat to it, and then, as I rounded the corner for Moon’s house, a red glow behind it, and I saw it wasn’t fog at all, it was smoke: Sean Moon’s house was ablaze, and a ring of onlookers shielded themselves from the heat as it went up. I could hear sirens. I parked and approached on foot as a Garda car, an ambulance and the fire service arrived. A round man with no neck in a round neck pullover with a newspaper rolled beneath his arm on the edge of the crowd was pulling ferociously on a short squat cigarette and making a succession of knowing faces and noises, all of which seemed intended to indicate that nothing he was seeing came as a surprise to him.

  “Just go up, did it?” I said.

  “If you want to believe that, you’re welcome, bud,” No Neck said.

  “What do you mean, it was started deliberately?”

  “And if you want to put words in my mouth, that’s another thing.”

  He took a step toward me, scowling, his eyes watering. He smelled of stale smoke and fresh booze and despair at nine thirty in the morning. I fronted off a little, turning my head so that he’d notice the wound on my face. He noticed it and stepped back.

  “Was there anyone in there?” I asked. “Was Moon there?”

  “Moon? Why would Moon be there? Fuckin’ runner in.”

  “I thought he owned the house. I was talking to him there yesterday.”

  “Were you now?” No Neck suddenly sounded interested. “What about, bud? The blue movies, was it?”

  “What do you know about the blue movies?”

  “I heard they were shooting them in there. Young ones, in the nip. And they were going to be selling them. Is that true?”

  “It might be,” I said. “But listen, if Moon doesn’t own the house, who does?”

  No Neck’s face went blank, as if a switch had been flicked to close it down. I found a five-euro note in my pocket and wafted it at him. His eyes clicked on like two balls of a fruit machine jackpot.

  “No names. But it’s well for some who can be buying pubs and houses all round here and drinks on the house up the rugby club for all the nobs. Well for fuckin’ some, isn’t that right, bud?”

  Brock Taylor again. You couldn’t keep him out of this. I gave No Neck the five. He grabbed my arm to thank me, but I shook him loose, gave him a wink and a thumbs-up and doubled back to my car. I could hear No Neck calling after me as I walked through the smoke, a series of chants whose alternate refrains were “Young Ones in the Nip,” and “Well for Fuckin’ Some.”

  I parked outside a semidetached house within view of the Woodpark Inn. I had been gone only fifteen minutes; chances were Jonathan was still in there. After an hour I began to doubt it; after two I was ready to give it up as a bad job. It was just as well I didn’t; about fifteen minutes later he came out, followed by Darren and Wayne Reilly. Wayne had a bandaged nose, I was happy to see. The three of them stood in the car park and nodded in a congratulatory kind of way at each other for a few minutes and then dispersed. The company he keeps.

  On my way out to visit Dan McArdle, the retired Garda detective, I called Sandra Howard and apologized for not having been in touch sooner.

  “That’s all right. No one got much sleep here last night.”

  “I can imagine. How is Emily faring?”

  “She’s very upset, as you can imagine. David Manuel is with her. He always has a calming effect. Ed, Denis said you were there. You saw the…body. Do you think Shane…?”

  “I don’t know, Sandra, is the answer. I don’t know. But I’m working on the basis that he didn’t.”

  “You’re still with us then. Thank God for that. Denis says he doesn’t think they have enough to charge him.”

  “That’s probably right,” I said.

  “Ed, I owe you an apology. For last night.”

  “Which part of last night?”

  “The slapping part.”

  “Good. Because I’m not sorry about the other part.”

  “Neither am I. I hoped that…that we might do it again. Soon.”

  “So did I.”

  We let that hang for a while.

  “Ed?”

  “I’m here.”

  But not for much longer. The traffic was getting busy as I took the Tallaght exit off the M50, and I needed to concentrate on the road.

  “I’m going to have to hang up in a minute, Sandra.”

  “Stephen Casey,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Richard O’Connor, my first husband. He was married before. His wife was killed, stabbed to death by an intruder. Rock was injured. The man-boy really, he was only seventeen-the boy who killed her-”

  “That was Stephen Casey?”

  “Yes. He killed himself. Drove a car off Bayview Harbour. They found him on All Souls’ Day, 1985. I couldn’t…I should have told you, but with everything that had happened, I just…didn’t want to go back there. Do you understand, Ed?”

  What was it David Manuel had said about the Howards? It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts.

  “Of course I understand. I’ll see you soon.”

  I broke the connection as she began to ask me when. I didn’t trust myself with Sandra Howard. I was glad she had told me about Stephen Casey, but I wasn’t sure if she had told me everything. It was going to have to be my job to find out, and it was probably wiser if I kept my distance while I did. I didn’t want to keep my distance though, and I doubted very much that I would.

  I drove out through a series of industrial estates and drive-in shopping parks. Housing developments fanned back toward the hills, and gleaming new apartment blocks were dotted along the main road, some with cranes still hovering above them. Between Tallaght and Jobstown, I turned off the road and pulled into a new apartment complex called Sycamore Fields. It had some desultory strips of landscaping around it, and about a dozen spindly sycamores wilting under the burden of the name; to one side there was a petrol station, to the other, a DIY warehouse. Dan McArdle buzzed me in and was waiting on the eleventh floor when the elevator doors opened. His apartment was not as high-end as David Brady’s-the fixtures and fittings were cheaper, and the furniture was basic and functional-but it was more like it than not; there was a dormitory feeling that this was a roof beneath which to sleep, not a home in which anyone would want to live, or certainly not for any length of time. Dan McArdle, steel grey hair gleaming, in a brown three-piece suit, shirt and tie and carpet slippers, told me to take a seat at the dining table, itself a mere step from the kitchen and living areas. While he was making tea I hadn’t asked for, through the walls I could hear a shower running, a TV tuned to a news channel and a woman having a tortured telephone conversation with an errant boyfriend. The neat, clean room smelled of smoke and fried food and pine air freshener. McArdle presented me with a mug of tea and a digestive biscuit and sat opposite me with the same.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “Fantastic, isn’t it?” he announced heartily, in a rich old buttermilk-thick Dublin accent. “The wife died, and I was roaming around the semi, no kids,
so I sold the thing, got a great price, bought three of these yokes, live in one, rent out the other two, great investments, on top of the Garda pension, not too bad at all.”

  He dunked his digestive in his tea and sucked at it. He was maybe seventy, silver thatch eyebrows, dark grey eyes, jutting chin smooth and glowing with aftershave; his jacket sagged on his big frame, and his shirt was loose around the folds of his shrinking neck; a physically powerful man getting used to the diminution of his powers, or to something worse. As if he could read my thoughts, he produced a package of Major cigarettes and pulled an ashtray between us.

  “Lung cancer. They can do shag all, excuse me French, except tell me to stop. They can shag off, am I wrong?”

  He lit a cigarette, took a long drag and then coughed for a few minutes. I went to the sink and got him a cup of water-I couldn’t find a glass. He drank the water and put his cigarette back in his mouth, I lit a cigarette of my own, and we sat for a while, smoking. The noise from the other apartments was so loud and clear it seemed to be coming from the very room we were in, but McArdle seemed inured to it, maybe even grateful for it, occasionally tapping his fingers to TV jingles or raising an eyebrow in mock sympathy if the girl on the phone yelled or cried especially plaintively.

  “I was hoping you might tell me something about Stephen Casey.”

  “So the bold Dave said. You were buddies from way back, is that so? Well, Dave was the first man to the house that time, hadn’t been a wet day on the job and I didn’t think he’d last after seeing what he seen, that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “Which house was this?”

  “Dr. O’Connor’s up in Castlehill, in a cul-de-sac there, just down from the hotel. The lad knocked on his door late, about nine it would have been. It was just getting dark, early autumn, August, September. Maybe they shouldn’t have opened it at all. But sure, it was a doctor’s house, used to callers, and anyway, who wouldn’t’ve answered the door back in those days? It’s only today we think like that.”