The Color of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “French and English.”

  “In both your classes?”

  “In my French class. I didn’t teach him English.”

  “What kind of…I understand you had a close relationship with Stephen Casey. Who was the son of a servant of the family, wasn’t he?”

  Sandra forced a tight smile.

  “I’m going to have a brandy. Would you like another brandy, Ed Loy?”

  “I would, yes.”

  Sandra made two more drinks, gave me one and took a deep hit of hers, which she drank neat.

  “I had…what would be called now an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with Stephen Casey. I could say I was in grief at the death of my father, which I was, and that in this grief my long-lost libido had returned with a vengeance, which it had, and that I was sick to death being the eldest child good girl who always knew better, which I was, and I didn’t want to waste time dating the kind of twerps and bozos who would go out with a frumpy old-before-her-time deputy headmistress without the handcuffs, which I didn’t; and they could all sound like excuses, which they aren’t. But basically, he was seventeen, and a brilliant pupil in my French class, and our housekeeper’s son, although she didn’t live in, and I seduced him, and it was inappropriate, as I’ve said, highly so, and dangerous, and very bad, and totally unexpected, and for a few months both of us had an absolutely fucking brilliant time.”

  She laughed then, a rueful, joyous, filthy laugh, and it was hard not to laugh along with her.

  “Although, you know, maybe if he’d lived, he would have found that I’d abused him and caused him untold and unaccountable distress, even if he was fucking seventeen and we could have got married, simply because I was his teacher. Who knows these days?”

  She drank some more of her brandy. I looked at mine, but I wasn’t sure I needed any more.

  “And then the nightmare began. Rock’s wife murdered, and Stephen vanished, and then the car brought to the surface in Bayview Sound, ahhhhh…”

  She shook her head until her hair fell forward, shook it back and forth, like a maenad, or a teenage girl headbanging into a speaker bin.

  “And that was the extent of your connection with those events.”

  “‘And that was the extent of your connection with those events Jesus Christ what a pencil-licking prick you sound like Edward Loy.”

  Her voice singsong and flaring with temper, her green eyes flashing red.

  “I am a pencil-licking prick. That is, before everything else, what I am.”

  “Do you really need me to spell it out? After…”

  She gestured around the room: the rumpled, damp sheets, the reek of sex, the brandy smoking in the glasses.

  I could live with this woman until the end of time. The blood beating in my ears, like wings.

  “Yes, I need you to spell it out.”

  Sandra stood then and looked down at me, calm again, cold, in fact, and I understood, whatever happened, there would almost certainly be no way back, and I almost hoped she was guilty of it all, of anything, so the pain I was going to feel might be lessened, or justified.

  “I did not have anything to do with the murder of Audrey O’Connor, either myself or in conspiracy with Denis Finnegan and/or Richard O’Connor. I didn’t…groom Stephen Casey, isn’t that the expression? I didn’t groom him to kill her, or to rob her house. I didn’t have a relationship with Denis or Richard. I hadn’t a notion, I stumbled about in a mist the whole time, I felt I could barely see. Is that enough on that?”

  I nodded. She went out of the room and was gone for a few minutes. I wondered whether I should get dressed. When she came back in, wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt, I wished I had. She sat in a chair and smiled at me. No handcuffs or whips, but I felt I’d been hauled naked before the deputy headmistress. I swallowed some brandy and smiled right back.

  “All right,” I said. “How did you get involved with Dr. O’Connor?”

  She shook her head and made a pained face at the open door, as if to an invisible jury in the corridor she knew would acquit her.

  “I suppose we had grief in common. We were both trying to put our lives back together…and he helped me to reassemble mine. He was very strong, very brave…”

  “Did he not have reservations at becoming close to someone who had been the lover of his wife’s murderer?”

  “He didn’t know that. He…who told you that anyway? Because it was far from common knowledge, it…maybe some people suspected, but no one could have known for sure.”

  “The Garda detective who investigated, Dan McArdle, had very strong suspicions.”

  “I remember him. In his three-piece suit that looked like it had been carved out of wood and an anorak over it. Couldn’t take his eyes off my tits the whole time he questioned me.”

  “All right then, let’s assume Dr.-Dr. Rock, is that what I should call him?”

  “That’s what everyone else called him.”

  “Let’s assume Dr. Rock didn’t know about your affair with the dead boy. What was it, do you think, that drew you to an older man, when you said before older men weren’t your type?”

  “What are you, a private dick or a shrink? Why should I answer that?”

  Dead boy, private dick. This was more of a lovers’ quarrel than a case.

  I drained my brandy and got out of bed and started to put some clothes on.

  “You don’t have to answer any of my questions. But it would help if you did. I’m convinced what happened yesterday is linked to what happened twenty years ago, that to keep your brother out of jail, we need to solve Audrey O’Connor’s murder. You say you were in a mist back then, you couldn’t see what was going on. Well you’re still in that mist tonight, and so is Shane, only now Emily is caught in it too, and Jonathan, and Martha O’Connor. I’m trying to clear it. I’m not trying to bully you, or pry into your private affairs. You can help me here. Or you can hold fast to a past you don’t pretend to understand and leave yourself and everyone else you know stumbling, blind, lost.”

  I went to her, reached a hand to her face. She stopped it before it touched her cheek, held it to her lips and looked up at me.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, and sat on the bed.

  “I guess a shrink might say…I didn’t use one, but it seems fairly obvious…that having lost my father, I was drawn to another…father figure. But I didn’t see Rock like that, or not only like that, not at first…I wasn’t attracted to him initially, we became friends first, then the attraction grew, although it turned out he’d been nursing a bit of a pash for me…but he was very fit, physically, we had a good sex life, he was…volatile and energetic and unpredictable, he wasn’t this…I don’t know, safe harbor, that’s what I always think of when I hear the words ‘father figure,’ safe harbor, like a fucking retirement home-”

  “But your own father wasn’t like that either, was he?”

  “No, I guess he wasn’t. He certainly wasn’t. And he was inspirational, or he would have been, if he wasn’t so difficult to live up to.”

  “You told me this, that you had no confidence, that Rock made you believe in yourself. Was that not something you had from your father?”

  “Father was very…it was the old style, never praise, if you got a B in your exams, you should have got an A, get an A and it’s no more than was expected. After a while, that wears you down, you feel you’ll never do anything worthy of his attention and respect. And so you don’t.”

  “That’s why you didn’t do medicine?”

  “And why Shane did dentistry. That was a real fuck-you to the old man. I was angry at the time. But now…”

  She dropped her head into her hand, pressed her eyes between thumb and forefinger.

  “I’m sorry. Keep going,” she said.

  “Your parents’ sex life. You said they had separate bedrooms, was that just through your father’s illness, or-”

  “Oh God no, they hadn’t slept together since Ma…since…I t
hink Father had an affair, or something…at least I assume that’s what it was, Mother never spoke about it…from when we were, I don’t know, teenagers. It was…I don’t know.”

  She shrugged, blushing, not wanting, like any of us I suppose, to go within ten miles of her parents’ sex life.

  “What was that you said, ‘Since Ma’…?”

  “Since Ma…found out, I suppose I was going to say. About the affair.”

  “You didn’t call your mother ‘Ma,’ did you? Posh girl like you?”

  “Hark at the little urchin lad. No, I didn’t, but Stephen did. So I did sometimes. Affectation.”

  “Social sliding. Below stairs slumming.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Stephen Casey. Is there any way on earth you would have expected him to do what he did?”

  “I still can’t believe it. Apart from anything else…I mean, I know he might have thought of himself as a charity case-or rather, some of his charming fellow pupils might have accused him of being one-but he wasn’t chippy in the slightest. He was a brilliant rugby player-that’s where I began to take a real interest in the game.”

  She grinned in a hungry way.

  “You said you weren’t attracted to the boys who played rugby.”

  “Yes. Well, that was a lie. That was before I’d decided to tell you about the affair with Stephen.”

  “Now would be a good time to clear up any more lies.”

  “No more lies, your honor.”

  “So there’s no way in which you can explain why he would do such a thing.”

  She shook her head.

  “I mean, say if he had harbored grudges, people have more money than me, I’m going to get me some no matter what I have to do-and then he ends up with a bag of old ornaments. What is that about?”

  “He wanted to steal big money, but the presence of the child, of Martha O’Connor, threw him off, brought him to his senses, he panicked and ran. And then, realizing what a mess he’d made of it all, how he’d murdered a woman in front of her husband and child, he took the only rational course open to him, and killed himself.”

  “I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it,” Sandra said.

  “Was there ever a time when you wondered if Rock had been the one to groom Stephen Casey? I know he wasn’t happy in his marriage to Audrey-”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Martha told me.”

  “Did she now? Well, then it must be true. Did she suggest her father had wanted his wife murdered? Nothing that woman said would surprise me.”

  “She speaks very highly of you too.”

  “She never gave me a chance. I went down on my hands and knees for that child, and she never gave me a chance-”

  “She was just a child, a traumatized child who’d seen her mother murdered-”

  Sandra was shaking, suddenly full of emotion, her burning eyes brimming with tears.

  “We all had our troubles, you know. We all had our troubles.”

  The emotion boiled over, sobs erupting from wherever they were stored. I went to hold her, but she shook her head and ran from the room. Down the corridor I heard her weeping, then a door slamming. The teenage symphony, Sandra had called it yesterday. It seemed, for the Howards, the melody lingered on long past the teenage years.

  I checked my watch: I was going to be late for David Manuel. I went down the great circular stairs. I wondered whether there was anything in Emily’s room worth my attention. I went back through the arch, crossed the rear hall and tried the double doors, which were open. There were no servants around, which surprised me, but in this instance, made life easier. Darkness lay ahead. I went along the white passageway that led to the bungalow, trying for lights at each corner until I found a panel and threw them all on. I knocked on Emily’s door a couple of times, then tried it. The room was empty, and all her stuff was gone: no clothes in the wardrobe, no boots beneath the bed. There was a drug company notepad but no notes had been made, or at least, if there had, there were no indentations to tell what the content might have been. I did the usual trawl: drawers, cupboards, bedside table, mattress, bed linen, came up with nothing. All I could find was, on the windowsill, a line of rowan berries spread across from edge to edge. There was another line on top of the lintel, and another layer on the carpet just inside the doorstop. Maybe, like heliotrope, it had some special meaning. Or maybe Emily had just become very bored, and had left before she coated the entire room with the red and green fruit.

  Back in Rowan House, all was quiet. I walked down along the rear corridor, which was hung with horse-racing prints and had a tiny marble holy water font wall-mounted beside each door. I saw two grandly decorated sitting rooms in a Victorian style, all heavy drapes and mahogany furniture and chintz, and the inevitable portraits of John Howard, who must have had artists queuing up to paint him. A couple of doors were locked, a couple opened onto musty bathrooms, there was a bedroom with a brown leather chaise and a rolltop desk and a wall of diplomas and degrees that I imagined was Howard’s, then a room where the light didn’t work. I pushed the door open and went across to the window and opened the curtains. It was a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper. There was a beautiful old dollhouse, and a teddy bear and a blue pig with only one ear lay on the pillow, as if waiting for the girl who owned them to come to bed. The wardrobe was full of dresses and skirts that might fit an eleven-or twelve-year-old girl, including school uniform pinafores and kilts in red and green tartan; the chest of drawers was packed with tops and shorts and underwear for the same. There wasn’t a speck of dust; everything was fresh and clean and smelled of lavender. I crossed the room and looked at the dollhouse, which sat on a table near the window. It was a model of Rowan House, just as I had seen in Emily’s room, with two differences: there was no garden plinth beneath it, and the roof opened. I turned it around and lifted the roof and looked underneath when the door flew open behind me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing in here? Who gave you permission to wander about the house?”

  Sandra Howard stood in the doorway in a white cotton shift, hair pulled up and back, face drained of blood, eyes ablaze.

  “I was just having a look around,” I said, working hard to get the words out. “Was this your room?”

  “Of course it wasn’t my room…yes, yes, it was, ages ago, now come on, out of here-”

  “Why is it preserved like this? It’s as if-”

  “It’s not ‘preserved,’ I went away to school, that’s all, it’s not ‘as if’ anything, now for God’s sake, will you get out?”

  Her voice had become a shrill, hard, screech, with the grace notes of hysteria. I walked past her in the wide doorway. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  In the hall, I waited for her to say good night, but she didn’t come.

  I shut the great doors of Rowan House behind me, two images vivid in my brain. One was of the haunted expression in Sandra’s eyes, the shadow across her suddenly gaunt face, as she said, “We all had our troubles, you know.”

  The other was what I saw beneath the dollhouse roof: Mary and Joseph and some wise men and an angel from a child’s crib in a ring around a Barbie doll on all fours with a hole punched between her spread legs and red painted around the hole and an Action Man doll kneeling behind the hole, between her legs. On the inside of the roof in red were daubed the words “I should be ashamed of myself.”

  Part Three. ALL SOULS’ DAY

  He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowring.

  O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

  Matthew 16: 2-3

  Twenty-one

  I DROVE TO HENNESSY’S IN BAYVIEW, WHERE EVERYTHING is available at a price, and Tommy met me in the car park and gave me a small bottle of GHB.

  “Be careful with it man,�
�� he said. “Very easy to OD, specially mixing with booze.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Tommy.”

  “Are you sure this is the right way to go?” he said. He was so used to my being the reliable one that, whenever it looked like I was getting wayward, Tommy got very grave and paternal. It always made me smile, and I was always glad of it.

  “I’ll only use it in an emergency,” I said.

  GHB in small doses works a little like Ecstasy; in conjunction with booze, it can knock a man out. I didn’t like using it, but I could hear the clock ticking.

  I drove through the night with the windows open and the damp night air blowing in, trying to breathe, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. I remembered what David Manuel had said: It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts; I wondered how much he knew, and what more Emily had told him: would she confirm that Sandra had been abused by her father? What might she add about herself? I called Manuel, but his phone was off; I left a message saying I was on my way, but I would be late.

  When I turned into the square I could smell the smoke clearly; no confusing it with fog this time. I got out of the car and saw it pouring out the top of Manuel’s house. There was no fire brigade, no ambulance or police, just a few neighbors gathering, and what appeared to be Manuel’s hysterical family running up and down the garden; I recognized his wife standing in the doorway.

  “Mrs. Manuel, I’m Ed Loy, I saw your husband this morning. I’m a detective.”

  “He’s trapped up there. Please, can you try and reach him?”

  A tall girl of about fifteen with the same dark coloring as Manuel’s wife was crying. She turned to me.

  “The flames are coming down the stairs.”

  I went into the house and started up the stairs; by the third floor, the smoke was too thick to see, and the heat was unbearable; I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t see the flames but I could hear their rumbling crackle, like some infernal engine.

  I went down and out through the kitchen into the back garden. An old metal fire escape ran from the first floor to the third; I shinned up onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension and climbed the spindly ladder until the pitched roof lay above me. Through the dark window of the attic room, I could see the red flames glowing like trammeled rage. I couldn’t see David Manuel, and reckoned he must have passed out from smoke inhalation; the roof tiles were concrete, and I thought if I could work a few loose and hurl them at the window, I might break it, let some air in and hopefully bring him back to consciousness; I worried that the air would drive the flames higher; as it turned out, plan and worry were all in vain. I flung one tile at the Velux window; it almost bounced off the double-glazed glass, skittered down the roof and fell the long three stories to smash on the paving stones below. As if this was some kind of occult summons, Manuel suddenly rose up in the window, an apparition in green, arms and shoulders on fire; his hands reached for the window’s release bar, and the red flames behind him danced higher as he forced the window open and there was a roar from within like a beast in torment and Manuel came out headfirst onto the roof above me. His back and his long hair were on fire now, his movements agonized, staccato, like an insect on a grill; I called to him, but he was beyond hearing, beyond vision. He moved on hands and knees down the roof, and looked like he might crawl right off the edge; I tried to reach across and grab him, but just then he stood up and stepped out into the night and fell like a burning angel, down into the garden below.