The Color of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “Did you take them from Rowan House?”

  Emily nodded.

  “This morning the cops came and asked me questions about Mum, and David. They talked to Sandra too. And then David Manuel showed up, and Sandra felt it was safe to go off to the clinic to boss people around, the way she likes. And I talked to David a while, then he left.”

  “What did you say to David Manuel?”

  “Not a lot. Not then. I spoke to him again later. I forgot, before then I had another row with my cousin, because he thought I shouldn’t be talking to David, and I thought he should. I said it was time to tell the truth about everything. But Jonny, my God, he is a true Howard, he wants to keep it all covered up. And…oh, other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?”

  Emily rolled her eyes.

  “He wanted to have sex with me. He always wants to have sex with me. And I haven’t for ages, except in that fucking porno. That was David Brady’s idea, to spite me, or get back at me for dumping him, or something. And I suppose I thought, well maybe it would be better than a complete stranger. You see, normal again. So he stormed off in his long black coat. I always slag him, he looks like one of those guys who shoot up classrooms.”

  “Jonathan said you had sex together all afternoon, in the house in Honeypark.”

  “He said that? How could we have? He wasn’t fucking there.”

  “He what? Where was he?”

  “He took off in the morning and came back not long before you arrived. He looked in a bad way.”

  “He said that’s what you did. And that when you came back, you showered and changed all your clothes.”

  Emily stared at me, her blackened eyes widening.

  “Jesus Christ. He was trying to point the finger at me.”

  “Did he shower and change his clothes when he came back?”

  She nodded, and tears sprang into her eyes again.

  “Why would he want people to think I had killed anyone?”

  “Maybe he was afraid I might think he had. Did you leave the house in Honeypark?”

  “For a while. I went to see Jerry at the Woodpark Inn, his band was supposed to have a rehearsal. But I couldn’t find him.”

  “That would have been what time?”

  “About midday. I had a cup of coffee there, came back around two. Still no sign of Jonny.”

  “All right. Let’s get back to yesterday. After you had the row with Jonny.”

  “He stormed off. And I was left alone. Sandra had given the staff the day off. So I went through to the old house. Wandered about, looking for…you know, something wrong.”

  “And you found all these?” I said, indicating the photograph albums and journals.

  “I don’t think Sandra wanted me to have them. Thought I’d grab them while the coast was clear. Also, I went into a room…a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper-”

  “I was in that room too.”

  “And a dolls’ house model of Rowan House.”

  “Did you look under the roof?”

  She nodded and swallowed hard.

  “You must have turned the flap back to face the wall again.”

  “I thought it was Sandra’s room. I thought, here it is, I’ve found it at last, Aunt Sandra was abused by my grandfather, that’s what’s wrong…and I went back to my room in the bungalow, with the photograph albums, I didn’t know what I was going to do, who I could tell. I mean, the idea of telling Dad, he’d just lose it. You cannot say a thing about Sandra, or about Granddad.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I gathered up all the books and papers, I rang a cab, and I got out of there. I came straight here, and Jerry let me in. And before I could tell him what I had seen, he showed me the photo of Marian and the clipping. And it all fit: the girl’s room preserved as if she was still alive, but frozen at the age of twelve. And we decided we should go to the cemetery-”

  “How did you know where it was?”

  “It was written on the back of the photograph. We’d go there and put the picture on the headstone if there was one, and…I don’t know what we thought after that. We were too upset, at least I was. Twelve years old. Jesus.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “I phoned David Manuel…and Jonathan. I thought he had a right to know. His aunt too, she would have been. He freaked out completely. Said I wasn’t to tell anyone else, that this was the family’s business, and it should be kept within the family.”

  “You told him you had told David Manuel then?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  I thought about how Manuel had died, and who might have done it, and decided Emily didn’t need to know that yet.

  “No reason. Is there anything in the journals?”

  “I’m going through them. Accounts of holidays, bridge evenings, family gatherings around the piano, that sort of thing. Occasionally the kids are allowed to write things. Here’s one from Sandra:

  Went with Dad to see Seafield play Old Wesley. Seafield won 24-16. I had a bag of Tayto and a Trigger Bar. Dad said it was a great try from Rock O’Connor. Kept warm in my new coat with fur trim hood and fur pom-poms.

  “That was in 1968, she would have been eight or nine.”

  “She sounds like an ordinary girl of eight or nine,” I said.

  Neither of us looked at each other, or said what was on our minds: that she wasn’t an ordinary little girl, or that if she had been, she wasn’t for long. I gave Emily my card.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “If you come across anything you think I should know about, call me. The other person you might like to talk to is Martha O’Connor, do you know who I mean?”

  Emily smiled.

  “Jonny’s half sister? The journalist? I know who she is, I’ve never met her.”

  “If you can’t get hold of me, call her. She’s good at letting people know about things.”

  “You mean, she’s got a big mouth?”

  “In a good way.”

  I left Emily on the floor, poring over the spidery writing in one of a pile of Mary Howard’s journals, then turned at the front door and came back.

  “Two things: the other dollhouse, the one in your bedroom in Bayview-have you always had that?”

  “No. No, that came from Granny Howard too, she left it to me. I’ve barely looked at it, to be honest. What’s the other thing?”

  “There’s rowan berries across the threshold out there. What’s going on with that? That was you left them up at Marian’s grave as well, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “They’re supposed to ward off evil spirits. They say.”

  “Hasn’t worked out very well so far, has it?”

  Emily rubbed the rings on her fingers together.

  “We live in hope, Ted. We live in hope.”

  Twenty-four

  PAT TRACY LIVED IN ONE OF A TERRACE OF THREE SMALL houses that opened onto the street just around the corner from the Anchor Bar. Martha O’Connor’s text had assured me that he stayed up late, and sure enough, his lights were on when I got there. I identified myself through the letterbox, and he opened the door and looked me up and down. We recognized each other immediately, or at least, I recognized him: he was a regular in the Anchor, where he was to be found consulting a newspaper for times of the tides, dispensing the occasional piece of information about alterations in ferry timetables, or gale warnings, or how EU fishing regulations were endangering the entire industry. Silent John called him the Captain, but I think the name was derisive in intent. He had a lined face and false teeth that didn’t fit properly that he liked to work back and forth on his gums, and he wore a flat cap that shone with grime. I sat in his tiny front room at a battered Formica table, and with great ceremony he poured the remainder of the pint bottle of Guinness he had open into a grimy half-pint glass he unearthed from his scary kitchen. I didn’t really want it, certainly not from that glass, but you couldn’t turn down a man’s hospitality. An old paperback copy of Sin
k the Bismarck! was open by his place at the table; a pale terrier slumbered in a cane basket; the house smelled of stale bread and damp dog.

  “I worked the piers most of me life,” Pat announced, “night watchman for coal importers, yacht clubs, lobstermen, engineering works, outboard motor sales, ships in for repairs, watched over the lot. Eyes and ears. That’s what they paid me for, son, eyes and ears.”

  “I wanted to ask you about a woman called Eileen Harvey. She was also known as Eileen Casey and Eileen Dalton.”

  “She had a few aliases, is that what you’re telling me?” He pronounced it “al-aye-asses.”

  “Something like that. You were the chief, in fact the only, witness to her disappearance.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Oh, was I now?” His tone had assumed a knowing, skeptical quality, as if to warn me that he was not a man who liked to be summed up in such narrow terms. “Was I indeed?” he said, giving equal weight to each word, like a prosecuting counsel in a television film.

  “You were. According to you, she left her clothes in a pile on the East pier and took a flier into the water, and you called Air-Sea rescue and who knows what else, and they never found her, and that was the end of that.”

  “And how do you know all this, Mr. Loy?”

  “Because it was in the newspapers, and on the TV as well. Because you told everyone.”

  Pat sat back at this and gave his dentures a good flex, then appeared to concede the charges.

  “And if I did?” he said, as if throwing the gauntlet back to me across a crowded courtroom.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “just how much the lady paid you. I take it she was pretty. What was the story, a boyfriend who beat her?”

  He stared at me for a few seconds, then looked away, then stared at me again. At first I thought he was having trouble remembering who I was, and it occurred to me that I had never been in the Anchor without his having been present. That kind of intake over years leads to all sorts of short-term memory issues, and can make the drabbest evening home alone a thrill ride of unexpected sights (A door there? I don’t remember that!) and surprise treats (A drink for me, freshly poured? Don’t mind if I do!). But then it emerged that this was merely part of his adversarial strategy.

  “The point is,” he began, and then paused for what presumably was intended to be dramatic effect. The pause went on for so long, however, that it began to look like he had forgotten what the point was. Even the slumbering terrier seemed to yawn in his sleep. Suddenly, and at terrific volume, Pat shouted: “NOT! The point is NOT!” I wondered whether I’d have to go back to the beginning and start again, when, in a completely different voice, at once milder, more flexible and altogether cannier, as if Pat himself had fallen asleep and his twin brother had emerged from another room to help out, he said, “The point is not whether I saw her, or what she paid. The point is why you’re looking for her, and what’s it worth to you.”

  Stated as plainly as that, the comedy seemed to bleed quickly from the scene. As often in situations like this, I found I couldn’t think of anything but the truth.

  “I think she can help me with the unexplained death of a twelve-year-old girl. I think she can explain how this girl came to die. I also want to reunite her with her long-lost son.”

  It was nothing but the truth, yet I could see its effect on Pat Tracy in terms of the melodramas it evidently reminded him of. His eyes glowed with excitement; he rocked back and forth in his chair, his gums working his teeth rhythmically, like maracas underwater.

  I produced a ten-euro note and laid it on the table. He glanced at it, then inclined himself away from me by forty-five degrees, picked up Sink the Bismarck! held it in front of his nose with one hand and began to read. The effect of this move was undermined a little by his holding the book upside down. I added a twenty to the ten, which he appeared to look on with more favor, before returning to his “reading.” I decided to employ some strategy of my own by whipping both notes away, standing up and walking to the window, as if in high dudgeon. I could see his reflection in the glass. He was peering at the table, as if the money was still there but had somehow been absorbed by the wood. I turned slowly and deliberately, and then walked back and slapped a fifty down, leaving my hand on half of it. He looked at it, tried to pick it up, looked at me and nodded. I let it go, he snaked it away in a pocket, and I sat down again. Pat looked cautiously about the room, then leant in close to me.

  “She was a looker all right,” he said. “Said she was the victim of her da. Wanted to marry her off to some fat oul’ fella, so he could get the use of some land the oul’ fella had. But she was in love with a young lad, and since her da wouldn’t give his consent, she was going to elope with him, and what’s more, never see the da again.”

  “It sounds very harsh on the da,” I said.

  “Sure the da was beating her black-and-blue,” he said. “And other things.”

  “And you believed all that, did you?”

  Pat looked around again, then leant in and said, “I believed the twenty quid. Twenty year ago, twenty quid was twenty quid.”

  “And what else can you remember?”

  “About her? Nothing. She brought the clothes, left them in a heap, gave me the money and went off on her boyfriend’s motorbike.”

  “Did you see the boyfriend?”

  “Not really. He had one of those crash helmets on, you know the ones with the full-face visors.”

  I got up to go. I was pretty sure I knew who it was anyway. The final thing Pat Tracy said confirmed it.

  “I can tell you what make the bike was though. A Norton Commando. British engineering. Fair play to the Brits, they knew how to build a fucking motorbike.”

  I had parked down by the pier. As I headed down toward the car, I checked my messages; seemed a sure way of getting people to call you, no matter what time of night, was to turn off your phone: Dave Donnelly had rung five minutes ago; I called him straight back.

  “Dave, you’re working late.”

  “Thought you might be up worrying.”

  “Why would I be worrying?”

  “That we’d get some more CCTV footage of the Waterfront Apartments for the time leading up to David Brady’s murder.”

  “And did you?”

  “We did. There’s a camera across the street.”

  “And how is it looking for me, Dave? Should I invest in a solicitor? Or a helmet?”

  “Always wise to have both. Unfortunately, all it picks up of you is your back, just like the one inside the door.”

  “Or the back of a man my height in a black coat like mine.”

  “Don’t get fucking smart with me, Ed.”

  Sooner or later, Dave always reminded you who was in charge. I was under no illusion; he could run out of patience with me, and he probably would if I didn’t take care. But it was getting so I didn’t give a damn; worse, it was getting so I wanted to bring it to a head.

  “So we did get a fine look at Shane Howard, barreling in like a man whose blood is up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But before that, we have three young fellas, one lad we don’t know, in a long black coat and a black baseball cap; two we do: Darren and Wayne Reilly. You know them?”

  “I know who they are.”

  And where they are, and how they died.

  “Not sure how they avoided the camera in the lobby, maybe they went up the emergency stairs. Anyway, we have good sets of prints all over the gaff, all over the knife. Remember the knife, Ed?”

  “Sabatier carving knife? I’m not supposed to know about the knife, Dave.”

  “You’re some fuckin’ comedian, do you know that? How’d you like to be laughing the other side of your face?”

  “And a motive? Squabble over a coke deal?”

  “Something like that. Brady was a big customer of theirs. Friends of his say he was always arguing about paying them. They said Brady’s father is loaded, which accounts for the flash apartment, but he had thr
eatened to switch off the money supply if Brady’s rugby game didn’t improve. The old man thought Brady was too fond of the old party lifestyle.”

  “So where are you, up in Woodpark waiting for the Reillys to come home?”

  “We’ve a couple of roadblocks. Thought you should know, although fuck knows why. On a two-way street, the information has been strictly one-way for a long time. Don’t suppose you’ve anything for me?”

  How about the Reillys’ dead bodies, Sean Moon, the murder weapon and Brock Taylor? How about the murderer of Audrey O’Connor, Stephen Casey and Dr. Rock? How about the riddle of a dead child no one wants to remember, and a suicide that never was? Why is a father who abused at least one of his daughters commemorated like a plaster saint? And how does a burning man who fell to earth fit with it all? How about you do my job, Dave, and I sit on my arse until the Garda Technical Bureau comes up with matching prints? I looked out over the black murk of the bay, and breathed in the damp clog of the air, and nearly choked.

  “Jonathan O’Connor has a black baseball hat. And a long black coat.”

  “So do I. That it?”

  I wanted to give him the Reillys. But I wasn’t finished with Brock Taylor. And I had to keep Maria and Anita Kravchenko out of it; they’d be deported if I didn’t.

  “I’ve another call, Dave, I’ll talk to you soon.”

  I broke the connection before Dave had finished swearing at me. The other call was from Tommy. At first I couldn’t make head nor tail of it because his voice was so hushed; I thought he must have gone back on the booze, if not the whole medicine cabinet.

  “I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Tommy.”

  So he said it plain.

  “Sean Moon is in your house.”

  I drove too fast to Quarry Fields; it was five minutes from the pier and I made it in three. And I didn’t think enough about what I was doing; I probably should have bided my time. But at three in the morning, it’s easier to lead with your chin than use your head. I parked across the road and up a stretch by a maroon BMW I couldn’t remember seeing before and bolted across the road with my hand on the Sig Sauer compact in my jacket pocket. There was a silver SUV in my drive, and the approach light was on and the front door of my house was open. I brought the gun out as I went through the gate, and was immediately blindsided by a smash across the right side of the head. I tumbled, and the Sig clanked to the ground as my grip turned to sand. I managed to climb to my feet very briefly; my balance was shot from the blow to the head; I could see that it had come from a baseball bat, although I couldn’t make out the features of the man who had hit me; I probably looked pretty comical staggering around in a half circle, trying to keep upright like a newborn colt, but it didn’t seem to amuse the guy with the baseball bat; he raised it over me, and I shielded my head with my arms; my legs were spread to help me stand, so he kicked me in the balls so hard I thought I was going to die, and hoped I would. I collapsed on my hands and knees and vomited and wept, and then I felt a smart of dull pain on the back of my head, more like a nudge than a pain, and I tumbled into a dark red pool.