Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“I’m scared to find out, sweetheart,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while after that. Jonathan drained his brandy, and Emily clicked the rings on her right hand against the rings on her left. Somewhere across the bay, fireworks crackled and shot their plumes of light through the murk; like a relief diagram of nerves and synapses in the body, they seemed to give the falling night scale and dimension. I felt like there was a gulf between me and these damaged, spoiled, feral kids; I feared that if I asked the wrong question or said a word out of place, it might tip them over an edge they were clearly teetering on. I could call Denis Finnegan and leave them in his charge. That would possibly have been the smart play. But I knew I wasn’t going to let any of this go until I got to the bottom of it.

“All right,” I said. “For starters, neither of you was forced to do anything against your will, is that so?”

“You mean, fuck?” Emily said with a big leering grin.

I nodded.

“No, we weren’t forced. Were we, Jonny?”

Jonathan shook his head, his smile back in place, his eyes in his lap.

“We did it all for love, Mr. Loy,” Emily said, and waggled her tongue at me.

“Why was David Brady shooting pornography? How did that come about?”

“How do you know it was David?” Emily said.

“Jonathan told us,” I said.

“Jonny is mistaken, aren’t ya, babe?” Emily said.

Jonathan pushed a kind of sputtered laugh through his nose.

“I make many mistakes,” he said in an arch, ironic tone, as if he was quoting a line from a movie.

“Also, there’s a shot of his wrist in the movie Jonny made with, what’s this they were called, Wendy and Petra?”

“Kylie and Stacey more like,” Emily said in a bad Dublin accent. “Hayley and Kelsey.”

“And on his wrist was his 2JS2 bracelet-no one but David Brady has one. And he had the films and the photos on his home computer. So we all know it was him. What we don’t know is, why.”

“Are they still there, on his computer, for the Guards to find?” Emily asked, her tone suddenly urgent.

“You first. Why were you making porn films with David Brady? And why were you doing it in Honeypark?”

Emily looked to Jonathan, down the corridor that led to her bedroom, and then toward the door, but there was no way out. She sighed laboriously and began to speak.

“Back when DB and I were going out, during the summer, we went through this phase of doing E and kind of like, getting off with other people in front of each other. It was like, we’d give each other marks out of ten, don’t think much of yours, total minger/total babe type of thing. And then sometimes we’d bring someone back to his. It was a bit of crack, a bit pervy, a bit fucked-up. And we’d be in control of it all, so the next morning, or even the middle of the night, if we decided we’d had enough, we’d just throw them out. Anyway, we were at this Saturday-night bash in Seafield Rugby Club and the usual parade of sluts were flaunting themselves at DB, honestly, they’d feel him up right in front of me. So we fix on this cute little one with porn hair, you know, dead flat, snow blond? And we get it together back in David’s. Didn’t think much more about it really.”

“Until when?”

“Until a couple of weeks ago, I get a call from David-we broke up last month, when I was going to Trinity, totally my call, just that thing of girls dragging their boyfriends from school to college is a bit tragic, isn’t it? Anyway, got this call, and he’s in a major fucking zone. Seems Miss Porn Hair took some shots on her mobile, seems her old man found them, seems she was only thirteen when she got with us. So he’s up in arms-but he’s also a bit of a dodgy geezer, the father.”

“Did you get a name?”

“I assume David did. But he didn’t tell me. What he said was, this guy and his daughter would press charges against both of us, which would be, like, a whole child abuse pedo trip, unless we did what he wanted. And what he wanted was, first off we’d do this porn thing, then we’d blackmail some money out of my dad.”

“And where did Jonathan come into it?”

Emily looked at Jonathan, her eyebrows raised.

“Ve haf alvays been, how you say, kissing cousins,” Jonathan announced in a stage German accent, then curled up with his head in Emily’s lap.

“And did David Brady know that?”

“Sure,” Emily said. “It was his idea that Jonny be involved. Easier for me to handle.”

“Keep it in ze family, ja? Unt also, ze question I am alvays asking myself is, fot vould Jesus do?”

“And the answer you got was, Jesus would make some porn?” I said.

“Jesus vould do fot he could to help his cousin,” Jonathan said, and they both howled with hysterical laughter. I felt like I was minding a couple of tots who’d broken into the booze cabinet and scarfed some Baileys: it was bound to end in tears; I just had to wait it out.

“It’s not a major deal, Daad, ” Emily said, increasingly irritated that I couldn’t see the funny side. “I mean, everyone’s done homemade these days. I used to do it all the time with DB, we’d watch it, then tape over it. The whole scenario this time was, it would never go public.”

“But that would be the threat.”

“To Dad? Sure. But like, fifty grand, so what? That’s like fifty cents to anyone else. All that old Howard lolly. Why not give someone else a suck?”

“And the idea that he might be upset, or anxious, that he might think you had been kidnapped and raped-the distress you might cause him: none of that was a worry to you?”

Emily’s expression shifted in an instant from the bad-girl bravado of her mother to the blank implacability of her father; she stared at me as if I understood nothing, and when she spoke, it was with deliberate, glacial force.

“Of course it was a worry. I’d never want to hurt my father. Or at least, not like this. But what else could I do? You think he’d’ve been happier if I was up on some child rape charge? The crucial thing was, it was never going to go public.”

“Except it may well have. The film Jonny made?”

“Mit Vendy unt Petra, ja?” Jonathan said, still skittish, almost hysterical.

“I have a few hundred copies of it, ready to be sold in pubs and door-to-door,” I said. “So whoever you were dealing with wasn’t to be trusted.”

“Jonny’s in shades, no one will recognize him.”

“Anyone who spots his tattoo will. I think the blackmailer could make a case to Jonny’s parents that Jonny’s identity could easily be uncovered by anyone who’s seen that tattoo.”

Jonathan sat up abruptly, his antic mask replaced by a cold stare he directed first at Emily; when he turned it on me, it was accompanied by the curling of his lips into a sneer.

“Is that what you think, Mr. Loy? Your ‘professional’ opinion, is it?” he said, his reedy voice shaking but stoked with the insolence of entitlement. Emily put a calming hand on his arm, but he shook it off.

“If my mother…” he hissed at Emily, then stopped and turned away from us both like a sulky child. Emily looked cautiously at his back, then turned to me.

“So who were we dealing with?” she said. “Who is this blackmailer?”

More than likely Brock Taylor, if Tommy Owens wasn’t lying. Always a big if.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone who still has both films in his possession. Someone who wants to put the bite on your father, and is likely to come back for more. Someone we can’t rule out for David Brady’s murder.”

“Are the Guards going to find the films on DB’s computer?”

“Not now,” I said.

“So we’re not connected to that?”