Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“As long as they don’t send the hard drive for technical examination. But if they don’t come up with a suspect fast, that’s what they’ll probably do. They’ve found a person who’s been beaten and stabbed to death. They’ll pull out all the stops to find his killer.”

Emily’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. She looked up to the ceiling, as if gravity might stem their flow, but they overspilled.

“Beaten and stabbed to death,” she said. “Oh Jesus, this is such a fucking nightmare. Poor David. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

She cried for a long time, her legs drawn to her chest, howls that dwindled into sobs. Eventually Jonathan climbed down off his perch and put his long skinny arms around her and they clung together on the sofa. It was pitiful to watch, but it was also a relief: one of the first signs either had exhibited of a normal human emotion.

There didn’t seem a lot more I could do here. Denis Finnegan’s card had his home number added in ink; I went out into the hall and rang it, and a Filipina or Latin American voice answered.

“Sandra Howard, please,” I said.

“Who is calling?”

“My name is Ed Loy. I’m calling about Ms. Howard’s son and her niece.”

I heard muffled voices in the background, then a crisp, tense Irish voice came on.

“Mr. Loy, this is Sandra Howard.”

“I’m a private detective, Ms. Howard. Your brother hired me to find Emily, and I have; she’s here in Bayview, in your sister-in-law’s house. Your son is with her, but Shane’s not here. I don’t think they should be alone now.”

“Don’t let them leave. I’ll be there in minutes.”

Fifteen of them, in fact; on the sofa, the kids sat in the dark, huddled together, asking for nothing. I paced the hall, smoking. The knock came on the door and a tall, green-eyed woman with a black cowl hood over her dark red hair stood in the porch, silhouetted in the shimmer of the approach light; out in the bay behind her, fireworks flashed and crackled, sending plumes of red high in the sky and making her look momentarily like a creature from myth, a rebel angel with red wings or a saint captured in stained glass.

“Mr. Loy? Sandra Howard,” she said.

“They’re inside,” I said.

She walked down the hall and smiled sadly at the sight of Emily and Jonathan curled up together on the couch. Thanking me, she put her cold hand on mine and drew me out to the front of the house, where we stood in the rain and mist, like the last mourners in a deserted churchyard. A volley of bangers crashed out like gunshots; after a hissing silence, the voices of dogs were raised in response; their barking and howling echoed through the hills.

“Poor dogs,” Sandra Howard said. “Halloween is always a bad night for them.”

I nodded.

“Denis told me you were searching for Emily. I hadn’t realized Shane was so worried about her.”

I nodded again, and told her a little about where I had found her son and her niece, and what they had been doing, and the part David Brady had played in it, and how he had ended up. She took it all in without seeming surprised or ruffled by anything except Brady’s murder. While I waited for her to respond, I looked at her milky skin, the laughter lines around her green eyes and her full red lips, the unlined brow and the fine high bones and I thought, even in distress, this is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I probably fell a little in love with her then and there. Maybe if I hadn’t, we’d’ve gotten to the truth a lot quicker. Then again, maybe if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten to it at all.

Sandra Howard had been looking out in the dark toward the sea, toward where she knew the sea to be; you could hear the roar in the rising wind. She turned back to me and took my hand again and began to speak.

“I’ve been trying to find Shane all day, ever since Denis told me he’d hired you. He’s not been answering his phone.”

“He’s not at the surgery either. His receptionist hasn’t seen him since this morning.”

“What did he hire you to do, exactly?”

“To find his daughter. And to bring her home if she wanted to come.”

“What about the people behind this? Did he not want you to put a stop to them?”

“Since the main man I understand to be behind this has photographs of Emily in a threesome with his thirteen-year-old daughter, I don’t know that we have a great deal of leverage. I mean, we could try and nail him for blackmail, but the reason Emily took it on herself to go along with the porn film in the first place was to avoid underage-sex charges, and all the attendant disgrace for her and the family. That hasn’t changed.”

“But those films are still out there. That means Shane is still susceptible to blackmail.”

“As are you,” I said. “Jonathan’s in both films.”

Again, there was no reaction that I would have expected from a parent: no expression of disgust, no shudder, no sense of disappointment. Just a shrewd, appraising glimmer in those flashing green eyes and a toss of her dark red head as she came to a decision.

“I’d like to retain you, Mr. Loy-as long, that is, as you’re still available. I want you to sort this out. If that means getting hold of the tapes, or films, or negatives, or whatever they are, fine. If you have to pay for them, I’ll make a deal. But we can’t have that waiting in the long grass for us. Not for the children, and not for the Howard family.”

She looked at me full on then, and smiled, as if to apologize for the rhetoric, and I smiled back, mostly because I found it impossible not to, impossible to refuse what she had asked. I nodded, and she went inside to the children, and I stayed outside and smoked a cigarette. They were normal kids, I told myself; troubled, sure, a little oversexed, maybe, but normal. I said it to myself again: normal kids, a normal family. Above the noise in my head of first cousins having three-way sex at all, not to say on camera, and their aunt and mother barely registering either fact, it was hard to make out exactly what I was saying.

I CHECKED MY MOBILE PHONE, WHICH I WAS IN THE HABIT of leaving turned off. There was a message from Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly of Seafield Guards, saying he looked forward to talking to me about my most recent client, Shane Howard, and his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That hadn’t taken long. So Dave had the case. I still didn’t feel right about removing evidence from the Brady crime scene. Last time we had spoken, Dave had accused me, only half in jest, of becoming part of the luxury service industry: someone who carried rich people’s bags for them and eased their burdens. He had finished his pint, so he used it as an exit line, which was just as well, as I couldn’t think of much to say in reply. “Rich people have their troubles too” sounded kind of lame, even if it was true. “Rich people pay my bills” was closer to the truth, though I didn’t like admitting it. Had I compromised a murder investigation just so I could keep Emily Howard’s life tidier than she took any care to make it? Maybe. But I took that risk because I knew I would get to the truth faster than the Guards. If I didn’t believe that, then I would be as bad as Dave had painted me. And if it involved serious criminals from Honeypark, even Brock Taylor himself, I could make those connections before anyone else. And Dave wasn’t above taking my help when he needed it.

Meanwhile, here I was, smoking a cigarette on top of Bayview Hill, waiting for a woman who drove a black ’06 Reg Mercedes-Benz S 500 to tell me what to do. She came out of the house with Emily and Jonathan, whom shock continued to age in reverse: they looked like a pair of frightened children, bloodless and numb. Jonathan had retreated behind iPod headphones; Emily carried an overnight bag and a worn stuffed dog. Sandra Howard opened the car for them, then came across and stood beside me. Her hood was down, and her red hair glistened in the thick damp air. She was wearing black, some combination of cape and cowl that came to her ankles. She took the cigarette from my hand and drew hard on it.