Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“Jesus, this is such a mess,” she said. “Mr. Loy-”

“Ed,” I said.

“Ed. I’m bringing Jonny and Em up to Rowan House, that’s the family home. Would you come with us?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll follow you there.”

She held the cigarette up as if to give it back; I gestured to her to keep it; she caught my hand again and held it in her cool grip. Her red nail polish was chipped, and her nails were bitten to the quick; she wore a red-and-green-braided band on her wrist; she smelled of smoky salt earth and the sweet tang of spice. She looked straight at me, and I looked straight back; I thought I could feel her green eyes searching mine, like she could see inside my thoughts, see my doubt, my suspicion, see how little I really trusted her, or anyone else. But I wanted her to believe I could trust. Looking in her eyes, I wanted to trust her.

Lord, I believe, oh, help my unbelief.

She brought her hand up to my face. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but I wanted her to keep doing it. Her crooked finger rested cool in the hollow of my cheek.

“Something is happening to us, Ed. Emily vanishing, David Brady-the Howard family is under threat. You’ll help us, won’t you?”

I nodded. I felt at that moment as if I were under her spell, as if I would have done whatever she asked me. A firework raked across the sky like a searchlight in the dark and caught us for a split second, frozen in its glow. I sometimes thought of it later as a strobe flash that captured Sandra Howard as she had been, before the fall-but of course it was no such thing; the high saga of the Howards was plummeting to its close, and whether she knew it or not, Sandra wasn’t just caught up in its descent, she was fanning the flames that sped it down.

I followed the roll of the great black Merc, feeling dragged in its imperious tide, as our cortege made slow progress through the rush-hour traffic on the narrow roads south of Castlehill. Once we joined the M50 northwards we picked up speed against the flow. The Merc turned west on Exit 13 and climbed through Sandyford and Kilgobbin, then cut up through narrow twisty roads to the foothills of the mountains. I followed along a road bounded now on one side by a high stone wall; on the other, gorse and ferns gave way to marsh and shallow bog. At a junction high above the city, great iron gates within the wall marked the entrance to Rowan House; I waited while they swung open, and then followed as the Merc crunched up a track lined with ash and rowan trees to a house I had seen already that day, in miniature, on a plinth beneath Emily Howard’s bed.

Rowan House looked like a Victorian merchant’s idea of a baronial castle: cut from pale granite, it had castellated bay windows, battlements, a small octagonal flag tower at one end and a much larger corner tower at the rear with a slated conical roof. A weather vane sprouted from the flag tower, atop whose pointer a spotlight picked out a metal H; another spot found the plain cross on the round tower’s peak.

The entrance hall was a great white rotunda with a sweeping circular staircase in pale wood to the right and a corridor at left that served the ground-floor front rooms; assorted portraits of Dr. John Howard hung at every turn; ahead, an arch through which Sandra Howard had already swept led to another, slightly smaller hall, with stairs down to the basement level and a further corridor for the back rooms and yet more paintings of her father. At the far end of this hall stood double doors that might once have led down to the garden; now they opened onto a windowless corridor whose ceiling was only about twelve feet high, whose walls were crisp white and unadorned by portraits of any kind, a corridor that emerged into a modern rectangular open-plan living space with great plate-glass walls and no hint of baronial grandeur: the corridor and living room of a house built maybe in the 1970s, seemingly grafted onto the rear of the fake castle. There was a fire burning in a big open grate, with a brushed-steel vent to take the smoke; the flames drew everyone to huddle in their glow.

Two maids in black-and-white uniforms had materialized when we first entered the house. After brisk instructions from Sandra Howard, they’d vanished; now they were back with drinks and cold cuts and salads, which they set on a long table at one end of the room. The sudden pang in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day; Jonny fell on the food like a starving man, and, once I had reassured myself that Sandra and Emily were okay, I followed suit. Sandra sat on a long couch at the end closest to the fire; Emily lay curled up with her head in her aunt’s lap, her stuffed dog pressed to her cheek and her left thumb in her mouth. The maids, who were both tiny and looked Filipina, swirled around collecting coats and filling cups and pouring glasses of water and setting out bottles of spirits and mixers and tubs of ice and asking if there was anything further before silently dispersing. I ate smoked salmon and rare cold roast beef and tomato and avocado salad and potato and hazelnut salad and drank a cup of coffee and halfway through my second bottle of Tyskie, a very strong Polish beer that I had pined for during my month on the dry, I began to feel faintly human again. Jonny had put steel-rimmed granny glasses on; he kept flashing anxious glances through them at his mother before looking at me and gulping air through his mouth. Finally, his mother rose and led Emily out of the room, and he got his chance to speak.

“You won’t tell, will you?” he asked. “Tell Mummy, I mean.”

“Tell her what?” I said blankly.

“About, y’know. The porn. And the whole thing with Emily.”

He had one of those voices that sounded as if it hadn’t completely broken, and was always struggling to find its correct register, like a radio station that isn’t fully tuned in. Combined with pale stubble that looked like thistledown and gangling limbs that seemed not to fit him properly, he could have passed for fourteen.

“Emily’s father thought she had gone missing. Did your family not worry?”

“I don’t live with Mummy; I have rooms in Trinity.”

And an old-style Trinity accent to go with them. Rums in Trin’ty.

“What age are you, Jonny?”

“Nineteen. Same as Emily. I got Schol-a Foundation Scholarship-in mathematics. Which confers all sorts of perks. I can eat in the Dining Hall, and wear an academic gown-”

“And graze your sheep in College Park?”

“They didn’t apprise me of that privilege, but if it’s available to me, I shall certainly take it up. As soon as I get the sheep.”

He gave a sniffing, snorting, yelping laugh, the kind of sound teenage boys who learn Monty Python routines by heart make, maybe the kind maths geeks make too; then he blinked unhappily at me, his anxious eyes enlarged by the powerful lenses.

“I need you to tell me a few things first. How did you get mixed up in all this?”

“Emily rang me. Asked me if I wanted to be in a threesome with two girls. Said that it would be filmed, but that I could wear a mask.”

“And you said no problem?”

“Mr. Loy, mathematics scholars are not exactly coming down with offers of twosomes, let alone, ah, exponentials thereof…and the offers we get-well, those I tend to get are generally from the kind of girls who hope I won’t be too interested in sex. So it was hardly something I felt I could pass up.”

“And the offer coming from Emily, that didn’t surprise you?”

Jonny stared at his plate.

“No. We’ve kind of…from a youngish age, sort of…experimented. Not so much in the last few years. Since Emily had boyfriends. But before, well…it was always her idea, I mean, it would have had to be, she being the girl…I suppose she tried stuff out on me…before doing it for real.”