Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“He died on All Souls’ Day, 1985,” I said.

Her eyes cast around the room, and up at me, and away again. It was almost painful to watch. The telephone rescued her. She left the room to answer it, and I stared at the fire and tried to remember the last time I had been surprised that someone was lying to me. I looked in the flames and tried to remember my ex-wife’s face. I found that I couldn’t.

I WENT THROUGH A DOOR THAT LED DOWN TO THE FRONT of the new house and stood outside and smoked a cigarette. There was a sloping garden and a gravel drive that seemed to lead down to the road, and I wondered why Sandra Howard had not approached the house this way. But since I was already wondering whether anything she had told me was the truth, it didn’t seem the most pressing detail. I wondered also whether I should feel pleased with myself that I had caught her in a lie, thereby breaking the spell she had cast over me, or dismayed by my easy susceptibility to a beautiful woman who paid me some attention. Maybe it was Jessica Howard who had got under my skin; maybe it was her daughter’s lurid adventures in pornography. Male lust is a tenacious and comical affliction, immune as it can sometimes be to feelings of compassion or understanding; at times it reduces us all to the lunatic in that Italian movie, sitting in a tree hollering “I want a woman.”

I checked my phone and found that Dave Donnelly had called again. I walked down the drive a pace, intending to ring him, when I spotted a circular pool halfway down the garden. Security lights lit the grass as I approached it, and I realized it was a match for the pool in the back garden of Emily’s dollhouse. It was bigger than the one in Shane Howard’s back garden, and less ornate: a low, roughly packed granite wall, maybe three feet of water, a rough sandy bed. No marble, no crystal gems, no sense of it being a memorial or a deliberate feature. I looked back up the hill: the turrets and castellations of Rowan House loomed up behind the new extension, ghostly in the mist, like a phantom castle from a gothic romance.

When I walked back up to the house, Denis Finnegan and Shane Howard were in the living room with Sandra. Shane was attempting to fix himself a drink he evidently didn’t need; when he saw me he came across and wrapped his arms around me, pinning my hands to my sides, and lifted me off the floor in an embrace. He smelled of whiskey and of rain.

“You found her! You boy ya! You found my princess!” he roared. His voice was hoarse, ragged with emotion; he looked like he’d been crying. He set me down and batted me on the shoulders with his forearms; I raised my hands to prevent him picking me up again.

“Have you seen her?” I said.

“I looked in,” he said. “She’s woozy. Sandra had a doctor in to give her something. Best to sleep it all off.”

Shane nodded then, as if his daughter’s difficulties could be dispensed with like a hangover, and went back to his drink. Denis Finnegan raised his eyebrows and beamed conspiratorially at me; Sandra looked anxiously around at us all.

“Where did you get to today, Shane?” I said. “We were all trying to get hold of you.”

Shane thrust his chin out and shrugged, like a bored and dismissive primate.

“Just needed to get some air, you know? After talking to you, got rattled. Couldn’t sit still. Drove around a bit, parked up near the old pine forest on Castlehill. Turned the old phone off, so I wouldn’t be waiting. The waiting is the worst. Tramped around there for a while. Stopped off for a few drinks, little place in the mountains. Then turned the phone back on and got the good word.”

Shane delivered all this in a burly rugby-club drawl that brooked no further interrogation. Maybe that was all he had done. And maybe I was bought and paid for. But I wasn’t going to be treated like the help.

“This case is not closed yet, and for as long as it runs, I’ll need access to you at any moment; I don’t want you to vanish like that again, do you hear me?” I said. “That’s if you care a damn about your daughter’s safety.”

Shane was ready to blow at that, but I didn’t give him an opening. Instead, I gave him what I had given Sandra: the sexual relationship between Emily and Jonathan, the two porn films and David Brady’s involvement with them, the threat of blackmail over underage sex leading to Emily’s part in the extortion attempt on Shane Howard, the uncertainty over just who was behind it all, the murder of David Brady. I left out the detail of my having been in David Brady’s apartment, and I left out Tommy Owens and Brock Taylor; I gave them everything else.

Shane Howard had been on his feet when I recounted the history of his daughter’s sexual relationship with her cousin, his hands balling into fists, his eyes blurring with rage; but the news of David Brady’s murder hit him the hardest. Sandra went to him and wrapped her arms around his great shoulders and pulled his head to her breast and they subsided to the floor, Sandra whispering to her little brother and stroking his sand-colored hair. It was touching and pathetic, a grotesque pietà that was moving and disturbing. It was a pity there wasn’t a fourth tower, the Howard Psychiatric Hospital; then the entire family could walk down the hill and check themselves in. I realized then that I wanted, as much as anything else, to understand this family in their houses on the tops of hills, to uncover their secrets, to see the Howards plain. Once I had admitted that to myself, I knew that there was no way on earth I was stepping off this train until the end.

Denis Finnegan stood by the fire in a black chalk-stripe suit and a canary yellow and royal blue striped tie with a face that seemed to have attained a deeper shade of red as the day wore on. With a scotch in his hand, he looked like a clubman from a bygone age.

“Sandra has advised me of her intention to retain you on the family’s behalf,” he said.

“The problem is blackmail, and it hasn’t gone away just because we’ve got Emily back,” I said. “In a way, her absence was never the problem, seeing as it was voluntary. Chances are, whoever’s behind this has copies of the films and photographs that can be rolled out again. Not to mention testimony and photographic evidence of underage sex. Chances are also, this individual won’t be content with fifty grand the next time.”

“Do you have an individual in mind?” Denis Finnegan said.

“It’s too early to say.”

Finnegan checked his watch and turned the TV on; it was nine o’clock, and the main evening news on RTE was just starting. David Brady was the first item in the bulletin, with an exterior shot of the body being wheeled on a gurney through the entrance to the Waterfront apartments. There was some archive footage of one of his schools cups performances; Shane Howard detached himself from his sister after this and took himself off to a corner by the window, where he sat on the floor and looked alternately out at the night and down at the floor, his great head tipping between his bent knees.

“I’ll need to talk to Emily again tonight,” I said to Sandra.

“She may already be asleep,” Sandra said. “Dr. Hoyle gave her something.”

“Then I’d better see her now,” I said.

I followed her down the white corridor to Emily’s room. She knocked on the door, then opened it cautiously. The bedside light was still on.

“Emily? Emily, it’s Sandra. Ed Loy needs to talk to you again.”

Emily moaned and grunted a little, then said, “Okay.”

Sandra went in and I followed. She sat down in a chair in the corner of the room, and I stayed where I was and shook my head. She looked at me quizzically, and I shrugged. She got up and said, “Emily, I’m going to leave Ed here. I’ll be outside.”