Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

I sent Dave Donnelly a text message reading: 1. Sorry about that, Chief. 2. Stephen Casey RIP All Souls’ Day 1985. Any bells? Loy.

There was a light blinking on my home phone. The message was from my ex-wife’s new husband. She wanted me to know she had gone into labor. She wanted me to hear the news before anyone else. I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to hear the news, and I didn’t drink to her or him or the child they would have together or the happiness I didn’t wish for them. I just drank, until finally the whiskey made me think there was almost something funny about it all. Then I almost laughed at it. Then I remembered I had tossed the Reilly brothers’ gun in a holly bush, and went outside and retrieved it. Then I lay on the living room couch that was long enough to pass out on without fucking up your back, kicked off my shoes and went to sleep.

THE BEATING OF WINGS WOKE ME AT SIX; THERE HAD been crows on the chimney stack and on the windowsills the past few mornings. I lay there for a while listening to the asthmatic sound of their breath, waiting for the cawing to begin, but they kept their counsel. I undressed, showered and, with some difficulty, shaved; my face bled a little, but it was in one piece, although the wound did make me look a little like the bad guy in a black-and-white movie. I dressed and cut two oranges into quarters and ate them while I scrambled three large eggs with butter and chives and had them with a few slices of smoked salmon and two cups of coffee. I took two Nurofen Plus for my hangover and another two for my face and for the ache in my hand where Emily Howard bit me.

Outside was dawning the kind of day I always remembered All Saints’ Day as having been: the overcast morning after, grey and gloomy and precarious, as if the world was a smoke-filled globe made of fragile glass that could shatter at any moment. The pungent smell of fireworks lingered, like cordite after a shoot-out. Above the low rumble of traffic I heard the brisk rustle of crows in the holly bushes; black and grey against the glistening red berries, they took my appearance as a cue to begin their arrhythmic dirge. The newspapers had been delivered; I picked the pile off the doorstep and put them on the passenger seat of the car. The phone rang as I left the house; it was Denis Finnegan to say the Guards had extended Shane’s period of detention for another six hours. At lunchtime, they could either charge him or release him. I had a lot to do before then. Grey dawn bled imperceptibly into day as I got the Volvo on the road.

The stop-start motion of cars on the N11 to Ranelagh gave me plenty of time to scan the headlines, which, in the tabloids, were dominated by the two murders. Jessica Howard took precedence, of course, and a couple of the tabloids printed her photograph alongside a shot of an Esther Martin, a woman who had been killed in her home a year or so back. The Guards had arrested her husband several times but had been unable to bring charges: placing the photographs of the two murdered women side by side made it clear, not only that the Guards believed Shane Howard to be guilty, but that they had no qualms about leaking their beliefs to the media. Amidst the appropriately pious tone of the reports, there was considerable leeway for a more salacious emphasis: Jessica had played Sally Bowles in Cabaret some years back, and the Irish Times was the only paper that didn’t find an excuse to feature a photograph of the actress spilling out of tight black 1930s underwear. Instead, the Times led with stories about a public sector pay rise and a European trade directive, relegating both murders to page two, where Jessica Howard was noted as the daughter-in-law of Dr. John Howard; the photograph they used showed her peering primly out from beneath a shawl in Riders to the Sea.

There was an ostensibly sympathetic account of Jessica’s career in the Irish Independent that read as if written in code, with references to the “exceptionally close professional relationships” she had formed with her directors.

David Brady’s rugby achievements were recorded and several ex-players-including some of Shane Howard’s former international teammates-pitched in with their eulogies; a couple suggested that perhaps latterly, Brady was beginning to see his future outside full-time professional rugby, a tactful way of saying that he hadn’t lived up to his youthful promise-or that he had blown his talent up his nose.

I turned left on Appian Way and cut up through Ranelagh village and stopped at the corner of a leafy square on the way to Rathmines. David Manuel lived in a Victorian three-story redbrick house with stained-glass panes in the front door and a tangle of bicycles and rucksacks and trainers in the wide hall and a wife with salt-and-pepper curls and purple dungarees who directed me up the bookshelf-lined stairs to his attic-floor office, which was decorated in cream and oatmeal tones with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves too and had roof windows that would have let in all the morning light if there had been any.

David Manuel, waiting, in his fifties, wore a three-quarter-length cardigan in assorted shades of green and a pale green collarless linen shirt and matching trousers and olive green Birkenstocks; his silver hair was shoulder length, his tiny face was lined but soft and unmarked, like a nun’s; he steepled his fingertips and smiled thinly at me through silver-framed glasses. I mopped my brow with the back of my hand; the sweat stung the teeth-shaped wound Emily Howard had left there.

“Dr. Manuel, Ed Loy.”

“I’m not a doctor-”

“I know that,” I said. Sweat smarted in my eyes, and I wiped them with my sleeve. Manuel looked at me quizzically.

“Maybe you need a doctor. Are you ill?” he said. His voice was high-pitched, querulous and amused. “You look too fit to have a heart condition.”

First rule with therapists: don’t get caught in a lie you can’t conceal.

“I probably had too much to drink yesterday. Last night.”

“Don’t you remember which?”

“Both.”

“And the face wound, that was a fight?”

“Yes.”

“And all of this, the drinking, the fighting, it has to do with Emily Howard? Or is it just how private detectives behave, or how they think they’re meant to behave?”

“The drinking just has to do with me. The fighting, yes, that had to do with the case.”

“And this case: is it the same one the Guards are investigating, the murders of Jessica Howard and David Brady?”

“I think it’s connected to those murders, yes.”

“Are you a fully licensed private detective?”

“I was. In L.A. When the licensing system kicks in here, I’ll apply for one.”

“And Shane Howard hired you?”

“Initially. Now his sister Sandra has. I suppose I’m working for both of them.”

“But you’re more concerned with Emily Howard.”

“I’m concerned with all the Howards. They’re all connected, I just don’t understand how. I was hoping you could help me.”

Manuel looked at me, nodded and sat back. I took him through Emily’s disappearance, the porn, the relationships with David Brady and with her cousin Jonathan. When I had finished, he sat still for a while, then shook his head.

“I can’t tell you anything she hasn’t already told you.”