Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

Across the road, a mass was giving out; All Saints’ Day was a holy day of obligation, but that didn’t carry the force it had in former times; even though it was early enough for workers to attend, none of the people streaming out of the church was under sixty; most looked eighty. Maybe the good old days were coming to an end at last.

The article about medical practices named several obstetricians, most of them either dead or struck off; the list of names included Dr. John Howard. The other name I noted was the writer’s: Martha O’Connor.

Dave Donnelly phoned as I was driving south, and told me to meet him in the car park of the Castlehill Hotel. I parked beneath the aching trees and crunched across the gravel, through horse chestnut shells and sycamore mulch, to his blue, unmarked car. I got in the passenger side, Dave flexing his massive neck right and left to make sure no one was looking. Then he turned on me.

“You’re some bollocks, Ed. You know what that kind of shit looks? Like you think you can do as you please because I’ll protect you. Telling a DS to fuck off. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m sorry. I was tired.”

“Don’t think Fiona Reed hasn’t heard either. The word’s gone out. That’s everyone gunning for you, Ed, any excuse, speeding, drunk and disorderly, vagrancy-”

“Vagrancy?”

“Yeah. Walking while Loy. I’m telling you, you better have something to offer in all this, or you’re fucked. And I can do nothing. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. And they’re having the CCTV footage enhanced, so you’re probably fucked anyway. You were there, weren’t you?”

Instead of answering, I gave Dave everything I could on the Emily Howard kidnap. When I finished, he said, “Were you at David Brady’s place? Did you interfere with a crime scene?”

“How’s it looking with Shane Howard?”

Dave looked at me hard, then waved a meaty hand in the air and snorted like a horse bothered by flies he knows he’s bigger than but has to put up with.

“The killer was someone she knew,” he said.

“Or someone she was showing the house to-she was going to get close to strangers too, especially if they were men.”

“What have you got?”

“Her phone calls. I spoke to her about half-ten yesterday morning.”

“You were one of the last people to see her alive.”

“She took at least two business calls while I was there, at least by her manner I assume they were business.”

“Her phone wasn’t at the scene. We’re waiting on the service provider to give us the details. Anything else?”

“Classy move, sticking Jessica Howard beside the Martin woman in the papers today.”

“Fiona Reed’s call.”

“So Howard’s the prime suspect then.”

“Of course he fucking is. Why? Because he’s the husband.”

I once worked a case in L.A. for a husband the Hollywood cops were convinced had killed his wife who had been photographed in San Francisco’s Chinatown signing a business deal at the moment his wife had been shot dead: neighbors heard the shots, and heard a car screeching away minutes afterward, so the TOD was firm. The detective in charge of the case explained to me that even if the husband had been photographed signing a business deal in China , they’d still make him their prime suspect. When I asked him why, he told me if I’d ever been married, I’d understand the guy with most reason to kill his wife is always the husband. As it turned out, my client was guilty; he had killed his wife that morning and hired a petty hood to fire a gun in the air and drive away at the moment he was establishing his alibi. But someone had spotted the driver, and as soon as the cops caught him, he gave the guy up. Moral of the story, for the cops at any rate, and I was more of a cop than I was anything else: it’s always the husband, even when it can’t be.

“We know Jessica Howard liked to play away. She was a regular in the Sunday papers sure, in some nightclub with some racing driver or footballer. Maybe she pushed Howard too far. Maybe David Brady was the last straw, his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That’s not right, is it? His blood is up, he has to do it. He’s over to Brady’s flat, does him, then charges back up to Castlehill and kills his wife.”

“You haven’t enough, have you?”

“That would be an operational matter.”

“In other words, no.”

“In other words, fuck away out of the car before someone spots me talking to you,” Dave growled.

“Anything on Stephen Casey?” I said.

He handed me a three-by-five index card with a name and number on it.

“That’s the man who worked the case.”

“What case?”

“You can find out. Now get out of the car.”

I shut the car door, and Dave started the engine. As he was about to pull away, I leaned in the passenger window.

“Dave, get Brady’s hard drive on his computers analyzed. His e-mails, who he sent attachments to.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Look for homemade porn films, and follow who he sent them to.”

“Ed, were you there? You were fucking there, weren’t you?”

“Thanks, Dave,” I said, and meant it. “I’ll give you what I get as soon as I can.”

“I can’t keep looking out for you if you’re hell-bent on behaving like a cunt,” Dave said, and drove away without meeting my eye.

I WALKED QUICKLY BACK TO MY CAR BENEATH THE LOWERING sky. My first idea was to brace Sean Moon. I drove slowly through Woodpark. Waiting at the lights by the Woodpark Inn, I saw Jonathan O’Connor crossing the main road and entering the car park toward the lounge. He wore a long black crombie overcoat and a black baseball hat, and he walked with a swagger I hadn’t seen in him before.

I drove on down into Honeypark as the mist was blowing in again. At least, mist was what I thought it was at first. Then I amended it to fog, thick and grey, belching across the sky. I passed the three massive bonfire sites, two of which were still smoking; some of the houses nearest the bonfires had blown-out windows; a couple had scorched walls and melted drainage pipes. The fog was gusting through the air, dark, almost black, and there was a heat to it, and then, as I rounded the corner for Moon’s house, a red glow behind it, and I saw it wasn’t fog at all, it was smoke: Sean Moon’s house was ablaze, and a ring of onlookers shielded themselves from the heat as it went up. I could hear sirens. I parked and approached on foot as a Garda car, an ambulance and the fire service arrived. A round man with no neck in a round neck pullover with a newspaper rolled beneath his arm on the edge of the crowd was pulling ferociously on a short squat cigarette and making a succession of knowing faces and noises, all of which seemed intended to indicate that nothing he was seeing came as a surprise to him.

“Just go up, did it?” I said.

“If you want to believe that, you’re welcome, bud,” No Neck said.

“What do you mean, it was started deliberately?”

“And if you want to put words in my mouth, that’s another thing.”

He took a step toward me, scowling, his eyes watering. He smelled of stale smoke and fresh booze and despair at nine thirty in the morning. I fronted off a little, turning my head so that he’d notice the wound on my face. He noticed it and stepped back.

“Was there anyone in there?” I asked. “Was Moon there?”

“Moon? Why would Moon be there? Fuckin’ runner in.”

“I thought he owned the house. I was talking to him there yesterday.”

“Were you now?” No Neck suddenly sounded interested. “What about, bud? The blue movies, was it?”

“What do you know about the blue movies?”