Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

“How did you get these?” I said.

“They were hand-delivered. I didn’t see who by. And there was a message.”

He passed me a sheet of white A4 with a note typed on it: Next stop the Internet, where your daughter’s ass will live forever-unless you cough up fifty grand by midday on Thursday. We’ll tell you where and when.

“They don’t say they’re holding her against her will,” I said.

“What are you suggesting-that she’s in on it?” Howard said. “How dare you?”

“Could she be?”

“Get out of my house.”

Howard’s voice was loud, but it lacked conviction; he clutched the edges of the desk with his great hands.

“Has she new friends, or friends you don’t know about? Has she become secretive about who she knows or where she goes?”

Howard’s hands slapped down hard on the desk, sending papers flying and raising a cloud of ash. He stared to one side and to the other, opening and closing his mouth as if, in his rage, he didn’t trust himself to speak, or he couldn’t figure out who he was angriest at. Then he tried another laugh, but it didn’t catch, and left him breathing hard and blinking back what looked like tears.

“Maybe you’d better tell me all about it from the beginning,” I said. “When did it go wrong between you and Emily?”

Howard flung his head toward me as if I had accused him of something, chin thrust out, jaw set, eyes ablaze, ready for the fray; then as quickly the fire left him; he nodded eagerly, exhaled loudly, and in a low, deliberate voice that sounded as if it was allowed out only on special occasions, began to speak.

“That’s just it,” he said. “We had always been very close, all the while she was at school-great pals. More. I suppose she was Daddy’s little princess, you know? That’s what her mother always said, anyway. But we were the best of friends. Always came with me to see Seafield play rugby, even the away games. Picking her up after dates and clubs and so on, like her own personal driver I was. Then she went to university, and all that stopped, overnight, it seemed. Didn’t want to know me. First cheek and smart answers, then the silent treatment. We’d always kept her hair long, and one day she came home with it all cut off, spiked up and bleached blond. Broke my heart. I mean, look at her.”

Howard plucked one of the framed photographs off his desk and passed it to me.

“That’s Emily the day she got her Leaving Cert results. A real lady she was growing into.”

I looked at a pretty girl with long blond hair and too much orange makeup and fussy designer clothes and intelligent eyes blurred with boredom and premature cynicism. There were fifty-year-old women all over the city traipsing from beauty parlor to hairdresser to designer store trying to maintain that look. At least Emily’d had the spirit to tear it up.

“Once she did the hair, we didn’t know what to expect next: a pierced nose, a tattoo, God knows. She dropped all the girls she’d been to school with, girls she’d known all her life, girls whose parents are our friends. Her boyfriend since fifth year, David Brady, had just made the Seafield first fifteen, smashing guy, one of the best fullback prospects in the country, good career ahead-and she dumps him for one of the club barmen, he’s in her class at college, some scrawny clown who plays in a band. Broken up about it, poor David was. Then she started staying out, night after night, wouldn’t tell us where.”

“Drugs?”

“No. I don’t know. Drink maybe. Hangovers. She spent enough time in that bed. But she’s nineteen, half of them get sleeping sickness that age. Seems to go to all her premed lectures.”

“She’s doing medicine?”

Howard gestured to the portrait above the fireplace with a wry smile.

“She’s going to make her grandfather proud. He didn’t think dentists were top drawer. At last, a doctor in the family.”

“How long has Emily been gone?”

“This is Wednesday. I haven’t seen her since last Friday. The photographs arrived yesterday.”

“And do you think she’s in on this?”

“She’s always had everything she wanted. No girl could have been better looked after.”

“Maybe she’s tired of being looked after. Maybe she’s decided it’s time she looked after herself.”

Howard shook his head.

“No, I…she has seemed angry at us…but I don’t believe she would do this. Not unless she was being forced in some way.”

“Why was your daughter angry, Mr. Howard?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She had no cause to be. No cause.”

Howard shook his head, his damp brown eyes gaping, seemingly bewildered at the thought that his daughter might not be his best friend for life, or that at nineteen she might want her own life, rather than the one he had fashioned for her.

“Will you find her?”

“Mr. Howard, why haven’t you taken this to the Guards?” I said.

“Because I don’t want any more people knowing about this than have to. In my experience, once the Guards know about something, so does everyone else. I can depend on you to be discreet, I assume.”

I said nothing. My job was getting people to tell me their secrets, not swearing them to secrecy. Discretion rarely came with the territory.

“Anyway, if I send the Guards after her, I have little chance of winning her back.”

“Maybe she’s a bit old for her father to win her back,” I said.

“Maybe,” he agreed wistfully, staring again at the photograph of his daughter as a six-year-old, as if that was the image of her that had taken permanent root in his mind. “But she’s never going to be old enough to have her body splashed across the Internet like a cheap whore.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

There was a knock on the door, and Anita appeared.

“Dr. Howard, there are six in the waiting room. And Miss O’Kelly is…well, you know how she gets.” A phenomenally loud overelocuted female voice could be heard bellowing something about consumer choice and the need for a patients’ charter.

“It’s not her fault,” Howard said. “I’ve kept them waiting. Thank you, Anita. Give me a minute.” The receptionist shut the door behind her. Howard stood up.

“Mr. Loy, I have patients to treat. If there’s anything else-”

“I’ll need phone numbers for Emily’s boyfriends and friends, past and present, I’ll need to look at her room-”

“I was about to say. My wife is waiting in the house. She’ll fill you in on all that.”

“I’ll need to know immediately they call, and what they say. I’ll need your mobile number to key into my phone, so I’ll know when you call. And I’ll need a check.”

I told him how much I wanted, and he said I should invoice him, and I said I preferred to get paid up front, and he asked would I settle for half, and I asked him if that’s how he ran his own business, and he said that was completely different, and by this stage Miss O’Kelly’s fluting cries were loud enough to be heard through the closed door, so Howard wrote the check, smiling, as if he found the little people’s need for money quaint and amusing, and flung it at me, just so I’d remember how completely different we were. He went out to rescue his patients, and as I heard his loud mechanical laugh defuse Miss O’Kelly’s ire and I got down on my knees to retrieve the check from under the desk where it had fallen, I wondered, not for the first time, why it was that the richer the people who hired me, the more reluctant they seemed to pay me. Maybe it was an attempt on their part to recapture the control they felt they had lost by revealing so much about themselves. Or maybe it was just that they hadn’t become that rich by parting easily with their money.