Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“I heard they were shooting them in there. Young ones, in the nip. And they were going to be selling them. Is that true?”

“It might be,” I said. “But listen, if Moon doesn’t own the house, who does?”

No Neck’s face went blank, as if a switch had been flicked to close it down. I found a five-euro note in my pocket and wafted it at him. His eyes clicked on like two balls of a fruit machine jackpot.

“No names. But it’s well for some who can be buying pubs and houses all round here and drinks on the house up the rugby club for all the nobs. Well for fuckin’ some, isn’t that right, bud?”

Brock Taylor again. You couldn’t keep him out of this. I gave No Neck the five. He grabbed my arm to thank me, but I shook him loose, gave him a wink and a thumbs-up and doubled back to my car. I could hear No Neck calling after me as I walked through the smoke, a series of chants whose alternate refrains were “Young Ones in the Nip,” and “Well for Fuckin’ Some.”

I parked outside a semidetached house within view of the Woodpark Inn. I had been gone only fifteen minutes; chances were Jonathan was still in there. After an hour I began to doubt it; after two I was ready to give it up as a bad job. It was just as well I didn’t; about fifteen minutes later he came out, followed by Darren and Wayne Reilly. Wayne had a bandaged nose, I was happy to see. The three of them stood in the car park and nodded in a congratulatory kind of way at each other for a few minutes and then dispersed. The company he keeps.

On my way out to visit Dan McArdle, the retired Garda detective, I called Sandra Howard and apologized for not having been in touch sooner.

“That’s all right. No one got much sleep here last night.”

“I can imagine. How is Emily faring?”

“She’s very upset, as you can imagine. David Manuel is with her. He always has a calming effect. Ed, Denis said you were there. You saw the…body. Do you think Shane…?”

“I don’t know, Sandra, is the answer. I don’t know. But I’m working on the basis that he didn’t.”

“You’re still with us then. Thank God for that. Denis says he doesn’t think they have enough to charge him.”

“That’s probably right,” I said.

“Ed, I owe you an apology. For last night.”

“Which part of last night?”

“The slapping part.”

“Good. Because I’m not sorry about the other part.”

“Neither am I. I hoped that…that we might do it again. Soon.”

“So did I.”

We let that hang for a while.

“Ed?”

“I’m here.”

But not for much longer. The traffic was getting busy as I took the Tallaght exit off the M50, and I needed to concentrate on the road.

“I’m going to have to hang up in a minute, Sandra.”

“Stephen Casey,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Richard O’Connor, my first husband. He was married before. His wife was killed, stabbed to death by an intruder. Rock was injured. The man-boy really, he was only seventeen-the boy who killed her-”

“That was Stephen Casey?”

“Yes. He killed himself. Drove a car off Bayview Harbour. They found him on All Souls’ Day, 1985. I couldn’t…I should have told you, but with everything that had happened, I just…didn’t want to go back there. Do you understand, Ed?”

What was it David Manuel had said about the Howards? It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts.

“Of course I understand. I’ll see you soon.”

I broke the connection as she began to ask me when. I didn’t trust myself with Sandra Howard. I was glad she had told me about Stephen Casey, but I wasn’t sure if she had told me everything. It was going to have to be my job to find out, and it was probably wiser if I kept my distance while I did. I didn’t want to keep my distance though, and I doubted very much that I would.

I drove out through a series of industrial estates and drive-in shopping parks. Housing developments fanned back toward the hills, and gleaming new apartment blocks were dotted along the main road, some with cranes still hovering above them. Between Tallaght and Jobstown, I turned off the road and pulled into a new apartment complex called Sycamore Fields. It had some desultory strips of landscaping around it, and about a dozen spindly sycamores wilting under the burden of the name; to one side there was a petrol station, to the other, a DIY warehouse. Dan McArdle buzzed me in and was waiting on the eleventh floor when the elevator doors opened. His apartment was not as high-end as David Brady’s-the fixtures and fittings were cheaper, and the furniture was basic and functional-but it was more like it than not; there was a dormitory feeling that this was a roof beneath which to sleep, not a home in which anyone would want to live, or certainly not for any length of time. Dan McArdle, steel grey hair gleaming, in a brown three-piece suit, shirt and tie and carpet slippers, told me to take a seat at the dining table, itself a mere step from the kitchen and living areas. While he was making tea I hadn’t asked for, through the walls I could hear a shower running, a TV tuned to a news channel and a woman having a tortured telephone conversation with an errant boyfriend. The neat, clean room smelled of smoke and fried food and pine air freshener. McArdle presented me with a mug of tea and a digestive biscuit and sat opposite me with the same.

“Nice place,” I said.

“Fantastic, isn’t it?” he announced heartily, in a rich old buttermilk-thick Dublin accent. “The wife died, and I was roaming around the semi, no kids, so I sold the thing, got a great price, bought three of these yokes, live in one, rent out the other two, great investments, on top of the Garda pension, not too bad at all.”

He dunked his digestive in his tea and sucked at it. He was maybe seventy, silver thatch eyebrows, dark grey eyes, jutting chin smooth and glowing with aftershave; his jacket sagged on his big frame, and his shirt was loose around the folds of his shrinking neck; a physically powerful man getting used to the diminution of his powers, or to something worse. As if he could read my thoughts, he produced a package of Major cigarettes and pulled an ashtray between us.

“Lung cancer. They can do shag all, excuse me French, except tell me to stop. They can shag off, am I wrong?”

He lit a cigarette, took a long drag and then coughed for a few minutes. I went to the sink and got him a cup of water-I couldn’t find a glass. He drank the water and put his cigarette back in his mouth, I lit a cigarette of my own, and we sat for a while, smoking. The noise from the other apartments was so loud and clear it seemed to be coming from the very room we were in, but McArdle seemed inured to it, maybe even grateful for it, occasionally tapping his fingers to TV jingles or raising an eyebrow in mock sympathy if the girl on the phone yelled or cried especially plaintively.

“I was hoping you might tell me something about Stephen Casey.”

“So the bold Dave said. You were buddies from way back, is that so? Well, Dave was the first man to the house that time, hadn’t been a wet day on the job and I didn’t think he’d last after seeing what he seen, that’s the God’s honest truth.”

“Which house was this?”

“Dr. O’Connor’s up in Castlehill, in a cul-de-sac there, just down from the hotel. The lad knocked on his door late, about nine it would have been. It was just getting dark, early autumn, August, September. Maybe they shouldn’t have opened it at all. But sure, it was a doctor’s house, used to callers, and anyway, who wouldn’t’ve answered the door back in those days? It’s only today we think like that.”

“So they opened the door,” I prompted. Like many lonely people, when he had a chance to speak he was eager to take full advantage of the opportunity by cramming in as many digressions and editorials as he could.