Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“The wife opened the door, Audrey her name was-and there was this lad in an anorak with a balaclava on, and he must have stabbed her there and then, straight through the heart, two or three times, nice clean job, very little blood, forcing her back into the hall and kicking the door shut behind him. From what he told us, the husband came out next and tried to save the wife, getting in front of her. He got slashes to the hands for his trouble, and a wound on his right side. The lad forced him back into the cupboard under the stairs and locked the door, then he went through the front rooms and filled a bag with silverware and ornaments. That was it really. Oh, and all O’Connor’s rugby medals, mounted on a board.”

“That was it? No jewelry, no safe?”

“He didn’t stay around long enough. Don’t know why. Only thing we could think, he was put off because the O’Connors’ ten-year-old daughter woke up and came down the stairs.”

“So Casey could kill a woman no bother, balked at killing a man and bungled the robbery rather than harm a ten-year-old girl? He couldn’t even tie her up?”

“That was all we could come up with, son.”

“Did the girl say anything?”

“She tried to call us, after Casey had left. But he cut the phone lines. She had to go out, in her nightdress, smeared in her mother’s blood, because of course she tried to wake her mammy up, across the road and get the neighbors to ring the Guards. God love her.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then, nothing: no witnesses, no leads, nothing. And a month or so later we found young Casey dead at the wheel of a stolen car. Drove off the harbor wall at Bayview. At the deepest part. He’d been missing all that time. And in the boot of the car, all the stuff that had been stolen from the O’Connor home. Apart from the rugby medals, they never showed up.”

“Very neat.”

“That’s what we thought.”

“Autopsy? Was he dead before he hit the water?”

“Postmortem putrefaction had been speeded up too much for any satisfactory examination to be carried out.”

“Very neat part two. And you got the glory.”

“All tied up in a nice neat bow. Stepped up to inspector. End of story.”

“And was it the end of the story? Or was there more that got brushed under the carpet?”

McArdle pressed his lips shut, plumped up his bird’s-nest eyebrows and looked at me through grey eyes that still glowed with quiet menace. That must have been a pretty intimidating look back in the day.

“You did what you had to do. Open-and-shut. No sense bringing in a lot of for-instances. Especially not given the people involved. And it was only later that you really began to wonder about them.”

“For instance?”

McArdle lit another cigarette, hummed along briefly to the piercingly loud theme tune of a sitcom from a neighboring apartment, then stared at his hand and began counting off on his fingers.

“For instance, Stephen Casey was a pupil at Castlehill College and was in Sandra Howard’s French class, where he was considered a favorite of hers. Where some of his classmates thought there was more than a teacher-pupil relationship between them.

“For instance, Dr. Rock was a part-time senior rugby coach at Castlehill, and Stephen Casey was prop forward on the first team.

“For instance, Sandra and Dr. Rock, who survived the attack that saw his wife slaughtered with relatively and mysteriously minor injuries, wed a mere two years later.

“For instance, Stephen Casey was the son of a single mother named Eileen who had been a servant for Dr. John Howard and family up in Rowan House until the doctor’s death; the Howards paid for Casey’s education.

“For instance, after Stephen Casey’s death, his mother Eileen, a servant as I say, suddenly had the money to buy a house in Woodpark, and married shortly after.”

Having used up the fingers and thumb of one hand, he made it into a fist and drove it into the palm of its twin, showering cigarette ash above us like funereal confetti. Then he stood up and went to a cupboard and took a bottle of Jameson and two glasses and brought them to the table.

“I usually have my first around about now,” he said. “Will you join me?”

It was twenty-five past twelve, but I nodded immediately: my heart was pounding and adrenaline was coursing through me, my brain racing at the implications of what McArdle had just told me.

“Dave D told me you were a sound man for the gargle,” he said approvingly.

He had poured two straight shots, and we both lowered them in one. McArdle leaned across the table then, his dark eyes flaring red and watery.

“See now, son, what I told you there. I don’t even know if there’s anything to it. Compared to some of the things I seen. Say nothing, isn’t that right? They should’ve had it embroidered on the uniform.”

He poured another for himself, picked up a remote control handset and pointed it at a wide-screen television, flicking through the channels until it arrived at an old western starring James Stewart, one of those fifties ones where his face looks twisted with hatred and fear, haunted by the past, by what he did, or failed to do. He turned the volume up so that it dampened out the spectral manifestations from the neighboring souls.

“Ah, the bold Jimmy. This is me now. Good luck there, son. God bless.”

I got up and went to the door, then thought of something.

“Just one last thing. The ten-year-old girl who saw her mother killed. Do you remember her name?”

McArdle frowned, muted the sound on the TV.

“Say again, son?”

I repeated the question.

“Mary, I think. No. Marie? No, Martha. Martha O’Connor. She does be on the television now, sometimes, making documentaries, sticking it to the Church and all. Fine big girl. Mouth on her. Writes for some paper or other, I don’t know, I just get them for the telly these days. But that was her name all right, Martha O’Connor.”

I BOUGHT AN EVENING HERALDAT A SET OF TRAFFIC lights coming out of Tallaght from a vendor weaving between the lanes. Its headline didn’t need much deciphering: Above shots of Jessica Howard, Shane Howard and David Brady blared the words “Deadly Triangle?” The phrase was prime tabloidese, as banal as it came, yet it set off a geometrical ricochet in my head, resonating across twenty years to the deadly triangle that haunted Dan McArdle to this day. I tried to remember what I had seen in Sandra Howard’s eyes the first time I mentioned Stephen Casey’s name: fear, or grief, or deception; I wondered whether she had acted on her attraction for me to quash her own sad memories, or whether she had fucked me on the stairs to tame me and draw my sting, whether, having run the Howard family for twenty years, she thought she could run me too. And I wondered, at some base level I didn’t much like thinking about, which of those motives I found the greater turn-on.

Nearing Seafield, the Jameson started setting off chemical explosions in my stomach. I parked below the Seafront Plaza, got a roast beef and pickle bagel and a bottle of beer and took them back to the car. Fog was rolling in now; I couldn’t see either of the great piers, let alone the water in the bay. I made some calls between bites: leaving a message for Martha O’Connor at her newspaper to call me on the subject of Dr. John Howard; and asking David Manuel to check in with me once he had spoken to Emily Howard. There was a message from Denis Finnegan waiting when I hung up: Shane Howard had been released. I drove through Bayview and up the hill by the harbor and parked a little way down from the surgery. I navigated the narrow road with difficulty; there were two Mercedes S-Series saloons and a BMW parked outside. Irish people loved announcing their newfound prosperity through bigger and wider cars; it was a pity they hadn’t spent a few shillings building roads for the cars to fit on, or wondered whether, if they wanted to live in old houses on quaint, windy roads, they should consider sizing their cars accordingly.