Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

Shane Howard came at me big but slow, full of rage but with no strategy; his arms were spread out and flailing at my head; I ducked and grabbed his left forearm as he slapped my head with his right; I bent his left at the elbow and drove it hard behind his back and up, fast and hard until he dropped to his knees and tried to scream but couldn’t, he was in such pain, held it just before the break.

“I’ve had just about as much as I can take on this case; I’ve been slapped and bitten and pistol-whipped, and all because I’m trying to help you and your fucking family, so don’t think about coming at me again, because you’re too slow and you’re too old and I’ll have you, do you understand? DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

He grunted a yes.

“Are you going to try and answer my questions?”

He nodded. I released his arm and shoved him away. He half walked, half ran to the rowan tree border and hung on one of the trees, shaking a hail of bloodred berries through the cold misty air, then turned, head bowed, massaging his left arm and shoulder. I looked back at the house, and saw Denis Finnegan’s face looming out from an upstairs window; we locked eyes briefly, and then he vanished like steam on a pane. Shane Howard loped back toward me, grinning, like we had just clashed on the rugby field, and he wanted to reassure me there were no hard feelings.

“Fair play. Lost it, understandable enough. Know you’re only doing your job.”

“Answer the question please.”

“Jessica abused, I never heard that. She never told me that. Why she’d tell Sandra and not me I don’t know, unless it was one of those women’s things. I mean, I knew she started early, thirteen or fourteen. She was always boasting about what she’d got up to as a teenager. And maybe that was an example for Emily. Started her off early too, the way her mother used to talk about…men, sex, all that. Pushed her into all this stuff she was doing with Brady, films and so forth. But in terms of…well, I never laid a finger on the child. And if someone else did…”

Howard shook his head, his body quivering with anger and unhappiness at the thought. I put a hand on his shoulder to signal that line of questioning was over. I was as relieved as he was. I believed him when he said he hadn’t killed his wife, or David Brady. And I thought he was telling the truth about Emily, at least as far as he knew it. Before I had a chance to say anything else, he produced an envelope and handed it to me. Inside was a sheet of white A4 paper, on which was typed:

In sympathy for your time of trouble, we extended the time allowed to you to pay the fifty grand. But we still have the film, so be outside the main door of St. Anthony’s Church in Seafield at six with the money in a shopping bag. No cops-and that means Ed Loy. Or watch your little girl become a worldwide porn star!

“How did this arrive?”

“By hand, just like the last one. Anita said it came this morning. She didn’t see anyone.”

There were only two possible candidates stupid or reckless enough to keep pushing a blackmail attempt on a murder suspect; I thought it was the Reillys; I hoped it wasn’t Tommy; either way, I felt I could handle it.

“Right. This is all right. Provided you can stay out of jail. It’s about three now. Can you get the cash?”

“I arranged it the day before yesterday; it’s ready to be collected today.”

“All right. Take it out, and we’ll make a plan. The bad news is, I don’t think these people are the real threat. The good news is, I think we can take them down.”

Howard nodded, eager to play an active part to protect his daughter.

“Just remember though, I don’t care about the money,” he said. “I just want to help my little girl.”

“Well, you just might start to care about the money when they ask for it once a week. But I’ll figure something out on that side of it too.”

He patted me on the shoulder. It hurt.

“There’s one other thing,” I said. “Sandra told me about Stephen Casey. Who he was, what he did. It’s very sad. I can understand why none of you wanted to dredge that particular memory up. It’s just that I’m worried about his mother. Eileen, I think her name was. Sandra told me she was in service at Rowan House, then she left to get married.”

“Why are you worried about Stephen Casey’s mother?” Shane Howard asked. His voice was careful and clear, and I was conscious that he was very wary of the subject.

“I think she might have something to do with all this. Just a hunch. That she might blame you-the Howards-for her son’s death.”

“That’s…why would she?”

“Chances are she doesn’t. I’d just like to make sure. Eliminate her from my inquiries, as your friends the Guards say.”

Howard almost smiled at that.

“I don’t really know much. As I say, I had the rugby, and the practice…it was one of those times, Sandra ran the show. What do I remember? She wasn’t bad-looking, say that. Very upset about the son, we all were, tragic for her. And then she got married…she moved to Woodpark, somewhere…Pearse something, Drive or Villas or whatever, everything’s called Pearse there. Married to a bloke she’d been going out with a while, once got a backer on his motorbike, what was his name?”

Like an old vinyl record, I seemed to hear Shane Howard’s next words in my head split seconds before he spoke them, like a ghostly premonition of worse to come, or the dead-bolt realization that, deep down, you knew the worst all along.

“Dalton, chap’s name was. Some kind of nickname, don’t remember that. His second name though was definitely Dalton.”

SANDRA HOWARD RANG; HER VOICE WAS HIGH AND urgent.

“Ed, Emily’s gone. I went down to the clinic to take care of a few things, and when I got back she had gone.”

“Is there any sign of forced entry, or of a struggle?”

“No. Oh my God, she’s been kidnapped again.”

“I don’t think so. Shane has just had another ransom demand. It just used the film as a threat. Why risk taking her when they have the film as a bargaining chip?”

“You’re right, I suppose.”

“She probably just wants some time to herself,” I said, wishing I were as confident as I sounded. When I ended the call, I had to go through it all again with Shane; by the time I had him reassured that Emily was in no danger, I was convinced she was.

Denis Finnegan was gone when we got back inside the house. I asked Shane Howard to use a mobile phone with an earpiece and to wear a hat so that I could contact him when he was waiting outside the church with a bag full of money. He said he didn’t have a shopping bag, so I looked around and finally found a silver and blue bag advertising some drug company’s latest product. Then I asked him to give Anita the rest of the day off so I could follow her. He was offended that I didn’t trust her; I reassured him that I didn’t trust anyone, including him, that not trusting anyone was my job. He thought I was being funny. I wish I had been. I didn’t tell him I thought she looked far too frightened to be trusted, or that she bore a striking resemblance to the blonde in the porn film with his nephew Jonathan. Shane Howard told me Anita had come into work today driving a blue ’98 reg Fiat Punto-he hadn’t noticed the car before-but he wasn’t sure where she lived or what her second name was. I waited in my car while he found her address in his files; by that time she had taken off, and I was on her tail. I hoped I wouldn’t have to follow her all the way to the North Circular Road, as that’s where Shane Howard said Anita Kravchenko’s flat was. I didn’t. She went through Bayview and along Rathdown Road straight onto upper Seafield Road, then took the third exit off the roundabout by the DIY retail park, straight down into the Woodpark Estate. I was hanging back, keeping my distance, but I misjudged the roundabout; two buses crunched in front of me, and a stream of traffic followed them, and by the time I’d reached Woodpark, I’d lost her. I drove around for a while, aware it was most likely a futile exercise; trying to find a nineties reg Punto in a council estate was like trying to find someone in a grey and navy tracksuit, or a girl with snow blond hair, for that matter; I was on my third car and my fourth blond when I decided to give up. And then I saw a small terrace tucked away in a corner between the church and the high wall the council had built to placate the residents of the adjacent, nonlocal authority houses, and I glimpsed a flash of blond hair and a blue car, and I pulled into the church car park and got out and walked across to the sycamores and beech trees and the low three-bar metal fence that marked the boundary between church and houses, and slipped among them and saw Anita Kravchenko knock on the front door of a two-up two-down grey pebbledash midterrace house, and look over her shoulder as a man opened the door and smiled in what looked like surprise and Anita looked in my direction and I tucked my head in behind the broad fungus-flecked beech trunk, and then looked out again to see her talking intensely to the man in the doorway, the man I had last seen in the Woodpark Inn, singing about Blood on the Wind. Jerry Dalton, who was the right age to be Eileen Casey’s second son, the right age to be Stephen Casey’s half brother, the right age to return and claim his inheritance. He stepped aside and looked at the traffic and the cars in the car park and Anita went into the house and someone else approached the door and spoke to Dalton. Dalton half turned and said something over his shoulder, and the person moved fully into the doorway to continue the conversation. She had dyed her hair black, and she looked very pale, but there was no question that it was Emily Howard.