Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“Emily? Emily, it’s Ed Loy.”

“Go away.”

“Emily, your father’s worried about you. Sandra too. I’m just checking that you’re okay.”

“My mother’s just been murdered and the cops think my dad did it; of course I’m okay.”

“Can you open the door? Can I talk to you?”

“No. Please, just leave me alone.”

“We have to believe Shane is innocent.”

“Why? I’d’ve killed her if I were him. They hated each other.”

“I don’t know that that’s true.”

“Who the hell are you? What do you know about any of it?”

“As much as you’ll tell me. I know about Stephen Casey, and Eileen Dalton being Jerry’s mother. I know you and Jerry are trying to get to the bottom of it all. That’s what I want too. But I need your help.”

There was a long silence, and then the sound of sobbing.

“Emily?”

“All right. I’ll ring Daddy. But please don’t tell him where I am, I just need some time alone. I’m safe here.”

The sobbing continued. I let the letterbox close.

I walked back to my car, picked the envelope from the windscreen and put it in my pocket; I didn’t have time for it now. Shane Howard was going to be outside St. Anthony’s Church at six with a bag of cash, and I needed a partner if I was going to track whoever was going to make the grab.

The fact Tommy Owens went to great lengths to hide-you could say he’d dedicated his entire life’s work to its concealment, if the phrase “life’s work” was one you could fit alongside Tommy with a straight face-was that his mother was a teacher, his family owned their own semidetached house, and, while his father had drunk himself to death by the age of forty-three, he was an alcoholic civil servant, not some drunken laborer. In other words, Tommy grew up lower middle class, or what passed for it in Ireland in those days (it didn’t always have much to do with money). But from the word go, Tommy wanted to be with the kids who were trouble, with the troubled kids, and his teachers went from telling him that they expected much better to eventually being relieved that his behavior wasn’t a lot worse. Everyone liked to say there was no real harm in Tommy, but that wasn’t true; he did his fair share of things to other kids that, looking back, were as vicious and mean as it comes; so did I; so did a lot of us. But Tommy always did stuff that seemed guaranteed to backfire, to land him in even greater trouble: when it comes to the various working definitions of a loser, Tommy Owens fit the bill in this regard: you always felt that, deep down, Tommy wanted to get caught. Not a man you needed on your side in a crisis. On the other hand, I hadn’t made enough friends since I’d been back to have many-all right, any -alternatives. Except for a few Guards, and they weren’t what I needed for a ransom grab, or, after last night, for anything else right now.

Sadie Owens greeted me with a hug.

“Ah Ed, the boy. I hope you’ve come to take him out of this,” she said. “The rages at least provide entertainment; the sulks are the worst thing.”

Sadie had looked about fifty when she was thirty-five, with paint flecks in her hair and colorful “ethnic” skirts and an absentminded air that never quite concealed how sharp she was; now she was seventy, she still looked fifty, but the paint flecks were grey hairs now, and the skirts were just a little wider at the hips. She rolled her eyes behind the thick Nana Mouskouri glasses she had always worn, opened the living room door, whispered “Light Blue Touch Paper” and disappeared into the kitchen.

It usually took a long time to talk Tommy out of a sulk, even when-especially when-the bad blood had been his fault. In that respect, it was like having a girlfriend, but without any of the advantages. But I didn’t have a long time. So I turned off whatever quiz show bollocks Tommy had been watching, sat down in front of him, put the sports bag I was carrying on the floor and said: “Tommy, I think the Reillys, working with Sean Moon or independent of him, have pressed ahead with an attempt to blackmail Shane Howard. They’ve set a pickup for six tonight, outside St. Anthony’s in Seafield. I want to follow them back to wherever they go once they’ve got the cash. Will you help me? And we’ll call it quits.”

Tommy’s valiant efforts to keep his sulk in place dispersed on the word “pickup.” He was grinning in anticipation and nodded eagerly.

“Sure, Ed, what do you want me to do?”

I guess the fact he was here at all, and still wearing pajamas and a dressing gown, ruled him out of the latest ransom bid. Another last chance for Tommy Owens.

“Two things, really. I need you to have a haircut and a shave, and then I need you to steal a car.”

St. Anthony’s is an old Victorian church set in off the main road near a crossroads; there’s a big yard in front that is either open or closed to cars, depending on whether there’s a coffin being brought to the church or just a regular mass. Tonight, the mass was at six, and all the dead were saints in heaven, so the yard was sealed off to traffic. Shane Howard stood in the church porch, pacing back and forth, his suede car coat on and a racing trilby on his head. He looked like a caricature of a south county Dublin rugby buffer, and as such, blended straight into an area where the oval ball game was a religion. I had passed by earlier and was waiting near the crossroads in the ’98 Punto Tommy Owens had stolen about half a mile from his house. (“Easier to leave it back if you know who you’ve stolen it from,” he said-some eighteen-year-old girl who had been given it for getting good exam results, apparently.)

When I’d called Howard on his mobile a few minutes earlier, he was still raging about the difficulties he had had getting out of his house.

“Some Garda fuckers must have told the press, a whole pack of them had gathered. Garda car there too, I think. I had them out in fucking Bray, thought I’d have to head up the mountains, but I lost them up Enniskerry way, cut back down here with fucking minutes to spare.”

“You’re all right now. Just hand them the bag, don’t worry about getting a look at them or anything: I have someone watching. I’m going to go now, I need to talk to him. Don’t lose the head Shane, all right?”

“All right. Be sure and get these cunts now.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Tommy Owens, clean-shaven, with hair newly cropped by his mother and slicked back from his forehead (Sadie said, “He looks like his father did when he only drank at weekends,” which, given the way Tommy lived, I thought was good going) and totally unrecognizable in a duffel coat, clear-lensed glasses with thick rims and grey desert boots, stood outside St. Anthony’s handing out eccentric religious pamphlets that I’d robbed from the porch of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Woodpark about the spiritual benefits that would accrue from a special devotion to someone called Mother Meera, and also from the talismanic properties of Padre Pio’s Mitten. Tommy was anxious that he hadn’t had the time to establish who or what these were, but I said the only people who might want to know would be as evidently mad as he was claiming to be. Beneath the duffel coat, Tommy had the Sig Sauer the Reillys had used to scare me off, only this time it was loaded; I had Parabellum 9mm at home, and now they were chambered and ready to go. I wasn’t armed. I figured if by some chance the Reillys made Tommy, he had the right to defend himself; giving him the gun wasn’t easy, but the sober look in his eyes when he realized how much trust I was placing in him gave me hope he wouldn’t fuck up. Not much hope, but some. What I really needed was some higher-quality backup, or some less complicated cases.