Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“What do you want?” he said, attempting to block my path.

“I want to talk to you, Jonny. Ask you a few more questions.”

“Anything you have to say, you can say out here. I’m very busy at the moment, I’ve an essay to finish.”

A couple of female students had come in Front Gate and were heading in our direction. “All right then,” I said in a much louder voice. “I want to ask you about your use of prostitutes in the pornographic films you made, and whether you feared some of them were having sex in those films under duress: being raped, in other words.”

Jonathan looked at me in shock, then at the approaching women, then withdrew and said, “Come up. Second floor.”

I followed him up two flights of stairs and into his “rums,” which consisted of a kitchen the size of a telephone kiosk, two tiny bedrooms and a living room with the kind of furniture junk shops no longer accept. There was a gas fire and no other form of heating; the bathroom was in the hall.

“Wow,” I said. “Where do you have to live if you don’t win Schol? On the street?”

“The privilege resides in living on campus,” he said, his little accent at its snootiest. “And I don’t have to share; one normally would. And of course I could fix it up and buy all sorts of furniture and so on, but how vulgar would that be?”

I nodded, impatient already with the idea of teasing him any further. I sat down on a steel-frame sofa and nearly fell through one of the cushions; Jonathan perched on an orange plastic chair in his expensive jeans and his expensive sweatshirt and looked at me with a supercilious grin. A silver laptop computer lay open on the table beside him. The walls were decorated with pictures of airbrushed, orange plastic women in and out of their underwear cut from the pages of FHM and Loaded and Maxim ; the women looked as if they were all dying for sex; none of them looked like they came fitted with the flesh you need to do it properly. There were two portraits of Dr. John Howard, and an aerial photograph of the three towers of the Howard Medical Center. I was cold, and I had just seen two men killed; I needed a meal and a drink and a good night’s sleep. One out of three would do.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I said.

“I’m not running a pub, you know,” Jonathan said in an exceptionally spoiled and shrill voice. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to smack him in the head. At some level, I think he may have picked up on this. He trudged off to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Absolut vodka and a carton of orange juice and two glass tumblers. I ignored the juice, poured off a slug of Absolut and threw it back.

“The blond girl in the second sex film you made,” I said. “What was her name?”

“Wendy. At least, that’s what they called her. She was in the film with Emily too.”

“Was she Eastern European? And if you say you didn’t check her passport, I’m going to toss you out the fucking window.”

Jonathan looked gratifyingly frightened at my threat. I kept looking at the window, not because I was going to throw him out of it but because through it, you could see straight up Grafton Street; you were right in the heart of the city. I was starting to see the point of these “rums.”

“I think so,” he said. “She didn’t really speak very much, but when she did it was with an accent. Polish, or Russian, I don’t know. And no, in answer to your next question, it didn’t seem like she was being forced. She wasn’t wildly enthusiastic either, but…I just figured she was being paid, she needed the money.”

“That’s as far as you thought about it?”

He looked at the floor and began to rub his wrists together; when he looked up again his eyes were glistening, and he was shaking.

“I don’t know. I…the other woman was Irish, Petra, Sean Moon called her, but that was bullshit, she was a hooker really, extremely coarse…she wasn’t very happy about it either…I think she was pregnant…the whole thing was a bit of a nightmare, actually…”

He started to retch, then ran out to the kitchen, where I could hear him vomit. I was giving him a hard time, bullying him, taking out on him the anger I should have used on Brock Taylor. I told myself I should have as much patience with Jonathan as I had with Emily; it looked like their family had put them both through the mill, and if I didn’t find him as sympathetic, that wasn’t necessarily his fault. When he came back in, his eyes burned red in his grey face.

“Are you all right?”

“What do you care? Just ask your questions and get out,” he said. “What are you after, anyway? The Guards are dealing with Uncle Shane. Either they have enough evidence to charge him or they don’t. It’s pretty straightforward, I should have thought. Why are you trying to complicate it?”

“Because I’m not so sure your uncle is guilty. Because if he isn’t, the question is, who did kill Jessica Howard and David Brady? Because there’s more to the case than just those murders, and what there is goes back twenty, maybe thirty years.”

“Christ, you sound like David Manuel. Nothing’s ever what it is, it’s always bound up with something else, something that happened in the past.”

“Your mother says that’s true of you. That nothing has been the same for you since your father’s death.”

“So what? Does that make me special? People die, life goes on. What’s it got to do with you? Why are you so interested in our family anyway? You’re like a little orphan boy, his face pushed up against the window of the big house. Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

“I’m being paid by your mother to do a job,” I said, stung by the sense that there was a whip of truth in his words, that for all I told myself, I didn’t just make my living this way, and it wasn’t just about justice; I seemed to need the chaos other people brought me so I could make a pattern from it, establish the connections they couldn’t see themselves. Not from envy, but from need.

“I’d be interested in the job description. Does it include fucking her on the stairs in Rowan House? Do you think that’s what a woman like my mother needs? You’re a grubby man, Mr. Loy. I don’t think you could make sense of our family in a million years. Do you know why? Because you’re not our kind of people.”

“There’s a fair likelihood Wendy was being held against her will, that she was either trafficked here or kidnapped once she arrived. That she was forced to have sex with you and Emily. That’s something you did, Jonathan, of your own free will. What kind of person does that make you?”

He flashed an anxious look at me, then stared at the floor again, shaking his head.

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” he said.

“Tell me what you remember about her, something, anything, no matter how trivial.”

“She wore a ring. She took it off before we started shooting. The stones were so big, they kept scratching us.”

“What kind of ring?”

“Red stones…they couldn’t have been rubies, but deep red. Two big ones, coming to points, like…I don’t know, like claws.”

Like crab claws. I remembered Anita’s words yesterday morning: It’s not an engagement ring. It’s for protection. A talisman.

I stood up and walked around the room and came to rest in front of the photograph of the three towers that made up the Howard Medical Center.

“Do you think there should be a fourth tower built, Jonathan? I know that’s what your mother wants.”

“Of course I do. And Denis wants it too. It’s an expression of confidence in the family, of continuity, of tradition. It’s the only option.”

“Jessica didn’t agree. Neither does Shane.”