Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

No names. It is too frightened.

I FOUND THE PAGES JERRY DALTON HAD LEFT BENEATHmy windscreen when I was looking in my pockets to pay for a pint of Guinness and a double Jameson. I was sitting on a barstool in an old-style pub waiting for Martha O’Connor, who had called and arranged to meet me. The pages were copies of press clippings. One, from 1999, was an obituary of Dr. Richard O’Connor, who it said had died suddenly. It gave a straightforward account of his medical and rugby careers (he had played for Seafield back in the preprofessional days, and was capped for Ireland A teams, but never played a full international game), the violent death of his first wife Audrey and the happiness of his second marriage to Sandra Howard. The second page was a short article that had been downloaded from some kind of forensic pathology Web site about how an overdose of insulin could make a diabetic look like he’d had a heart attack.

I had finished both drinks and was ordering more when a voice behind me said, “And a pint of Carlsberg.”

Martha O’Connor was about five nine and, as Dan McArdle had said, a fine big girl, heavy without seeming overweight (at least, not unless you looked too hard at models in glossy magazines, which it didn’t look like she did), in a loose cotton polo shirt and a fleece jacket and faded jeans and Timberland boots; her dark brown hair was cropped short at the back and sides, long at the front, like an English public schoolboy’s; her complexion was dark, as were her eyes; her eyebrows were unplucked, and she wore no makeup. She didn’t resemble her half brother in the slightest.

“I didn’t think I looked that obvious,” I said.

“You probably don’t. But this is my local; everyone else here either works on the paper or is a regular.”

She sat on the stool beside me and nodded greetings to a variety of faces. The drinks arrived. Martha O’Connor looked at my whiskey and pint combination and smiled.

“You’d fit in here, no problem,” she said. “Ed Loy. You worked the Dawson case, right?”

I nodded.

“Don’t think we heard the real story there.”

“Doubt it,” I said. “A lot of lawyers made sure of that.”

“How’d you like to tell it? The truth, by the man on the inside…”

“When I retire, you’ll be the first to know.”

“If you keep on drinking like that…”

“Here’s to drinking,” I said. “Who wants to retire?”

I raised my pint, and she grinned and clinked hers against it.

“I’m working on a case that involves your stepmother now,” I said. Her grin took on a strained quality.

“Has she ensnared you yet? Cast her Sandra-spell? She’s good at that, captivating men, inspiring them with her goodness and nobility and beauty, until the poor sods are so cuntstruck they can’t see through her.”

A couple of men turned their heads in Martha’s direction, as if appalled that a woman should use such language, only to turn away without comment when they saw who it was.

“What should they see? When they see through her?”

Martha shrugged.

“Calculation. Ambition. Ice,” she said. “My stepmother and I did not get along, not from day one. Understandable enough, I suppose, ten-year-old girl loses her mother, then her beloved daddy to another woman two years later, it’s textbook stuff. And I didn’t think of my father, that’s true, what he might have needed, I just thought of myself. But you know, why not? I was the little girl who’d seen her mother stabbed to death. I needed my father to myself for as long as I felt like it. Why couldn’t he have waited? I’d be an adolescent soon enough.”

The pain sounded true and clear in her voice, and as fresh as it had happened yesterday.

“So I just withdrew. Insisted on being sent to a boarding school run by fucking nuns; then went to Oxford. God knows why I came back.”

“In the absence of His wisdom, why did you come back?”

“I don’t know. To settle some scores.”

“With your family?”

“And with the Church. And with the whole fucking country.”

“And how’s all that going for you?” I said.

“Pretty fucking good so far,” she said, and lilted, “You’re never short of a score to settle, in dear old Ire-land.”

She drained her pint and caught the barman’s eye.

“Pat, a Carlsberg, and…do I have to buy you two drinks? Fuck’s sake, pricey date.”

“Just the pint. The Jameson’s done its work.”

“And a Guinness. So, how’s it looking up there anyway? Is the murder triangle theory going to hold? Are they going to charge Shane? Poor Jessica, I always liked her, she was very sexy.”

“Are you working now?” I said.

“‘Sources close to…’” she said.

I shook my head.

“I can’t do that, not yet.”

The drinks came, and we paid them some attention.

“I wanted to ask you about Dr. John Howard,” I said.

“Now that… that’s a work in progress. Speaking of scores. But information doesn’t come for free. If you won’t show me yours…”

I looked at her. She was grinning, but she was a serious person, and the work she did was intense and scrupulous and valuable.

“Okay, what I’m going to tell you, you cannot say to anyone until this case breaks for me, do you understand?”

“Says you.”

“No, I’m serious. And then I will tell you everything, on condition you leave me out of it. Because it’s people’s lives and deaths here. Including your parents.”

She looked down the bar for a moment. When she turned back, her face was set, her eyes grave. She nodded.

“Okay. I spoke to a retired Garda detective today who worked the case of your mother’s murder, who was promoted to inspector at its conclusion. Now, he wasn’t saying anything explicitly. But he was certainly unhappy with the outcome. What he seemed most especially uneasy about was the idea that Casey acted alone. He pointed to the disparity between your mother’s and father’s injuries, the fact that not only was Casey a pupil of your mother’s and a player on the rugby team coached by your father but he was also the child of a servant in the Howard household whose school fees were being paid by the family.”

“Are you saying Sandra and my father…”

“I’m not saying anything. And neither was he. These are hypotheses-”

Martha O’Connor nodded impatiently, as if to say, “I know how this works, keep the bullshit for civilians.”

“Okay, so the boy seems to have been encouraged to see himself as a favorite of Sandra’s. Apparently some of his classmates felt there was a good deal more than favoritism involved. So we have the possibility that Sandra is-”

“Fucking him.”

“And in the process, training him to do as she wants. Casting her Sandra-spell, as you put it. And what she wants is for Dr. Rock to become available. Which of course involves finding a way to get your mother out of the picture.”

“And in this hypothesis, is my father involved?”

“That’s one possibility. He would have worked with Casey on the rugby field. He seems to have been an inspiring man, is that so?”

“People say so. For a ten-year-old girl, unless she’s very unlucky, her daddy’s always an inspiration, he’s her entire world. But people always said, in the world of rugby particularly, Dr. Rock was a mighty man. A hero to the guys.”

She made the world of rugby sound like a childish place, and her lip curled with irony when she said “Dr. Rock,” but despite that, the pain she still felt at his absence was evident.

“It’s not necessary though, Sandra could easily have trained him herself. She took the long view: once Audrey was dead, she’d work on Dr. Rock and reel him in.”