Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

Martha sat openmouthed.

“You know, I had always wondered…not that I wished him dead, but it didn’t make any sense that Casey’d kill her and let him live.”

“Afterward, the Howards paid Stephen Casey’s mother off. Bought her a house.”

“For her silence? You mean she knew they’d killed her son?”

“No, she knew he’d killed your mother. And had then committed suicide. They paid her off so she wouldn’t ask any inconvenient questions.”

“Like why? What was in it for him?”

“Exactly.”

“And what was?”

“We have to assume-again, falling in with what is only a hypothesis-that Sandra cast some kind of spell, maybe that your mother stood in the way of Dr. Rock’s happiness, and only by killing her could he be free.”

“That’s a bit weak, isn’t it?”

“Is it? For a seventeen-year-old who went ahead and did it? It might have been enough.”

“Well, yes, I suppose, the fact that he did go ahead and do it…”

“Were your mother and father happy?”

Martha took a long drink of her beer.

“I was ten years old, remember,” she said.

“I know. A good age to think whatever you like, without censoring your thoughts. Did you ever feel glad it was just you and your father? And did that make it so much worse when Sandra came on the scene? I know you might feel like it’s some kind of betrayal to talk like that, but I’m just trying to get at the logic of it, of what might have seemed plausible-to Sandra, to Stephen Casey, maybe even to your father.”

Martha stared into her drink. In a low, awkward voice that sounded like she was reading a prepared statement, she said, “Yes, I was happy when it was just the two of us; my mother wasn’t a very giving person, and resented the affection my father showed me; when he got together with Sandra, what became obvious to me was that they were sexually very attracted to each other, they were doing it all the time; and then I began to feel that hadn’t been the case between my dad and my mother. Did that make Sandra’s presence even harder to take? For a girl who still believes her daddy is her prince? The fuck do you think ?”

Martha drained her pint and looked for the barman, but he was nowhere to be seen; she turned back to me and shook her head.

“I’ve been paying a talking-cure woman for the last five years, and I haven’t come close to telling her what I’ve just told you.”

“She was probably too chicken to ask straight out if your da killed your ma.”

“You’re in the wrong line of work, Ed Loy. Where’s the barman? Pat?”

Martha’s face and manner were somber in repose, but she worked them over with a big girl’s forced jollity. The beer was eating into the jollity, however, and I didn’t want to lose her.

“Don’t get drunk,” I said. “Remember, you promised to show me yours.”

“Drunk on beer? Not me, I have hollow legs.”

Pat materialized at the bar, a mask of jaded skepticism on his ruddy round face.

“Do you have any food?” I said.

“No,” he said. “We have toasted sandwiches.”

I ordered two ham and cheese and more drinks.

“And now,” I said, “Dr. John Howard, please.”

“Dr. John Howard. Actually, I was exaggerating his importance. The disappointing thing is how typical he was of the Irish Catholic doctor of the age. The Church’s willing enforcers. If Ireland had been in the Eastern bloc, we would have been riddled with secret police. We’d’ve had more police than people. I love this thing that we’re supposed to hate informers, of all things, Jesus, we’d give up our own children so long as we could do it in secret. Anyway, the Church couldn’t have carried out its antisterilization, antiabortion, anticontraception policies without the enthusiastic participation of the medical profession. Just like secret police and informers, when you have the laity doing it for you, it means you don’t have to keep reminding them. I guess the fact that Howard advised several ministers on public health-care policy means he’s become a kind of symbol of it all, the king who must be retrospectively dethroned. But in reality, and as much as I’d dearly love to single out the head of the Howard family for particular opprobrium, he’s the same as all of those guys-a stethoscope in one hand and a crucifix in the other. He was just more successful than they were. And with the Howard Clinic, he saw that private medicine was never going to die here, that there’d always be money to be made, and prestige to be garnered, from keeping the upper tier open and the comfortable class in good health.”

The sandwiches arrived, and I fell on mine. It wasn’t very nice, but English mustard took care of that, and it was hot and it qualified as food, and as I’d seen two men murdered since the last time I’d eaten, it suddenly felt reassuring simply to be alive, and hungry, and able to do something about it. Martha pushed her sandwich toward me, and I slathered it with mustard too.

“What about the hysterectomies and the symphis…I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce-”

“Symphisiotomies. Yes, well, there’s no doubt these were barbaric practices, but it’s not as if he was the only one, and it’s not as if that just happened back in the bad old days in black and white when no one knew any better than to beat children with leather straps and bugger them in industrial schools and presbyteries. These things were going on in the nineteen eighties, into the nineties, when the Church was losing its grip entirely. I’m not undermining the seriousness of it, or the women’s lives that were ruined, just saying that at least back then when Howard was on the go, there was a context, a societal and religious context for it.”

“So no smoking gun then.”

“No smoking gun. Very amusing, erudite fellow, wrote several anecdotal books-Doctors and Golf, Doctors and Dining, Doctors and Drink and, would you believe, Doctors and Smoking. Made a broader public name for himself in the seventies when he became a regular guest on the Late Late Show , part of a panel they’d have on to discuss the events of the day.”

“And he’d weigh in with the Catholic line, would he?”

“No actually, he was seemingly quite deft at finessing all of that. He was funny and ironic and charming-like an Irish David Niven, one of the old hands on the paper told me. And of course, that did the clinic’s business no harm at all, the notion that it had almost showbiz cachet.”

My phone rang. It was Tommy; he was in the car, heading for the city. I told him where I was and he said he’d come and get me. Martha finished her drink and looked at her watch.

“Before you go,” I said, and passed her the pages Jerry Dalton gave me. After she had read the second page, about how an overdose of insulin could resemble a heart attack, she turned to me and grabbed my arm.

“My father was a diabetic. Are you saying Sandra murdered him?”

“I haven’t had time to work out what I’m saying yet. Someone put those two pages under my windscreen tonight. Yesterday they left a mass card for Stephen Casey.”

“Someone is leading you along?”

“It feels like it.”

I didn’t want to tell her I knew who it was. Not until I discovered more about what Jerry Dalton was up to.

“I feel like the top of my head’s about to come off.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you that. I mean, there’s no evidence for it, for any of this…”

“Don’t worry, I’m not about to collapse, or worse, barge into Rowan House and start making accusations. I know what you’re doing. Still, it is, as the Pope would say, a bit of a mind-fuck.”

“I don’t know if you remember the details of your father’s death…”