Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“What about Stephen Casey? He was a pupil of yours, wasn’t he? In your…what did you teach?”

“French and English.”

“In both your classes?”

“In my French class. I didn’t teach him English.”

“What kind of…I understand you had a close relationship with Stephen Casey. Who was the son of a servant of the family, wasn’t he?”

Sandra forced a tight smile.

“I’m going to have a brandy. Would you like another brandy, Ed Loy?”

“I would, yes.”

Sandra made two more drinks, gave me one and took a deep hit of hers, which she drank neat.

“I had…what would be called now an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with Stephen Casey. I could say I was in grief at the death of my father, which I was, and that in this grief my long-lost libido had returned with a vengeance, which it had, and that I was sick to death being the eldest child good girl who always knew better, which I was, and I didn’t want to waste time dating the kind of twerps and bozos who would go out with a frumpy old-before-her-time deputy headmistress without the handcuffs, which I didn’t; and they could all sound like excuses, which they aren’t. But basically, he was seventeen, and a brilliant pupil in my French class, and our housekeeper’s son, although she didn’t live in, and I seduced him, and it was inappropriate, as I’ve said, highly so, and dangerous, and very bad, and totally unexpected, and for a few months both of us had an absolutely fucking brilliant time.”

She laughed then, a rueful, joyous, filthy laugh, and it was hard not to laugh along with her.

“Although, you know, maybe if he’d lived, he would have found that I’d abused him and caused him untold and unaccountable distress, even if he was fucking seventeen and we could have got married, simply because I was his teacher. Who knows these days?”

She drank some more of her brandy. I looked at mine, but I wasn’t sure I needed any more.

“And then the nightmare began. Rock’s wife murdered, and Stephen vanished, and then the car brought to the surface in Bayview Sound, ahhhhh…”

She shook her head until her hair fell forward, shook it back and forth, like a maenad, or a teenage girl headbanging into a speaker bin.

“And that was the extent of your connection with those events.”

“‘And that was the extent of your connection with those events Jesus Christ what a pencil-licking prick you sound like Edward Loy.”

Her voice singsong and flaring with temper, her green eyes flashing red.

“I am a pencil-licking prick. That is, before everything else, what I am.”

“Do you really need me to spell it out? After…”

She gestured around the room: the rumpled, damp sheets, the reek of sex, the brandy smoking in the glasses.

I could live with this woman until the end of time. The blood beating in my ears, like wings.

“Yes, I need you to spell it out.”

Sandra stood then and looked down at me, calm again, cold, in fact, and I understood, whatever happened, there would almost certainly be no way back, and I almost hoped she was guilty of it all, of anything, so the pain I was going to feel might be lessened, or justified.

“I did not have anything to do with the murder of Audrey O’Connor, either myself or in conspiracy with Denis Finnegan and/or Richard O’Connor. I didn’t…groom Stephen Casey, isn’t that the expression? I didn’t groom him to kill her, or to rob her house. I didn’t have a relationship with Denis or Richard. I hadn’t a notion, I stumbled about in a mist the whole time, I felt I could barely see. Is that enough on that?”

I nodded. She went out of the room and was gone for a few minutes. I wondered whether I should get dressed. When she came back in, wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt, I wished I had. She sat in a chair and smiled at me. No handcuffs or whips, but I felt I’d been hauled naked before the deputy headmistress. I swallowed some brandy and smiled right back.

“All right,” I said. “How did you get involved with Dr. O’Connor?”

She shook her head and made a pained face at the open door, as if to an invisible jury in the corridor she knew would acquit her.

“I suppose we had grief in common. We were both trying to put our lives back together…and he helped me to reassemble mine. He was very strong, very brave…”

“Did he not have reservations at becoming close to someone who had been the lover of his wife’s murderer?”

“He didn’t know that. He…who told you that anyway? Because it was far from common knowledge, it…maybe some people suspected, but no one could have known for sure.”

“The Garda detective who investigated, Dan McArdle, had very strong suspicions.”

“I remember him. In his three-piece suit that looked like it had been carved out of wood and an anorak over it. Couldn’t take his eyes off my tits the whole time he questioned me.”

“All right then, let’s assume Dr.-Dr. Rock, is that what I should call him?”

“That’s what everyone else called him.”

“Let’s assume Dr. Rock didn’t know about your affair with the dead boy. What was it, do you think, that drew you to an older man, when you said before older men weren’t your type?”

“What are you, a private dick or a shrink? Why should I answer that?”

Dead boy, private dick. This was more of a lovers’ quarrel than a case.

I drained my brandy and got out of bed and started to put some clothes on.

“You don’t have to answer any of my questions. But it would help if you did. I’m convinced what happened yesterday is linked to what happened twenty years ago, that to keep your brother out of jail, we need to solve Audrey O’Connor’s murder. You say you were in a mist back then, you couldn’t see what was going on. Well you’re still in that mist tonight, and so is Shane, only now Emily is caught in it too, and Jonathan, and Martha O’Connor. I’m trying to clear it. I’m not trying to bully you, or pry into your private affairs. You can help me here. Or you can hold fast to a past you don’t pretend to understand and leave yourself and everyone else you know stumbling, blind, lost.”

I went to her, reached a hand to her face. She stopped it before it touched her cheek, held it to her lips and looked up at me.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, and sat on the bed.

“I guess a shrink might say…I didn’t use one, but it seems fairly obvious…that having lost my father, I was drawn to another…father figure. But I didn’t see Rock like that, or not only like that, not at first…I wasn’t attracted to him initially, we became friends first, then the attraction grew, although it turned out he’d been nursing a bit of a pash for me…but he was very fit, physically, we had a good sex life, he was…volatile and energetic and unpredictable, he wasn’t this…I don’t know, safe harbor, that’s what I always think of when I hear the words ‘father figure,’ safe harbor, like a fucking retirement home-”

“But your own father wasn’t like that either, was he?”

“No, I guess he wasn’t. He certainly wasn’t. And he was inspirational, or he would have been, if he wasn’t so difficult to live up to.”

“You told me this, that you had no confidence, that Rock made you believe in yourself. Was that not something you had from your father?”

“Father was very…it was the old style, never praise, if you got a B in your exams, you should have got an A, get an A and it’s no more than was expected. After a while, that wears you down, you feel you’ll never do anything worthy of his attention and respect. And so you don’t.”

“That’s why you didn’t do medicine?”

“And why Shane did dentistry. That was a real fuck-you to the old man. I was angry at the time. But now…”