Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

She dropped her head into her hand, pressed her eyes between thumb and forefinger.

“I’m sorry. Keep going,” she said.

“Your parents’ sex life. You said they had separate bedrooms, was that just through your father’s illness, or-”

“Oh God no, they hadn’t slept together since Ma…since…I think Father had an affair, or something…at least I assume that’s what it was, Mother never spoke about it…from when we were, I don’t know, teenagers. It was…I don’t know.”

She shrugged, blushing, not wanting, like any of us I suppose, to go within ten miles of her parents’ sex life.

“What was that you said, ‘Since Ma’…?”

“Since Ma…found out, I suppose I was going to say. About the affair.”

“You didn’t call your mother ‘Ma,’ did you? Posh girl like you?”

“Hark at the little urchin lad. No, I didn’t, but Stephen did. So I did sometimes. Affectation.”

“Social sliding. Below stairs slumming.”

“Fuck off.”

“Stephen Casey. Is there any way on earth you would have expected him to do what he did?”

“I still can’t believe it. Apart from anything else…I mean, I know he might have thought of himself as a charity case-or rather, some of his charming fellow pupils might have accused him of being one-but he wasn’t chippy in the slightest. He was a brilliant rugby player-that’s where I began to take a real interest in the game.”

She grinned in a hungry way.

“You said you weren’t attracted to the boys who played rugby.”

“Yes. Well, that was a lie. That was before I’d decided to tell you about the affair with Stephen.”

“Now would be a good time to clear up any more lies.”

“No more lies, your honor.”

“So there’s no way in which you can explain why he would do such a thing.”

She shook her head.

“I mean, say if he had harbored grudges, people have more money than me, I’m going to get me some no matter what I have to do-and then he ends up with a bag of old ornaments. What is that about?”

“He wanted to steal big money, but the presence of the child, of Martha O’Connor, threw him off, brought him to his senses, he panicked and ran. And then, realizing what a mess he’d made of it all, how he’d murdered a woman in front of her husband and child, he took the only rational course open to him, and killed himself.”

“I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it,” Sandra said.

“Was there ever a time when you wondered if Rock had been the one to groom Stephen Casey? I know he wasn’t happy in his marriage to Audrey-”

“How do you know that?”

“Martha told me.”

“Did she now? Well, then it must be true. Did she suggest her father had wanted his wife murdered? Nothing that woman said would surprise me.”

“She speaks very highly of you too.”

“She never gave me a chance. I went down on my hands and knees for that child, and she never gave me a chance-”

“She was just a child, a traumatized child who’d seen her mother murdered-”

Sandra was shaking, suddenly full of emotion, her burning eyes brimming with tears.

“We all had our troubles, you know. We all had our troubles.”

The emotion boiled over, sobs erupting from wherever they were stored. I went to hold her, but she shook her head and ran from the room. Down the corridor I heard her weeping, then a door slamming. The teenage symphony, Sandra had called it yesterday. It seemed, for the Howards, the melody lingered on long past the teenage years.

I checked my watch: I was going to be late for David Manuel. I went down the great circular stairs. I wondered whether there was anything in Emily’s room worth my attention. I went back through the arch, crossed the rear hall and tried the double doors, which were open. There were no servants around, which surprised me, but in this instance, made life easier. Darkness lay ahead. I went along the white passageway that led to the bungalow, trying for lights at each corner until I found a panel and threw them all on. I knocked on Emily’s door a couple of times, then tried it. The room was empty, and all her stuff was gone: no clothes in the wardrobe, no boots beneath the bed. There was a drug company notepad but no notes had been made, or at least, if there had, there were no indentations to tell what the content might have been. I did the usual trawl: drawers, cupboards, bedside table, mattress, bed linen, came up with nothing. All I could find was, on the windowsill, a line of rowan berries spread across from edge to edge. There was another line on top of the lintel, and another layer on the carpet just inside the doorstop. Maybe, like heliotrope, it had some special meaning. Or maybe Emily had just become very bored, and had left before she coated the entire room with the red and green fruit.

Back in Rowan House, all was quiet. I walked down along the rear corridor, which was hung with horse-racing prints and had a tiny marble holy water font wall-mounted beside each door. I saw two grandly decorated sitting rooms in a Victorian style, all heavy drapes and mahogany furniture and chintz, and the inevitable portraits of John Howard, who must have had artists queuing up to paint him. A couple of doors were locked, a couple opened onto musty bathrooms, there was a bedroom with a brown leather chaise and a rolltop desk and a wall of diplomas and degrees that I imagined was Howard’s, then a room where the light didn’t work. I pushed the door open and went across to the window and opened the curtains. It was a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper. There was a beautiful old dollhouse, and a teddy bear and a blue pig with only one ear lay on the pillow, as if waiting for the girl who owned them to come to bed. The wardrobe was full of dresses and skirts that might fit an eleven-or twelve-year-old girl, including school uniform pinafores and kilts in red and green tartan; the chest of drawers was packed with tops and shorts and underwear for the same. There wasn’t a speck of dust; everything was fresh and clean and smelled of lavender. I crossed the room and looked at the dollhouse, which sat on a table near the window. It was a model of Rowan House, just as I had seen in Emily’s room, with two differences: there was no garden plinth beneath it, and the roof opened. I turned it around and lifted the roof and looked underneath when the door flew open behind me.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing in here? Who gave you permission to wander about the house?”

Sandra Howard stood in the doorway in a white cotton shift, hair pulled up and back, face drained of blood, eyes ablaze.

“I was just having a look around,” I said, working hard to get the words out. “Was this your room?”

“Of course it wasn’t my room…yes, yes, it was, ages ago, now come on, out of here-”

“Why is it preserved like this? It’s as if-”

“It’s not ‘preserved,’ I went away to school, that’s all, it’s not ‘as if’ anything, now for God’s sake, will you get out?”

Her voice had become a shrill, hard, screech, with the grace notes of hysteria. I walked past her in the wide doorway. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

In the hall, I waited for her to say good night, but she didn’t come.

I shut the great doors of Rowan House behind me, two images vivid in my brain. One was of the haunted expression in Sandra’s eyes, the shadow across her suddenly gaunt face, as she said, “We all had our troubles, you know.”

The other was what I saw beneath the dollhouse roof: Mary and Joseph and some wise men and an angel from a child’s crib in a ring around a Barbie doll on all fours with a hole punched between her spread legs and red painted around the hole and an Action Man doll kneeling behind the hole, between her legs. On the inside of the roof in red were daubed the words “I should be ashamed of myself.”