Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

I DROVE TO HENNESSY’S IN BAYVIEW, WHERE EVERYTHING is available at a price, and Tommy met me in the car park and gave me a small bottle of GHB.

“Be careful with it man,” he said. “Very easy to OD, specially mixing with booze.”

“Okay. Thanks, Tommy.”

“Are you sure this is the right way to go?” he said. He was so used to my being the reliable one that, whenever it looked like I was getting wayward, Tommy got very grave and paternal. It always made me smile, and I was always glad of it.

“I’ll only use it in an emergency,” I said.

GHB in small doses works a little like Ecstasy; in conjunction with booze, it can knock a man out. I didn’t like using it, but I could hear the clock ticking.

I drove through the night with the windows open and the damp night air blowing in, trying to breathe, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. I remembered what David Manuel had said: It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts; I wondered how much he knew, and what more Emily had told him: would she confirm that Sandra had been abused by her father? What might she add about herself? I called Manuel, but his phone was off; I left a message saying I was on my way, but I would be late.

When I turned into the square I could smell the smoke clearly; no confusing it with fog this time. I got out of the car and saw it pouring out the top of Manuel’s house. There was no fire brigade, no ambulance or police, just a few neighbors gathering, and what appeared to be Manuel’s hysterical family running up and down the garden; I recognized his wife standing in the doorway.

“Mrs. Manuel, I’m Ed Loy, I saw your husband this morning. I’m a detective.”

“He’s trapped up there. Please, can you try and reach him?”

A tall girl of about fifteen with the same dark coloring as Manuel’s wife was crying. She turned to me.

“The flames are coming down the stairs.”

I went into the house and started up the stairs; by the third floor, the smoke was too thick to see, and the heat was unbearable; I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t see the flames but I could hear their rumbling crackle, like some infernal engine.

I went down and out through the kitchen into the back garden. An old metal fire escape ran from the first floor to the third; I shinned up onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension and climbed the spindly ladder until the pitched roof lay above me. Through the dark window of the attic room, I could see the red flames glowing like trammeled rage. I couldn’t see David Manuel, and reckoned he must have passed out from smoke inhalation; the roof tiles were concrete, and I thought if I could work a few loose and hurl them at the window, I might break it, let some air in and hopefully bring him back to consciousness; I worried that the air would drive the flames higher; as it turned out, plan and worry were all in vain. I flung one tile at the Velux window; it almost bounced off the double-glazed glass, skittered down the roof and fell the long three stories to smash on the paving stones below. As if this was some kind of occult summons, Manuel suddenly rose up in the window, an apparition in green, arms and shoulders on fire; his hands reached for the window’s release bar, and the red flames behind him danced higher as he forced the window open and there was a roar from within like a beast in torment and Manuel came out headfirst onto the roof above me. His back and his long hair were on fire now, his movements agonized, staccato, like an insect on a grill; I called to him, but he was beyond hearing, beyond vision. He moved on hands and knees down the roof, and looked like he might crawl right off the edge; I tried to reach across and grab him, but just then he stood up and stepped out into the night and fell like a burning angel, down into the garden below.

By the time I reached the ground, the sound of sirens filled the air, but they didn’t drown out the grief of Manuel’s family, who had all been watching from below; his distraught wife clutched her teenage daughter and a younger girl; two teenage boys were caught between the need to go to their father’s ruined body and the natural human urge to turn away; quickly, the ambulance men intervened, and then the fire service were running hoses through the house, and the family’s agony was buffered by official intervention. A fireman tried to get me to stay at the scene, but I slipped away and drifted in among the neighbors and the ghouls as the Guards arrived. It would be useful to know who Manuel’s last client had been, but I couldn’t ask his wife; it was probable she didn’t even know. All I knew was that Manuel was going to tell me what he had learned from Emily Howard, and now he was dead. It was hard not to believe those two facts were connected.

I caught sight of myself in the rearview and almost drove off the road; my face was blackened by smoke, my hair frosted with white ash; I looked like a photo negative of myself. I pulled in at a hotel in Donnybrook, walked quickly through the lobby to the bathroom and gave myself a wash and a brushup. It was twelve ten, and I’d been on the road since six this morning; I told myself it was time to pack it in for the night. I walked back across the lobby with every intention of listening to myself. But the bar was still open, with an extension for something they described as the “Halloween Festival”-not just a night but an endless weekend-and I decided any man who’d just seen what I’d seen deserved a drink. The bar was thronged with people who looked like they’d been at a party for too long and needed to go home, but had forgotten where they lived. My type of crowd. I sat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee, then, when it arrived, asked for a double Jameson as if it were an afterthought. I put sugar in the coffee and added the whiskey and drank the whole thing in three drafts. It burned my throat and warmed up my gut and made me feel half alive again. I was doing 50 percent better than David Manuel. The voice in my head reminded me that I should go home, that a night’s sleep and everything would look, would even be, different. I pondered this, and all I could come up with were the facts: that there was a killer on the loose, that he or she had just killed again, that everyone I was working for: Sandra Howard, Shane Howard, Emily Howard, Jonathan O’Connor, Denis Finnegan, each of them was in danger of being the next victim. Equally, any of them-more than one-might be the killer. I was the only one who knew the extent of the connections and how they all joined together-to the extent that I did. The killer didn’t show any sign of stopping. That meant I couldn’t either. Maybe I could catch a quick nap, like the two old boys at the all-night Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament across in Woodpark. Maybe even that was unwise: neither of them looked like he was certain to wake up. I checked my phone to see if Martha O’Connor had called or texted with the information I’d asked her for. The phone I picked out of my pocket wasn’t my phone though; it was David Brady’s. I had checked the text messages before; I ordered another coffee and worked through the Received Calls and Dialed Numbers lists, comparing them to the numbers I had on my phone for the principals in the case. Several of the incoming calls were listed as “no number.” There had been calls made to and received from Emily in the days leading up to the murder; I noted Emily’s number, which came up with her name and which I didn’t have. I thought of ringing her, but it was close to one now, and I didn’t want to wake her if she was asleep. I sent her a text message hoping she was well and asking to speak to her as soon as I could.