Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

Under the bed, I found a beautifully made dollhouse: it had castellations and a turret and a tower. The back doors opened to reveal the usual furniture and a random assortment of toy figures; neither side of the roof opened. The house stood on a broad wooden base; to the front there was a drive lined with plastic trees; at the rear there was a lawn sloping down to a circular pond; the perimeter of the pond was made of tiny pebbles glued together. A fine coat of dust clung to it like age; I guess it hadn’t been played with for a long time.

I went through every item of clothing that had a pocket, but there were no scraps of paper or tickets; there was nothing else under the bed, no boxes of letters or mementos or photographs. I flicked through the pages of the books, but all that fell out, from the very oldest, were dried autumn leaves. Had Emily taken everything with her that bore a personal trace, or had she simply not kept any of it to begin with? I heard Jessica Howard calling my name. I did the only other thing I could think of: I pressed “redial” on the telephone.

After a dozen rings, a male voice answered. “Woodpark Inn?”

I thought for a few seconds.

“Hello?”

“Have you a late extension tonight?” I said.

“Halloween party, ten till two, battle of the bands, tickets twenty euros,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, and hung up. The Woodpark Inn. Not Emily Howard’s style, I would have thought. But then, what would I know? As much as anyone, it seemed.

In the living room, Jessica Howard sat at the table, her hands folded across her breast, her head slightly bowed, her crossed legs tucked beneath her chair. She looked exhausted, about ten years older than the woman who had greeted me. The way she sat seemed intended to minimize her body space, and I remembered at last what she reminded me of: the swings between sexual exhibitionism and physical awkwardness, between rage and carelessness, cold objectivity and tears. She reminded me of the lost girls I tried to rescue from San Fernando Valley porn sets, or rather, the way they’d be in twenty years’ time, eyes still bright but hard, souls cold as the dead.

She brightened up when she saw me, and pointed to a sheet of paper on the table.

“David Brady was Emily’s boyfriend for two years. This is his address and mobile number. Here’s a photograph of the two of them together. Absolute ride, I certainly would have, thighs to die for. The guy she’s going out with now is called Jerry…blank, I’m sorry. He was a barman at the rugby club, not sure if he still is. Oh yes, and his band is called-what’s the other name for Calvary? You know, where Christ was crucified?”

“Golgotha,” I said.

“That’s right. His band is called The Golgotha Pyre.”

A smile creased up through her beautiful, sad face.

“You can only imagine what they sound like.”

She got a bag and an umbrella and saw me to the door. Outside, as she was locking up, I thought of the Alice Miller books.

“Jessica, was Emily in therapy of any kind?”

“No. At least, not that I know of. But I wouldn’t be surprised if…no, actually, Shane wouldn’t have kept that from me. No, she wasn’t.”

“Are you?”

Her slender figure crooked against the cold rain that had started to fall, Jessica Howard flashed a grin at me as she walked toward her car.

“I’m beyond therapy, Ed,” she said, without turning around. “I’m out the other side.”

She got in the Porsche, pointed it down the hill and vanished into the mist.

I walked back up to my car. I drove a racing green ’65 Volvo 122S. It had been my father’s, and although we had never seen eye to eye, I somehow felt driving it was keeping faith with his memory, though I’d be hard put if called upon to explain exactly what I thought that meant. Beneath the windscreen wiper someone had left a white envelope, which was now damp with rain. I pulled it out, sat into the car and opened it. Inside was a mass card. The name on it was Stephen Casey, and the date of the requiem mass was set as All Souls’ Day, 1985. All Souls’ Day was November 2, two days from now. I put the card in my jacket pocket. Before I had a chance to turn the car, a black Mercedes the width of the road swept past me, with Shane Howard at the wheel.

TOMMY OWENS HAD GIVEN UP BOOZE AND DOPE AND coke and E because he was broke because he couldn’t hold down a job because of all the booze and dope and coke and E he’d been doing, and his ex refused to let him see his daughter until he cleaned up. Being sober all the time wasn’t easy for Tommy, and Tommy being sober wasn’t easy for me either, since he’d asked me to act informally as his sponsor. I explained that, since I had no intention of stopping drinking, that mightn’t be the wisest idea, but he insisted, maintaining that having to put up with some sanctimonious bastard thrilled with himself for having given up booze would drive him to drink. In practice, it didn’t mean a lot more than my letting Tommy hang out at my house, sleep on my floor and generally make himself at home whenever it suited him, as well as helping him out of whatever scrapes he inevitably found himself in. All of which I’d been doing anyway. The new development was Tommy wanting to be involved with the cases I worked, to talk them through and offer me advice. At first I resisted this because my work was complicated enough, and depended a lot on instinct and intuition, capacities that were easy to undermine, especially if exposed to the chaos of Tommy’s mind. Not to mention client confidentiality. But his thinning, wispy hair and tufty straggle of beard weren’t the only ways in which Tommy resembled a beady old lady: he knew everyone in Seafield, Bayview and Castlehill and outlying areas, and everything about them, always had, since we were kids, who lived where and who lived there before them; who was rising, who falling, everyone’s business but his own. So when I checked my phone and found three messages from Tommy asking what the deal was with Shane Howard, I called him and gave him the bare skeleton-it was always a fine line, because I had the persistent suspicion if he heard something juicy enough, he’d trade it in for a night in the pub and a gram of coke. Not this time though. Immediately he heard David Brady’s name and the word “porn,” he said I should meet him at once at my house in Quarry Fields.

Although I had grown up in the house, I hadn’t been back in it long enough to get used to calling it mine, despite a hefty standing order on my bank account reminding me that I was the only one paying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn’t live to see. A fifties semidetached, it had seen better days, and I had done nothing to the exterior to improve it, other than have the side garage demolished and a gated wall built to connect the back line of the house to the perimeter. The earth had been turned where the concrete was lifted, and I scattered some grass seed for want of any better idea of what to do with a space I still considered haunted. Tommy was outraged, and accused me of wanting “a businessman’s lawn, like a fuckin’ snooker table”; he had worked for my father once, and restored the Volvo in the garage, so he felt he had a claim on the space. He got busy with paving stones, cobbles, recycled tiles and anything else he could steal from the day laboring jobs he occasionally worked, laying them in a loose path and planting herbs and heathers in the gaps between them. The hedge at the front of the house was of holly, yew and cypress; Tommy flanked the path with these, adding bay to give richness; the result was a secluded, tranquil path running south toward a gate of spiked black palings that let in the afternoon light. It was a good job, and I was grateful to him.