Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

“Did you find anything in Mary Howard’s journals, Emily?” I said.

“There’s no reference to Marian’s death. The journal stops about six months before. And after that, it’s just a stream of bile about Granddad, right up until his death. She really hated him.”

Emily leafed through a particular journal until she found a particular passage.

“Here, this must refer to Jerry’s mother, listen:

Eileen came to me tonight and told me she was in trouble, and who by. I didn’t doubt it for a second, she’s always been a good girl and would never lie. God damn that man to hell. The girl has found a chap to stand by her. We must do our best nonetheless. How I’d love to tell the world the truth. But Shane mustn’t be hurt any more than he has been already.

Still Shane Howard sat with his head bowed. It was like he had begun to fear the worst. That was healthy. I needed to play on his fears.

“Shane, I want to ask you about Denis Finnegan. Tonight, Brock Taylor was killed. Before he died, he confessed to the murders of Audrey O’Connor and Stephen Casey.”

“Brock Taylor? The reformed crook? Hangs around SRC?”

“He’s the fellow you remember as Eileen’s boyfriend, Brian Dalton, the one on the Norton Commando?”

“And you say he killed her son?”

“That’s right. But he said he did it for someone who paid him. Someone who idolized you and Sandra, who wanted the best for her-what he thought was the best for her.”

“Dinny?”

“Denis Finnegan, yes. And Taylor said there would be a payback coming, that soon he would be set to inherit, big-time. I took that to mean via some scheme of Finnegan’s. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“I don’t. I mean, I don’t have any big share portfolio or anything. I’ve this house, and the surgery.”

“And Rowan House.”

“That’s it. And I’ve seen the mother’s will, it’s all straightforward. The property comes to me, end of story.”

“But if you were genuinely disposed toward sharing it with Sandra in order to build the last tower, in order to fulfill the Howard family dream, the completion of the Howard Medical Center at last-”

“Who told you that?”

“Denis Finnegan. He said that’s what you all wanted. For the family. But your wife was opposed to it.”

“I was opposed to it too. I didn’t want to build a load of apartments, but I didn’t want a fourth tower, like it was some fucking monument …Sandra wanted it…said she wanted it to honor our father, although how she could…”

He looked up at me, his eyes red with rage.

“What I’d like best, is if the house was burned to the ground. After that, we could think about what came after. But best for everyone…best for Sandra above all…if the whole place was dust and ashes.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You’ll have to ask Sandra. I won’t say any more.”

“And what about Finnegan? Do you think there’s some way he envisaged getting his hands on the whole project through Sandra? If you were going to go into it on an equal basis-”

“But I wasn’t-”

“What if you were in jail for killing your wife? Your resolve might not be quite so great then. You’d need money for appeals, you’d need to take the advice of your sister and your solicitor.”

“What are you saying, Dinny had something to do with Jessica’s death?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Try and remember. You got a call yesterday, or rather the day before, Halloween, someone telling you your wife was having an affair with David Brady. Now, two people rang your number that morning. One of them was Denis Finnegan. Do you remember the call? It would have been after I left, you went back to the surgery. Your patients were getting, ah, impatient.”

Shane scowled in concentration.

“Yeah. Because it was the mobile, in my pocket. Dinny asking about you, was there anything he needed to know. Always such a fussy fucker. You can hardly say, would you ever fuck off, with some oul’ one in the chair. So I said no and hung up.”

“Right. So the other call was the anonymous call.”

“That’s right. Prissy kind of voice, I thought, but trying to sound tough. Why? Do you know who it was?”

Keep stirring, Loy.

“The Guards traced the number. It was your nephew, Jonathan.”

The telephone rang, and Emily went to answer it. Shane Howard was on his feet and breathing like a man who’s just remembered how. Jerry Dalton’s eyes never left me. Emily came back into the room.

“That was Granny,” she said. “They’re at the airport. They’re staying at the Radisson. I wrote the number on the pad.”

For a moment I had trouble moving my lips. Finally, I got them to work in conjunction with my tongue.

“Your granny,” I said.

“Yes. Mum’s mum. And Granddad. They retired to the Algarve. Awful journey, to bury their daughter’s body.”

“What did Jessica’s father-your granddad-do?” I asked. “He wasn’t an actor, was he?”

“Oh, God no. Mum said she had the biggest rows with him when she wanted to go into the theater. No, he ran a business, a…carpets? What was it, Dad?”

“Contract cleaning,” Shane said, his mind elsewhere.

Sandra’s lie had been a detailed and elaborate one-about Jessica’s father being a failed actor, and a widower, and a drunk; about Jessica being her father’s little wife when she was thirteen, for eighteen months; about how she didn’t love sex in itself so much as the power it gave her-could it have been that Sandra was talking, not about Jessica, but about herself?

The telephone rang again, and Shane answered it.

Emily was tidying all the photograph albums and journals together. I asked her if she’d looked at the dollhouse in her room yet, and she made a cartoon face and said she had forgotten about it, and ran toward her room at once. Dalton followed her.

Shane came off the phone.

“No one in this family is sleeping tonight. That was Sandra. She and Denis are up in Rowan House. They’re in a panic, want to talk. Will you follow me up there?”

LATER, WHEN IT WAS ALL OVER-WHEN I HAD BEENreleased from Seafield Garda Station having been involuntarily “debriefed”; when the identity of the man accompanying the Reillys in the CCTV footage outside the Waterfront Apartments before David Brady was murdered had been established; when neighbors living close to the house Jessica Howard was murdered in confirmed that they had seen a man whose photograph they were shown arriving at or leaving the house close to the time the murder took place; when a paper trail was uncovered that linked Denis Finnegan conclusively to Brock Taylor, particularly in regard to the plans for the fourth tower at the Howard Medical Center; when the Guards in Seafield Station had ordered the booze for their celebration party; and when I had been trailed from interrogation room to cell often enough for it to be made clear to me that if I ever conducted another case the way I had conducted this one (withholding evidence, tampering with evidence, interfering with a crime scene, lying to the Guards and, as Dave put it, generally carrying on like a total fucking bollocks who thinks he’s fucking it ) I would find it impossible to buy a dog license, let alone pursue a career as a private investigator-when it was all over, I stood among the charred remains of Rowan House and wondered whether the sins of the fathers could ever be washed away with their deaths, or whether a legacy of tainted blood would always color the lives of the children and the children’s children. I didn’t come up with any answers.

Shane led the way in his black Mercedes, like Sandra’s two days before, once again giving a funereal feel to the cortege. I rode in its wake, and we drove in the grey predawn to Rowan House. Crows had been gathering on telephone wires and poles on Bayview Hill when we left; they were massing on the turrets of Rowan House as we arrived, beating their wings and making their predatory moans.