The Color of Blood

Eleven

THE BEATING OF WINGS WOKE ME AT SIX; THERE HAD been crows on the chimney stack and on the windowsills the past few mornings. I lay there for a while listening to the asthmatic sound of their breath, waiting for the cawing to begin, but they kept their counsel. I undressed, showered and, with some difficulty, shaved; my face bled a little, but it was in one piece, although the wound did make me look a little like the bad guy in a black-and-white movie. I dressed and cut two oranges into quarters and ate them while I scrambled three large eggs with butter and chives and had them with a few slices of smoked salmon and two cups of coffee. I took two Nurofen Plus for my hangover and another two for my face and for the ache in my hand where Emily Howard bit me.

Outside was dawning the kind of day I always remembered All Saints’ Day as having been: the overcast morning after, grey and gloomy and precarious, as if the world was a smoke-filled globe made of fragile glass that could shatter at any moment. The pungent smell of fireworks lingered, like cordite after a shoot-out. Above the low rumble of traffic I heard the brisk rustle of crows in the holly bushes; black and grey against the glistening red berries, they took my appearance as a cue to begin their arrhythmic dirge. The newspapers had been delivered; I picked the pile off the doorstep and put them on the passenger seat of the car. The phone rang as I left the house; it was Denis Finnegan to say the Guards had extended Shane’s period of detention for another six hours. At lunchtime, they could either charge him or release him. I had a lot to do before then. Grey dawn bled imperceptibly into day as I got the Volvo on the road.

The stop-start motion of cars on the N11 to Ranelagh gave me plenty of time to scan the headlines, which, in the tabloids, were dominated by the two murders. Jessica Howard took precedence, of course, and a couple of the tabloids printed her photograph alongside a shot of an Esther Martin, a woman who had been killed in her home a year or so back. The Guards had arrested her husband several times but had been unable to bring charges: placing the photographs of the two murdered women side by side made it clear, not only that the Guards believed Shane Howard to be guilty, but that they had no qualms about leaking their beliefs to the media. Amidst the appropriately pious tone of the reports, there was considerable leeway for a more salacious emphasis: Jessica had played Sally Bowles in Cabaret some years back, and the Irish Times was the only paper that didn’t find an excuse to feature a photograph of the actress spilling out of tight black 1930s underwear. Instead, the Times led with stories about a public sector pay rise and a European trade directive, relegating both murders to page two, where Jessica Howard was noted as the daughter-in-law of Dr. John Howard; the photograph they used showed her peering primly out from beneath a shawl in Riders to the Sea.

There was an ostensibly sympathetic account of Jessica’s career in the Irish Independent that read as if written in code, with references to the “exceptionally close professional relationships” she had formed with her directors.

David Brady’s rugby achievements were recorded and several ex-players-including some of Shane Howard’s former international teammates-pitched in with their eulogies; a couple suggested that perhaps latterly, Brady was beginning to see his future outside full-time professional rugby, a tactful way of saying that he hadn’t lived up to his youthful promise-or that he had blown his talent up his nose.

I turned left on Appian Way and cut up through Ranelagh village and stopped at the corner of a leafy square on the way to Rathmines. David Manuel lived in a Victorian three-story redbrick house with stained-glass panes in the front door and a tangle of bicycles and rucksacks and trainers in the wide hall and a wife with salt-and-pepper curls and purple dungarees who directed me up the bookshelf-lined stairs to his attic-floor office, which was decorated in cream and oatmeal tones with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves too and had roof windows that would have let in all the morning light if there had been any.

David Manuel, waiting, in his fifties, wore a three-quarter-length cardigan in assorted shades of green and a pale green collarless linen shirt and matching trousers and olive green Birkenstocks; his silver hair was shoulder length, his tiny face was lined but soft and unmarked, like a nun’s; he steepled his fingertips and smiled thinly at me through silver-framed glasses. I mopped my brow with the back of my hand; the sweat stung the teeth-shaped wound Emily Howard had left there.

“Dr. Manuel, Ed Loy.”

“I’m not a doctor-”

“I know that,” I said. Sweat smarted in my eyes, and I wiped them with my sleeve. Manuel looked at me quizzically.

“Maybe you need a doctor. Are you ill?” he said. His voice was high-pitched, querulous and amused. “You look too fit to have a heart condition.”

First rule with therapists: don’t get caught in a lie you can’t conceal.

“I probably had too much to drink yesterday. Last night.”

“Don’t you remember which?”

“Both.”

“And the face wound, that was a fight?”

“Yes.”

“And all of this, the drinking, the fighting, it has to do with Emily Howard? Or is it just how private detectives behave, or how they think they’re meant to behave?”

“The drinking just has to do with me. The fighting, yes, that had to do with the case.”

“And this case: is it the same one the Guards are investigating, the murders of Jessica Howard and David Brady?”

“I think it’s connected to those murders, yes.”

“Are you a fully licensed private detective?”

“I was. In L.A. When the licensing system kicks in here, I’ll apply for one.”

“And Shane Howard hired you?”

“Initially. Now his sister Sandra has. I suppose I’m working for both of them.”

“But you’re more concerned with Emily Howard.”

“I’m concerned with all the Howards. They’re all connected, I just don’t understand how. I was hoping you could help me.”

Manuel looked at me, nodded and sat back. I took him through Emily’s disappearance, the porn, the relationships with David Brady and with her cousin Jonathan. When I had finished, he sat still for a while, then shook his head.

“I can’t tell you anything she hasn’t already told you.”

“But you can tell me what you think.”

David Manuel angled his head from side to side, as if weighing up his options.

“I think Emily, to use a not very technical term, has been acting out. And acting out is not inconsistent with anger at her parents. And that anger may have many causes.”

“Might one of the causes be sexual abuse?”

Manuel said nothing, so I went on.

“Her aunt told me Emily’s mother was abused as a child. She certainly seemed to have an extremely competitive attitude to her daughter when it came to sex. And the fact that Emily let herself be photographed and filmed having sex, well, I’ve dealt with girls who’ve gone into that world. You could say the porn industry is based on a whole bunch of angry, abused women ‘acting out.’ And we ignore their pain and pretend to believe them when they say they’re reclaiming the control that was stolen from them, that they’re ‘empowered’; they were already degraded as children, and we become complicit in their further degradation as disturbed, malformed adults; we’re like the keepers in an asylum, raping the patients over and over again and insisting they’re in charge.”

“You’re a moralist, Mr. Loy.”

“Aren’t you? Or can you not tell me about that either? Was Emily Howard sexually abused?”

“I don’t know, is the truth.”

“Do you know what she thought?”

“That, I certainly can’t tell you.”

“This is a serious business.”

“And I assure you, I’m taking it seriously. I intend to talk to Emily as soon as possible. Depending on what she feels free to share-”

“What about Jonathan?”

Manuel put a hand up to his mouth, then instantly removed it; an echo, conscious or unconscious, of Jonathan O’Connor’s inhibited mannerisms.

“I would say, that in many Irish families, going back through the years, the children who were abused and the children who weren’t, in many respects often resemble each other. They exhibit similar symptoms and vulnerabilities. And so it is very dangerous, even when a child-I’m talking about adult children, you understand, the child-parent relationship-it can be dangerous even when a tale of past abuse is raised, for the therapist automatically to assume that what is being recounted is the literal truth. Or alternatively, to believe someone’s ferocious denials that no abuse took place, particularly when you’ve heard from that person’s siblings that it most certainly did.”

“Why is that? Why would people believe they had been abused when they had not? Why would they deny it when it had occurred?”

David Manuel took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his linen shirt.

“I believe it stems from…from a cultural legacy in this country, a legacy of deep-rooted worthlessness that was inculcated in the individual and handed down through the generations. Man handing on misery to man as Larkin put it. The English enforced the idea that being Irish was an inferior state. The Catholic Church instilled a sense of fear and shame, not just about sex, about everything, about our very existence: work and pray, work and pray. Poverty, of course, a history of poverty played its part in undermining any sense we might have of our worth, of our personal identity. And the crawthumpers and bogtrotters who replaced the Brits, the pious fools and gombeens and Irish-language fanatics who told us we couldn’t all expect to live in our own country, and then made sure half of us had to emigrate by their insularity and sheer bloody incompetence. All internalized by our parents and grandparents, always the same message: we’re worth nothing, and we deserve less. And now, of course, we have money, and the Church is no longer a force, and we’re still hiding behind the lies, we keep insisting nothing bad has happened, we live in determined, alcoholic furies of denial. ‘We’re grand now,’ we laugh, with our legendary sense of humor. But you can’t shake off all that…what is it the Catholic Church used to call its teaching, ‘formation.’ You can’t just get rid of it. It’s, ah, ‘part of what we are.’”

I wasn’t sure I followed everything Manuel said, but I nodded just the same.

“I wouldn’t have thought Larkin was the most inspiring laureate for a therapist,” I said.

“It depends what you think a therapist is,” Manuel said. “People think therapists are all about dredging up what your parents did to you and then blaming them for it and feeling better about yourself as a result.”

“Isn’t that what they are about? I see you’ve a row of Alice Miller books there on the shelf. Emily had a bunch of them in her bedroom. Isn’t that her M.O.? It’s all Mummy and Daddy’s fault? Every child a damaged child?”

“Well of course, in a way she’s right. But that doesn’t mean the parents are to blame.”

“You’re speaking in riddles. Either someone is to blame or he isn’t.”

“And now you’re speaking like a cop. Look, in regard to the Howards, I think…I think if you want to know about what’s going on in that family in the present, you need to be investigating the past, Mr. Loy. It’s not what Emily and her cousin did last week, or last year. It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts.”

“Is that what Emily has been talking to you about?”

“As I said, I need to speak to Emily. If she agrees to what I ask…is it to you or the Guards I should talk?”

“Talk to me. I’m not just a cop. The Guards only care about the killer.”

“And what do you care about, Mr. Loy?”

“Oh, I care about the killer too. But most of all, I care about the truth.”

I didn’t know what to make of David Manuel. On the one hand, he sounded like a columnist for a Sunday newspaper, with his elaborate theories and historical justifications for why the Irish are the most unhappy nation on earth; on the other, he seemed like he wanted to help, and genuinely concerned about Emily Howard. I had some more coffee in Ranelagh in one of those uncomfortable little shops with tiny metal tables and chairs and high stools all packed too close together. None of the serving staff was Irish. David Manuel might have said something in our collective psyche prevented us from working in cafés, a postcolonial superiority complex that didn’t permit us to wait on people without being obnoxious to them, perhaps. Whatever the reason, it was all to the good; the European staff was friendly and pleasant and didn’t make you feel you were burdening them with your custom, or detaining them from more important pursuits like text-messaging their friends and rolling their eyes. I leafed through the rest of the papers. Two things caught my eye: one was a follow-up item about a recent report into clerical child sex abuse in a rural diocese. It highlighted the way in which, time after time, when the original allegations had been made against priests who had turned out to be guilty of abuse, the local communities had automatically closed ranks-with the priest, and against the accusers, ostracizing them within their own villages for daring to speak out. The other was an article about obstetricians and gynecologists who had worked over the years in hospitals bound by a Catholic code of ethics, and detailed a number of incidents in which obstetricians had performed hysterectomies on women who might have had complications with future pregnancies; sterilization was against the Catholic “ethos” and so removing the womb was seen as preferable. It also outlined a practice called symphysiotomy, which involved cracking and widening the pelvis of women who might require repeat cesarean sections. I couldn’t work out if or why cesarean sections were against the Catholic “ethos” in themselves, but they were considered high-risk procedures in the past; the fear seemed to be that women, rather than take the risks, might employ some form of artificial contraception, or undergo sterilization. In practice, symphysiotomies gave women crippling bone injuries and permanent bowel and bladder problems; those who gave birth to further children were often left bedridden. Again, these barbarities were prescribed by the Church, but enforced enthusiastically by its many willing lay helpers.

Across the road, a mass was giving out; All Saints’ Day was a holy day of obligation, but that didn’t carry the force it had in former times; even though it was early enough for workers to attend, none of the people streaming out of the church was under sixty; most looked eighty. Maybe the good old days were coming to an end at last.

The article about medical practices named several obstetricians, most of them either dead or struck off; the list of names included Dr. John Howard. The other name I noted was the writer’s: Martha O’Connor.

Dave Donnelly phoned as I was driving south, and told me to meet him in the car park of the Castlehill Hotel. I parked beneath the aching trees and crunched across the gravel, through horse chestnut shells and sycamore mulch, to his blue, unmarked car. I got in the passenger side, Dave flexing his massive neck right and left to make sure no one was looking. Then he turned on me.

“You’re some bollocks, Ed. You know what that kind of shit looks? Like you think you can do as you please because I’ll protect you. Telling a DS to fuck off. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m sorry. I was tired.”

“Don’t think Fiona Reed hasn’t heard either. The word’s gone out. That’s everyone gunning for you, Ed, any excuse, speeding, drunk and disorderly, vagrancy-”

“Vagrancy?”

“Yeah. Walking while Loy. I’m telling you, you better have something to offer in all this, or you’re fucked. And I can do nothing. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. And they’re having the CCTV footage enhanced, so you’re probably fucked anyway. You were there, weren’t you?”

Instead of answering, I gave Dave everything I could on the Emily Howard kidnap. When I finished, he said, “Were you at David Brady’s place? Did you interfere with a crime scene?”

“How’s it looking with Shane Howard?”

Dave looked at me hard, then waved a meaty hand in the air and snorted like a horse bothered by flies he knows he’s bigger than but has to put up with.

“The killer was someone she knew,” he said.

“Or someone she was showing the house to-she was going to get close to strangers too, especially if they were men.”

“What have you got?”

“Her phone calls. I spoke to her about half-ten yesterday morning.”

“You were one of the last people to see her alive.”

“She took at least two business calls while I was there, at least by her manner I assume they were business.”

“Her phone wasn’t at the scene. We’re waiting on the service provider to give us the details. Anything else?”

“Classy move, sticking Jessica Howard beside the Martin woman in the papers today.”

“Fiona Reed’s call.”

“So Howard’s the prime suspect then.”

“Of course he fucking is. Why? Because he’s the husband.”

I once worked a case in L.A. for a husband the Hollywood cops were convinced had killed his wife who had been photographed in San Francisco’s Chinatown signing a business deal at the moment his wife had been shot dead: neighbors heard the shots, and heard a car screeching away minutes afterward, so the TOD was firm. The detective in charge of the case explained to me that even if the husband had been photographed signing a business deal in China, they’d still make him their prime suspect. When I asked him why, he told me if I’d ever been married, I’d understand the guy with most reason to kill his wife is always the husband. As it turned out, my client was guilty; he had killed his wife that morning and hired a petty hood to fire a gun in the air and drive away at the moment he was establishing his alibi. But someone had spotted the driver, and as soon as the cops caught him, he gave the guy up. Moral of the story, for the cops at any rate, and I was more of a cop than I was anything else: it’s always the husband, even when it can’t be.

“We know Jessica Howard liked to play away. She was a regular in the Sunday papers sure, in some nightclub with some racing driver or footballer. Maybe she pushed Howard too far. Maybe David Brady was the last straw, his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That’s not right, is it? His blood is up, he has to do it. He’s over to Brady’s flat, does him, then charges back up to Castlehill and kills his wife.”

“You haven’t enough, have you?”

“That would be an operational matter.”

“In other words, no.”

“In other words, fuck away out of the car before someone spots me talking to you,” Dave growled.

“Anything on Stephen Casey?” I said.

He handed me a three-by-five index card with a name and number on it.

“That’s the man who worked the case.”

“What case?”

“You can find out. Now get out of the car.”

I shut the car door, and Dave started the engine. As he was about to pull away, I leaned in the passenger window.

“Dave, get Brady’s hard drive on his computers analyzed. His e-mails, who he sent attachments to.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Look for homemade porn films, and follow who he sent them to.”

“Ed, were you there? You were fucking there, weren’t you?”

“Thanks, Dave,” I said, and meant it. “I’ll give you what I get as soon as I can.”

“I can’t keep looking out for you if you’re hell-bent on behaving like a cunt,” Dave said, and drove away without meeting my eye.