The Color of Blood

Seventeen

I FOUND THE PAGES JERRY DALTON HAD LEFT BENEATH my windscreen when I was looking in my pockets to pay for a pint of Guinness and a double Jameson. I was sitting on a barstool in an old-style pub waiting for Martha O’Connor, who had called and arranged to meet me. The pages were copies of press clippings. One, from 1999, was an obituary of Dr. Richard O’Connor, who it said had died suddenly. It gave a straightforward account of his medical and rugby careers (he had played for Seafield back in the preprofessional days, and was capped for Ireland A teams, but never played a full international game), the violent death of his first wife Audrey and the happiness of his second marriage to Sandra Howard. The second page was a short article that had been downloaded from some kind of forensic pathology Web site about how an overdose of insulin could make a diabetic look like he’d had a heart attack.

I had finished both drinks and was ordering more when a voice behind me said, “And a pint of Carlsberg.”

Martha O’Connor was about five nine and, as Dan McArdle had said, a fine big girl, heavy without seeming overweight (at least, not unless you looked too hard at models in glossy magazines, which it didn’t look like she did), in a loose cotton polo shirt and a fleece jacket and faded jeans and Timberland boots; her dark brown hair was cropped short at the back and sides, long at the front, like an English public schoolboy’s; her complexion was dark, as were her eyes; her eyebrows were unplucked, and she wore no makeup. She didn’t resemble her half brother in the slightest.

“I didn’t think I looked that obvious,” I said.

“You probably don’t. But this is my local; everyone else here either works on the paper or is a regular.”

She sat on the stool beside me and nodded greetings to a variety of faces. The drinks arrived. Martha O’Connor looked at my whiskey and pint combination and smiled.

“You’d fit in here, no problem,” she said. “Ed Loy. You worked the Dawson case, right?”

I nodded.

“Don’t think we heard the real story there.”

“Doubt it,” I said. “A lot of lawyers made sure of that.”

“How’d you like to tell it? The truth, by the man on the inside…”

“When I retire, you’ll be the first to know.”

“If you keep on drinking like that…”

“Here’s to drinking,” I said. “Who wants to retire?”

I raised my pint, and she grinned and clinked hers against it.

“I’m working on a case that involves your stepmother now,” I said. Her grin took on a strained quality.

“Has she ensnared you yet? Cast her Sandra-spell? She’s good at that, captivating men, inspiring them with her goodness and nobility and beauty, until the poor sods are so cuntstruck they can’t see through her.”

A couple of men turned their heads in Martha’s direction, as if appalled that a woman should use such language, only to turn away without comment when they saw who it was.

“What should they see? When they see through her?”

Martha shrugged.

“Calculation. Ambition. Ice,” she said. “My stepmother and I did not get along, not from day one. Understandable enough, I suppose, ten-year-old girl loses her mother, then her beloved daddy to another woman two years later, it’s textbook stuff. And I didn’t think of my father, that’s true, what he might have needed, I just thought of myself. But you know, why not? I was the little girl who’d seen her mother stabbed to death. I needed my father to myself for as long as I felt like it. Why couldn’t he have waited? I’d be an adolescent soon enough.”

The pain sounded true and clear in her voice, and as fresh as it had happened yesterday.

“So I just withdrew. Insisted on being sent to a boarding school run by fucking nuns; then went to Oxford. God knows why I came back.”

“In the absence of His wisdom, why did you come back?”

“I don’t know. To settle some scores.”

“With your family?”

“And with the Church. And with the whole fucking country.”

“And how’s all that going for you?” I said.

“Pretty fucking good so far,” she said, and lilted, “You’re never short of a score to settle, in dear old Ire-land.”

She drained her pint and caught the barman’s eye.

“Pat, a Carlsberg, and…do I have to buy you two drinks? Fuck’s sake, pricey date.”

“Just the pint. The Jameson’s done its work.”

“And a Guinness. So, how’s it looking up there anyway? Is the murder triangle theory going to hold? Are they going to charge Shane? Poor Jessica, I always liked her, she was very sexy.”

“Are you working now?” I said.

“‘Sources close to…’” she said.

I shook my head.

“I can’t do that, not yet.”

The drinks came, and we paid them some attention.

“I wanted to ask you about Dr. John Howard,” I said.

“Now that…that’s a work in progress. Speaking of scores. But information doesn’t come for free. If you won’t show me yours…”

I looked at her. She was grinning, but she was a serious person, and the work she did was intense and scrupulous and valuable.

“Okay, what I’m going to tell you, you cannot say to anyone until this case breaks for me, do you understand?”

“Says you.”

“No, I’m serious. And then I will tell you everything, on condition you leave me out of it. Because it’s people’s lives and deaths here. Including your parents.”

She looked down the bar for a moment. When she turned back, her face was set, her eyes grave. She nodded.

“Okay. I spoke to a retired Garda detective today who worked the case of your mother’s murder, who was promoted to inspector at its conclusion. Now, he wasn’t saying anything explicitly. But he was certainly unhappy with the outcome. What he seemed most especially uneasy about was the idea that Casey acted alone. He pointed to the disparity between your mother’s and father’s injuries, the fact that not only was Casey a pupil of your mother’s and a player on the rugby team coached by your father but he was also the child of a servant in the Howard household whose school fees were being paid by the family.”

“Are you saying Sandra and my father…”

“I’m not saying anything. And neither was he. These are hypotheses-”

Martha O’Connor nodded impatiently, as if to say, “I know how this works, keep the bullshit for civilians.”

“Okay, so the boy seems to have been encouraged to see himself as a favorite of Sandra’s. Apparently some of his classmates felt there was a good deal more than favoritism involved. So we have the possibility that Sandra is-”

“Fucking him.”

“And in the process, training him to do as she wants. Casting her Sandra-spell, as you put it. And what she wants is for Dr. Rock to become available. Which of course involves finding a way to get your mother out of the picture.”

“And in this hypothesis, is my father involved?”

“That’s one possibility. He would have worked with Casey on the rugby field. He seems to have been an inspiring man, is that so?”

“People say so. For a ten-year-old girl, unless she’s very unlucky, her daddy’s always an inspiration, he’s her entire world. But people always said, in the world of rugby particularly, Dr. Rock was a mighty man. A hero to the guys.”

She made the world of rugby sound like a childish place, and her lip curled with irony when she said “Dr. Rock,” but despite that, the pain she still felt at his absence was evident.

“It’s not necessary though, Sandra could easily have trained him herself. She took the long view: once Audrey was dead, she’d work on Dr. Rock and reel him in.”

Martha sat openmouthed.

“You know, I had always wondered…not that I wished him dead, but it didn’t make any sense that Casey’d kill her and let him live.”

“Afterward, the Howards paid Stephen Casey’s mother off. Bought her a house.”

“For her silence? You mean she knew they’d killed her son?”

“No, she knew he’d killed your mother. And had then committed suicide. They paid her off so she wouldn’t ask any inconvenient questions.”

“Like why? What was in it for him?”

“Exactly.”

“And what was?”

“We have to assume-again, falling in with what is only a hypothesis-that Sandra cast some kind of spell, maybe that your mother stood in the way of Dr. Rock’s happiness, and only by killing her could he be free.”

“That’s a bit weak, isn’t it?”

“Is it? For a seventeen-year-old who went ahead and did it? It might have been enough.”

“Well, yes, I suppose, the fact that he did go ahead and do it…”

“Were your mother and father happy?”

Martha took a long drink of her beer.

“I was ten years old, remember,” she said.

“I know. A good age to think whatever you like, without censoring your thoughts. Did you ever feel glad it was just you and your father? And did that make it so much worse when Sandra came on the scene? I know you might feel like it’s some kind of betrayal to talk like that, but I’m just trying to get at the logic of it, of what might have seemed plausible-to Sandra, to Stephen Casey, maybe even to your father.”

Martha stared into her drink. In a low, awkward voice that sounded like she was reading a prepared statement, she said, “Yes, I was happy when it was just the two of us; my mother wasn’t a very giving person, and resented the affection my father showed me; when he got together with Sandra, what became obvious to me was that they were sexually very attracted to each other, they were doing it all the time; and then I began to feel that hadn’t been the case between my dad and my mother. Did that make Sandra’s presence even harder to take? For a girl who still believes her daddy is her prince? The fuck do you think?”

Martha drained her pint and looked for the barman, but he was nowhere to be seen; she turned back to me and shook her head.

“I’ve been paying a talking-cure woman for the last five years, and I haven’t come close to telling her what I’ve just told you.”

“She was probably too chicken to ask straight out if your da killed your ma.”

“You’re in the wrong line of work, Ed Loy. Where’s the barman? Pat?”

Martha’s face and manner were somber in repose, but she worked them over with a big girl’s forced jollity. The beer was eating into the jollity, however, and I didn’t want to lose her.

“Don’t get drunk,” I said. “Remember, you promised to show me yours.”

“Drunk on beer? Not me, I have hollow legs.”

Pat materialized at the bar, a mask of jaded skepticism on his ruddy round face.

“Do you have any food?” I said.

“No,” he said. “We have toasted sandwiches.”

I ordered two ham and cheese and more drinks.

“And now,” I said, “Dr. John Howard, please.”

“Dr. John Howard. Actually, I was exaggerating his importance. The disappointing thing is how typical he was of the Irish Catholic doctor of the age. The Church’s willing enforcers. If Ireland had been in the Eastern bloc, we would have been riddled with secret police. We’d’ve had more police than people. I love this thing that we’re supposed to hate informers, of all things, Jesus, we’d give up our own children so long as we could do it in secret. Anyway, the Church couldn’t have carried out its antisterilization, antiabortion, anticontraception policies without the enthusiastic participation of the medical profession. Just like secret police and informers, when you have the laity doing it for you, it means you don’t have to keep reminding them. I guess the fact that Howard advised several ministers on public health-care policy means he’s become a kind of symbol of it all, the king who must be retrospectively dethroned. But in reality, and as much as I’d dearly love to single out the head of the Howard family for particular opprobrium, he’s the same as all of those guys-a stethoscope in one hand and a crucifix in the other. He was just more successful than they were. And with the Howard Clinic, he saw that private medicine was never going to die here, that there’d always be money to be made, and prestige to be garnered, from keeping the upper tier open and the comfortable class in good health.”

The sandwiches arrived, and I fell on mine. It wasn’t very nice, but English mustard took care of that, and it was hot and it qualified as food, and as I’d seen two men murdered since the last time I’d eaten, it suddenly felt reassuring simply to be alive, and hungry, and able to do something about it. Martha pushed her sandwich toward me, and I slathered it with mustard too.

“What about the hysterectomies and the symphis…I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce-”

“Symphisiotomies. Yes, well, there’s no doubt these were barbaric practices, but it’s not as if he was the only one, and it’s not as if that just happened back in the bad old days in black and white when no one knew any better than to beat children with leather straps and bugger them in industrial schools and presbyteries. These things were going on in the nineteen eighties, into the nineties, when the Church was losing its grip entirely. I’m not undermining the seriousness of it, or the women’s lives that were ruined, just saying that at least back then when Howard was on the go, there was a context, a societal and religious context for it.”

“So no smoking gun then.”

“No smoking gun. Very amusing, erudite fellow, wrote several anecdotal books-Doctors and Golf, Doctors and Dining, Doctors and Drink and, would you believe, Doctors and Smoking. Made a broader public name for himself in the seventies when he became a regular guest on the Late Late Show, part of a panel they’d have on to discuss the events of the day.”

“And he’d weigh in with the Catholic line, would he?”

“No actually, he was seemingly quite deft at finessing all of that. He was funny and ironic and charming-like an Irish David Niven, one of the old hands on the paper told me. And of course, that did the clinic’s business no harm at all, the notion that it had almost showbiz cachet.”

My phone rang. It was Tommy; he was in the car, heading for the city. I told him where I was and he said he’d come and get me. Martha finished her drink and looked at her watch.

“Before you go,” I said, and passed her the pages Jerry Dalton gave me. After she had read the second page, about how an overdose of insulin could resemble a heart attack, she turned to me and grabbed my arm.

“My father was a diabetic. Are you saying Sandra murdered him?”

“I haven’t had time to work out what I’m saying yet. Someone put those two pages under my windscreen tonight. Yesterday they left a mass card for Stephen Casey.”

“Someone is leading you along?”

“It feels like it.”

I didn’t want to tell her I knew who it was. Not until I discovered more about what Jerry Dalton was up to.

“I feel like the top of my head’s about to come off.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you that. I mean, there’s no evidence for it, for any of this…”

“Don’t worry, I’m not about to collapse, or worse, barge into Rowan House and start making accusations. I know what you’re doing. Still, it is, as the Pope would say, a bit of a mind-fuck.”

“I don’t know if you remember the details of your father’s death…”

“I was away at university, they couldn’t get hold of me, left messages at the college, with my tutor, at the flat…I was having a lost weekend, actually, hidden away, getting in touch with what I had just discovered was my sexuality. So when I got the message…my roommates put up posters all over the town…when I finally found out my father had died, I was full of guilt and shame for not being around, and so of course I blamed myself for being gay. Then I blamed him for making me gay. And my mother, for dying, and Sandra, for being beautiful and capable, it was all their fault that I was gay and therefore my father died. It was all about me, in other words.”

“So you don’t know, was he in hospital, or-”

“Yes, he was out somewhere, taken ill, rushed to the Howard Clinic with a suspected heart attack. I know the doctor who treated him-I’ve interviewed him a few times on politics of health-care issues, he’s a very sound bloke, progressive.”

Martha was summoning up a number on her phone.

“A progressive who works in a private clinic?”

“Ah here, if you judged Irish doctors’ politics by public and private, you’d be in trouble.”

“Somehow, I thought from the tone of your articles, you might.”

“Oh yes indeed. ‘Somehow, I thought all you socialists would live on rice and sleep in tents and give the rest of your money to the poor.’ Ready for the revolution, but it ain’t here yet, baby.”

She strode down the bar, speaking into her phone.

I called Tommy, who said he was coming down Dawson Street. I told him I’d be waiting on Fleet Street. Martha O’Connor came back.

“I’ve just spoken to him. He has a break in half an hour, he’ll talk to you then. Mr. James Morgan, Consultant Cardiologist. I told him what it was about.”

She turned and caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the bar, pulled a despairing face and looked at the floor.

“When I left after my father’s funeral, I swore it was the end. And a fresh start. That meant no contact, trying not even to think about any of it. Good luck with your lives, let me get on with mine. Even with Morgan, I never asked him about my father’s last hours. Last night, the murders, all the coverage of the Howard family, Rowan House-it’s just opened it all up again. Like it never really ended, like it’s unfinished business.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

A text message announced itself on Martha’s phone.

“I have to go, I’ve a pain-in-the-arse sub questioning copy for tomorrow.”

We walked out into the night. A bus advertising some green fizzy drink loomed queasily in front of us. At the traffic lights, a drunken woman in a skimpy red dress was roaring abuse at her equally drunk partner.

“Martha, do you see your brother Jonathan?” I said. “Your half brother, I suppose is more accurate.”

“I try,” she said. “I barely know him. But I’ve called, and written…I wrote him a note when he got Schol. He never replies. He…sad but true to say, he just doesn’t want to know.”

“I think…I think he could do with a friend at the moment. He’s in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

I didn’t say. But I said he was in his rooms, tonight, and she said she’d think about it. She didn’t look like she’d anywhere else to go. And I was worried about the kid, as much because of how I’d treated him as anything else. The abusive woman at the lights had started to punch her partner in the face; he deflected this after a fashion by twisting to one side, so the barrage rained on the back of his head.

Martha turned to me, tears suddenly in her eyes.

“What do you think happened? Fuck, I’m a mess now.”

“I’m sorry. I would be too. I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I will find out. And then I’ll tell you.”

She wiped her eyes, and forced another of those cheerful good-girl smiles out.

“It won’t just be about me, by then. Tell the world, Ed Loy. Tell the world.”

I watched her walk down the street, her head bowed, and knew she had stored up all the pain to relive on her own, that she would continue to do so, whether I got to the truth or not. As she vanished through the night door of her newspaper’s offices, the drunk man on the corner had had enough of being punched in the head by his girlfriend; he raised his long arm high above her, then seemed to think better of it, turned and sprinted past me. As the woman subsided to the wet ground in howling sobs, Tommy Owens drove the racing green Volvo 122S up alongside me.