The Color of Blood

Twenty-seven

I CALLED DAVE DONNELLY AND TOLD HIM THE REASON the Reillys weren’t coming home to Woodpark was because they were lying dead in the Dublin Mountains. I gave him the location of the quarry and told him Sean Moon and Brock Taylor had been responsible. I also told him that the murder weapon was one of two Steyr 9mm Tactical Machine Pistols that could be found in Taylor’s house in Fitzwilliam Square. He had already heard about the killings there and in Ballsbridge. I said I hadn’t heard about any of that, and didn’t know anything about it either. Dave called me a few names, and I let him. Then I said he should get up the mountains fast, before the workforce at the quarry showed up and some other station got the collar. I asked him if he had traced the phone calls made to Jessica and Shane Howard on Halloween morning. He gave me one mobile number, an 087, which had called Shane Howard; the other mobile, which had called both, used a concealed number. The 087 I recognized as Denis Finnegan’s. I told Dave I expected to have something for him soon on the Stephen Casey/Audrey O’Connor murders. Before I ended the call, Dave said they’d uncovered something about Jonathan O’Connor-he had a record of fire-starting back when he was twelve or thirteen, schools and churches, never detained but close to it, social services were involved, went on for about a year, then stopped.

I switched on Emily Howard’s iBook and read through the most recent e-mails, a sequence of three highly emotional notes negotiating an urgent session with David Manuel. But these e-mails had been sent this evening, when the laptop was in Jonathan’s room in Mountjoy Square, so they couldn’t have been sent by Emily. They had been sent by Jonathan masquerading as his cousin. The last message from Manuel read:

Dear Emily,

Will cut short my scheduled ten o’clock; come at ten thirty and we can have forty minutes. But it will be all right-although let me repeat, I believe this to be a legal matter as much as it is anything else, and I am reaching the stage where I can no longer stay silent.

All best,

David

When I had left Jonathan last night in Trinity, I thought I had heard him crying. Maybe he had been laughing. I called Dave back and went straight through to message: I told him why Jonathan O’Connor should be considered the favorite for the killing of therapist David Manuel last night, gave him Jonathan’s address in Trinity, and said I considered him extremely dangerous. Then I called both numbers I had for Sandra Howard and, in my best Dave Donnelly impersonation, left the message that Jonathan was not only being sought in connection with the Manuel killing, but was also the prime suspect in the murders of David Brady and Jessica Howard. It was time to stir things up.

I drove fast to Jerry Dalton’s house in Woodpark. It was five in the morning, still dark, the lights in the church still on. I banged on the door, and Dalton answered it as if a caller at this hour was nothing out of the ordinary. He led me into the living room. There was no sign of Emily, or of any of the photograph albums and journals she had taken from Rowan House. The room was a mess of paper, though; handwritten sheets from a lined A4 pad were scattered about; an acoustic guitar lay among them.

“You writing a song?” I said.

“I’m trying. Never really sure you’ve written one until it’s done.”

“Where’s Emily?”

“She’s up with her father. She said if you came back, to go up there, to Bayview. She said it was important.”

I nodded.

“May I sit down?” I said.

“Sure. What happened to your head?”

“A baseball bat.”

“Fuck me. Who did it?”

“A guy called Moon, Sean Moon.”

“I don’t know him, do I?”

“You won’t get to know him now. He’s dead.”

Dalton picked up his guitar and fingered a little run.

“Sounds like you have something to tell me. It might be better if you just came out with it. Better for me, at least, rather than having to prise it out of you, question by question.”

So I told him everything his mother had told me, about John Howard being his father, about being persuaded against her better judgment to leave him behind, about how she had missed him, and how she wanted so badly to know the truth of what had taken place in the Howard house. And I told him how Brock Taylor had been the murderer of his half brother, and now, of his mother. I told him how she died, I didn’t spare him anything. When I was done, he sat for a while in silence, then looked around the room.

“I thought by living here, I’d pick up something…a clue, a hint, a sense of how she was. There wasn’t a trace. How did she seem to you? My mother?” he said.

“She was very beautiful. But scared. As if she’d been in hiding the last twenty years. From you, from herself, from the world. From what she maybe feared all along. That the man who had rescued her was her destroyer.”

“Maybe it wasn’t all as simple as that.”

“Maybe it wasn’t all. But I think we can feel free to condemn the man who murdered her son so that he wouldn’t be in his way without being confused for the lock-’em-all-up-and-let-God-sort-’em-out brigade.”

“Jesus, I’ve seen Brock Taylor so often, in the rugby club, in the Woodpark Inn.”

“I thought chances were, he was your father.”

“And now it turns out I’m John Howard’s son. I feel like I’ve contracted a curse.”

He laughed then, and shook his head.

“No, that’s not true. I actually feel…like this is a kind of dream? Like I’m still Elizabeth and Robert Scott’s son, Alan, who helps out at church fetes, and is going to be a doctor. Like my life will be fine.”

“There’s every chance it can be. But Brock Taylor wasn’t finished with the Howards yet. He thought he had money coming to him. That can only mean through Denis Finnegan, somehow. Through the mother’s will? You said Emily’s at Shane Howard’s now. I’d better go there myself.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said, following me to the door.

I stopped him.

“This case is not going to get any safer. And if you are a Howard now, it may get very dangerous indeed for you in particular.”

Jerry Dalton shrugged.

“There’s more to life than church fetes,” he said.

On the short journey, Dalton told me he had come up with the suspicions about Rock O’Connor’s death himself; in her cups, Jessica Howard had referred to O’Connor’s diabetes, and suggested it was very convenient that Denis Finnegan had been the only one with Dr. Rock when he died; Jerry played a hunch and passed me the material about how an insulin overdose can resemble a heart attack. I told him if he ever got tired of medicine, he would make a fine detective: knowing what hunch to play and when was the hardest part of the job.

The narrow drive to what Anita Kravchenko called “Howard residence” ran up from Bayview Harbour. It was still dark, but the clouds had peeled away; the sky looked like it had been polished and come up shining, like a dark mirror. Shane Howard was standing in the window of the front room, looking out to sea; he saw us arrive and opened the door to let us in. Emily was sitting on the sofa, her pile of photograph albums and journals around her.

“You can put those away now, Emily,” Shane barked.

His daughter laughed at him.

“Dad, it’s too late for that.”

“Your daughter’s right, Shane. It’s too late to keep secrets anymore. Especially when you and your sister don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

Shane scowled at me.

“Who’s this?” he said, pointing at Jerry Dalton.

“Well,” I said. “There’s a number of ways I could introduce him. I could say he’s a friend of your daughter’s from university. I could say he’s Eileen Casey-you remember Eileen, your old, what would you call her, au pair? Nanny?-I could say he’s Eileen Casey’s son. But I think we should get it over with and say he’s your half brother, Shane. John Howard was his father.”

I thought Shane would explode, would demand proof, would wave his fists around and rail against me, against us all. Instead, he looked at Dalton and nodded his head and stared at the floor. He knew. He knew all along. The rage seemed to pass out of him like the fire of youth, and he slumped in a chair by the cold grate. Emily stared across at Jerry in astonishment. I looked at their faces and wondered if they’d been telling the truth, or if they had already slept together. This case was full of questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.

“What else did you know, Shane? Back then, what did you know about Marian? And about Sandra?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t tell you…I made a promise.”

“To Sandra?”

He nodded.

“That must have been a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. I made it. I can’t break it.”

“Not even for the sake of your own child? She’s desperate to know the truth, Shane.”

“I’ve always tried to protect her. That’s what we said we’d do, protect the kids,” Shane said in a hoarse whisper, his eyes glued to the floor.

“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?”