The Color of Blood

Six

I CHECKED MY MOBILE PHONE, WHICH I WAS IN THE HABIT of leaving turned off. There was a message from Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly of Seafield Guards, saying he looked forward to talking to me about my most recent client, Shane Howard, and his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That hadn’t taken long. So Dave had the case. I still didn’t feel right about removing evidence from the Brady crime scene. Last time we had spoken, Dave had accused me, only half in jest, of becoming part of the luxury service industry: someone who carried rich people’s bags for them and eased their burdens. He had finished his pint, so he used it as an exit line, which was just as well, as I couldn’t think of much to say in reply. “Rich people have their troubles too” sounded kind of lame, even if it was true. “Rich people pay my bills” was closer to the truth, though I didn’t like admitting it. Had I compromised a murder investigation just so I could keep Emily Howard’s life tidier than she took any care to make it? Maybe. But I took that risk because I knew I would get to the truth faster than the Guards. If I didn’t believe that, then I would be as bad as Dave had painted me. And if it involved serious criminals from Honeypark, even Brock Taylor himself, I could make those connections before anyone else. And Dave wasn’t above taking my help when he needed it.

Meanwhile, here I was, smoking a cigarette on top of Bayview Hill, waiting for a woman who drove a black ’06 Reg Mercedes-Benz S 500 to tell me what to do. She came out of the house with Emily and Jonathan, whom shock continued to age in reverse: they looked like a pair of frightened children, bloodless and numb. Jonathan had retreated behind iPod headphones; Emily carried an overnight bag and a worn stuffed dog. Sandra Howard opened the car for them, then came across and stood beside me. Her hood was down, and her red hair glistened in the thick damp air. She was wearing black, some combination of cape and cowl that came to her ankles. She took the cigarette from my hand and drew hard on it.

“Jesus, this is such a mess,” she said. “Mr. Loy-”

“Ed,” I said.

“Ed. I’m bringing Jonny and Em up to Rowan House, that’s the family home. Would you come with us?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll follow you there.”

She held the cigarette up as if to give it back; I gestured to her to keep it; she caught my hand again and held it in her cool grip. Her red nail polish was chipped, and her nails were bitten to the quick; she wore a red-and-green-braided band on her wrist; she smelled of smoky salt earth and the sweet tang of spice. She looked straight at me, and I looked straight back; I thought I could feel her green eyes searching mine, like she could see inside my thoughts, see my doubt, my suspicion, see how little I really trusted her, or anyone else. But I wanted her to believe I could trust. Looking in her eyes, I wanted to trust her.

Lord, I believe, oh, help my unbelief.

She brought her hand up to my face. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but I wanted her to keep doing it. Her crooked finger rested cool in the hollow of my cheek.

“Something is happening to us, Ed. Emily vanishing, David Brady-the Howard family is under threat. You’ll help us, won’t you?”

I nodded. I felt at that moment as if I were under her spell, as if I would have done whatever she asked me. A firework raked across the sky like a searchlight in the dark and caught us for a split second, frozen in its glow. I sometimes thought of it later as a strobe flash that captured Sandra Howard as she had been, before the fall-but of course it was no such thing; the high saga of the Howards was plummeting to its close, and whether she knew it or not, Sandra wasn’t just caught up in its descent, she was fanning the flames that sped it down.

I followed the roll of the great black Merc, feeling dragged in its imperious tide, as our cortege made slow progress through the rush-hour traffic on the narrow roads south of Castlehill. Once we joined the M50 northwards we picked up speed against the flow. The Merc turned west on Exit 13 and climbed through Sandyford and Kilgobbin, then cut up through narrow twisty roads to the foothills of the mountains. I followed along a road bounded now on one side by a high stone wall; on the other, gorse and ferns gave way to marsh and shallow bog. At a junction high above the city, great iron gates within the wall marked the entrance to Rowan House; I waited while they swung open, and then followed as the Merc crunched up a track lined with ash and rowan trees to a house I had seen already that day, in miniature, on a plinth beneath Emily Howard’s bed.

Rowan House looked like a Victorian merchant’s idea of a baronial castle: cut from pale granite, it had castellated bay windows, battlements, a small octagonal flag tower at one end and a much larger corner tower at the rear with a slated conical roof. A weather vane sprouted from the flag tower, atop whose pointer a spotlight picked out a metal H; another spot found the plain cross on the round tower’s peak.

The entrance hall was a great white rotunda with a sweeping circular staircase in pale wood to the right and a corridor at left that served the ground-floor front rooms; assorted portraits of Dr. John Howard hung at every turn; ahead, an arch through which Sandra Howard had already swept led to another, slightly smaller hall, with stairs down to the basement level and a further corridor for the back rooms and yet more paintings of her father. At the far end of this hall stood double doors that might once have led down to the garden; now they opened onto a windowless corridor whose ceiling was only about twelve feet high, whose walls were crisp white and unadorned by portraits of any kind, a corridor that emerged into a modern rectangular open-plan living space with great plate-glass walls and no hint of baronial grandeur: the corridor and living room of a house built maybe in the 1970s, seemingly grafted onto the rear of the fake castle. There was a fire burning in a big open grate, with a brushed-steel vent to take the smoke; the flames drew everyone to huddle in their glow.

Two maids in black-and-white uniforms had materialized when we first entered the house. After brisk instructions from Sandra Howard, they’d vanished; now they were back with drinks and cold cuts and salads, which they set on a long table at one end of the room. The sudden pang in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day; Jonny fell on the food like a starving man, and, once I had reassured myself that Sandra and Emily were okay, I followed suit. Sandra sat on a long couch at the end closest to the fire; Emily lay curled up with her head in her aunt’s lap, her stuffed dog pressed to her cheek and her left thumb in her mouth. The maids, who were both tiny and looked Filipina, swirled around collecting coats and filling cups and pouring glasses of water and setting out bottles of spirits and mixers and tubs of ice and asking if there was anything further before silently dispersing. I ate smoked salmon and rare cold roast beef and tomato and avocado salad and potato and hazelnut salad and drank a cup of coffee and halfway through my second bottle of Tyskie, a very strong Polish beer that I had pined for during my month on the dry, I began to feel faintly human again. Jonny had put steel-rimmed granny glasses on; he kept flashing anxious glances through them at his mother before looking at me and gulping air through his mouth. Finally, his mother rose and led Emily out of the room, and he got his chance to speak.

“You won’t tell, will you?” he asked. “Tell Mummy, I mean.”

“Tell her what?” I said blankly.

“About, y’know. The porn. And the whole thing with Emily.”

He had one of those voices that sounded as if it hadn’t completely broken, and was always struggling to find its correct register, like a radio station that isn’t fully tuned in. Combined with pale stubble that looked like thistledown and gangling limbs that seemed not to fit him properly, he could have passed for fourteen.

“Emily’s father thought she had gone missing. Did your family not worry?”

“I don’t live with Mummy; I have rooms in Trinity.”

And an old-style Trinity accent to go with them. Rums in Trin’ty.

“What age are you, Jonny?”

“Nineteen. Same as Emily. I got Schol-a Foundation Scholarship-in mathematics. Which confers all sorts of perks. I can eat in the Dining Hall, and wear an academic gown-”

“And graze your sheep in College Park?”

“They didn’t apprise me of that privilege, but if it’s available to me, I shall certainly take it up. As soon as I get the sheep.”

He gave a sniffing, snorting, yelping laugh, the kind of sound teenage boys who learn Monty Python routines by heart make, maybe the kind maths geeks make too; then he blinked unhappily at me, his anxious eyes enlarged by the powerful lenses.

“I need you to tell me a few things first. How did you get mixed up in all this?”

“Emily rang me. Asked me if I wanted to be in a threesome with two girls. Said that it would be filmed, but that I could wear a mask.”

“And you said no problem?”

“Mr. Loy, mathematics scholars are not exactly coming down with offers of twosomes, let alone, ah, exponentials thereof…and the offers we get-well, those I tend to get are generally from the kind of girls who hope I won’t be too interested in sex. So it was hardly something I felt I could pass up.”

“And the offer coming from Emily, that didn’t surprise you?”

Jonny stared at his plate.

“No. We’ve kind of…from a youngish age, sort of…experimented. Not so much in the last few years. Since Emily had boyfriends. But before, well…it was always her idea, I mean, it would have had to be, she being the girl…I suppose she tried stuff out on me…before doing it for real.”

“When you say youngish?”

“Thirteen, fourteen.”

“And then she dropped you. Did that hurt you?”

“Maybe. A little. But we’d still, occasionally-Christmas, or at a family party-she’d give me…a treat.”

“So there was no great problem for you when she suggested you make a second movie with her?”

“On the contrary.”

“And this whole thing about her and David Brady being blackmailed-”

“They didn’t tell me about that until afterward. And I wasn’t too happy. I mean, whoever was doing it was going to try and get money out of Uncle Shane, it was clearly some kind of low-life scumbag. But when Emily explained the situation, that they were implicated in a whole underage thing, I had to go with it.”

“You didn’t think you were being sucked into it?”

“I didn’t. But with the tattoo, I don’t know what to think.”

“When did you get the tattoo?”

“About a month ago. And it was Emily’s idea. She asked me to come along with her, when she was getting hers, part of her whole new look, the hair, the piercings, all that. And while we were there, she persuaded me to have one done. I’m sure she didn’t…I’m sure it was just in fun.”

“I’m sure it was. But do you think…might Emily have lied about the whole situation with the thirteen-year-old girl? Might she have set you up?”

“No.”

“Jonny, was she with you all day today? In the house in Honeypark?”

“She was in the house, but not always in the room. We had our own rooms. It was a weird setup. I mean, that creepy guy, Moon, and the Reillys, total little skangers but decent enough actually, they’d get us food and drink and whatever, it didn’t feel like we were there against our will. I was just waiting for Emily to give me the word on when we were getting out. And to be frank, given the amount of sex we were having, I didn’t care when that would be.”

“She was in the house, but not always in the room. If she wasn’t in the same room as you, could that mean she might have left the house?”

“I suppose so,” he said, then shook his head quickly, took his glasses off and stared at them.

“Why would she have left the house?” he said, his voice shrill. “What are you implying? That she killed David Brady?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m asking questions. That’s my job.”

“Well, I think I’ve had enough of your questions, Mr. Private Detective. It’s a grubby little job, don’t you find?”

His Trinity manner had become grander, his voice a fluted drawl; I could feel the class boundary rising to divide us.

“It certainly has the habit of uncovering a lot of grubby secrets,” I said.

“So there’s no point in asking you not to tell Mum-”

“I’ve already told your mother everything. I’m working for her, as well as for your uncle. She didn’t appear particularly surprised.”

Jonathan stood up abruptly, and his metal chair fell back with a crash against the hardwood floor. He looked down at me, his lips compressed, his hands clenched into fists.

“If you think trying to pin a murder on Emily is going to help anyone in this family, you must be out of your fucking mind,” he said, in a low voice thick with passion. “But I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand a family like ours.”

Since Jonathan himself had raised the possibility that Emily had the opportunity to kill her ex-boyfriend, I was a little taken aback by his sudden rage. As he stalked off, his mother approached from the passageway and tried to stop him; he backed away and waved his unwieldy arms at her, then ran down the corridor, and a door slammed.

Sandra Howard replaced Jonathan’s chair, sat in it, a pale smile on her face, and began to assemble the ingredients for a gin and tonic. She was wearing a dark suit, black shot with some kind of green; the hem of her skirt brushed her knees; her legs in black stockings looked long and slender.

“The teenage symphony: tears and tantrums, and the slamming of the bedroom door. Don’t take it personally, Ed.”

“I think he meant it personally.”

“What were you talking about?”

“His relationship with his cousin. Among other things. Where is Emily?”

“Resting. She has a room here. She was starting to freak out. A doctor is coming up from the center to see to her.”

Sandra flashed an uneasy look at me, the first time I’d seen her furtive or defensive. She took a long hit on her drink, which was heavy on the Tanqueray, and brandished the green bottle at me. I took it and made my own. When Sandra looked up again, her gaze was steady.

“They’ve had a rough time of it over the years, Ed, both Jonny and Em. I know, silver spoon, everything money can buy, everyone should have their troubles, but really, they shouldn’t.”

“Why shouldn’t they? Tell me their troubles.”

“Jonny’s father died when he was eleven. Richard O’Connor was my first husband. He was a doctor-he was the one who helped me believe in myself, in my father’s legacy-because I hadn’t gone into medicine myself, I felt unworthy, I had been teaching in Castlehill College, drifting, really, but he gave me focus-he reminded me I was my father’s daughter. And I took over the running of the Howard Maternity Center, and I founded the Howard Clinic and the Howard Nursing Home, assembled the investors, saw them built and open and running successfully.”

Sandra got up suddenly and turned all the lights out and beckoned me across the room to the great window.

“You can just about make the three towers out through the mist, see? I hope one day to see a fourth.”

Three great blurs of light were discernible, shimmering in the murk. I looked at Sandra, straight-backed, regal. Her eyes were shining with pride, and something that looked like defiance, or triumph, and something else, a shadow, a sudden darkness that appeared from nowhere and was just as briskly dispelled.

“He said I did it all myself, but of course I didn’t, it was Dr. Rock-that’s what everyone called him, Richard O’Connor, R-O-C-he inspired me, Ed, just like my own father had inspired me, and Rock inspired Jonny too, he-you know when Jonny was eleven, he played rugby, played very well, he was a prospect, insofar as you can be at that age, but to look at him now, well, you couldn’t imagine it, could you?”

I shook my head.

“Rock had played, and he coached at Seafield and even in the school. And I’m not like Shane, I’m not saying rugby is some kind of universal panacea, but-sometimes a father can be so important, so inspiring, that when he dies it’s like the air has gone out of the world. I think that’s what happened for Jonny. And Denis didn’t get to know him until later. In fairness, Jonny’s started to get along really well with Denis since he went to college. He really goes for the whole legal Caesar bit. It’s me and Denis who don’t get along so well anymore.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Are you separating?”

“I think so. Mutually. Amicably. We’ve just…run out of…”

She exhaled, smiling, and shrugged, and waved a hand in the air. I didn’t smile back.

“I don’t think it’s having an effect on Jonathan, if that’s what you meant,” she said.

“It wasn’t. You were going to tell me about Emily. Her troubles.”

“Emily-oh Jesus, Emily.”

She walked across to the fire, where she stood, staring into the flames. I stayed by the window. I could see the fire reflected in the glass, flickering red in the black.

“Emily’s mother, Jessica-you met her, didn’t you?”

“This morning, yes.”

“How did she strike you?”

“Initially, very sexy, maybe a bit too flirtatious, a bit blatant. A bit much. And then…I don’t know, like she was at one remove from herself…like she was damaged.”

Sandra stared into the fire and breathed out slowly.

“Damaged…‘damaged’ is a good word. Jessica’s mother died of ovarian cancer when she was six. She was an only child. Her father was a not terribly successful actor, and the heavy drinking that usually goes along with the theater got much worse after his wife’s death. And Jessica looked after him. Made his breakfast, ironed his clothes, made sure he was on time for rehearsals. She was his little wife. Her periods started early, when she was about eleven; at twelve, she’d reached full sexual maturity. At least, her body had. And her father noticed. And Jessica noticed him noticing, and began to use makeup, and to dress so he’d go on noticing. And one night when he lumbered in from the pub after whatever play he was in, or wasn’t in, drunk again, she was waiting for him in the marital bed…his patient little wife, all ready for love…and he tried to resist, but, as with the drink and the failure, he didn’t try hard enough.”

Her voice had thickened with emotion; now it faltered. The fire crackled and hissed. I stood dead still, as if moving might break the spell, as if we were at a séance, and Sandra was communing with the departed. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at me, and I saw her eyes were glistening. There was nothing I could say, and before I had a chance to think of something, she turned back to the fire and continued.

“She told me all about it one night, early in the marriage. She’d had a row with Shane-over sex, how she wanted it more than he did, or how he had accused her of cheating with her leading man: young love, high drama, and she arrived up here and we drank brandy, and she told me all about it. How it lasted eighteen months or so, until she was fourteen. By then she had started sleeping around-older boys at school, a couple of her friends’ fathers. And her own father had fallen apart under the strain, the shame of it all. Spent time in mental hospital. And drying out, though as soon as he’d get out, the drinking would start again. Whiskey, at the end. And Jessica running wild now, expelled from school, and no one to care for her-there was an aunt, on her mother’s side, in Clontarf, but she didn’t want to know. And the father died, pancreatitis, I think, or maybe liver, a drink death anyway, and Jessica was left, sixteen, all alone, desperate, afraid. Taken into foster care, ran away, one, two, three families. And finally the social worker in charge of her case, despairing, took a flier, had the inspired idea of encouraging her to act. She got in touch with some of Jessica’s father’s former colleagues, the employable ones, and they were all stricken with guilt and ‘there but for the grace go I’ sentimentality and they got her some walk-ons and a few auditions and she turned out to be a natural. I suppose you could say the theater saved Jessica’s life.”

Sandra turned and faced me, and I could see the glow of the fire in her red hair and the pity in her green eyes.

“But those eighteen months, Ed…herself and her father, and Jessica just twelve, thirteen years old…alone in the house, her father’s little wife…I don’t think she ever moved on from there. From what Shane said-and I know she’s been unfaithful to him throughout their marriage-she doesn’t much enjoy sex, but she likes the power it gives her.”

“And Emily…” I said.

“And Emily,” she said. “Her mother’s daughter. Emily and Jonathan. Shane didn’t know, and Jessica didn’t know, but I knew, I think I’ve always known. Is that what Jonny was so excited about, that I might find out?”

I nodded.

“The weird thing is-the awful thing, maybe-I never felt it was wrong. I mean, kids are going to do it, thirteen, fourteen, you can try and delay, but by sixteen most of them are having sex, and as a parent what are you going to do? Tell them not to? Or pretend they aren’t? I mean, it’s good, isn’t it? If you do it right? And if they experiment together, if it’s not an older person taking advantage of them.”

“I think some people might feel a little uneasy at their being cousins.”

“It’s not brother and sister. It’s not an incestuous relationship. The taboo about cousins marrying, reproducing, is based on the fear that they’ll keep doing it, and that the children of extended families of married cousins will marry each other. Then you have a problem.”

“I doubt if your brother would be so sanguine.”

“I don’t know that I’m sanguine about it either, Ed. I’m just saying I never felt it was wrong. Maybe that says as much about me as it does about anyone else. I mean, Jonny’s been in therapy since shortly after Rock’s death. And Emily-this is something else her father doesn’t know-Emily has been seeing the same therapist for years too. She came to me, I set it up for her. So…and no, I don’t believe there should be a stigma attached to it, but I’m old-fashioned enough to wish our kids didn’t need it. So sanguine isn’t close to how I feel.”

“When I spoke to Jessica Howard, she said it was your idea that Emily do medicine. She suggested that you were anxious one of the children be the keeper of the Howard flame. That that burden came to rest upon Emily.”

A flash of rage creased her brow and stained her cheeks like wine spilled on white linen.

“It was not a burden, that’s so typical of the way Jessica twists everything, Emily wanted to do medicine, wants to still, she…”

Sandra caught herself, and gave a rueful little laugh, and twisted her mouth in acknowledgment of her flash of temper.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Loy. Sisters-in-law. Jessica is…not always the easiest person to get along with. I’m sure it is difficult to marry into a family like ours. But her own insecurities, her need to be the center of attention, haven’t helped matters. She wouldn’t even come to my mother’s funeral this year. Said they’d never got along, and to pretend otherwise just because she was dead was hypocrisy. Never mind that it was her husband’s mother, the self-obsessed fucking egotism…”

“Did Emily go to the funeral?”

“Of course. She and her granny were close. But look, I don’t…I didn’t really want to get into all this…I don’t necessarily believe that’s at the root of Emily’s issues…”

“I think family is central,” I said. “She seems very angry at the Howards. That there’s some great tradition, some grand example she’s expected to live up to. She wishes you’d just all leave her alone.”

Sandra nodded.

“She’s nineteen, just started at college, a new life. Maybe that’s as it should be. Jonny’s gone the other way, he talks about the Howards like we’re an empire on the march, superior beings all. Probably healthier at that age to want your family on the sidelines. Make your own name.”

I was relieved at what she said. It didn’t mean the blackmailer had gone away. But it suggested that the source of Emily’s troubles was not as grave as it might have been.

We stood in silence for a moment. The fire, reflected in the black glass of the wall, seemed to wash the room in its red glow; logs spat and hissed in the grate. Sandra smiled, and this time I smiled back. She came close to me; I could feel her breath on my face, her wood spice scent, her sudden need. I swallowed, and took a step back, and put my hand in my jacket pocket, and fingered the mass card that had been left beneath my windscreen wiper outside Shane Howard’s surgery, and played a hunch.

“All right then, Sandra,” I said. “Do you remember someone called Stephen Casey?”

I must really have fallen for Sandra Howard. Because when she looked at me, and looked away and as quickly back, and said, “Who?” and then, when I had repeated the name and she, having given herself time, having made a thinking face and taken a thinking walk, shook her head emphatically and said “No,” not only did I realize instantly that she was lying, I was surprised.

“He died on All Souls’ Day, 1985,” I said.

Her eyes cast around the room, and up at me, and away again. It was almost painful to watch. The telephone rescued her. She left the room to answer it, and I stared at the fire and tried to remember the last time I had been surprised that someone was lying to me. I looked in the flames and tried to remember my ex-wife’s face. I found that I couldn’t.