The Color of Blood (16 page)

“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.

I WALKED QUICKLY BACK TO MY CAR BENEATH THE LOWERING
sky. My first idea was to brace Sean Moon. I drove slowly through Woodpark. Waiting at the lights by the Woodpark Inn, I saw Jonathan O’Connor crossing the main road and entering the car park toward the lounge. He wore a long black crombie overcoat and a black baseball hat, and he walked with a swagger I hadn’t seen in him before.

I drove on down into Honeypark as the mist was blowing in again. At least, mist was what I thought it was at first. Then I amended it to fog, thick and grey, belching across the sky. I passed the three massive bonfire sites, two of which were still smoking; some of the houses nearest the bonfires had blown-out windows; a couple had scorched walls and melted drainage pipes. The fog was gusting through the air, dark, almost black, and there was a heat to it, and then, as I rounded the corner for Moon’s house, a red glow behind it, and I saw it wasn’t fog at all, it was smoke: Sean Moon’s house was ablaze, and a ring of onlookers shielded themselves from the heat as it went up. I could hear sirens. I parked and approached on foot as a Garda car, an ambulance and the fire service arrived. A round man with no neck in a round neck pullover with a newspaper rolled beneath his arm on the edge of the crowd was pulling ferociously on a short squat cigarette and making a succession of knowing faces and noises, all of which seemed intended to indicate that nothing he was seeing came as a surprise to
him
.

“Just go up, did it?” I said.

“If you want to believe that, you’re welcome, bud,” No Neck said.

“What do you mean, it was started deliberately?”

“And if you want to put words in my mouth, that’s another thing.”

He took a step toward me, scowling, his eyes watering. He smelled of stale smoke and fresh booze and despair at nine thirty in the morning. I fronted off a little, turning my head so that he’d notice the wound on my face. He noticed it and stepped back.

“Was there anyone in there?” I asked. “Was Moon there?”

“Moon? Why would Moon be there? Fuckin’ runner in.”