The Color of Blood (28 page)

“That’s why you didn’t do medicine?”

“And why Shane did dentistry. That was a real fuck-you to the old man. I was angry at the time. But now…”

She dropped her head into her hand, pressed her eyes between thumb and forefinger.

“I’m sorry. Keep going,” she said.

“Your parents’ sex life. You said they had separate bedrooms, was that just through your father’s illness, or—”

“Oh God no, they hadn’t slept together since Ma… since… I think Father had an affair, or something… at least I assume that’s what it was, Mother never spoke about it… from when we were, I don’t know, teenagers. It was… I don’t know.”

She shrugged, blushing, not wanting, like any of us I suppose, to go within ten miles of her parents’ sex life.

“What was that you said, ‘Since Ma’…?”

“Since Ma… found out, I suppose I was going to say. About the affair.”

“You didn’t call your mother ‘Ma,’ did you? Posh girl like you?”

“Hark at the little urchin lad. No, I didn’t, but Stephen did. So I did sometimes. Affectation.”

“Social sliding. Below stairs slumming.”

“Fuck off.”

“Stephen Casey. Is there any way on earth you would have expected him to do what he did?”

“I still can’t believe it. Apart from anything else… I mean, I know he might have thought of himself as a charity case — or rather, some of his charming fellow pupils might have accused him of being one — but he wasn’t chippy in the slightest. He was a brilliant rugby player — that’s where I began to take a real interest in the game.”

She grinned in a hungry way.

“You said you weren’t attracted to the boys who played rugby.”

“Yes. Well, that was a lie. That was before I’d decided to tell you about the affair with Stephen.”

“Now would be a good time to clear up any more lies.”

“No more lies, your honor.”

“So there’s no way in which you can explain why he would do such a thing.”

She shook her head.

“I mean, say if he had harbored grudges, people have more money than me, I’m going to get me some no matter what I have to do — and then he ends up with a bag of old ornaments. What is that about?”

“He wanted to steal big money, but the presence of the child, of Martha O’Connor, threw him off, brought him to his senses, he panicked and ran. And then, realizing what a mess he’d made of it all, how he’d murdered a woman in front of her husband and child, he took the only rational course open to him, and killed himself.”

“I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it,” Sandra said.

“Was there ever a time when you wondered if Rock had been the one to groom Stephen Casey? I know he wasn’t happy in his marriage to Audrey—”

“How do you know that?”

“Martha told me.”

“Did she now? Well, then it must be true. Did she suggest her father had wanted his wife murdered? Nothing that woman said would surprise me.”

“She speaks very highly of you too.”

“She never gave me a chance. I went down on my hands and knees for that child, and she never gave me a chance—”

“She was just a child, a traumatized child who’d seen her mother murdered—”

Sandra was shaking, suddenly full of emotion, her burning eyes brimming with tears.

“We all had our troubles, you know. We all had our troubles.”

The emotion boiled over, sobs erupting from wherever they were stored. I went to hold her, but she shook her head and ran from the room. Down the corridor I heard her weeping, then a door slamming. The teenage symphony, Sandra had called it yesterday. It seemed, for the Howards, the melody lingered on long past the teenage years.

I checked my watch: I was going to be late for David Manuel. I went down the great circular stairs. I wondered whether there was anything in Emily’s room worth my attention. I went back through the arch, crossed the rear hall and tried the double doors, which were open. There were no servants around, which surprised me, but in this instance, made life easier. Darkness lay ahead. I went along the white passageway that led to the bungalow, trying for lights at each corner until I found a panel and threw them all on. I knocked on Emily’s door a couple of times, then tried it. The room was empty, and all her stuff was gone: no clothes in the wardrobe, no boots beneath the bed. There was a drug company notepad but no notes had been made, or at least, if there had, there were no indentations to tell what the content might have been. I did the usual trawl: drawers, cupboards, bedside table, mattress, bed linen, came up with nothing. All I could find was, on the windowsill, a line of rowan berries spread across from edge to edge. There was another line on top of the lintel, and another layer on the carpet just inside the doorstop. Maybe, like heliotrope, it had some special meaning. Or maybe Emily had just become very bored, and had left before she coated the entire room with the red and green fruit.

Back in Rowan House, all was quiet. I walked down along the rear corridor, which was hung with horse-racing prints and had a tiny marble holy water font wall-mounted beside each door. I saw two grandly decorated sitting rooms in a Victorian style, all heavy drapes and mahogany furniture and chintz, and the inevitable portraits of John Howard, who must have had artists queuing up to paint him. A couple of doors were locked, a couple opened onto musty bathrooms, there was a bedroom with a brown leather chaise and a rolltop desk and a wall of diplomas and degrees that I imagined was Howard’s, then a room where the light didn’t work. I pushed the door open and went across to the window and opened the curtains. It was a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper. There was a beautiful old dollhouse, and a teddy bear and a blue pig with only one ear lay on the pillow, as if waiting for the girl who owned them to come to bed. The wardrobe was full of dresses and skirts that might fit an eleven-or twelve-year-old girl, including school uniform pinafores and kilts in red and green tartan; the chest of drawers was packed with tops and shorts and underwear for the same. There wasn’t a speck of dust; everything was fresh and clean and smelled of lavender. I crossed the room and looked at the dollhouse, which sat on a table near the window. It was a model of Rowan House, just as I had seen in Emily’s room, with two differences: there was no garden plinth beneath it, and the roof opened. I turned it around and lifted the roof and looked underneath when the door flew open behind me.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing in here? Who gave you permission to wander about the house?”

Sandra Howard stood in the doorway in a white cotton shift, hair pulled up and back, face drained of blood, eyes ablaze.

“I was just having a look around,” I said, working hard to get the words out. “Was this your room?”

“Of course it wasn’t my room… yes, yes, it was, ages ago, now come on, out of here—”

“Why is it preserved like this? It’s as if—”

“It’s not ‘preserved,’ I went away to school, that’s all, it’s not ‘as if’ anything, now for God’s sake, will you get out?”

Her voice had become a shrill, hard, screech, with the grace notes of hysteria. I walked past her in the wide doorway. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

In the hall, I waited for her to say good night, but she didn’t come.

I shut the great doors of Rowan House behind me, two images vivid in my brain. One was of the haunted expression in Sandra’s eyes, the shadow across her suddenly gaunt face, as she said, “We all had our troubles, you know.”

The other was what I saw beneath the dollhouse roof: Mary and Joseph and some wise men and an angel from a child’s crib in a ring around a Barbie doll on all fours with a hole punched between her spread legs and red painted around the hole and an Action Man doll kneeling behind the hole, between her legs. On the inside of the roof in red were daubed the words “I should be ashamed of myself.”

He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowring.
O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

Matthew 16: 2–3

I DROVE TO HENNESSY’S IN BAYVIEW, WHERE EVERYTHING
is available at a price, and Tommy met me in the car park and gave me a small bottle of GHB.

“Be careful with it man,” he said. “Very easy to OD, specially mixing with booze.”

“Okay. Thanks, Tommy.”

“Are you sure this is the right way to go?” he said. He was so used to my being the reliable one that, whenever it looked like I was getting wayward, Tommy got very grave and paternal. It always made me smile, and I was always glad of it.

“I’ll only use it in an emergency,” I said.

GHB in small doses works a little like Ecstasy; in conjunction with booze, it can knock a man out. I didn’t like using it, but I could hear the clock ticking.

I drove through the night with the windows open and the damp night air blowing in, trying to breathe, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. I remembered what David Manuel had said:
It’s what happened twenty,
thirty
years ago that counts;
I wondered how much he knew, and what more Emily had told him: would she confirm that Sandra had been abused by her father? What might she add about herself? I called Manuel, but his phone was off; I left a message saying I was on my way, but I would be late.

When I turned into the square I could smell the smoke clearly; no confusing it with fog this time. I got out of the car and saw it pouring out the top of Manuel’s house. There was no fire brigade, no ambulance or police, just a few neighbors gathering, and what appeared to be Manuel’s hysterical family running up and down the garden; I recognized his wife standing in the doorway.

“Mrs. Manuel, I’m Ed Loy, I saw your husband this morning. I’m a detective.”

“He’s trapped up there. Please, can you try and reach him?”

A tall girl of about fifteen with the same dark coloring as Manuel’s wife was crying. She turned to me.

“The flames are coming down the stairs.”

I went into the house and started up the stairs; by the third floor, the smoke was too thick to see, and the heat was unbearable; I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t see the flames but I could hear their rumbling crackle, like some infernal engine.

I went down and out through the kitchen into the back garden. An old metal fire escape ran from the first floor to the third; I shinned up onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension and climbed the spindly ladder until the pitched roof lay above me. Through the dark window of the attic room, I could see the red flames glowing like trammeled rage. I couldn’t see David Manuel, and reckoned he must have passed out from smoke inhalation; the roof tiles were concrete, and I thought if I could work a few loose and hurl them at the window, I might break it, let some air in and hopefully bring him back to consciousness; I worried that the air would drive the flames higher; as it turned out, plan and worry were all in vain. I flung one tile at the Velux window; it almost bounced off the double-glazed glass, skittered down the roof and fell the long three stories to smash on the paving stones below. As if this was some kind of occult summons, Manuel suddenly rose up in the window, an apparition in green, arms and shoulders on fire; his hands reached for the window’s release bar, and the red flames behind him danced higher as he forced the window open and there was a roar from within like a beast in torment and Manuel came out headfirst onto the roof above me. His back and his long hair were on fire now, his movements agonized, staccato, like an insect on a grill; I called to him, but he was beyond hearing, beyond vision. He moved on hands and knees down the roof, and looked like he might crawl right off the edge; I tried to reach across and grab him, but just then he stood up and stepped out into the night and fell like a burning angel, down into the garden below.

By the time I reached the ground, the sound of sirens filled the air, but they didn’t drown out the grief of Manuel’s family, who had all been watching from below; his distraught wife clutched her teenage daughter and a younger girl; two teenage boys were caught between the need to go to their father’s ruined body and the natural human urge to turn away; quickly, the ambulance men intervened, and then the fire service were running hoses through the house, and the family’s agony was buffered by official intervention. A fireman tried to get me to stay at the scene, but I slipped away and drifted in among the neighbors and the ghouls as the Guards arrived. It would be useful to know who Manuel’s last client had been, but I couldn’t ask his wife; it was probable she didn’t even know. All I knew was that Manuel was going to tell me what he had learned from Emily Howard, and now he was dead. It was hard not to believe those two facts were connected.

I caught sight of myself in the rearview and almost drove off the road; my face was blackened by smoke, my hair frosted with white ash; I looked like a photo negative of myself. I pulled in at a hotel in Donnybrook, walked quickly through the lobby to the bathroom and gave myself a wash and a brushup. It was twelve ten, and I’d been on the road since six this morning; I told myself it was time to pack it in for the night. I walked back across the lobby with every intention of listening to myself. But the bar was still open, with an extension for something they described as the “Halloween Festival” — not just a night but an endless weekend — and I decided any man who’d just seen what I’d seen deserved a drink. The bar was thronged with people who looked like they’d been at a party for too long and needed to go home, but had forgotten where they lived. My type of crowd. I sat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee, then, when it arrived, asked for a double Jameson as if it were an afterthought. I put sugar in the coffee and added the whiskey and drank the whole thing in three drafts. It burned my throat and warmed up my gut and made me feel half alive again. I was doing 50 percent better than David Manuel. The voice in my head reminded me that I should go home, that a night’s sleep and everything would look, would even be, different. I pondered this, and all I could come up with were the facts: that there was a killer on the loose, that he or she had just killed again, that everyone I was working for: Sandra Howard, Shane Howard, Emily Howard, Jonathan O’Connor, Denis Finnegan, each of them was in danger of being the next victim. Equally, any of them — more than one — might be the killer. I was the only one who knew the extent of the connections and how they all joined together — to the extent that I did. The killer didn’t show any sign of stopping. That meant I couldn’t either. Maybe I could catch a quick nap, like the two old boys at the all-night Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament across in Woodpark. Maybe even that was unwise: neither of them looked like he was certain to wake up. I checked my phone to see if Martha O’Connor had called or texted with the information I’d asked her for. The phone I picked out of my pocket wasn’t my phone though; it was David Brady’s. I had checked the text messages before; I ordered another coffee and worked through the Received Calls and Dialed Numbers lists, comparing them to the numbers I had on my phone for the principals in the case. Several of the incoming calls were listed as “no number.” There had been calls made to and received from Emily in the days leading up to the murder; I noted Emily’s number, which came up with her name and which I didn’t have. I thought of ringing her, but it was close to one now, and I didn’t want to wake her if she was asleep. I sent her a text message hoping she was well and asking to speak to her as soon as I could.