The Color of Blood (30 page)

“And that’s what the fourth tower would be, would it?” I said. “The vindication of the Howards?”

“I don’t think ‘vindication’ is the appropriate word. You might find ‘apotheosis’ excessive.”

“I might. If I was sure just what it meant.”

“Their ascension to Olympus. Their deification. Mock all you like, but when John Howard built the first tower there was no vision in this country, nothing but piety and spite. And he saw beyond that, he saw… he saw the future, Mr. Loy. It’s not fashionable anymore to laud great men, but I’ve seen one in my lifetime, and John Howard was that man. I remember the day I first set eyes on him. It was way back, an under thirteens A game. I played hooker for Belvedere, Shane was the captain of that year’s Castlehill side. It wasn’t much of a game, muddy pitch, kick and ruck, grind out the penalties. Castlehill won, of course, chiefly because of a great piece of opportunist play from young Howard, blind-side break from twenty yards caught us napping, handed off fullback and winger like they were made of straw, only try of the game. And it was a killer, but it was one of those times where you have to go, fair enough, you’ve got it and we don’t. And that’s when I saw John Howard for the first time, tall, elegant, the long coat, the red and green paisley scarf, the black fedora. He cut a dash, you know? He really cut a dash. He looked fitter than any of the boys on the field, and he must have been knocking on seventy by then. Like Peter O’Toole, you know? And the two angel girls with him, my God. Sandra, maybe fourteen, with her hair right down her back, her eyes like jewels, her milky skin… my God, she looked like a princess. Like a real… princess.”

Finnegan stood against the window, swaying now, slopping the whisky in his glass. He leant over from the waist and let gravity trundle him toward the fire, where he slapped his crystal tumbler down above his chin on the high mantelpiece and left his arm there, as if his glass was a peg he was hanging from. I hardly dared breathe, waiting for him to continue; from my neck to my rib cage, wave after wave of chill ice rippled; I was shaking with it. Finally, because he seemed lost to dreams, and I was afraid the drug would kick in before he said any more, I spoke.

“And her sister?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Sandra’s sister. You were remembering seeing John Howard for the first time, and his two angel girls.”

Finnegan stared at me as if I had set him a riddle. Then he shook his head slowly, and gingerly lifted his glass of whisky down from the mantelpiece, brought it to his lips and held it there a moment before moving it away from his head and holding it at arm’s length. The glass seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and Finnegan appeared mesmerized by it.

“What was she like?” I said. “Sandra’s sister.”

“No no no,” he said. “Sandra’s mother.”

“Sandra’s mother? You said ‘two girls,’ ‘John Howard’s two girls.’”

“That’s right.”

“Her mother was one of the girls?”

“Yeah. Fine-looking woman she was too, for her age. That’s when I saw the Howards first. And you know, to this day… there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for them… to this day…”

Finnegan pulled the glass back in toward his face, tipped it up to his mouth and emptied it, then staggered across to pour himself another. On the way, he was intercepted by his chair, which soaked up his great bulk without a sound. He waved his glass vaguely in the direction of the Macallan on the drinks table, then dropped it on the arm of the chair, where it tumbled silently to the floor. His head came down to rest where the glass had just been.

Within seconds, he was snoring, and I could do what I came to do. The attic floor was full of old case files and law books. On the first floor, there was a master bedroom and two guest bedrooms, one of which looked to be in regular use. With a collection of men’s magazines —
FHM
,
Loaded
,
Maxim
— and a shelf full of mathematics textbooks, it wasn’t too difficult to work out that Jonathan O’Connor stayed here. As with his rooms in Trinity, a portrait of John Howard and a photograph of the Howard Medical Center hung on the wall. There was a laptop computer on a pine desk, and I wondered whether he had been here tonight. But Jonathan’s laptop was silver; this one was white. I switched it on, opened Entourage and saw that it belonged to Emily Howard — and I remembered there had been a laptop dust outline in her room. I worked through the in-box until I came to an e-mail address I recognized: [email protected]. I opened the mail. It was a note of congratulations to Emily for getting a place in Trinity to study medicine, and it came from Denis Finnegan.

The other guest bedroom contained a display cabinet that was like a shrine to Seafield and Irish rugby, with photographs and press cuttings and Finnegan’s own schoolboy and club medals. Shane Howard and Richard O’Connor featured prominently; there were several shots of David Brady, even a few of Finnegan himself, younger and slimmer and not quite as red.

I went next door to examine Finnegan’s bedroom. I trawled through wardrobes and chests of drawers. There was nothing but clothes and shoes and volumes of political biography. I began to feel like this was a wasted trip, that anything I needed would be fast in a safe. I went back into the rugby shrine. There were two drawers beneath the glass cabinet that I hadn’t noticed. The first one opened to reveal all manner of memorabilia: tickets stubs to games from the sixties and seventies; autographs of JPR Williams and Tony O’Reilly and other rugby greats of the past; programs and lapel badges and so on. The second drawer was locked. I went up to the second floor to check on Finnegan: he was solid. I tipped his head to one side in case he vomited in his sleep and went down to the kitchen on the ground floor. I was looking for tools, but there weren’t any; there was a lot of expensive kitchenware that looked like it was never used. I got a mallet and a pointed steel used for keeping knives sharp and brought them upstairs and, using the steel like a chisel, I smashed my way into the locked drawer, breaking off every now and again to make sure Finnegan was still asleep.

The drawer was lined with green velvet. Rugby medals were laid out on the velvet. I looked at the medals, and pocketed one of several with a name engraved on the back. I also took a silver ID bracelet. Then I pushed the drawer back in and tried to minimize the apparent damage. I took Emily’s laptop and went downstairs and replaced the mallet and the steel in the kitchen. On the counter there was a block with a number of sharp Sabatier knives. There were two knives missing. As I walked to my car, I fingered the medal and the bracelet in my pocket. The name engraved on the back of the medal was Richard O’Connor’s. The words engraved on the bracelet were
Diabetes Type 1.

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE OLD GRAVEYARDS UP IN THE
mountains, with a small ruined church within the high granite walls, and an archway with a locked gate that had a sign pinned to it with the name and address of the caretaker. You’d call it an old country graveyard, except the city had come to meet it: there were redbrick cul-de-sac developments on either side, and a line of new bungalows across the road. There were no lights on in any of the houses, and no light in the sky either. But the ivy-clad wall was old and broken enough to offer as many footholds and handholds as I needed to scale it with relative ease, and I took a torch from the car to check the names on the graves, limiting my search to those that looked relatively new; there were many old stones and crosses on the uneven ground, and a scurrying underfoot that might have been rabbits, or rats; I didn’t want to be there at two o’clock in the morning and yet, as soon as I had received the text from Martha with the directions, I knew I had to go there at once.

The Howard plot was in a corner, shaded by yew trees and a single rowan; a big Celtic cross of black marble marked where John Howard lay; I assumed his wife had gone into the same grave; her name hadn’t been added to the headstone yet. The other grave had a stone of white marble and gold lettering and a photograph that fitted into a plastic cover. The photograph was of a girl of twelve, with strawberry blond hair and large blue eyes and a slight overbite and a cheeky smile on her face that said she knew she had been naughty but she was sure she could get away with it. She was holding a blue pig with one ear beneath her arm; her school pinafore was red and green tartan. What was written on the grave was:

M
ARIAN
H
OWARD

B
ORN
M
AY
15, 1963

D
IED
N
OVEMBER
2, 1975

R
EQUIESCAT IN
P
ACE

I thought of what Sandra said about her parents, that they hadn’t slept in the same bedroom “since Ma…” She had been going to say “since Marian died” but had stopped herself. I thought of Denis Finnegan tonight, drunk on fine scotch and a dream of the Howards, recalling the first time he’d set eyes on John Howard and his two angel girls. Two angel girls, only one still living.

I went and looked out the gates onto the road after that, in the hope that a car might drive by, or a truck, or a plane might fly overhead, or anything to take my thoughts away from here. But there was nothing but black cloud and mist and coal black night. I thought that this was right, with a dead child: there is no escape from it, and there is no prayer that can ease the pain of it. Then I thought of how little my feelings were worth in the scheme of things, and how little time I had to waste if I wanted this all to end. And then I turned around and went back to work.

The cover on the photo looked new; it certainly wasn’t weathered the way it should have been. And it seemed to be stuck on the headstone with glue, or resin. The grave had been visited recently; the earth was dented with marks, and there were even fresh prints in the softer mud leading up to the plot: the prints showed the kind of treads you get on motorcycle boots. There were prints small enough to be Emily’s, and prints large enough to be Jerry Dalton’s. And right around the child’s grave, someone had spread a trail of rowan berries.

There were lights on in Jerry Dalton’s house in Woodpark, but I would have knocked on his door even if there hadn’t been. I knocked like a bailiff about to repossess the place; it was only a matter of time before his neighbors were awake too. Emily Howard’s voice came from behind the door.

“Who is it?” she said.

“Ed Loy. It’s time we talked,” I said.

She opened the door, said “Hi, Ted” and went back inside. The door opened into a tiny hallway; a door led right into the living room. Emily sat in the middle of the floor in that knees-tucked-beneath-her way only women seem able to do. She wore indigo blue jeans and a black sweater; her newly black hair made her pale skin appear opalescent; her eyes were panda black, and her lashes were thick with mascara; her bloodstone rings gleamed in the glow from a gas fire. On the floor around her, she was surrounded by old photograph albums and journals; there was a smell of dust and worn paper in the room, of the faded and antique, of the past.

“They went through every album, picked out every photograph, and destroyed it. Even the shots of her as a baby. Isn’t that weird? No, isn’t that fucked-up?”

“Are you talking about Marian Howard?”

“Ye-ah.”

“What about the photograph on her headstone?”

“Oh, we put that up,” Emily said, staring at me through solemn brown eyes. She seemed to have aged several years in the hours since I’d seen her; I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time: a serious young adult.

“We?”

“Me and Jerry Dalton.”

“You and Jerry Dalton. You’re working together, are you?”

“I don’t know about ‘together.’ Don’t know about ‘working’ either. We’ve… he’s been getting sent this stuff about his real parents, about his background. And it crosses over with stuff about my family. So we’ve been, kind of, comparing notes. Trying to find out who fucked us up.”

“When I met your father, he said you’d been a perfectly normal girl, and then all of a sudden you’d had your hair dyed, broke up with your perfect boyfriend, gone off the rails entirely. Was that because you met Dalton?”

“I guess so. Jerry told me stuff about my family, about the ways people close to the Howards keep dying.”

“People like Audrey Howard and Stephen Casey and Eileen Casey?”

“You’ve been doing your detective thing, haven’t you? Yes, people like that, Ted. But you know, what my father said, about me being perfectly normal — I’ve been bulimic since I was thirteen, been in therapy since as long, my perfect boyfriend was a cokehead addicted to porn and that turned me on. How the fuck is any of that perfectly normal? And you know the joke of it? My parents didn’t even notice. They weren’t paying attention. Dad was too busy working, or lost in the land of rugby with fat Denis and all the Seafield man-boys, and Mum was obsessed with herself, with her looks or her fading looks, with her career or her fading career, with cheating on Dad with as many men as possible. I’m surprised Dad even noticed I was missing. Bet if he hadn’t received the ransom demand, he wouldn’t have.”

She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, without any self-pity; as if she feared I might attribute some to her, she quickly added, “I’m not doing a poor little rich girl routine here, it’s just… there’s something
wrong.
Something wrong with my aunt thinking it’s okay for me to screw my cousin, something wrong with me for doing it, something wrong for her to put me in therapy and not tell my folks, something wrong with me for going along with it. Even if I was the child, I’m not anymore. But I didn’t seem to have it in me to do anything about it on my own. Jerry said, what’s the problem? Something’s wrong in my family. What’s the solution? Well, if six years of therapy isn’t telling you, maybe it isn’t all in your head: chances are you need to find out for real. And I was getting somewhere, feeling better just searching, you know, looking at the Howards, at Dad, at Aunt Sandra, at Jonny even, trying to figure out what lies they were telling when half the time they didn’t seem to know themselves. And dumping David Brady, who was like my sick addiction. And then this fucking porno thing comes back to haunt me, Jesus.”