The Color of Blood (33 page)

There was a knock on the door, and Eileen left the room. When she came back in, she looked me up and down, flashed me a nervous grin, then went to what looked like a plain white wall, pressed on it and a cupboard door swung open.

“What do you drink?” she said.

“Jameson,” I said. “Two-thirds to a third water.”

“I’ll give you half and half. You’ve got to take it easy.”

She poured herself a whiskey too, and came over and sat beside me with both drinks.

“Who was at the door?” I said.

“One of Brian’s… security staff. Checking to see if everything is all right.”

“And is it?”

“Have a drink and see.”

She tipped the glass to my lips and I gulped maybe half of it. She took my glass, clinked hers against it, said “Sláinte” and drank.

“How long have you been with Brock then?”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about him.”

“And then he sends a boy around to check up on you.”

“Checking up on
you.
”

“What do you think he’s going to do with me?”

“Make sure you’re scared, good and proper, so you keep your nose out of his business.”

“And you think that’s all he’ll do?”

“Brian may have robbed a few banks in his time, security vans, but that’s all; he’s settled with the CAB, he’s moved beyond that now. And no one’s said he ever killed anyone. No one’s ever said that.”

The near repetition of her avowal of Brock Taylor’s innocence seemed to undermine her faith in it. She fetched an ashtray and set it down beside her. She lit a cigarette, and I asked for one. When she lit mine, her hand was trembling.

“You’re very frightened. Why is that?”

She drank some more whiskey.

“I was in London nearly twenty years. St. Thomas’s Hospital. I wouldn’t have come back if I didn’t think Brian was on the level. Don’t make him out to be some kind of gangster.”

“Do you know Sean Moon?”

Eileen flinched.

“There are people he sometimes has to deal with, people from the past who don’t understand who he’s become—”

“Tonight, Sean Moon murdered two criminals from Woodpark, the Reilly brothers. Brian sat there and watched.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I saw it. Afterward, they put a Ukrainian woman called Maria Kravchenko in the Bentley and drove her here. Moon had been holding her against her will, forcing her to have sex against her will. Raping her, I believe it’s called.”

Eileen was shaking her head.

“I took her away from them, and let her and her sister stay in my house. But they broke in and took them, and when I tried to stop them, they attacked me. Did you see the Kravchenko girls tonight? How was I delivered here?”

“I wasn’t… nobody… I didn’t see you arrive. I was upstairs. Brian came up and…”

She was having some trouble forming sentences, or organizing her thoughts.

“What did he tell you? Or are you used to entertaining, what should we call them, business clients of your husband who are beaten senseless and tied to chairs?”

“We know you’re working for the Howards. He thought we might learn something from you. Said you’d been a bit obstreperous and Moon had to knock you into line.”

“Did Tommy Owens set me up?”

“I don’t know who Tommy Owens is, love.”

She looked across at me, took the smoked-down cigarette from my mouth and butted it in the ashtray. Then she brushed some ash from my shirtfront.

“He didn’t say anything about any girls,” she said, in a low, hopeful voice.

I nodded, as if this was understandable.

“What were you and Brock hoping to learn from me? What’s Brock doing out in Woodpark, buying the whole place up? Bought the old house you used to live in, did he?”

“He didn’t have to buy it. It was his, and mine — except I’m dead, of course; Brian had me declared legally dead after seven years.”

“But you’re not dead anymore, are you? You’re coming back to life now, coming back in a big way. Sending hints and allegations about the Howards to your son Jerry, the son who’s never met you. What do you want, Eileen? Is it money? You look pretty well set up here, Fitzwilliam Square, hard to top that. What is it?”

“It’s not the money. I want the truth about my son Stephen to be told,” Eileen said. Her voice was suddenly thick with emotion. “I want the Howards to own up, in public, to what they did, to what they’ve done.”

“What have they done? Why don’t you tell me what the Howards have done? Did John Howard rape you?”

All the lights and lamps in the room were controlled by a panel of switches by the door, and now Eileen stood and walked across the room and dimmed the lights, then stood, dark, by the closer of the two high windows and lit another cigarette. A wash of yellow streetlight flowed through the etiolated off-white glow of the room; I thought of Honeypark, the way it looked in November light, like melting snow smeared with dirt. Eileen looked down into the street, and when she spoke, it was in a voice I hadn’t heard her use before, a high, clear, girlish sound that seemed to come from as far in the past as the events she began to describe.

“We lived in one of the cottages along the road from Rowan House, and my father worked in the gardens there. I think at one time they were tenant cottages, and the Howards still behaved as if that’s what we were, presents at Christmas, patronizing, you know? When I was seventeen, I got into trouble — a local lad, a complete fucking eejit, him and me both. My parents were furious, and there were all sorts of plans about how I should hide the baby and then pretend it was my ma’s and she could raise it, or that I should be sent to a home for unmarried mothers and then the baby would be taken off me and given to a good family. Anyway, one night I had a temperature, a fever, and my parents were very scared, and my father ran down to Rowan House, and Dr. Howard came up and treated me, and discovered I was pregnant. The next day, Mrs. Howard came and made my parents an offer: that if I went into service in Rowan House, I could have the baby safe from prying eyes, in the Howard Maternity Center no less, and I could raise him while living there. I’d have my own quarters, and the Howards’d pay for everything.”

“When was this?”

“Sixty-nine. No, 1970.”

“So you would have been older than Sandra.”

“Oh yes. The idea was that I could look after the children. Sandra was ten, Shane was eight. And little Marian was six.”

“That was generous of the Howards.”

“That’s what my parents thought. I suppose I thought so too. Or maybe I was just relieved I wasn’t gonna be sent to some house full of nuns. I hadn’t banked on a life as a servant though. I thought I could do a secretarial course, move into town, get started, you know? But how was I going to do that with a kid? So I moved in and had the baby, a boy, Stephen.”

“Was the father’s name Casey?”

“No, that was my idea. That there was a father, but he died. I could be a widow at eighteen. I suggested it to Mary Howard, and she liked it. So we had his name put on the birth cert — Noel, I think it was. Noel Casey. And I was Casey to the children from then on. And that was that, Stephen grew up in Rowan House. He went to the local primary, but he was clever, so John Howard paid to have him sent to Castlehill. My own parents took a step back, it was as if Stephen was the Howard’s grandchild, not theirs. And I went along with that.”

“How did the Howard children react?”

“Very well at first. I was like a big sister to Sandra. Shane was all boy, flying about the place. And little Marian was such a cutie, oh she was gorgeous. A real little princess. And they loved to play with Stephen. And then, when he was two or three, it all changed.”

“In what way?”

“In a dramatic way. Mary Howard came to me one morning and said she felt I needed to live on my own, that they had found me a small house I could live in, that I could come in daily.”

“Why did she do that? Was she afraid her husband was getting too fond of you? Did he ever make a pass?”

“Not then, no. He was a perfect gent. No, I just thought Mary was thinking of me, that I might need some independence. And the cottage was the one in Woodpark, there was a bus you could get up to Rowan House. A bit rough there, maybe, but it was nice to have my own front door. Actually, the one I thought was jealous of anyone else having anything to do with her father was Sandra, she would have been twelve, thirteen, in the first teenage flush of it all, and she took against me. Quite subtly, but making it clear I wasn’t really part of the family. Remarks about my hair, my clothes, girls’ school stuff, quite bitchy. Quite cruel really.”

“But Sandra and her father were particularly close?”

“She’d always idolized him. She was Daddy’s little girl. And she and her mother started — it wasn’t exactly fighting, frosting would be a better way to describe it, they avoided each other, and were sharp when they had to be together.”

“It’s not an unusual situation. Adolescent girl fixates on her father, rows with her mother. Happens in a thousand houses, up and down the land.”

“It’s perfectly normal. I’m sure it was.”

She hadn’t turned from the window. I could see the tip of her cigarette glow and fade in the glass, a tiny beacon in the night.

“I’m just telling you what I remember. I said I wanted the Howards to own up to what they did. But I still don’t know the extent of it. That’s why I hoped Jerry might find a way… and maybe now you can help him. Help me. To get to the truth.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. I reckon I could make a better stab at it without these ropes.”

Eileen Taylor turned and looked at me, tied to the chair, and turned back to the glass and continued talking.

“The inquest into Marian Howard’s death didn’t make sense, I remember that. The child had been ill for months beforehand, in isolation at the end of the rear corridor. Scarlet fever, pleurisy, pneumonia. I didn’t see her once. Dr. Howard treated her himself, and a nurse from the clinic came up. That was all I knew; then all of a sudden, she had been in the pool outside and drowned. In November, and with the child ill for so long. I couldn’t believe that.”

“What did you believe?”

“One night, I cooked dinner downstairs for Shane and Sandra, and they went out together to the pictures or something. Marian was still alive at this point, still in her sickroom. I tidied up the meal, and I was preparing to go home. I came upstairs to the rotunda, and Mary Howard was standing there in the darkness, in a dressing gown, her hair unkempt, looking down the long corridor, tears streaming down her face. She was quite a forbidding person, and I normally would have stared at the floor, pretended I hadn’t seen her, passed on by. But she was in such a state, I didn’t even think, I ran to hold her. She wept on my shoulder, and kept saying the same thing, over and over. ‘At least this is the end of it,’ she said. ‘At least this must be the end of it.’ And I thought I heard… I still couldn’t swear to it, and Mary was repeating the words in my ears, but I thought I heard a baby crying. I looked her in the eye, and she pulled herself together, and apologized, and started to fuss around Stephen, who had just come into the hall, and she shooed us both out the door.”

“You couldn’t swear to it. That Marian was pregnant, not ill. That she had a baby, and it was taken off her, or it died, and she what? Killed herself? Was murdered?”

“I couldn’t swear to any of it.”

“What do you
think
?”

Eileen’s cigarette glowed red, and a cloud of grey smoke shrouded her dark head.

“After Marian’s death, they built the new house, the bungalow. Mary wouldn’t live in Rowan House anymore; she wanted a clean break. But John Howard wouldn’t hear of moving. He had his dream of the three towers, and while only one existed during his lifetime, he thought if he moved away now he’d lose his chance of it coming true. So they compromised by sticking one on the back of the other. And when it came to it, Mary wouldn’t move into the bungalow at all; I think she felt it would somehow downgrade her in the scheme of things.

“I trained as a nurse, with Mary Howard’s encouragement — and with the Howards’ money. I think Mary took me on then, as a project. Sandra and Shane were older, and at university, so she asked Stephen and me to move back in. We lived in the bungalow. John Howard spent most of his time in the old house. Sandra spent a lot of time at home, and we became quite close — it seemed to me she was doing her best for both parents by then, as they took fewer pains to conceal how much they loathed each other.”

“And Stephen went to school.”

“That’s right, to Castlehill, and I worked in the Howard Clinic; and then when John Howard got cancer, I nursed him until he died.”

“Sandra told me she was her father’s nurse.”

“Took more than one. Anyway, she had her hands full keeping the peace between him and the mother. It was fireworks every night.”

“And what happened? Did he rape you?”

“You know, all these years I’ve been saying yes, he did, telling myself, telling Brian. Telling the Howards. But the truth is, it wasn’t rape. He was… a very attractive man, even at seventy. Very charismatic, very powerful. And yes, he was ill, but between bouts of the illness, he’d be fit. Fit enough. And I had had nobody for the longest time. I was susceptible. I mean, it was wrong on just about every count you could think of. But we had a — kind of an — affair. Under everyone’s noses. And I thought nothing would happen, he’s got cancer, he couldn’t be fertile — it’s funny the way you get taken in by old wives’ tales you’d scorn anyone else for believing. And something happened.”

“Was Brock Taylor on the scene at this stage? Or Brian Dalton — what
is
his name?”

“He was christened Dalton. Still went by that when I met him, around this time. But his da had taken off when he was a kid, Brian never forgave him. After we got married, he started to call himself Taylor, his ma’s maiden name.”

“Handy to have more than one name.”

“Sure, who are you tellin’? Brian was on the horizon at that stage, yeah. He was… hovering around. He seemed to know who I was. I went to see Stephen play rugby and he was there, I became aware of him that way.”