The Color of Blood (7 page)

“What are the usual twats like?” I said, as we went back into the living room.

“Big ex-cops in anoraks with beer bellies. They’re supposed to be inconspicuous, I mean, hello? In a pub full of scrawny students, and a fat culchie with a big red face trying to blend in? I don’t
think
so.”

Emily sat down beside her cousin, slapped her hand on his knee and ran it up his thigh. Jonathan rolled his eyes back in his head as she did this; when she reached his crotch, she squeezed, and he shot his tongue out. I went to get a brandy for myself. The house was cold, and what the kids were doing was annoying, and what I feared lay behind it was disturbing me. There was Jameson, so I had a glass of that instead. It was suddenly dark, dark the way it gets at three thirty on a dull misty Halloween, darker than night it seemed.

Emily was poking Jonathan in the side now, and he was juddering and grimacing and giggling. I sat down opposite them and waited for them to stop, and after a while, they did.

“Whose idea was the porn?” I said.

There was silence for a while, then Jonathan pulled his hand from his mouth.

“David Brady’s,” he said.

Emily hit him in the face so quickly that it was difficult at first to take in what had happened. She was wearing several rings, and they raked across Jonathan’s cheek and temple, drawing needle sprays of blood. He yelped in pain and cowered away from her, but quickly tried to retrieve himself, shaking his head and contorting his grimace of pain back into the mask of detached amusement he seemed to wear for protection. Just as quickly he was on top of Emily, his hands around her neck, and she was writhing beneath him on the sofa, her motorcycle boots kicking in the air. I grabbed his head by the hair and tugged him off her, then hauled Emily to her feet and clasped her flailing wrists in one hand. Jonathan recoiled on the couch, hands up, head bowed, cowering, a dog who’d been beaten too often; Emily was kicking at my shins, dragging me across the room.

“That’s enough now, enough, do you hear me?” I shouted. Emily’s face was flushed with rage, her lips compressed, her breath coming hard through her nose. She bent down and sank her teeth into my hand, and I had to use all my will not to slap her face. I put the flat of my hand against her chest and pushed her hard across the room. She fell back onto the couch, winded. There was blood on my torn hand; it tasted of metal, and of fear.

Emily was staring at me in astonishment.

“No one pushes me around,” she said. “No one treats me like that.”

“No one bites my hand unless I ask them to,” I said. “But here’s the thing: if you take a walk on the wild side, be prepared for the unexpected.”

“Do you —
actually
— know who I am?” Emily Howard said, with all the contemptuous hauteur a private education and an exclusive south Dublin address afford.

“I’m scared to find out, sweetheart,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while after that. Jonathan drained his brandy, and Emily clicked the rings on her right hand against the rings on her left. Somewhere across the bay, fireworks crackled and shot their plumes of light through the murk; like a relief diagram of nerves and synapses in the body, they seemed to give the falling night scale and dimension. I felt like there was a gulf between me and these damaged, spoiled, feral kids; I feared that if I asked the wrong question or said a word out of place, it might tip them over an edge they were clearly teetering on. I could call Denis Finnegan and leave them in his charge. That would possibly have been the smart play. But I knew I wasn’t going to let any of this go until I got to the bottom of it.

“All right,” I said. “For starters, neither of you was forced to do anything against your will, is that so?”

“You mean, fuck?” Emily said with a big leering grin.

I nodded.

“No, we weren’t forced. Were we, Jonny?”

Jonathan shook his head, his smile back in place, his eyes in his lap.

“We did it all for love, Mr. Loy,” Emily said, and waggled her tongue at me.

“Why was David Brady shooting pornography? How did that come about?”

“How do you know it was David?” Emily said.

“Jonathan told us,” I said.

“Jonny is mistaken, aren’t ya, babe?” Emily said.

Jonathan pushed a kind of sputtered laugh through his nose.

“I make many mistakes,” he said in an arch, ironic tone, as if he was quoting a line from a movie.

“Also, there’s a shot of his wrist in the movie Jonny made with, what’s this they were called, Wendy and Petra?”

“Kylie and Stacey more like,” Emily said in a bad Dublin accent. “Hayley and Kelsey.”

“And on his wrist was his 2JS2 bracelet — no one but David Brady has one. And he had the films and the photos on his home computer. So we all know it was him. What we don’t know is, why.”

“Are they still there, on his computer, for the Guards to find?” Emily asked, her tone suddenly urgent.

“You first. Why were you making porn films with David Brady? And why were you doing it in Honeypark?”

Emily looked to Jonathan, down the corridor that led to her bedroom, and then toward the door, but there was no way out. She sighed laboriously and began to speak.

“Back when DB and I were going out, during the summer, we went through this phase of doing E and kind of like, getting off with other people in front of each other. It was like, we’d give each other marks out of ten, don’t think much of yours, total minger/total babe type of thing. And then sometimes we’d bring someone back to his. It was a bit of crack, a bit pervy, a bit fucked-up. And we’d be in control of it all, so the next morning, or even the middle of the night, if we decided we’d had enough, we’d just throw them out. Anyway, we were at this Saturday-night bash in Seafield Rugby Club and the usual parade of sluts were flaunting themselves at DB, honestly, they’d feel him up right in front of me. So we fix on this cute little one with porn hair, you know, dead flat, snow blond? And we get it together back in David’s. Didn’t think much more about it really.”

“Until when?”

“Until a couple of weeks ago, I get a call from David — we broke up last month, when I was going to Trinity, totally my call, just that thing of girls dragging their boyfriends from school to college is a bit tragic, isn’t it? Anyway, got this call, and he’s in a major fucking
zone.
Seems Miss Porn Hair took some shots on her mobile, seems her old man found them, seems she was only thirteen when she got with us. So he’s up in arms — but he’s also a bit of a dodgy geezer, the father.”

“Did you get a name?”

“I assume David did. But he didn’t tell me. What he said was, this guy and his daughter would press charges against both of us, which would be, like, a whole child abuse pedo trip, unless we did what he wanted. And what he wanted was, first off we’d do this porn thing, then we’d blackmail some money out of my dad.”

“And where did Jonathan come into it?”

Emily looked at Jonathan, her eyebrows raised.

“Ve haf alvays been, how you say, kissing cousins,” Jonathan announced in a stage German accent, then curled up with his head in Emily’s lap.

“And did David Brady know that?”

“Sure,” Emily said. “It was his idea that Jonny be involved. Easier for me to handle.”

“Keep it in ze family, ja? Unt also, ze question I am alvays asking myself is, fot vould Jesus do?”

“And the answer you got was, Jesus would make some porn?” I said.

“Jesus vould do fot he could to help his cousin,” Jonathan said, and they both howled with hysterical laughter. I felt like I was minding a couple of tots who’d broken into the booze cabinet and scarfed some Baileys: it was bound to end in tears; I just had to wait it out.

“It’s not a major deal,
Daad,
” Emily said, increasingly irritated that I couldn’t see the funny side. “I mean, everyone’s done homemade these days. I used to do it all the time with DB, we’d watch it, then tape over it. The whole scenario this time was, it would never go public.”

“But that would be the threat.”

“To Dad? Sure. But like, fifty grand, so what? That’s like fifty cents to anyone else. All that old Howard lolly. Why not give someone else a suck?”

“And the idea that he might be upset, or anxious, that he might think you had been kidnapped and raped — the distress you might cause him: none of that was a worry to you?”

Emily’s expression shifted in an instant from the bad-girl bravado of her mother to the blank implacability of her father; she stared at me as if I understood nothing, and when she spoke, it was with deliberate, glacial force.

“Of course it was a worry. I’d never want to hurt my father. Or at least, not like this. But what else could I do? You think he’d’ve been happier if I was up on some child rape charge? The crucial thing was, it was never going to go public.”

“Except it may well have. The film Jonny made?”

“Mit Vendy unt Petra, ja?” Jonathan said, still skittish, almost hysterical.

“I have a few hundred copies of it, ready to be sold in pubs and door-to-door,” I said. “So whoever you were dealing with wasn’t to be trusted.”

“Jonny’s in shades, no one will recognize him.”

“Anyone who spots his tattoo will. I think the blackmailer could make a case to Jonny’s parents that Jonny’s identity could easily be uncovered by anyone who’s seen that tattoo.”

Jonathan sat up abruptly, his antic mask replaced by a cold stare he directed first at Emily; when he turned it on me, it was accompanied by the curling of his lips into a sneer.

“Is that what you think, Mr. Loy? Your ‘professional’ opinion, is it?” he said, his reedy voice shaking but stoked with the insolence of entitlement. Emily put a calming hand on his arm, but he shook it off.

“If my mother…” he hissed at Emily, then stopped and turned away from us both like a sulky child. Emily looked cautiously at his back, then turned to me.

“So who were we dealing with?” she said. “Who is this blackmailer?”

More than likely Brock Taylor, if Tommy Owens wasn’t lying. Always a big if.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone who still has both films in his possession. Someone who wants to put the bite on your father, and is likely to come back for more. Someone we can’t rule out for David Brady’s murder.”

“Are the Guards going to find the films on DB’s computer?”

“Not now,” I said.

“So we’re not connected to that?”

“As long as they don’t send the hard drive for technical examination. But if they don’t come up with a suspect fast, that’s what they’ll probably do. They’ve found a person who’s been beaten and stabbed to death. They’ll pull out all the stops to find his killer.”

Emily’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. She looked up to the ceiling, as if gravity might stem their flow, but they overspilled.

“Beaten and stabbed to death,” she said. “Oh Jesus, this is such a fucking nightmare. Poor David. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

She cried for a long time, her legs drawn to her chest, howls that dwindled into sobs. Eventually Jonathan climbed down off his perch and put his long skinny arms around her and they clung together on the sofa. It was pitiful to watch, but it was also a relief: one of the first signs either had exhibited of a normal human emotion.

There didn’t seem a lot more I could do here. Denis Finnegan’s card had his home number added in ink; I went out into the hall and rang it, and a Filipina or Latin American voice answered.

“Sandra Howard, please,” I said.

“Who is calling?”

“My name is Ed Loy. I’m calling about Ms. Howard’s son and her niece.”

I heard muffled voices in the background, then a crisp, tense Irish voice came on.

“Mr. Loy, this is Sandra Howard.”

“I’m a private detective, Ms. Howard. Your brother hired me to find Emily, and I have; she’s here in Bayview, in your sister-in-law’s house. Your son is with her, but Shane’s not here. I don’t think they should be alone now.”

“Don’t let them leave. I’ll be there in minutes.”

Fifteen of them, in fact; on the sofa, the kids sat in the dark, huddled together, asking for nothing. I paced the hall, smoking. The knock came on the door and a tall, green-eyed woman with a black cowl hood over her dark red hair stood in the porch, silhouetted in the shimmer of the approach light; out in the bay behind her, fireworks flashed and crackled, sending plumes of red high in the sky and making her look momentarily like a creature from myth, a rebel angel with red wings or a saint captured in stained glass.

“Mr. Loy? Sandra Howard,” she said.

“They’re inside,” I said.

She walked down the hall and smiled sadly at the sight of Emily and Jonathan curled up together on the couch. Thanking me, she put her cold hand on mine and drew me out to the front of the house, where we stood in the rain and mist, like the last mourners in a deserted churchyard. A volley of bangers crashed out like gunshots; after a hissing silence, the voices of dogs were raised in response; their barking and howling echoed through the hills.

“Poor dogs,” Sandra Howard said. “Halloween is always a bad night for them.”

I nodded.

“Denis told me you were searching for Emily. I hadn’t realized Shane was so worried about her.”

I nodded again, and told her a little about where I had found her son and her niece, and what they had been doing, and the part David Brady had played in it, and how he had ended up. She took it all in without seeming surprised or ruffled by anything except Brady’s murder. While I waited for her to respond, I looked at her milky skin, the laughter lines around her green eyes and her full red lips, the unlined brow and the fine high bones and I thought, even in distress, this is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I probably fell a little in love with her then and there. Maybe if I hadn’t, we’d’ve gotten to the truth a lot quicker. Then again, maybe if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten to it at all.

Sandra Howard had been looking out in the dark toward the sea, toward where she knew the sea to be; you could hear the roar in the rising wind. She turned back to me and took my hand again and began to speak.

“I’ve been trying to find Shane all day, ever since Denis told me he’d hired you. He’s not been answering his phone.”