Pale hardwood floors and bare white walls made the open-plan ground floor of Linda Dawson’s house look even larger and emptier than it already was, like an art gallery waiting for an exhibition. A floor-to-ceiling plate glass window ran the length of the curved back wall. Through it you could see half the county, from the mountains to the sea, all over Bayview as far as Seafield Harbour, and beyond it to Dublin Bay itself.
Linda’s hair was wet, and her face glowed; she wore a short black silk robe and her feet were bare. She stood at a granite counter beside a stainless steel double-doored fridge. A crystal jug of mint leaves and a bottle of Stolichnaya rested by her elbow; a bunch of keys hung on a hook above the counter, with a small sign that read: “Car keys, you idiot.” Linda threw ice cubes and mint leaves and grapefruit juice into a tall glass.
“I’m having a drink. Grapefruit screwdriver. Are you interested? Or is it too early for you?”
“I’m interested. But it’s half-eleven in the morning. The only people it isn’t too early for are sitting in doorways with cuts on their heads.”
“Is that a yes or a no? There’s a pot of coffee freshly brewed.”
“I’ll have the coffee, please. Milk, no sugar.”
Linda poured a large slug of Stolichnaya into her glass and brought me a mug of coffee. She sat on a cream-colored sofa that ran along the back glass wall, tucked her bare legs beneath her and gave me a smile. Her eyes looked out of focus somehow, as if this was not the first drink she’d had, or she’d scarfed some tranquilizers, or both. Her black robe probably had a lot of uses, but keeping her soft brown body covered was not one of them.
“So tell me, Ed: what do you want from me?”
“No, tell me what you want from me. Are you sure you want me to find your husband?” I said, trying to keep my eyes fixed on hers and failing.
“I told you last night. Of course that’s what I want.” She smiled again, aware of the effect she was having. “It’s not all I want though.”
“It’s not all I want either. But as I’m going to be working for you, I’m afraid it’ll have to do. Because if I’m sleeping with a man’s wife, I tend to lose interest in her husband. So maybe you could put some clothes on. Then we can talk about Peter.”
Linda’s smile vanished in an instant. She flushed, and seemed to flinch, as if she’d been slapped. She stood up and left the room without a word. I wished for a moment that I’d had that drink.
Out in the bay, the first few sails dotted the sea. They gleamed pearl white in the powder blue haze. Seagulls swooped down the cliffsides and skimmed across the rippling tides. It was going to be another glorious day.
Linda returned wearing a black trouser suit. She sat down on the sofa again and said, “I hope this is sober enough for you. All my dun-colored sacks are at the cleaners.”
She took a long hit of her drink. She looked frightened again, but there was defiance in the set of her red mouth, and a flash of anger in her eyes. Before I had a chance to, she brought up the subject of money.
“Since you are going to be working for me, I suppose we better sort the practical side out first. What is it they used to say in the movies, twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses?”
“That must be the silent movies you’re thinking of. Last job I worked, I got a thousand dollars a day.”
“A thousand dollars? I thought you said you were the monkey. You helped the organ-grinder out.”
“That’s how it started.”
“And then what happened?”
“The organ-grinder died, and the monkey took his place.”
Linda’s hand went to her throat, and her eyes widened.
“You didn’t tell me that. How did your boss die?”
“He was murdered.”
“Did you get the guy who killed him?”
“His wife killed him.”
“His wife?”
“It’s nearly always the wife. And yes, I got her.”
Linda finished her drink and lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking. She made them stop.
“Weren’t we talking about money?” I said.
“How does seven-fifty a day sound?”
“It sounds fine. All right then. Did you get those records?”
“They’re all gone,” Linda said. “I checked his home office this morning. Bills, correspondence, personal photographs, they’ve all been taken.”
“I thought you said they were here.”
“I thought they were.” She gestured toward a pile of box files on the kitchen table. “Everything is on file with Peter, right back to his birth cert. But these boxes have been cleaned out.”
I looked at the four box files. Each one was clearly labeled: Bank—Statements/Cheque books; Eircom/Vodafone; Property; Shares. And each one was empty.
“There’s no sign of a break-in, so…”
She waved a hand in the air and shrugged, as if to suggest that it was a mystery, or that Peter must have taken them himself, or that she was already so out of it that she didn’t care what had happened to them. Then she nodded her head violently, as if ordering herself to get a grip, and sat forward, staring at the floor, her hands clenched in small fists between her knees. It was exhausting watching her change personality and mood every thirty seconds, and impossible to know if it was guilt, or fear, or just the blithe shape-shifting of a drunk.
“Can I see his office?”
“It’s upstairs, last door along.”
The white hall curved in a spiral up the stairs. I walked to the end of the landing and opened the door to Peter Dawson’s office. The wooden blinds were closed, so I flicked the lights on. An entire wall’s worth of shelving was crammed with box files encompassing every aspect of Peter’s life. There were files dealing with school, university and work; files labeled Swimming, Tennis, and Sailing; there were even files devoted to stamp collecting, football cards and the Boy Scouts, and two files stamped “Scrapbooks—Pop” and “Scrapbooks—Sport.” Linda was right: Peter had his entire life filed away up here. I worked my way through each box, checking the contents off against the labels. The only other files that were empty, apart from a couple of unmarked boxes, were two labeled “Family 1” and “Family 2,” and another marked “Golf Club.”
The desk was a pale oak table with no drawers; an Apple Mac G4 computer sat on it, its semispherical white base and floating monitor looking stridently last-word-in-design. While it was booting up, I looked around the rest of the office. Two-year planners hung on one of the side walls, marked with things like “Argus Vale—64 Apts., Town Houses—Sept. 2006” and “Glencourt Comm’ty C’tre—18 months.” The shelf full of books housed mostly sports and business biographies and a few sailing manuals.
There was a photograph on Peter’s desk, of two men and a racehorse. One of the men was plump and tanned and looked pleased with himself; he wore a waxed jacket and a tweed cap. I couldn’t remember his name, but he hit it big in property in the sixties; the papers used to call him “Ireland’s First Millionaire.” The other man was thinner than when I saw him last, and his small, cold eyes peered suspiciously from beneath the brim of a black fedora: John Dawson, Peter’s father.
I sat at the desk and gave the Mac a quick once-over, but the files seemed almost entirely work-related: spread sheets and profit-and-loss accounts and so on. If the secret to Peter’s disappearance lay buried in any of that, I’d have to hire a specialist to wade through it all. I opened Word and worked through the Recent Documents option. Most of them—saved under titles like “hhhh” or “lllll”—had evidently been trashed, provoking the message: “The alias ‘hhhh’ could not be opened, because the original item could not be found.” The most recent document had been saved as “twimc,” but it opened to a blank page. I wondered whether Peter had saved the title without getting any further, or if its contents had been deleted by another hand. I located it within the documents folder and checked. Date Created: Fri. July 16, 1:27 p.m.; Date Modified: Tues., July 20, 12:05 p.m. Just afte
r midday yesterday, someone had wiped whatever had been written there, but hadn’t put the document in the computer’s virtual wastebasket.
I got down on the floor to see if there was any interesting litter, but the whole place looked spick-and-span, as if it had been cleaned and dusted that day, and the stainless steel wastebasket was empty, but for the fossil stain of an apple core on its base.
I had a quick look in the other upstairs rooms: a large white-tiled bathroom, two bedrooms furnished in a spare, impersonal style that suggested they were for guests, a third bedroom full of art books, a silver Apple laptop, oil paints, sketch pads and canvases stretched on wooden frames, and the master bedroom, which had the same stunning view as the living room, with the addition of a massive abstract canvas on the opposite wall. The painting was two great glowing swabs of red and orange, it had a dark, passionate intensity that was violent and melancholy in almost equal measure, and if I hadn’t known that Linda had probably painted it in an afternoon, I’d’ve thought it was a genuine Rothko. At school Linda used to make a tidy sum knocking off copies of the old masters and selling them to the kind of people who felt a Renoir or a Monet suspended above the mantelpiece would set their suburban lounge off a treat.
Downstairs, Linda was eating a banana and drinking a cup of coffee—time-out from her drinking. She looked at me, her gaze a little clearer now.
“Did you find anything? Was there a break-in?”
“I don’t know. There are three more empty files here.”
I put them on the table. “The two marked ‘Family’…”
“Peter kept all his photographs in those. His mum and dad’s wedding, his childhood snaps…are they gone too?”
“What about ‘Golf Club’?”
“Don’t know what that’s about. Peter wasn’t in any golf club. He didn’t play golf.”
“Sure he hadn’t taken it up?”
“Certain. We still…we hadn’t become complete strangers. Not yet, anyhow.”
Without knowing I was going to ask it, I said, “Did you and Peter make a decision not to have children?”
Linda flushed and stared into her coffee for a moment. Then she shook her head and, in a strained, brittle voice, said, “No, they just didn’t come. My fault. Left it too late, maybe. And now I’m…sterile? No, barren. A Barren Woman. And…I guess the air seemed to go out of the marriage after we found that out. I offered Peter a divorce, but he said no. He probably should have said yes, ’cause we’ve been…winding down ever since.”
“And you were meeting on the Friday to talk about a separation. Did Peter know that was on the agenda?”
“I’m sure he did. He must have. Why is this relevant?”
“Because it gives Peter a reason to take off. Avoid the conversation, and by the time he got back—”
“She’ll have worked it all out by herself. That what you’d do?”
“That’s what most men do. Lie low until the storm passes.”
“And are you most men?”
“I tend to lead with my chin. But this isn’t about me.”
“Four days. No. He’d have called. Left some message. He wouldn’t leave me to worry like this. He’s a very considerate man. That awful mother of his had it bullied into him.”
“What about Peter’s parents? Have you spoken to them?”
“They think I’m overreacting. Barbara said maybe he just needed a break from me. ‘You know the way men can be.’ Then she said if I was really worried, she’d get John to ring the Garda Commissioner. Whatever good that would do.”
“Does Dawson have that kind of pull?”
“That’s the whole point, he used to. Story goes, that’s how he did his first big land deal, the houses up on Rathdown Road, back in ’77. Friends in high places, the right palms greased. Those days are gone. Barbara thinks they still have the clout, but I doubt it. Better if they know as little as possible.”
“They’ll get to know soon enough if I go round asking a lot of questions.”
“Maybe. You’d be surprised just how isolated they’ve become.”
“Do you ever use Peter’s computer?”
“I have a laptop of my own.”
“Because someone was on it yesterday, at midday. A document titled t-w-i-m-c was adjusted—wiped clean, if there was anything in it to wipe.”
“Midday. I was at your mum’s funeral.”
As if I was accusing her. Maybe I was.
“Anyone else have a key?”
“Agnes. The cleaner. But she came today.”
“Where would she have put the trash?”
Linda smiled. “‘The trash.’ You mightn’t’ve lost your accent, but there are still a few giveaways. Out here.”
She led me out the front door and around the side of the house. A small wooden shed stood behind a young beech tree. Inside the shed, Linda pointed to a gray wheelie bin.
“What are you looking for?”
“Anything that might have been in Peter’s office. The wastepaper basket, on the floor.”
A bunch of newspapers lay at the top of the wheelie bin. I took out an Irish Times, spread it on the floor of the shed and tipped the first bag of garbage on top.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Linda said, wrinkling her nose, and went back in the house.
I worked my way through two small bags full of crushed orange juice and milk cartons, plastic tonic water bottles, apple cores and lemon peel. And an awful lot of cigarette butts, ash and vacuum cleaner dust.
The third bag contained a Jo Malone grapefruit cologne atomizer, a Dr. Hauschka quince moisturizer bottle and an old toothbrush—so at least we’d made it upstairs. I sorted through used cotton buds and peppermint tea bags and eventually salvaged three receipts and two crushed index cards. I had a quick look in the carport, where a red and black Audi convertible sat in factory-fresh splendor, entertained a few rancorous thoughts about people with too much money and knocked on the front door.
After washing my hands and face, I showed Linda my haul. Two of the receipts she identified as hers; they were for buying art materials from a shop on Harcourt Street.
“It’s good you’re still painting, anyway,” I said.
“I’m a Sunday painter, Ed. I teach art at the Sacred Heart in Castlehill now.”
“Really? That’s—”
“Yes, isn’t it? Disappointed alcoholic lady teacher. A suburban cliché, is what it is. This is from Ebrill’s, that’s a stationery shop in Seafield. It’s itemized too: envelopes, two reams of white A4, address labels. Thrilling stuff.”
Linda went to the fridge, collected the grapefruit juice and the vodka, and brought them back to the table. She mixed herself a very strong second drink and downed half of it.
“Slainte,” she said, and grinned with bad-girl bravado.
I laid the index cards out on the table and flattened them. They were both lists. One had four items:
Dagg
T
L
JW
The other had fourteen names.
“You recognize any of these?” I asked Linda.
“There’s a Rory Dagg who’s a project manager with Dawson Construction. No one else rings a bell.”
“You said Peter was at the Seafield Town Hall renovation last Friday. Was Rory Dagg on-site?”
“Could have been.”
“Because then, this L could be you. This could be a list of people Peter was to meet that afternoon.”
I looked at the other list: Brian Joyce, Leo McSweeney, James Kearney, Angela Mackey, Mary Rafferty, Seosamh MacLiam, Conor Gogan, Noel Lavelle, Eamonn Macdonald, Christine Kelly, Brendan Harvey, Tom Farrelly, Eithne Wall, John O’Driscoll.
The T could be Tom Farrelly. The L might be Leo McSweeney. But who were they? Had they anything to do with a golf club to which Peter Dawson didn’t belong?
Linda shook her head. Her eyes were gone again, lost in a mist of booze. I was tempted to join her. It looked safe in there; miserable, but safe.
/> “Anything else? His car?”
“It’s in the garage. There’s his boat.”
“He sails? With a club?”
“The Royal Seafield.”
“Did you check it?”
“He doesn’t go out much anymore. He used to crew for other people. I think the fact that his father bought him the boat put him off using it. But it’s moored in front of the clubhouse all summer. The Dawsons still count at the yacht club.”
“I’d better have a look at it. What’s she called?”
Linda pretended she hadn’t heard me. “What?” she said.
“What’s the boat called?” I said.
She shook her head, and smiled down at her drink.
“It’s really stupid. He named it after this awful Beach Boys song that I…that we both used to like. The Lady Linda.”
She looked up at me with a start, as if she had just woken up in the middle of herself, and was dismayed by what she had found. Her smile dissolved, and her face reddened, and she turned away and began to cry, great wrenching sobs this time. I didn’t know whether she remembered how much she had loved him, and missed the feeling, or whether she was ashamed that she didn’t feel more, and I didn’t know how much the booze had ramped up all those feelings, but it was a long time since I had seen anyone look so frightened, and lonely, and lost.
Four
THE ROYAL SEAFIELD YACHT CLUB IS ONE STORY ABOVE A basement. Since the basement is right on the water, and the club is situated hard at the base of Seafield Harbour, and it was built in the high style of the 1840s so that the fashionable rich might have a fitting location to amuse themselves, it’s as impressive a one-story exterior as you might see.
It’s impressive inside too, with high ceilings and fancy coving and ceiling roses and chandeliers and classical columns and what have you.
The staff are not unaware of this, which is presumably why I had been waiting in the foyer for twenty-five minutes studying a brochure extolling the club’s virtues and watching a procession of men in navy blazers with gold buttons and women in navy sweaters with gold stitching pad about in deck shoes from, as far as I could surmise, the Dining Room to the Formal Bar to the Club Room to the Informal Bar to the Commodore’s Room to the Billiard Room to the Forecourt. The club secretary, whose name, the brochure told me, was Cyril Lampkin, had been considering my request to see Peter Dawson’s boat for all this time. Linda had phoned ahead to arrange things, and I had Peter’s club identity card and the spare keys to the storage booths on the boat, but it seemed Cyril Lampkin was still weighing the evidence.
The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Page 4