In a dream, I saw a trim brunette in a black pencil skirt and a black silk blouse with hair piled on top of her head and hanging longer at the back and good legs in black stockings wandering about a room with high windows and white walls and white furniture and a white carpet, everything white, against which she seemed to sway like a dark shadow. She was busy everywhere, doing something with the shutters, lighting a cigarette, rearranging white marble ornaments on the white marble fireplace and dabbing at the mirror that hung above it. As the growing pain in my stomach and in my head told me this was no dream, the brunette’s movements started to appear agitated and fussy; after completing each action, she would sit on a long white couch opposite me and take a drag on her cigarette; sometimes she would have to relight it first. My head was slumped on my left shoulder, and I could see out of both eyes, but it felt like there was a heavy weight on the side of my head. I became convinced it was a clock, some old antique clock with heavy workings, made of lead, perhaps – did they make clocks out of lead? I could hear its ticking in my head like the driving rhythm of an old diesel train, feel it thumping in my chest, and the muck sweat on my brow and the cold sparky taste of metal, then acid, on my tongue. I raised my head and the pain in my stomach slipped down into my balls, and I forgot about getting sick because I thought I was going to die. I could see a white clock on the centre of the mantelpiece. For some reason, that reassured me. I could see the brunette’s ankles, but I couldn’t seem to lift my eyes yet to look at the rest of her. A wave of nausea shot up my stomach on an acid tide; I opened my mouth, but it turned in my throat and hurled itself back toward my balls. A white plastic bowl, the kind you’d pack salad leaves for a picnic in, was placed in my lap, and a white hunk of something the size of a human brain was pushed carefully between my legs; it was a pack of ice wrapped up in soft plastic. After a few minutes, the pain receded to the point where I felt it would be possible to lift my head.
“Keep something down?” the brunette asked. She had a soft, mild Dublin accent. She was holding up a bottle of pills.
“What?” I said, or tried to; my voice sounded like the crackle of burning wood.
“Ponstan,” she said. “They’ll help.”
“Morphine,” I barked.
“Trust me, I’m a nurse,” she said. “Morphine would be if he’d cut your balls off.”
I was tied to a straight-backed chair. I couldn’t see whether it was white or not. I didn’t care much, but I seemed to care enough to wonder. The brunette stood in front of me with the pills and a glass of water; I took a drink to lubricate my mouth and throat, then she put the pills on my tongue, one by one, and I washed them down with the rest of the water. My stomach did some more rumbling and heaving, and sweat poured down my face. The right side of my head felt like a boiled flesh poultice attached to my brain with barbed wire and rusty nails. Tears of pain rolled down my cheeks. The brunette went out of the room and came back in with a wet facecloth; she sat on a couch beside my chair and mopped my brow, and wiped my cheeks and rested the cloth carefully along the right side of my face.
She must have been in her midfifties, but she didn’t look it; I’d’ve put her at forty-five; she was probably aiming for forty, and not falling too far short. Her face had that lush, pearly glow expensive women all seem to have these days; her brown eyes and naturally dark colouring meant she needed little in the way of makeup; her blouse had shoulder pads, and with her hair piled up the way it was, she looked a bit like a woman from the 1940s; with that thought, the whole situation seem to dissolve once more into a dream.
She dropped the facecloth in the plastic bowl and took them away someplace, then sat back down opposite me and lit a fresh cigarette.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Eileen… is it Dalton? Or Taylor?”
She looked pleased and anxious at the same time, as if she had finally got her wish and instinctively realized living it wasn’t going to be as simple as wishing for it had been.
“Taylor,” she said. “Eileen Taylor.”
“But Brock’s name was Dalton when you married. Did he change it or fake it?”
“Let’s leave Brian out of it.”
“I wish we could, Eileen. But we wouldn’t be having this little chat without him and his pal Sean Moon. Do you think I might have a drink?”
She raised her eyebrows and smiled to herself, as if in praise of folly.
“Not recommended, Ed Loy. Not in the state you’re in.”
“Did Father Massey give you my name?”
“He told me you were snooping around.”
“So you’ve kept in touch, you two. He knew all about your disappearing act, did he?”
“Not before, no. I wrote him a letter a little while after. Asking for his forgiveness.”
“He must have given it.”
“He was very good to me. Not many priests of that time would have been so sympathetic.”
“Explain something. You left a baby in the porch of the church. Father Massey takes it to the Howards, who arrange for it to be adopted. All very hush-hush. How did that work? I mean, it was 1986, in a city. He was a priest, he must have had… legal obligations.”
Eileen Dalton stood up and walked to the window, a fussy dark shadow once again. From there she looked around at me pityingly, reprovingly, as if I were some impossibly naive idiot she was a fool to be wasting her time on. I had a feeling she’d used that look before.
“I thought you’d know why.”
“I think I do. Was it because you somehow told Father Massey—”
“I left a note with the baby. A sealed envelope, addressed to him.”
“Telling him who the boy’s father was.”
“That’s right. So you do know.”
“I think I know. But I’d like to hear you say it.”
She looked out through the dark glass. I could see her reflection. She was shaking. When she turned, she held on to the shutter handle for balance.
“All right,” she said, throbbing with passion, as if every moment of regret for the long years of missing her son was laced through the words. “All right then. Jerry Dalton’s father was Dr. John Howard.”
Chapter Twenty-five
THERE’S A MOMENT IN EVERY CASE when you catch a glimmer of the end: not that you know all the answers, but you begin to see the pattern. It often comes when you’re at your lowest ebb, and you’ve nothing but darkness in sight. Eileen Dalton telling me John Howard was Jerry Dalton’s father felt like such a moment. The energy in the room seemed to split apart and flow together again in a new configuration. I was still tied to a chair in Brock Taylor’s Fitzwilliam Square house, but I felt I had been given, if not quite a winning hand, at least something to play for. If Eileen Dalton had been feeding her son clues about the Howard family, chances were she wanted something to happen, and that something had to involve her getting out of Brock Taylor’s, and she might need some help to get where she was going.
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. Afterwards, 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 Centre 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 avo
ided 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.”
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