“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.”
“He’s not at the surgery either. His receptionist hasn’t seen him since this morning.”
“What did he hire you to do, exactly?”
“To find his daughter. And to bring her home if she wanted to come.”
“What about the people behind this? Did he not want you to put a stop to them?”
“Since the main man I understand to be behind this has photographs of Emily in a threesome with his thirteen-year-old daughter, I don’t know that we have a great deal of leverage. I mean, we could try and nail him for blackmail, but the reason Emily took it on herself to go along with the porn film in the first place was to avoid underage-sex charges, and all the attendant disgrace for her and the family. That hasn’t changed.”
“But those films are still out there. That means Shane is still susceptible to blackmail.”
“As are you,” I said. “Jonathan’s in both films.”
Again, there was no reaction that I would have expected from a parent: no expression of disgust, no shudder, no sense of disappointment. Just a shrewd, appraising glimmer in those flashing green eyes and a toss of her dark red head as she came to a decision.
“I’d like to retain you, Mr. Loy-as long, that is, as you’re still available. I want you to sort this out. If that means getting hold of the tapes, or films, or negatives, or whatever they are, fine. If you have to pay for them, I’ll make a deal. But we can’t have that waiting in the long grass for us. Not for the children, and not for the Howard family.”
She looked at me full on then, and smiled, as if to apologize for the rhetoric, and I smiled back, mostly because I found it impossible not to, impossible to refuse what she had asked. I nodded, and she went inside to the children, and I stayed outside and smoked a cigarette. They were normal kids, I told myself; troubled, sure, a little oversexed, maybe, but normal. I said it to myself again: normal kids, a normal family. Above the noise in my head of first cousins having three-way sex at all, not to say on camera, and their aunt and mother barely registering either fact, it was hard to make out exactly what I was saying.
Six
I CHECKED MY MOBILE PHONE, WHICH I WAS IN THE HABIT of leaving turned off. There was a message from Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly of Seafield Guards, saying he looked forward to talking to me about my most recent client, Shane Howard, and his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That hadn’t taken long. So Dave had the case. I still didn’t feel right about removing evidence from the Brady crime scene. Last time we had spoken, Dave had accused me, only half in jest, of becoming part of the luxury service industry: someone who carried rich people’s bags for them and eased their burdens. He had finished his pint, so he used it as an exit line, which was just as well, as I couldn’t think of much to say in reply. “Rich people have their troubles too” sounded kind of lame, even if it was true. “Rich people pay my bills” was closer to the truth, though I didn’t like admitting it. Had I compromised a murder investigation just so I could keep Emily Howard’s life tidier than she took any care to make it? Maybe. But I took that risk because I knew I would get to the truth faster than the Guards. If I didn’t believe that, then I would be as bad as Dave had painted me. And if it involved serious criminals from Honeypark, even Brock Taylor himself, I could make those connections before anyone else. And Dave wasn’t above taking my help when he needed it.
Meanwhile, here I was, smoking a cigarette on top of Bayview Hill, waiting for a woman who drove a black ’06 Reg Mercedes-Benz S 500 to tell me what to do. She came out of the house with Emily and Jonathan, whom shock continued to age in reverse: they looked like a pair of frightened children, bloodless and numb. Jonathan had retreated behind iPod headphones; Emily carried an overnight bag and a worn stuffed dog. Sandra Howard opened the car for them, then came across and stood beside me. Her hood was down, and her red hair glistened in the thick damp air. She was wearing black, some combination of cape and cowl that came to her ankles. She took the cigarette from my hand and drew hard on it.
“Jesus, this is such a mess,” she said. “Mr. Loy-”
“Ed,” I said.
“Ed. I’m bringing Jonny and Em up to Rowan House, that’s the family home. Would you come with us?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll follow you there.”
She held the cigarette up as if to give it back; I gestured to her to keep it; she caught my hand again and held it in her cool grip. Her red nail polish was chipped, and her nails were bitten to the quick; she wore a red-and-green-braided band on her wrist; she smelled of smoky salt earth and the sweet tang of spice. She looked straight at me, and I looked straight back; I thought I could feel her green eyes searching mine, like she could see inside my thoughts, see my doubt, my suspicion, see how little I really trusted her, or anyone else. But I wanted her to believe I could trust. Looking in her eyes, I wanted to trust her.
Lord, I believe, oh, help my unbelief.
She brought her hand up to my face. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but I wanted her to keep doing it. Her crooked finger rested cool in the hollow of my cheek.
“Something is happening to us, Ed. Emily vanishing, David Brady-the Howard family is under threat. You’ll help us, won’t you?”
I nodded. I felt at that moment as if I were under her spell, as if I would have done whatever she asked me. A firework raked across the sky like a searchlight in the dark and caught us for a split second, frozen in its glow. I sometimes thought of it later as a strobe flash that captured Sandra Howard as she had been, before the fall-but of course it was no such thing; the high saga of the Howards was plummeting to its close, and whether she knew it or not, Sandra wasn’t just caught up in its descent, she was fanning the flames that sped it down.
I followed the roll of the great black Merc, feeling dragged in its imperious tide, as our cortege made slow progress through the rush-hour traffic on the narrow roads south of Castlehill. Once we joined the M50 northwards we picked up speed against the flow. The Merc turned west on Exit 13 and climbed through Sandyford and Kilgobbin, then cut up through narrow twisty roads to the foothills of the mountains. I followed along a road bounded now on one side by a high stone wall; on the other, gorse and ferns gave way to marsh and shallow bog. At a junction high above the city, great iron gates within the wall marked the entrance to Rowan House; I waited while they swung open, and then followed as the Merc crunched up a track lined with ash and rowan trees to a house I had seen already that day, in miniature, on a plinth beneath Emily Howard’s bed.
Rowan House looked like a Victorian merchant’s idea of a baronial castle: cut from pale granite, it had castellated bay windows, battlements, a small octagonal flag tower at one end and a much larger corner tower at the rear with a slated conical roof. A weather vane sprouted from the flag tower, atop whose pointer a spotlight picked out a metal H; another spot found the plain cross on the round tower’s peak.
The entrance hall was a great white rotunda with a sweeping circular staircase in pale wood to the right and a corridor at left that served the ground-floor front rooms; assorted portraits of Dr. John Howard hung at every turn; ahead, an arch through which Sandra Howard had already swept led to another, slightly smaller hall, with stairs down to the basement level and a further corridor for the back rooms and yet more paintings of her father. At the far end of this hall stood double doors that might once have led down to the garden; now they opened onto a windowless corridor whose ceiling was only about twelve feet high, whose walls were crisp white and unadorned by portraits of any kind, a corridor that emerged into a modern rectangular open-plan living space with great plate-glass walls and no hint of baroni
al grandeur: the corridor and living room of a house built maybe in the 1970s, seemingly grafted onto the rear of the fake castle. There was a fire burning in a big open grate, with a brushed-steel vent to take the smoke; the flames drew everyone to huddle in their glow.
Two maids in black-and-white uniforms had materialized when we first entered the house. After brisk instructions from Sandra Howard, they’d vanished; now they were back with drinks and cold cuts and salads, which they set on a long table at one end of the room. The sudden pang in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day; Jonny fell on the food like a starving man, and, once I had reassured myself that Sandra and Emily were okay, I followed suit. Sandra sat on a long couch at the end closest to the fire; Emily lay curled up with her head in her aunt’s lap, her stuffed dog pressed to her cheek and her left thumb in her mouth. The maids, who were both tiny and looked Filipina, swirled around collecting coats and filling cups and pouring glasses of water and setting out bottles of spirits and mixers and tubs of ice and asking if there was anything further before silently dispersing. I ate smoked salmon and rare cold roast beef and tomato and avocado salad and potato and hazelnut salad and drank a cup of coffee and halfway through my second bottle of Tyskie, a very strong Polish beer that I had pined for during my month on the dry, I began to feel faintly human again. Jonny had put steel-rimmed granny glasses on; he kept flashing anxious glances through them at his mother before looking at me and gulping air through his mouth. Finally, his mother rose and led Emily out of the room, and he got his chance to speak.
“You won’t tell, will you?” he asked. “Tell Mummy, I mean.”
“Tell her what?” I said blankly.
“About, y’know. The porn. And the whole thing with Emily.”
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