The Color of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  He shook his head, ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair.

  “Not much. I’ve been trying to sound out the Howards. I proceeded from the position that they wanted to keep it a secret, so I’ve avoided confrontations.”

  “Did you work through Emily? Do you think she might have been the person who was sending you the information?”

  “No. I was the one who told her about Stephen Casey. I think I might be responsible for getting her agitated about the whole…family plot. I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to tell with Emily. She’s got a lot of stuff going on herself, many issues.”

  I sensed his caginess. He wanted to find out more without giving too much away. I understood that, it was practically my job description. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him who Brian Dalton had turned out to be, at least not while there was the chance he could still be his father.

  “So you’re looking at the possibility that this mystery Dalton character-”

  “Brian Patrick Dalton.”

  “Was your father.”

  “Jessica Howard doesn’t remember him. Didn’t remember him. She said Shane’s mother didn’t like her, so she avoided Rowan House. Whether she would have met him up there, I don’t know. And the subject of Stephen Casey was avoided by everyone.”

  “Shane told me he remembers getting a lift on Casey’s motorcycle.”

  Dalton nodded.

  “Some of the Woodpark oul’ ones, I got talking to them down the pub, the ones who remember love to rabbit on about how awful and tragic it all was, and they said he was this guy in a leather jacket with a motorbike.”

  “How did you come to rent the same house?”

  “Again, it was sent to me in the post, the item in the newspaper advertising it for rent.”

  “So there’s someone pulling your strings.”

  “It feels like that. But I feel I’m ready to push hard now, to start confronting people.”

  “When you say people, you mean Shane and Sandra.”

  “There’s no one else, is there?”

  “Emily. Jonathan. If you’re a part of that family…Denis Finnegan…someone has been feeding you the information, it must be that one of them wants you to get at the truth. For their own reasons, as much as yours.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  The bouncer came over to where we were sitting.

  “JD, Barnesy said to give you the call, okay?”

  Dalton got up.

  “Two things before you go. Jonathan O’Connor ever drink here?”

  “Sure. He comes in with Denis Finnegan. And I’ve seen him with the Reillys as well, out in the car park. Last question.”

  “If your father’s not Dalton, who might it be?”

  He shrugged.

  “Who were the available males in the Howard household at the time? Shane? John Howard himself? Which is why Emily and me never got it together, or at least, haven’t yet.”

  “Howard was a dying man.”

  “Stranger things have happened. I mean, there are too many unanswered questions: Why did the Howards go to the lengths they did to cover things up? Why did they buy a house for Eileen Casey? She’d been living on her own for a long time with her son Stephen, seems to have been a tough cookie. Why did she suddenly crack up and commit suicide?”

  “Postnatal depression, abandonment by another partner, on top of the grief around losing her first son. It’s not an impossible place to get back from, but even the toughest cookie would find it hard.”

  Dalton looked out over the fog-drenched night.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just think of him as a black rider who took off into the dark, never to be seen again, and leave it at that. Is that what you’d do?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t have to think very long.

  “No, that isn’t what I’d do.”

  “Well, it isn’t what I’m going to do either. ’Course, the possibility that Emily and I are blood relations has something to do with it too. Because I really like her. So I’m kind of hoping the old black rider option is true.”

  “JD! People’re dying of thirst here!” called the bouncer.

  “All right, I’m coming.”

  He turned back to me.

  “The funny thing is, you’re searching for one thing, and it eventually becomes about everything, do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. I knew only too well what he meant.

  “So the thing is, if I were you, I’d check the graveyard.”

  I drove through Woodpark to the Church of the Immaculate Conception. On the way, I called Martha O’Connor.

  “Martha, it’s Ed. Just wanted to check you’re okay. Hope it’s not too late.”

  “I’m in the office, working. Didn’t see how I was going to sleep after the load you dumped in my lap.”

  “I’m sorry. But-”

  “No, it’s my fault. I’ve dealt with it by avoiding it for so long. One of the downsides of therapy, you can make yourself feel okay, or at least, less bad, just by talking. But you don’t get anywhere. I thought the only way I could survive living here was by avoiding it all. Hey, it seems to work for most Irish families, right?”

  Her laugh seemed tiny over the phone, like a struck match against the night sky.

  “I think maybe you were ready to head in that direction anyway,” I said. “I mean, the investigation into John Howard, the fact that you looked at him at all…that could only have been the start of something.”

  “Mmm. Maybe. Anyway, what’s up? I value your concern for my welfare, but what the fuck do you want?”

  “Two things, if you can get to them. Where’s John Howard buried? Is it a family plot?”

  “Can do that, it would have been in the death notices. Thing two?”

  “I’m looking for the name of an eyewitness to a suicide by drowning. It would have been off Seafield Pier, late April 1986.”

  “Not much of a story.”

  “Apparently there was a big search and rescue attempt, all the emergency services were out.”

  “That would have guaranteed coverage. Tonight?”

  “If you can.”

  “Does this mean we’re partners?”

  “Long as you give me a cocredit when you write it up.”

  “A cocredit? What kind of sick fuck are you?”

  “How’d it go with Jonathan, did you see him?”

  “We had a drink. He’s not a happy boy. Doesn’t like you at all.”

  “I was kind of hard on him.”

  “Do him no harm, he’s a bit of a spoiled brat.”

  “Did he seem, when you left him, I don’t know, stable?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Why? You think he’s likely to top himself? Let me tell you, he’s a lot more depressed about my life now than he is about his. Leave ’em thanking God they’re not you. That’s the therapy to give ’em. I’ll call you back…whenever?”

  “As soon as you get anything, no matter how late. Thanks, Martha.”

  The lights in the church were still on, and I remembered there was a vigil tonight. There were three old ladies and two old men on their knees in the pews, and one woman hauling herself around the stations of the cross on a red four-wheel walker. On the altar, the Monstrance was prominently displayed, with its inner circle to expose the consecrated host, which Catholics believe is the actual body of Christ, and its surrounding ring of silver spikes; I flashed on the Halloween fireworks that had lit the heavens; maybe they were both faces of the same impulse. I thought I saw the sacristy door to the right of the altar slam shut; I walked down the aisle and tried the side door, but it was locked; I genuflected at the altar and went up to the door and tried it; it was locked too. I came down off the altar, soaking up the disapproving looks I was getting from a couple of the old ladies; the old men were asleep, or rapt in devout prayer, whichever is the greater. I knelt at the side altar near the sacristy to give myself a moment to think. The altar was devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and there was a sta
tue of Mary with the infant Jesus in her arms. I reached for a prayer but didn’t get very far. I stood up and genuflected again, the old training ingrained, and set off down the side aisle when something I had seen but not fully taken in made me turn around. There was a brass plate on the wall beside the altar, and I went back and read it properly.

  It read: The restoration of this Marian Altar was made possible with the generous assistance of the Howard Family, 1986.

  The presbytery was an old Victorian villa to the rear of the church. There were no lights on. I knocked on the door. Either Father Massey wasn’t there, or he wasn’t answering.

  Twenty

  I APPROACHED ROWAN HOUSE FROM THE BUNGALOW side, but there were no lights on in the modern building, so I climbed the hill and swung the Volvo down the long drive and up through the red-berried trees to park beside Sandra Howard’s black Mercedes. I’m not sure what I had in mind, if I thought I was going to confront Sandra Howard with what I had learned, or try and catch her in a lie like a barrister with a defendant, or simply brief her on my progress so far and watch her reactions, but when she opened the door in a dark green silk robe that barely reached the tops of her pale, freckled legs, my mind fought a brief tussle with my blood and lost. She wore a silver chain around her neck with a bloodstone that nestled between her breasts; her nipples were red and full, as were her lips; her green eyes looked clouded with lust; her hair was outstretched on her head like a fiery halo, and between her legs a red band glowed like a tongue of flame. She turned and led me through the hall and up the dark stairs, and we might have made it to a bed this time, but her scent, the tang of sweet earth spice in my nose, and her walk, the sway of her hips and the roll of her buttocks, robbed me of everything but urgency and instinct; I pulled her to me and kissed the back of her neck and her cheeks, and the clefts below her ears, and ran my hands slowly up her rib cage to her breasts, and then kissed her back, slowly down her spine, and she wouldn’t turn, just sank to her knees and raised herself in the air, and reached a hand back for me, and guided me inside, and she screamed with the first thrusts, and then steadied in rhythm, and then stopped and turned and showed her face, and she sat above me and steadied again, and we drove and ground at each other hard and long and came, blood beating in my ears and the sweet sound of her screams.

  After a while, she stood up and opened a door and light bled through to the landing.

  “We’re getting closer to a bed,” she said.

  I followed her into a bedroom with two arched sash windows that looked out over the three towers to the city beyond; between them stood a mahogany tallboy with a tray of booze on top; against the wall facing, the bed was brass-framed; I left my clothes on a chair and joined Sandra there. She had smears of blood on her lips; she brought her hand up to mine to show me I had too. There were weals on her hips, right and left.

  “How did you get those?” I said.

  “Your wedding ring,” she said. “How long were you married? You don’t have to answer.”

  “Not long enough. Or too long. Isn’t that how it goes?”

  “I don’t know. I think it goes differently for each person.”

  “Are you still married?”

  “Not really. Not in any of the ways that count. But I probably won’t divorce Denis. He’s worked hard for us all.”

  I lay there for a while and thought about my wife, married to another man and about to give birth to his child, and about our child, dead and buried in the ocean, about the anger I couldn’t seem to shake and the way it expressed itself, in lust for a woman who could be a murderer, my balls hardening again as Sandra rubbed a nipple against mine and held my cock firm in her pale hand.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “We need more than talk,” she said, and we took more from each other, took what we needed, or tried. Afterward, I stood and looked out over the three great towers and the city beyond, and thought how like a king it must feel to have this view at your command, how a castle would be nothing more than your due. When I turned back, Sandra had pulled the white cover up to her neck, and there were tears in her eyes.

  “If we need to talk, you’d better start,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve found out and what you think it might mean.”

  “I don’t know what any of it means yet,” I said. “Maybe you can tell me.”

  I thought about getting dressed, and then I thought, If I do, Sandra is less likely to trust me, to keep her guard down. So I got back into bed beside her, and as I propped up some pillows to sit against and pressed a smile onto my face, I felt in need of a drink to cleanse the shame of what I’d just thought from my mind; no wonder my wife had been drifting away long before our child died; how could you live with, let alone love, someone whose every thought was double, whose cast of mind was all manipulation, calculation, whose deepest urge was not to live life, to experience moments, but to analyze them and connect them up until they reached a statement, a verdict, an indictment?

  As if she could read my thoughts, or maybe because she shared some of them, Sandra rose from the bed and pulled her green silk wrapper on and got brandy and San Pellegrino and glasses from the tallboy and brought them back to bed and made drinks and gave me one and grinned, her mascara smeared and her lips the color of blood, high above Dublin with the brandy warming us.

  I could live with this woman until the end of time, I thought, and felt it was true, and then laughed at it, or made myself laugh at it, as if it was one of those things you think on holiday, drunk: “Why don’t I drop out of the rat race, move to this island and live off the land?” But I felt it, and I thought it was true. And then I opened my mouth.

  “You and Denis Finnegan and Richard O’Connor were all at Castlehill College around the same time, in the 1980s. I suppose you must have been involved with hiring Denis, as deputy headmistress.”

  Sandra laughed.

  “No, not really, there was a panel to discuss appointments, but it was the principal’s call. And the board ratify that. No, all a vice principal-that’s what they were called even in the eighties, I think the only deputy headmistresses they have now are in dungeons with handcuffs and whips-all I did was, well, I’m not sure what I did, filled in gaps and held the fort, I suppose. Responsibility without power, the wrong way round. Made my mother very happy though.”

  “And your father? Your father was still alive then?”

  “He was dismayed neither of us was doing medicine.”

  “What about dentistry?”

  “Father thought you might as well be an anesthetist, or a nurse, as a dentist.”

  “It was a big step for a school like Castlehill, with its very burly rugby atmosphere, to appoint a woman to a top job.”

  “That’s why they did it. So people would see they had done it, and then they could just continue on the way they were. Most appointments had something to do with rugby, Denis’s included. I was the exception that proved the rule. And of course, given who my brother was, I wasn’t even an exception.”

  “And did you know Dr. O’Connor well? He just came in to lend a hand coaching, didn’t he? Did you get involved at that level?”

  Sandra shook her head.

  “I’ve never really cared for the game. Never attracted to the boys who played it. And the cult of it in school…the mother, in her fur coat, presenting the winning captain, her son, with the cup…it’s like something from the Colosseum.”

  “Not even when Jonathan showed signs of being a player?”

  “That was different. That was because of how well it meant he and his father were getting on.”

  “So did you know Dr. O’Connor well, rugby aside?”

  “When?”

  “In the early eighties. In the years before his wife was murdered.”

  “Did I know him…well…you mean, as more than a colleague? As a friend? As a lover?”

  “Any of the above. And Denis Finnegan. How well did you know him?”

  “In the period before Audrey How
ard was murdered.”

  “That’s right. Same categories.”

  Sandra drank her brandy down and pulled her wrapper across her breasts and cupped the bloodstone in her hand; I could see it flash green and red, like a barometer of the energy between us.

  “In the early eighties, I spent most of the time either working or looking after my elderly parents, that is to say, nursing Father through his long final illness and keeping Mother, or my fucking mother as I exclusively thought of her back then, from alternately driving him mad, firing his nurses, taking an overdose herself, selling the house from underneath us or otherwise trying to steal the limelight. Tramping up and down that stairs at all hours, because you could be sure if he had a fever, she’d develop one too, and God forbid she should sleep in a room on the ground floor. ‘I couldn’t sleep knowing your father was suffering so close to me,’ so I was the one who went without sleep. I wore navy suits and had permed hair and looked older in my twenties than I do now. I didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t have time or energy for a boyfriend, and if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen Denis or Rock; they were too old, and I still thought I was young, even if I wasn’t getting a chance to live as if I was.”

  “What did your father die of?”

  “Cancer. Well, pneumonia got him at the last, but it was cancer that had weakened him, lung at first, then it spread into the lymphs. He smoked a hundred a day for years, and cigars, and a pipe. There are still rooms in the house, even repainted, sit for ten minutes and they reek of smoke.”

  “You were close, you and he.”

  Sandra looked at me, her eyes clear and bright now, and nodded gravely.

  “He was a great man. And funny, charming, attractive, clever, arrogant maybe, a little imperious, his way or the highway, but great men have their foibles, shouldn’t they be allowed them? And that’s what he was, a great man.”

  “And he died in ’85, isn’t that right?”

  “In March. And Audrey O’Connor was murdered in August 1985. So did I start a relationship with Denis or Rock during that period is your next question. No, I did not.”

  “What about Stephen Casey? He was a pupil of yours, wasn’t he? In your…what did you teach?”