The Color of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  “Brock Taylor? The reformed crook? Hangs around SRC?”

  “He’s the fellow you remember as Eileen’s boyfriend, Brian Dalton, the one on the Norton Commando?”

  “And you say he killed her son?”

  “That’s right. But he said he did it for someone who paid him. Someone who idolized you and Sandra, who wanted the best for her-what he thought was the best for her.”

  “Dinny?”

  “Denis Finnegan, yes. And Taylor said there would be a payback coming, that soon he would be set to inherit, big-time. I took that to mean via some scheme of Finnegan’s. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  “I don’t. I mean, I don’t have any big share portfolio or anything. I’ve this house, and the surgery.”

  “And Rowan House.”

  “That’s it. And I’ve seen the mother’s will, it’s all straightforward. The property comes to me, end of story.”

  “But if you were genuinely disposed toward sharing it with Sandra in order to build the last tower, in order to fulfill the Howard family dream, the completion of the Howard Medical Center at last-”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Denis Finnegan. He said that’s what you all wanted. For the family. But your wife was opposed to it.”

  “I was opposed to it too. I didn’t want to build a load of apartments, but I didn’t want a fourth tower, like it was some fucking monument…Sandra wanted it…said she wanted it to honor our father, although how she could…”

  He looked up at me, his eyes red with rage.

  “What I’d like best, is if the house was burned to the ground. After that, we could think about what came after. But best for everyone…best for Sandra above all…if the whole place was dust and ashes.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ll have to ask Sandra. I won’t say any more.”

  “And what about Finnegan? Do you think there’s some way he envisaged getting his hands on the whole project through Sandra? If you were going to go into it on an equal basis-”

  “But I wasn’t-”

  “What if you were in jail for killing your wife? Your resolve might not be quite so great then. You’d need money for appeals, you’d need to take the advice of your sister and your solicitor.”

  “What are you saying, Dinny had something to do with Jessica’s death?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Try and remember. You got a call yesterday, or rather the day before, Halloween, someone telling you your wife was having an affair with David Brady. Now, two people rang your number that morning. One of them was Denis Finnegan. Do you remember the call? It would have been after I left, you went back to the surgery. Your patients were getting, ah, impatient.”

  Shane scowled in concentration.

  “Yeah. Because it was the mobile, in my pocket. Dinny asking about you, was there anything he needed to know. Always such a fussy fucker. You can hardly say, would you ever fuck off, with some oul’ one in the chair. So I said no and hung up.”

  “Right. So the other call was the anonymous call.”

  “That’s right. Prissy kind of voice, I thought, but trying to sound tough. Why? Do you know who it was?”

  Keep stirring, Loy.

  “The Guards traced the number. It was your nephew, Jonathan.”

  The telephone rang, and Emily went to answer it. Shane Howard was on his feet and breathing like a man who’s just remembered how. Jerry Dalton’s eyes never left me. Emily came back into the room.

  “That was Granny,” she said. “They’re at the airport. They’re staying at the Radisson. I wrote the number on the pad.”

  For a moment I had trouble moving my lips. Finally, I got them to work in conjunction with my tongue.

  “Your granny,” I said.

  “Yes. Mum’s mum. And Granddad. They retired to the Algarve. Awful journey, to bury their daughter’s body.”

  “What did Jessica’s father-your granddad-do?” I asked. “He wasn’t an actor, was he?”

  “Oh, God no. Mum said she had the biggest rows with him when she wanted to go into the theater. No, he ran a business, a…carpets? What was it, Dad?”

  “Contract cleaning,” Shane said, his mind elsewhere.

  Sandra’s lie had been a detailed and elaborate one-about Jessica’s father being a failed actor, and a widower, and a drunk; about Jessica being her father’s little wife when she was thirteen, for eighteen months; about how she didn’t love sex in itself so much as the power it gave her-could it have been that Sandra was talking, not about Jessica, but about herself?

  The telephone rang again, and Shane answered it.

  Emily was tidying all the photograph albums and journals together. I asked her if she’d looked at the dollhouse in her room yet, and she made a cartoon face and said she had forgotten about it, and ran toward her room at once. Dalton followed her.

  Shane came off the phone.

  “No one in this family is sleeping tonight. That was Sandra. She and Denis are up in Rowan House. They’re in a panic, want to talk. Will you follow me up there?”

  Twenty-eight

  LATER, WHEN IT WAS ALL OVER-WHEN I HAD BEEN released from Seafield Garda Station having been involuntarily “debriefed”; when the identity of the man accompanying the Reillys in the CCTV footage outside the Waterfront Apartments before David Brady was murdered had been established; when neighbors living close to the house Jessica Howard was murdered in confirmed that they had seen a man whose photograph they were shown arriving at or leaving the house close to the time the murder took place; when a paper trail was uncovered that linked Denis Finnegan conclusively to Brock Taylor, particularly in regard to the plans for the fourth tower at the Howard Medical Center; when the Guards in Seafield Station had ordered the booze for their celebration party; and when I had been trailed from interrogation room to cell often enough for it to be made clear to me that if I ever conducted another case the way I had conducted this one (withholding evidence, tampering with evidence, interfering with a crime scene, lying to the Guards and, as Dave put it, generally carrying on like a total fucking bollocks who thinks he’s fucking it) I would find it impossible to buy a dog license, let alone pursue a career as a private investigator-when it was all over, I stood among the charred remains of Rowan House and wondered whether the sins of the fathers could ever be washed away with their deaths, or whether a legacy of tainted blood would always color the lives of the children and the children’s children. I didn’t come up with any answers.

  Shane led the way in his black Mercedes, like Sandra’s two days before, once again giving a funereal feel to the cortege. I rode in its wake, and we drove in the grey predawn to Rowan House. Crows had been gathering on telephone wires and poles on Bayview Hill when we left; they were massing on the turrets of Rowan House as we arrived, beating their wings and making their predatory moans.

  We got out of our cars and walked through the rowan trees, and I thought about the berries, and about the heliotrope crystals, the bloodstones that Emily always wore, how Shane said Sandra had been the one to introduce them to the family. I tried to remember what Emily had told me about them: how, in water, they made the sky turn red, but simply to hold one rendered the bearer invisible. The times I had worked with sexual abuse survivors before, almost every one of them had at some point or other said that there were days she felt like she was completely invisible, that her sense of self was so fragile that no one could actually see her; equally, there were days when she felt so low, so wretched and unloved and consumed with self-hatred that she wished she could simply vanish off the face of the earth, be visible to nobody, least of all herself. The first thing I noticed about Sandra Howard that last night was that she was wearing bloodstones all over: on her fingers, in her ears and on a chain around her neck. The second thing I noticed was her drawn, anxious face, the lines around her red eyes that had softened into crepe, the mouth set tight and hard like that of a wary animal. I don’t know if she was surpr
ised to see me, or angry, or resigned; maybe she didn’t know herself. Her hair was pulled back tight, and she wore a long green wraparound dress with red velvet detail that tied at the waist over a pair of jeans. She still looked like the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but now her beauty scared me; way beyond danger, it was too sad and too angry; I felt pity and fear for her.

  The house was dark, the shutters and drapes closed; light spilled into the rotunda from the chandelier on the upper floor. Sandra led us down the rear corridor and into one of the sitting rooms I had seen before.

  The room was lit by table lamps; it felt dark and heavy, with its mahogany side tables, dark red chairs and matching couches, dark wood fireplace and dark green carpet. There were antimacassars on the chairs and cushions, with needlework covers on the couches; there was an upright piano and a piano stool with an embroidered cushion cover seat that lifted off; inside there was sheet music from another time: “Autumn Leaves,” “Night and Day,” “Last Night When We Were Young.” I had a flash of the Howard family gathered around the piano, singing together. It seemed unbearable even to imagine; what must it have been like to recall?

  There were four portraits of John Howard in the room, painted at intervals between his thirties and his early sixties; in conjunction with the mirrors that hung above the hearth and on the wall opposite, it meant that wherever your eye rested, he was in sight. I could see what Martha O’Connor’s colleague had meant about the David Niven comparison: there was a natural, rangy elegance to Howard which, combined with the flannels and tweeds he favored, gave him the appearance of a classic English gentleman. But his face lacked the genial, open features needed to round that image off; his eyes were small and piercing, his nose pointed, his lips compressed in a faint smile of what looked like self-satisfaction. His children barely resembled him, although Jerry Dalton had the same carved bone structure. No, the person who most looked like John Howard was his grandson, Jonathan, who wasn’t here. Denis Finnegan was, however: he rose and performed a kind of greeting in dumb show; then he sat again, a sheaf of papers by him on a side table. I stood by the mantelpiece. With his rictus grin and a wave of his red hand, Finnegan tried to induce me to sit down. I needed to keep on my feet. In my pocket, I fingered the Sig Sauer I had taken from Darren Reilly, now dead. I was glad to have it.

  Sandra stood by a chair on the other side of the room from Denis Finnegan. On a couch between them, Shane raised his gaze from the floor and looked at his sister. She in turn looked at Denis Finnegan, who spread his palms, as an emperor might say, “Let the games commence.”

  “I had hoped this would just be family, Shane,” Sandra said, avoiding my eyes.

  “I think it’s too late for that, Sandra,” Shane said.

  “I think it always was,” I said.

  Sandra took a deep breath and began.

  “The Guards have been in touch. David Manuel fell to his death from his attic last night. His house was on fire. The Guards believe the fire was started deliberately. By Jonathan. It seems they also suspect him of being involved in the murders of David Brady…and of Jessica.”

  Sandra sounded like she wanted someone to reassure her that nothing she had said could possibly be true. Even Denis Finnegan couldn’t stretch to that.

  “What they suspect and what they can support with evidence are two different things” was the best he could come up with.

  “Jonathan called Denis late last night,” Sandra went on.

  “He woke me up, with some difficulty,” Finnegan said, staring pointedly in my direction. “At first he thought I was dead. He had to pour water on my face and shake me hard. It was as if I had been drugged. What do you think, Mr. Loy?”

  I met Finnegan’s gaze and shrugged. If he connected me to the GHB, I could be in a lot of trouble. But I was in a lot of trouble already. And if I had my way, Finnegan wasn’t going to be the most reliable witness the world had ever seen come the dawn.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing,” Finnegan said. “He left again almost immediately, wouldn’t tell me where he was going. He seemed extremely agitated.”

  “There must be something we can do,” Sandra said. “I mean, what they’re saying can’t be true, can it?”

  “It was Jonathan who called me and told me Jessica was with David Brady,” Shane said. “The Guards traced the calls. I think he knew me well enough to know I would lose the head altogether, that I’d lam around there to try and catch them in the act, and in the process get caught up on CCTV, which needless to say is just what I did. He tried to frame me for the murder.”

  “He tried to throw the blame onto Emily as well,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it,” Sandra said. But she sounded, wearily, as if she did.

  “Jonathan called Jessica that morning also,” I said. “Was that usual? Did he ever have any contact with her?”

  Shane shook his head.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Denis Finnegan sprang into action.

  “I might be able to shed some light on that,” he said. “I’ve been doing a certain amount of dabbling in the property market. Jonathan would visit properties on my behalf and make an assessment for me of their potential. In that regard, I know for a fact he has seen several of the houses Jessica was showing in recent months.”

  It was impossible to tell whether Finnegan was improvising to protect his stepson, or whether he was telling the truth. Before I could push him on it, Shane Howard plowed in.

  “You’re a great man for property schemes, aren’t you, Dinny? The fourth tower, isn’t that right?”

  “I’ve made no secret of my views. They support those of your sister.”

  “And isn’t it very convenient that Jessica’s not around anymore to get in the way of your plans?”

  “If you intend to level any malign insinuation regarding Jessica’s murder at my door, I would advise-”

  “Ah, cut the lawyer crap now, Dinny. I bet that’s not the way you talk with Brock Taylor.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I bet Brock Taylor wouldn’t let a woman stand in the way of his plans. What’s a nice lawyer like you doing with a crook like that?”

  “Brian Taylor has paid his debt to society, has settled with the Revenue and the CAB. He is now a respectable businessman, and is legally entitled-”

  I couldn’t let that one run.

  “Brock Taylor was a murderer and a crook, and you owed him big-time. Incalculable, really, how much. At least, that’s what he reckoned. I don’t know what way the pair of you structured the deal, or whether he just left it up to you, but either way, he was expecting to be paid back in a major way. Was he going to be a partner? Once Shane was safely stowed in jail, and you and Sandra had the running of it all, it would have been easy to cut him in, wouldn’t it? Or was he already in? For what? A third? A half? It’s all for Sandra, remember, so you can’t cut her out entirely. Although with someone like Brock Taylor, who knows where the bodies are buried because he killed them himself, you’re on very shaky ground, aren’t you, Denis? Maybe your loyalty to your childhood pal will have to take precedence over your veneration of the glorious Howard family.”

  Sandra found her voice again.

  “Denis? What is he saying? What bodies?”

  Denis Finnegan had set his little feet down beside each other on the floor. I stroked the Sig with one hand, just to remind me it was there. Finnegan wasn’t going to speak, so I had to.

  “Denis had a crush, no, more than a crush, a kind of blind, overwhelming interest in your future, Sandra. He was benevolent, all-powerful, like God, really. And just like God, he didn’t mind if a few bodies got in the way, so long as it was to serve what were considered your best interests. I don’t know why he decided on Richard O’Connor-maybe he felt you needed a father figure, maybe Denis loved Dr. Rock himself and hoped to channel his sublimated passion through you. Fuck knows, I’m not a psychologist, what I do know is that he paid a man w
ho called himself Brian Dalton-who we know as Brock Taylor-to murder Audrey O’Connor and carry out a bungled robbery at Richard O’Connor’s house, and then to plant the proceeds of the robbery on Stephen Casey, Eileen Harvey’s first son, and murder him too. Which he duly did. And in due course, presumably encouraged on both sides by Denis Finnegan, romance blooms and Sandra and Dr. Rock marry, and have a son. Jonathan.”

  “I must warn you that legally, you are on the flimsiest of grounds here, Mr. Loy. The law of slander-”

  “Legally, I live in a cell with cockroaches and rats and no running water; when the Seafield cops are done with me, I won’t have a legal bone left in my body,” I said. “So let’s just skip the legalities for a while and continue with our nice cozy family chat. After all, Brock Taylor used to work for my father once, so I think I can consider myself part of the family too, even if I come in through the servants’ entrance.”

  I looked around the room. Sandra was staring alternately at me and Finnegan, her green eyes sick with fear. I took the rugby medal out of my pocket and gave it to her.

  “See, Rock’s name is engraved on it. The Guards never recovered Rock’s medals after the robbery. I found them in a drawer in the spare bedroom of your husband’s house in Mountjoy Square.”

  Sandra Howard thrust the medal into my hand, flung herself off her chair and vomited into the fireplace.

  “I heard Brock Taylor admit to killing Audrey O’Connor and Stephen Casey tonight. And then his wife killed him.”

  Finnegan was squirming in his chair, but he seemed to have lost the power of speech. Sandra got to her feet and breathed deeply.

  “Keep going, Ed,” she said. “Tell it all.”

  “So then, having set you up for marriage with Dr. Rock, Denis goes off and completes his legal training and starts his practice, representing many of the prominent criminals of the day including, of course, his boyhood pal, Brock Taylor. But he keeps a hand in on the Southside, the bit of coaching for Castlehill, the bit of attention paid to Sandra, and a spot of rugby sevens on a Saturday morning with the guys. Including Dr. Rock. And then one Saturday morning, Dr. Rock collapses, a suspected heart attack. Maybe he hasn’t taken his insulin, maybe he’s hung over and the exercise is getting to him. And Denis says he’ll take him to hospital, which he does. Now I can’t be sure-the only one who knows is Denis-but I think what happened was, Rock asks him to inject him with insulin. And Denis does, only he gives Rock an overdose. By the time they get to hospital, Rock is slipping into a coma, and Denis neglects to mention that Rock is a diabetic, and Rock is treated as if it’s a regular myocardial infarction, a heart attack, and he dies in a couple of hours.”