The Wrong Kind of Blood (12 page)

The smile stayed on her lips, but there was a challenge in her eyes. I suddenly felt less like a detective than a jealous lover myself, in thrall to the pulse of my own stupid blood.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “Did you?”

“I always get what I want,” said Linda, baring her teeth. “Then I always discover it wasn’t what I wanted at all. That what I really wanted all along… was a drink.”

She was standing inches from me. I could smell, I could almost taste, the makeup on her face, her grapefruit scent, the smoke on her breath.

“What happened to your lip?” she said.

“I bit it,” I said.

She touched my cheek with her cold hand, then turned back into the house.

I found her in the kitchen, where she was filling a jug with lime juice and rum, and dropping sprigs of mint into a bowl.

“Mojitos,” said Linda. “Want one?”

“Sure,” I said. “And while you’re mixing it, you can fill in some of the gaps in the story you told me.”

“What gaps would those be?” Linda said.

“How you met Tommy Owens in the High Tide just after Peter left. How he must have told you he gave Peter a bag of cash from George Halligan. How you know much more than you’re telling me about that, and about everything else. How if you really give a damn about finding your husband, you’ll tell me all you do know.”

Linda was pounding the mint leaves together with sugar and water. She stopped, her head bowed, and appeared to be sobbing.

“And you can cut out the tears, Linda. I’m not sure I believe them anymore.”

She looked up and glared at me, her dry eyes flashing.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had met Tommy that night?”

Linda looked away and shook her head.

“Why did George Halligan give Peter money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Peter trying to develop land around here? Castlehill Golf Club, for example?”

“He might have been. If he was, he didn’t tell me about it.”

“How well do you know George Halligan?”

“I don’t know him at all. I know who he is, obviously; everyone does.”

“But you can’t think of any reason he’d give Peter all that money?”

“Are you sure he did? If all you’ve got to go on is Tommy Owens’s word, I wouldn’t count on it.”

Linda piled the mint and sugar syrup into the jug, added sparkling water and ice and stirred the mixture with a long spoon.

“What did you and Tommy Owens talk about? Why does he hate you so much?”

“Because long ago, before my marriage but during his, we slept together — once, after a drunken party, or maybe
during
the party, I don’t remember. It was one of those mistakes you make, at least for me it was, but Tommy thought it was the real thing, so he went home and told his wife, and their baby was a year old at this stage, and the wife threw Tommy out, and he hounded me and stalked me until I had to be very cruel indeed to get rid of him, and his wife never took him back, and that’s why he hates me.”

Linda poured two mojitos, topped them off with sprigs of mint and gave me one.

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you all about it. Or do men not talk about stuff like that?”

“Not men like Tommy and me, anyway,” I said.

“Up,” she said, lifting her glass. We both drank. The mojito was cooling, and it kicked like a Spanish mule. She took the jug and sat in the living room. I followed her through. Her scent was so intense, I felt I was tracking her.

“Who are you all dressed up for, Linda?”

“You, Ed. And luckily you came.”

She topped up my drink and patted me on the shoulder. But her eyes darted anxiously toward the front door, and I wondered what the deal was: if someone was due here, or if she was expected somewhere else.

“What else do you want me to tell you?” she said.

“Tell me about Seosamh MacLiam.”

“That’s the council guy who drowned, right? God, that was awful. Three sons.”

“Were Peter and he close?”

“Not that I know.”

“Was the money from George Halligan a bribe for MacLiam?”

“As I say, I wouldn’t know.”

“You never seem to know much about Peter, do you? It’s as if you were leading separate lives.”

“That’s pretty much the truth. And we had finally worked up the courage to acknowledge that fact.”

“Tommy says you never loved Peter to begin with. All you wanted was the money.”

“Tommy thought I couldn’t love anyone else because, deep down, I loved him. So deep down, he was the only one who knew about it.”

“That isn’t exactly a denial.”

“What am I, on trial here?”

“So you didn’t know Seosamh MacLiam either.”

“Again, I knew of him.”

“Peter planned to meet someone with the initials JW after you that evening. JW — Joseph Williamson — is the English version of Seosamh MacLiam. Did you know anything about that meeting?”

“No. Wait. He said he might have to duck out for five minutes, to sort out some site problem. But that’s all it would be, five minutes. And he didn’t tell me who it was.”

Five minutes. Time enough to give a bag of money to an incorruptible councillor to persuade him to alter his vote on a zoning decision for Castlehill Golf Club — a decision that would destroy MacLiam’s reputation and his political support, made by a man married to a very rich woman. Then he took a phone call and vanished into thin air. None of it made any sense.

I stood up and walked to the window. The moon looked swollen, fit to burst. My stomach ached from where Podge Halligan had hit me, and my head throbbed from where I had nutted Blue Cap. I finished my drink. Linda stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders.

“I can’t get anywhere if you don’t want to help me. You have to tell me what you know,” I said.

“I can’t tell you everything, Ed. I’m not sure I know myself. What I think might have happened… what I’m afraid happened… you’ll have to find it out. I
want
you to find it out.”

I turned around and searched her eyes. I don’t know what I was looking for there: trust, honesty, some sign that she was on the level. All I saw was the cold glow of fear.

I headed for the front door. Linda followed, stopping to rummage through the drawer of a cupboard in the hall until she found a keypad for the security gates.

“You know you shouldn’t be driving,” she said.

“Drunk driving was the national sport when I left,” I said. “What happened? Has there been a sudden outbreak of civilization?”

“Not exactly. Maybe just the appearance of it.”

But when I hit the air, my legs nearly went from beneath me. Still. Drive with the windows open and no harm done. Linda walked down the drive with me, hissing out for her cat. When she saw the Volvo, she came over to admire it.

“It was my father’s,” I said. “You know he used to run a garage with John Dawson. They grew up together.”

A light came into Linda’s eyes.

“There’s something Peter started to say: ‘It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas.’ Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know that he did either,” she said.

Linda opened the gates for me. I pointed the Volvo out through them and headed up the slip road. I pulled in beneath my sycamore on Castlehill Road and lit a cigarette.

It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas.
That’s where my mother and father grew up, and John and Barbara Dawson too. They were kids together, fifty-odd years ago. It all goes back to there. But what? What all goes back? The body found buried in concrete in the foundations of Seafield Town Hall? A photograph of my father and John Dawson? The fact that two box files marked “Family” in Peter Dawson’s office had been emptied of any other photographs that might show the two men together? I sat and smoked and waited.

After half an hour, a charcoal gray Lexus with tinted windows swept down from Castlehill and swung in toward Linda’s house. After another fifteen minutes, I left the car and walked down the slip road to the security gates. The Lexus was parked outside Linda’s darkened house. I took a note of the license plate. The other thing I took note of was the security firm responsible for monitoring this little gated community. The name emblazoned on the gates was “Immunicate.”

I was pulled over at the bottom of Castlehill Road. Two uniformed Guards approached me. They looked at the car for a while, then one of them came to my window and tapped on it. I rolled down the window.

“Nice car, sir.” He had pale blue eyes and thin lips set in a supercilious smirk it would have felt good to slap off his face.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do you know you’ve no tax or insurance?”

“Yes. The car was fixed up today, and I couldn’t wait to take it out.”

“I suppose you’ve no driving license either.”

“Of course I have a license,” I said. “Just not on me. My name is Edward Loy. I came home from America for a funeral. So everything’s been a bit… you know…”

“Yes. Have you had a drink tonight, sir?”

“I have, oh yes, a drink or two,” I said. “Or three. Even.”

“Step out of the car, please, sir.”

I thought about this, and decided that stepping out of the car was not what I wanted to do. What I apparently did want to do, in the few seconds available to me while the smirking Guard stepped back to allow me out of the car, was turn the key, put the car in gear and swerve left and out of the way of the other Guard, who was running for their car and slapping the siren on as I tore down past Bayview and along the main Seafield road by Fagan’s Villas and cut into Quarry Fields.

I parked in front of the house, to make it easy for them, and ran inside, where several things struck me, more or less simultaneously:

1. Someone had ransacked the place from top to bottom. Every cupboard had been emptied, every couch and armchair rent asunder, every table and chair smashed in pieces. The floors were ankle deep in broken crockery, torn books and ripped upholstery.
   
2. I had parked in the space the rental car had been in, which meant that the rental car was gone. The rental car with the Glock and the ammunition I was holding for Tommy Owens in the boot.
   
3. There was no sign of Tommy Owens either.
   
4. The siren was getting closer. Once it stopped, the police would arrest me and then I would spend the night behind bars in Seafield Police Station.
   

I went out and sat on the porch. Tommy Owens had left a couple of fingers of Laphroaig in the bottle. I drank the whiskey in the moonlight while I waited for the police to arrive.

A CAB COLLECTED ME AT THE AIRPORT AND
brought me to the house. The garden was well tended, with red and yellow roses, and the hedge was neatly clipped. I walked up to the front door and rang the bell. The man who answered was my father as he had been in his twenties, when he had just married. He looked at me politely, but without recognition. My mother joined him at the door. She was in her twenties also, and pregnant. They stood there together for a while, as if they were posing for a photograph. My mother smiled at first, but the smile soon faded, and the longer I stood there, the more frightened she began to look. Then she looked older, her hair white, her skin like crepe. Then my father stood in front of her, and indicated that I should go. Then he was shouting at me, and pushing me down the drive. Then he was older too, and in his anger, the bones in his face pressed against his shining skin. Then his eyes turned black, and sank into their sockets. Then he vanished, and my mother slammed the door on me, and I stood in Quarry Fields, not knowing who I was, or where to go, or what to do.

In the morning, I was given a cup of tea and sent to wait in an interview room with walls the color and texture of old porridge and dark gray carpet tiles and community center chairs and table. At half-nine, Detective Sergeant Dave Donnelly came in, leaving the door open.

“How’s the head this morning, Ed?” he said, his broad face expressionless, his voice hoarse. He wore fawn flat-fronted Farah slacks, a white short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, the buttons straining against his barrel chest, and a loosely knotted gray suede tie with fresh egg yolk on it. He hung his gray jacket on the back of the chair, sat across from me and rested his elbows on the table, his massive forearms forming a triangle with his clasped fists.

“Not so bad, Dave,” I said. “But that’s ’cause I’m probably still drunk.”

Dave smiled tightly but said nothing. We sat in silence for a while. Then Detective Inspector Fiona Reed appeared and shut the door behind her. Dave fished a cassette tape from his jacket pocket and put it in a big double tape deck mounted on the wall above the table.

“Let’s just leave the tape for a moment,” Reed said.

Reed was looking at me. I looked at my hands. For some reason, each of my fingers was stained black. Then she turned to Dave, who immediately lit into me.

“You had quite a time yesterday, Ed. Trespassing on a crime scene, drinking whiskey with known drug dealer Tommy Owens, brawling in Hennessy’s with local hoodlum Podge Halligan and his gang, a cozy little chat with George Halligan — that’s Seafield’s criminal contingent pretty much used up, I think. Then round it off with driving five times above the alcohol limit, without tax, insurance or a license, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer — tell me, was it your birthday, by any chance?”

“I had a lot on my mind, Detective. I don’t remember assaulting—”

“You pushed Garda Nolan into a rosebush. His face looks like a cat scratched him. A cat that escaped from a zoo.”

“Garda Nolan. Is he the smirker?”

“Not this morning. What the fuck did you think you were up to? I mean, I know you just buried your mother, but… fuck’s sake, man, you can’t be runnin’ round actin’ the bollocks like that. Apart from anything else, driving pissed out of your mind.”

I was about to make an excuse, something about how, instead of having the space to grieve after the funeral, I had spent the day trying to solve other people’s problems, but I didn’t. I remembered tracking down a hit-and-run once who’d killed a mother and her three-year-old boy. He said he’d been drinking because it was the anniversary of his wife’s death, drinking at her grave. He ran over his victims on his way home from the cemetery. When I rang for the police, he began to cry, not for the mother, or the little boy, or even for his dead wife, but for himself, for the sadness of his own drunken, self-pitying life. That’s what I had done after my daughter died. First I got drunk to numb the pain, and then I got drunk to preserve the pain, and after a while I was using the pain as an excuse to get drunk, so I wouldn’t feel pain or anything else.