The Wrong Kind of Blood (14 page)

In the house, I began to fill the garbage bags with the debris from the break-in. As I filled each bag, I took it out and threw it in the garage. The furniture downstairs hadn’t been in great shape to begin with; now it was well beyond repair. I tossed broken chair frames and table legs in on top of the garbage bags. I would have to rent a Dumpster to get rid of it all, but I didn’t feel up to it today. The writing desk in the back room had been smashed to pieces too, and it was only after I had cleared it away that I remembered it was where the family photographs were kept. All the snaps it had contained were gone. The fragment I had found on Peter Dawson’s boat was the only shot I had of my father. Someone was trying to remove all trace of my past, just as they had removed all trace of his.

I sat on the living room floor and looked through the newspapers. They were having a field day, and who could blame them? deadly triangle blared the
Daily Star,
with reports on “much-loved councillor” Seosamh MacLiam, Dawson, and the concrete corpse found in the town hall. I suspected he would drop right down the priority list now. If he’d been dead (and buried) that long, he could wait a little longer for justice. trouble in paradise announced the
Irish Independent,
with many sidebar features on the upscale Bayview-Castlehill “Top People’s Seaside Suburb,” where the luxury homes of top Irish rock stars, film directors, barristers, and CEOs formed the exclusive enclave the reporter claimed was nicknamed “Bel Eire.” The
Irish Sun
took up this theme: black day in bel eire, it screamed, claiming “sources close to the Garda investigation” said that Seosamh MacLiam had been dead before he went in the water, and detailing the rise of John Dawson’s construction business. The
Irish Times,
the national “newspaper of record,” confined itself to a brief report on page four which was so circumspectly written, presumably to spare the feelings of the families, or possibly the paper’s readers, and so apparently anxious not to prejudice any criminal prosecution that might ensue, that it was hard, having read it, to be sure if anyone had been killed, or had died, or indeed, if anything had happened at all. The
Times
did however mention that John Dawson had been one of a group of businessmen who in the seventies and eighties had clustered around the figure of Jack Parland, Seosamh MacLiam’s father-in-law.

Most of the papers speculated that the simultaneous murder inquiries would prove too much for Seafield Garda, and that while the investigation would remain based at Seafield Station, the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation would almost certainly be drafted in to assist. I wondered if Dave would appreciate the help. I wouldn’t in his shoes; I’d see it as them muscling in and stealing my case. But it was his case now, nothing to do with me anymore.

It was uncomfortable sitting on the floor, so I thought I’d see if lying on it was any better. That’s where I awoke, to the sound of the doorbell. One side of my body was numb, and when I finally managed to haul myself to my feet, the blood rushed from my head and set me reeling. The sun had set, but it wasn’t dark yet; the dusty house was thick with blurred shadows. The doorbell rang again, continuously this time. I ran a hand through my hair, rubbed my eyes in an attempt to persuade them to stay open and opened the front door to Peter Dawson’s mother, Barbara.

Someone had once told Barbara Dawson she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, and she had taken it to heart. Her hair was golden brown now, and cascaded in lush folds over the top of a loosely tied aubergine scarf. Her eyes were large and brown, her aubergine lips wide and full; her skin was pale bronze and firm around eyes and chin, and it shone with a pearly glow. She wore a black linen trouser suit over a black top that revealed a hint of black lace cleavage, stood about five six in heels and exuded a sexuality that would have been potent in a woman thirty years her junior. Barbara Dawson, with a matching aubergine scarf around her neck, was sixty-four, a year older than my mother had been; there were tears in her eyes as she embraced me.

“I’m so sorry about Peter, Barbara,” I said, aware that I still stank of booze and smoke and sweat.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a small silk handkerchief that matched her scarf. “My family thanks you for all you did, Edward.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t do very much,” I said.

“You did what you could, child. I believe we all did. I’m afraid there was a limit to what could be done.”

She smiled brightly, pressing her lips together with her teeth and nodding, as if to say how brave we must all be. I nodded my head, but I didn’t understand. Barbara spoke as if Peter had finally succumbed to a slow-working disease, as if his death had been expected for months.

She held the handkerchief to her nose and looked around her, batting her heavily mascaraed eyelids. I was about to apologize for the state of the place when Barbara, in a terribly grawnd Dublin-on-its-best-behavior accent, said, “Daphne certainly kept the house looking lovely and tidy.” I looked at her to see if she was mixing it deliberately, but we were still standing in the hall and her gaze was fixed on the chipped wooden banisters, so I decided she was trying to be polite without having much practice at it.

“Actually, we’ve just had a break-in, Barbara,” I said, walking her into the kitchen. She stood in silence just inside the door. I asked if she wanted some tea, or a drink, but she shook her head. I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I took the mackerel out of the fridge, unwrapped them and laid them on the draining board.

“They destroyed all the furniture, so I can’t offer you a chair,” I said, trying to fill the silence. “But the only thing they took was the family photograph albums. Every single photograph of my mother and father. Right the way back to their wedding and before. Don’t you think that’s weird, Barbara?”

Barbara Dawson was clutching a small black leather purse in her immaculately manicured, aubergine-nailed hands. One hand shot to her mouth in an expression of distress, then clutched at her tiny chin.

“It’s barbaric, Edward,” she said. “That you don’t have so much as a memento of your mother. Barbaric, that’s what it is.”

Her eyes kept flickering uneasily toward the mackerel, as if they were still alive and could at any moment make a jump for her.

“Fresh today,” I said. “Leaping into the boats, they were.”

Barbara Dawson shuddered. “Your mother, God rest her, her father and mine were both fishermen. I grew up with the house stinking of fried fish: herrings, mackerel, ray, God help us, the reek’d be in your hair and beneath your nails, and never enough hot water to scrub it away. I swore when I had a house of me own, I’d never fry another fish, nor ea’ any neither. Eat any either,” she quickly corrected herself. Her accent had slipped back briefly to Fagan’s Villas, where she and my mother had been next-door neighbors. She shuddered again, a more elaborate, full-body spasm this time, with one hand on her breastbone and one to her nose to fan away the imaginary odor of fish straight from the sea. I remembered my mother saying of her, tartly, “She should’ve gone on the stage, that one. Only in a big theater, mind, and you’d have to sit at the back.”

“All I have is this,” I said, showing her the torn photograph I had found on Peter’s boat. Look, my father, Eamonn Loy, and John Dawson.”

The blood seemed literally to drain from Barbara’s face. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

“Are you all right?” I said. “I didn’t mean to give you a fright.”

“It’s all right, child,” she said, her voice suddenly very low and deliberate. “It’s just such a land, seeing your poor father like that, after all these years.”

“I guess it must be thirty-five, forty years ago,” I said. “Somebody’s wedding, maybe?”

But Barbara had looked away, and was staring out the window. The male and female apple trees stood in the center of the unkempt back garden, their hard green fruit showing no sign of ripeness.

“There’s something written on the back,” I said, turning the photo over and showing her. “See?”

ma Courtney
3459.

“You don’t know who that might have been, Barbara, do you? Someone called Courtney? From the old days?”

Barbara shook her head, her lips set.

“I flung that past as far from me as I could, Edward,” she said. “Haven’t kept so much as a photograph. Don’t like to see anything that reminds me. I date my life from the year John built the bungalows over on Rathdown Road and we moved up to Bayview Heights.”

My mother had always tracked my father’s decline from the moment the Dawsons moved to Bayview Heights: suddenly, John Dawson had outpaced him. Bayview Heights was considered very much more the thing than Quarry Fields, and with each passing year, the Dawson construction business grew and grew until finally, to crown their triumphal ascent, John and Barbara bought a Victorian mansion in extensive grounds at the top of Castlehill. When John Dawson put up the money for my father to open a garage, it was viewed by everyone as an act of loyalty, a tribute to where they had come from. My father had been drinking heavily for years, and working fitfully, and had it not been for my mother’s job behind the perfume counter in Arnotts, the family would have gone under. The garage represented one last chance for my father, but as so often with people who need one last chance, he probably didn’t deserve it, certainly hadn’t prepared for it, and blew it comprehensively and, it seemed, willfully. I put the photograph back in my pocket,

Barbara was fumbling with her purse. She took a brown envelope from it and thrust it at me.

“My family thanks you,” she said, her eyes full of tears, “and I thank you.”

I took the envelope. Inside, there was a wedge of hundred-euro notes.

“What’s this for? I can’t take this,” I said.

“For all you did, Edward,” Barbara said. “You’ve been a great help to Linda.”

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t find Peter. I don’t know who murdered him.”

“If it was murder.”

“If it was murder? He was shot twice, Barbara. What are you saying?”

“The police said it could be suicide.”

“The police what? Detective Donnelly said a suicide can shoot himself twice?” I said.

“Superintendent Casey said it was perfectly possible. The trigger finger can go into spasm. They’re waiting for the pathologist to complete the postmortem.”

“And how did his body get onto the boat? It wasn’t there yesterday, I searched it myself. Someone must have moved it there after he was dead.”

Barbara shook her head, then raised her eyes to heaven, as if that was one of those mysteries only God Himself could solve.

“Why would Peter commit suicide?”

“Living in the shadow of a great man like his father,” Barbara said, her voice tremulous, her tone solemn and elegaic. “Every passing day, the boy would feel increasingly diminished by comparison. And then of course poor Linda couldn’t have children. So all in all…”

All in all, what? It’s what he would have wanted? It’s better this way? Barbara sounded as if she were talking about another mother’s son entirely, like a churchyard ghoul tying a neighborhood tragedy up in cod-psychological ribbons and bows. Maybe it was shock, or grief shackled by the steeliest of self-control, or that she did consider her son an inferior manifestation of his father, who was better off dead by his own hand. Whatever it was, it was scaring the hell out of me.

“I don’t know what the details of the postmortem were, Barbara,” I said. “But when I spoke to D.S. Donnelly and D.I. Reed, they were treating it very much as a murder inquiry.”

Barbara smiled tolerantly.

“Yes, well, Superintendent Casey…” she purred, as if seniority of rank were the only deciding factor. “Of course, we may never know exactly what the circumstances were. There may have been any amount of drunken carrying-on and shenanigans in the run-up. But no matter. I believe my poor boy took his own life.”

She nodded tragically, clutched her purse in both hands and walked out into the hall.

I followed her to the front door and tried to return the money she had given me.

“Barbara, I can’t take this money,” I said. “It’s way too much. Besides, Linda has already paid me for the work I did.”

“It’s only money,” she said, the beloved catchphrase of those who never have to worry about it. She looked around at the shabby, damp-stained walls, the grimy wallpaper, the chipped and rotting window jambs and the threadbare rugs, then turned her gaze on me, all of a sudden not bothering to disguise her contempt.

“Course, you were going to make a show of us all, weren’t you?” Barbara said, a glint of malice in her smiling eyes. “A doctor, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“A doctor, indeed. And look at you now. The cut of you! You might have made Daphne proud, God rest her. And sent the few bob back to put manners on the house. Crumbling around her, it’s a ruin so it is.”

Her teeth were bared, her smile a lurid mask, her trim, neat body shaking with passion.

“Gonna make a show of us all, weren’t you? And now look at you! Well, I don’t doubt you’ll find some use for that money. I’m only sad I didn’t give it to Daphne herself. Course, she wouldn’t have accepted it. Too proud, you see. Pride, yes, pride.”

Her voice faltered. She brought the aubergine handkerchief to her bowed face and stood in the doorway, making sobbing sounds. I couldn’t tell whether Barbara was on the level or faking, but her words had cut deep; the condition of my mother’s house had filled me with shame the moment I saw it; I should have helped her, and I hadn’t.

Barbara dabbed her face. She was muttering something under her breath; it had the rhythm of prayer without the serenity; for all her willed composure, all her pantomimed gestures, grief was animating every breath she drew. How could it not?

“How is Linda?” I asked.

“In a terrible state, the poor child. She’s going to stay with us for a while. She’s been through so much, and of course, she’s extremely vulnerable,” Barbara said. “It’s hard not to feel she’s been taken advantage of. Especially recently.”