The Wrong Kind of Blood (16 page)

The top one — a tabloid — said deep pockets of drowned pol. The story below it suggested, on the basis of “Garda sources,” that a substantial amount of cash had been found, wrapped in bin liners and taped to MacLiam’s body, that this “could well have been a corrupt payment” (no evidence was adduced for this), and that as a result the reputation of MacLiam as the incorruptible “Councillor who Cares” lay in tatters. The next tabloid led with dead pol’s drug riddle. It quoted sources “close to senior Gardaí” and claimed MacLiam had enough heroin in his bloodstream to have caused an overdose. The remaining papers carried versions of one or other story. I looked at Aileen Williamson and waited for her to speak. She looked me in the eye, as if taking my measure, then spoke without waver.

“Joseph had an addictive personality, Mr. Loy. Most people use the term as an excuse for weakness. But Joseph wasn’t weak. When I met him, he was an alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler. But he conquered those addictions. We married, we had a family. With my encouragement, he went into politics. I was ashamed of what he had been, but so proud of what he became. And my pride outweighed my shame. I believed in him, you see. I still do.”

She smiled nervously at me, as if begging my indulgence for her sin of pride. I wondered if her husband’s problems had been as serious as she claimed before he met her. Faced with such an intense and searching degree of regard from their wives, many men would take steps, secret or otherwise, to prove themselves unworthy of it.

The Filipina maid appeared with a tray of coffee and scones. She set it on the table and Aileen Williamson dismissed her with a quick smile and poured me a cup. I refused a scone; she poured half a cup of coffee for herself and continued talking.

“It’s quite possible Joseph had relapsed. We’re only human, after all,” she said, as if this was a regrettable but transitional state of affairs. “The one thing I can’t and won’t bear is any suggestion that he might have taken a bribe. That for me is completely unacceptable.”

Ah yes, Jack Parland’s daughter. The rectitude of rich men, the morality of money. All men are weak — Jack Parland was on his third wife twenty years ago, when his daughter was barely out of her teens — but money is strong, and demands strength in return.

“Do you think we can believe this overdose story, Mr. Loy?”

“I can find out,” I said. “Do you think it’s believable? It’s not unusual for a middle-aged family man to take drugs, but heroin is rarely his first choice.”

“Joseph — not long after the birth of our third child, Joseph was in a state of… well, I suppose you might say he had some kind of nervous collapse. I tried to snap him out of it, but he was extremely stubborn when he wanted to be. So I arranged for him to take a year out. I fund-raise for a Catholic aid agency, and Joseph went on one of their missions to Southeast Asia.”

“Southeast Asia.”

“Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. Thailand.”

“You think he developed a habit while he was out there?”

“I didn’t want to think it. But something in him had… relaxed. At first, I thought it was just a newfound calm. And he got caught up in the whole world of local politics — he said he wanted to make a difference — and everything seemed back to normal. Better than normal.”

“But?”

“But there was something about him — a look in his eyes, an attitude, as if nothing really mattered. As if, deep down, life were one big joke.”

“I’d have thought, if you were a local councillor with people pestering you about garbage disposal and broken streetlights, you’d need a sense of humor.”

“It’s serious work, Mr. Loy. Local politicians are the people’s direct connection to power — especially for those who have little else in the way of wealth or status. And Joseph took it seriously.”

“But nonetheless, you suspected him of being on heroin?”

“I knew he wasn’t drinking. My mother was alcoholic, and you develop a radar for it in other people. But I worried that he was on
something.
And I know that, if one’s life is not lived hand to mouth, a heroin habit can be tended for years.”

“What about gambling?”

“He didn’t have the money. A councillor’s salary is a pittance, six or seven thousand a year. I gave Joseph an allowance, of course, but it wasn’t enough to gamble, at least, not on the scale he had been used to.”

“Maybe he got fed up having to make do with an
allowance
from his wife. Maybe he wanted some money of his own. I have to tell you, though, that your husband was one of several councillors who were almost certainly being targeted by a land developer—”

“And I tell you, any hint of financial corruption on my husband’s part is simply unthinkable!”

Her voice had risen to a shout. She clasped her hands together and bowed her head. I couldn’t tell if she was praying or crying. When she looked up, her eyes were wet.

“My father built a business — an empire, some say — from nothing. But all along, there were the whispers, that he greased the right palms, took bribes here, gave them out there. That he dodged tax, and fiddled expenses. Even that he fleeced shareholders. None of it was ever proved — because it wasn’t true — yet it stuck. People file him in their minds with the lads from the sixties and seventies, the smart boys in the mohair suits, the bunch of crooks who robbed us all blind with their secret land deals…”

I thought of the photograph of John Dawson with Jack Parland. There wasn’t much money in Ireland back then, so anyone who had managed to acquire some was both revered and despised, often by the same people. I saw a guy on the Venice boardwalk once selling T-shirts that read, “The rich are different from us — they get away with it.” No one was buying any. What if they got rich one day themselves? Who knows what they might have to get away with then? Time enough to get all moral about money when they had some. And maybe not even then.

“I should tell you that any money I have is now invested in Church-approved ethical funds,” she said. “And the greater part of the dividend — once the boys’ education is paid for — a great deal of our income goes to charity.”

So despite maintaining that Jack Parland had come about his fortune honestly, his daughter still felt the need to give much of his money away — and to launder the rest, spiritually speaking. And to justify it all to me. And to clear her dead husband of the kind of allegations most people believed true of her father.

Aileen Williamson looked down at the table.

“I suppose you think it strange, that a wife would rather her husband was on heroin than that he had taken a bribe,” she said quietly.

“I think I understand,” I said.

“But you don’t approve?”

“I’m not in the approval business, Mrs. Williamson. Understanding is hard enough, don’t you think?”

“It’s important to be able to believe in people, Mr. Loy.”

“Important not to believe in them too much though. They’re only people, after all.”

She touched the crucifix that hung around her neck, rubbed it between fingers and thumb.

“You’re not religious, Mr. Loy,” she said.

“Not at the moment,” I said. “But if I needed to believe in something, I’d believe in God.”

“Well, I suppose that’s a start.”

“After all, He can’t let you down if he doesn’t exist.”

She shook her head and looked away, then looked back at me as if she had never seen me before. Suddenly she was all business.

“You’ll need these,” she said, and pushed a set of keys across the table. “The keys to Joseph’s flat.”

“He didn’t live here?” I said.

“Of course he did. But he needed a residence within the Seafield Council area. So I bought him a flat in one of the old houses on Victoria Terrace. The Guards have been through it, but I don’t know if they found anything. Or if they even knew what to look for.”

“Did your husband ever mention Peter Dawson?”

“He spoke about Dawson Construction.”

“He didn’t like them.”

“Joseph was antidevelopment. He didn’t like builders in general.”

“Where are people supposed to live?”

“Everyone else thinks like that. Joseph was an idealist. He wanted everything that was built to be beautiful. He stuck to his principles. He was his own man.”

She was building him a mausoleum. I interrupted the eulogy to ask for a check. She balked at the price, and tried to bring it down. I wouldn’t haggle, and eventually she gave in. The rich aren’t so different after all, at least, not from each other.

“One last thing,” I said. “I understand your father is a newspaper proprietor.”

“He owns or controls just under half the press in the country,” she said, not without a flash of pride.

“I don’t understand then — couldn’t you get him to tell his editors to go easy, play the story down, cut you a break?”

“Jack Parland didn’t get where he is by cutting people breaks.”

“Even for his own family?”

“Especially for his own family. I’m the only one of seven children living in this country, the rest couldn’t stand being near him. Besides, he didn’t like Joseph. He never really forgave me for marrying him. I was supposed to stay by his side. Daddy’s best girl all my life.”

Her lips twisted in a thin smile that colored her pale cheeks; her blue eyes flickered brightly with a fierce emotion I couldn’t quite discern; somewhere between shame and pride, anger and grief; whatever it was, it had nothing to do with smiling.

Out on the street, I got a call on my mobile from Dave Donnelly.

“What do you need, Ed?”

“For now, Peter Dawson’s bank details and phone records.”

“You’ve got them.”

“And anything you get on ballistics, forensic reports, so on.”

“I’ll do my best. They won’t come to me, but… I have my sources.”

“Is D.I. Reed—”

“D.I. Reed is playing politics with Superintendent Casey. D.I. Reed is not going out on a limb.”

“Explain something to me, Dave. Tommy Owens said Podge Halligan gave him the gun after the shots were fired. Surely that puts the Halligans in the frame?”

“Casey will do anything to avoid putting the Dawsons and the Halligans in the same frame. That’s just not gonna happen. On top of which, the gun has conveniently disappeared.”

“The gun has what? The Glock 17?”

“Somewhere within the Technical Bureau in the Phoenix Park. Ballistics were done with it, and it was bagged and tagged. Then it just vanished into thin air.”

There was a long silence. Then Dave spoke, his voice a cracked, throaty rumble.

“I can’t just keep looking the other way, Ed. If I do… I’m as bad as they are.”

“MOVE AND YOU’RE DEAD.”

It had been years since someone had pulled a knife on me, but it hadn’t gotten to be any more fun in the meantime. I had just let myself into Joseph Williamson’s flat and closed the door behind me when I felt the point of a blade jab at the left side of my throat.

“The fuck are you?”

A reedy, nasal Dublin accent. I said nothing.

“Cat got your tongue? The fuck are you, bud?”

He was standing to my left, along the wall, his arm outstretched. The hand that held the knife was shaking. The serrated edge had already snagged my Adam’s apple. It cut me again beneath my chin. I felt blood trickle into the fold above my collarbone. Coats hanging on the back of the door brushed against my ears and the back of my neck.

“Shaves you close, then closer still. Gonna answer me? Or’d you prefer to bleed all over your nice white shirt?”

His voice was strained, almost hysterical. He laughed, a high-pitched, grating sound, like a drill hitting metal. I feinted right and glanced quickly at him — a blur of navy sportswear, greasy cropped hair and gray skin. He jolted back as if in fear, then lunged forward with the blade again. His arm was at full extension from his shoulder. I braced myself back against the door, among the coats, and as the knife flashed past my face, I grabbed his forearm at wrist and elbow and jammed it up as hard as I could against the heavy brass coat hook. He screamed and tried to jab the knife back toward me, but I swung myself left into him, twisted his arm around and smashed it up into the hook again. There was a crack that sounded like wood smashing, then another, more prolonged scream, and the knife went skittering across the tiled floor. I followed the knife, pocketed it, then turned to see how its owner was faring. I thought the coat hook had come off its fitting, but it was still solid in the old door; the sound of smashing wood had been breaking bone; he crumpled to the floor, supporting his right arm with his left, whimpering in pain. I couldn’t remember which bone was the radius and which the ulna, but the broken edges of one of them pressed red raw against the needle-pocked flesh of his forearm.

“You broke me fuckin’ arm! You broke me fuckin’ arm!”

A pool of urine seeped out beneath him and spread clear on the black-and-white-tiled floor. Tears rolled down his heroin cheekbones, blood collected in his charcoal smear of mustache, drool glistened on his chin. Had I seen him before, or had I just marked his type, one among ten thousand Dublin smackheads and small-time hoods?

“There was no need to break me fuckin’ arm. I wouldn’ve cut you.”

“You did cut me though.”

I ran the back of my hand across my throat. It came away smeared in blood.

“Just scratches, man. You’d do worse to yourself shavin’, sure.”

He was right. He hadn’t planned to stab me. But if he had, well, junkie’s defense, he didn’t mean anything. As long as he was using, he never would.

“You gave me a fright, is all. I just wanted to know your name.”

“My name is Edward Loy,” I said.

Recognition drifted slowly across his streaming, bloodshot eyes.

“I know you. You’re the smart cunt that had a go at Podge, aren’t you? Ended on your knees, puking your ring up. Didn’ look so fuckin’ smart then, did you?”

I recognized him too; not from Hennessy’s, although he must’ve been there, but with his family, weaving across the Seafront Plaza in Seafield, shouting obscenities into a mobile phone.

“About as smart as you look now. What are you doing here? You one of Podge Halligan’s little friends?”