The Wrong Kind of Blood (18 page)

By the time she got back, I had counted the money in the envelope. Barbara Dawson had been anxious to buy something from me: my silence, my assent to a verdict of suicide on her son, my agreeing to leave Linda alone, whatever; so anxious she’d been willing to pay me twenty grand. Even if you can afford it, that’s still a lot of money.

The receptionist sat down hard behind her desk, her face flushed, her head down, her breath coming in steady gasps. There was a rustle of paper, and her hand went to her mouth.

“Top floor, through the glass doors, right down the corridor to the door at the end,” she said, her muffled words rising gradually from the oblivion of chocolate to which she had returned.

In the elevator, I could hear the rumble and clang from the builders below. I thought of the body that had been buried down there for twenty years, the concrete corpse: could it be my father? The timing fit, but the idea wouldn’t take: he was in Australia, with a completely new family; he was living rough on the streets of London; he was fixing engines in a garage in Brazil. It was only because I was back in Dublin that I expected him to turn up; this was where I had left him, after all, not long after he left me. But he could be anywhere, and he probably was alive; it was morbid and sentimental to imagine otherwise.

At a desk outside James Kearney’s office sat a slim sixty-something woman dressed in beige with a terra-cotta complexion and a blow-dried orb of pearl-tinted hair. As I approached she rose and said, “Mr. Parland?”

I didn’t contradict her. She fixed me with a gleam of efficient charm, introduced herself as Mrs. McEvoy and, ignoring the supplicants waiting on the two charcoal couches that flanked her desk, ushered me straight into Kearney’s office, announced me as “Mr. Parland,” and swished briskly out in a cloud of Issey Miyake.

If you couldn’t be a millionaire, it seemed like the next best thing was to become the county planning officer, at least to judge by the view. From James Kearney’s office you could see past Seafield Harbour to the city, south along the coast all the way to Castlehill, and west across half the county to the mountains, and all over, as the sun burned off the last of the gray, the great cranes stood black against the sky: one here, three there, half a dozen above the largest sites, as far as the eye could see and farther, the cranes swooped and swung and loomed, hovered and turned and rose, until the ground beneath their feet seemed provisional, subject to their imperious whim. It was as if Dublin had become a city of cranes; like great steel titans of the property boom, they delved on the horizon, churning up the city’s past and concreting it over so some unknown but inevitable future could be built, some enticing, elusive dream of the new.

James Kearney dressed like a national school teacher from the 1950s, in a tattersall shirt, herringbone jacket, cavalry twill trousers, polished brown brogues and bottle green knit tie. His only concession to the weather was that shirt and jacket were of lighter material than the brushed cotton and tweed they impersonated; otherwise, he looked ready to thrust a shovelful of coal into a classroom stove. He was a tall man with a thin face stretched tight over high bones; his pale hair was side-parted and fell lightly across his forehead, just as it must have done when he was eleven. He gave my hand a damp, loose grip, extended his sympathies on my sad loss and motioned for me to sit at a circular glass-topped table. He sat across from me and began unwrapping a package of sandwiches he had taken from a Tupperware box.

“Lunch hour. I’d offer you one, but I’ve only sufficent for myself,” he said in a careful, peevish voice, biting into a thick wholemeal wedge filled with ham and egg mayonnaise. “Prices have gone very dear these days. Better to make your own. Safer too.”

He unscrewed the top of a thermos flask and poured out a cup of steaming brown liquid.

“You might have a cup of tea — if we could find another cup.”

“I’m all right, thanks,” I said.

He looked relieved at this, and put the top back on the flask.

“Now, Mr. Parland,” he said, “just what is it I can do for you?”

That was the question I was still struggling to find an answer to. Never mind. When in doubt, barge straight in and give things a shake.

“We know that the late Peter Dawson was lobbying for a change in the zoning status of Castlehill Golf Club. We know he approached many councillors in the hope of securing their votes for the designation change. We know that he was not above offering donations to secure those votes to any councillor who showed willing. And we know that the last person on earth who would ordinarily have accepted such a bribe was Joseph Williamson. Yet the Guards claim to have found a substantial cash sum on his body. A sum the press are now describing as a bribe.”

James Kearney chewed his sandwich, washed it down with a mouthful of tea and, without lifting his gaze from the surface of the table, said, “When you say ‘we,’ who else, exactly, do you mean?”

“The councillor’s widow. Mrs. Williamson.”

“Ah. Yes. Go on.”

I took the brown envelope of cash out of my breast pocket and set it on the table. Kearney’s eyes locked onto it instantly.

“Now, I’m sure we’re both realists. We know how wheels need to be greased in order to get things to happen. It’s how the world works, everyone does it, and there’s no need to get rigid about it. You might think the late councillor was something of a moral grandstander. But that was who he was, that was who Aileen married, that’s how she wants him to be remembered. Now I want you to level with me — and I know you’ll know, everyone has told me, there isn’t much that gets past Jim Kearney — we know that Councillors O’Driscoll and Wall accepted so-called corrupt payments from Dawson — did Joe Williamson take one too? Because if he didn’t, we’d be anxious to return the money to its rightful owner.”

I picked up the envelope, opened it so that the stack of notes were visible and tapped it against the palm of my hand.

“Obviously this isn’t the identical money, the Guards are holding on to that as evidence. But it’s the equivalent, twenty grand in cash. If the family could learn that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for how that money came to be on the body, it would be a great strain lifted.”

Kearney shifted in his chair. His remaining sandwiches lay forgotten, and a film of grease rippled across the surface of his cup of tea. His tongue slid between his parted lips as he gazed at the brown envelope, his eyes widening in a leer of avarice.

“Well,” he said, wresting his eyes away from the money, “we all know Jack Parland of course, by reputation at any rate. Helped set this country on its feet. Cut through all the red tape that was holding us back. Man of vision. It’s not going too far to describe him as a great man. Yes, a great man.”

“I’m sure he believes he still is,” I said.

“Oh, he is for sure and certain. But you won’t find many to agree with me, I’m sorry to say, in these days where people expect business to be run like a, like a teddy bear’s picnic. Openness and transparency and codology! As if… you know the kind of men I’m talking about, of course you do, you’re your father’s son. If you bog these fellas down with rules and regulations and what have you, they’ll just tell you to shag off. And right they are.”

Kearney jammed a hunk of sandwich into his mouth. Egg spilled onto his chin as his eyes locked onto the brown envelope once more, and sweat glistened on his brow.

“Right they are! Pygmies do not make the rules for giants! Am I right, Mr. Parland?”

He was shouting now, frosting the glass tabletop with crumbs of ham and egg. I assured him that he was absolutely right. I had a flash of Kearney and myself as the pygmies, high above the city, with the giant cranes advancing, angry and baying for blood. Kearney nodded in agreement with himself, drained his mug of tea, replaced the cap on top of his flask and cleared his throat.

“Now, about this money. I did, in fact, in…
point
of fact, have a number of financial dealings myself with Councillor MacLiam.”

“You did?”

“Indeed and I did. He recommended a, several times to me indeed, a, how do you put it, an ethical investment fund, something his wife dealt in, and I asked him if he was willing to invest a sum of money… on my behalf.”

“A sum of money?”

I wondered if he’d try for the whole twenty.

“Yes, fif — In fact, twenty thousand was the sum.”

A falter, but he made it. Rory Dagg had been right.

“It seems a very large amount to have given him in cash.”

Kearney’s eyes flickered with suspicion, and he stared at me through a cloud of it. I’d shown an unhealthy sympathy with the pygmies’ side of the argument.

The telephone rang. He crossed the room to his desk and took the call with his back to me. He listened for a while, then said: “Thank you, as ever, Mrs. McEvoy,” and hung up. When he turned around, he looked more like a national schoolteacher than ever before, the kind who was looking for someone to make an example of.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “All the things we know, what? About golf clubs and councillors and Jack Parland and so on. But what we don’t know is, who the hell are you? Because Mrs. McEvoy informs me Jack Parland may have been married four times, but his only son is fifty-eight.”

I furrowed my brow, as if that might add the necessary years to it.

“And completely bald,” Kearney said. “And based in Hong Kong. So now. Maybe we’ll see what the Guards have to say about all this.”

I smiled and nodded my head in agreement.

“Good idea,” I said. “When in doubt, get the Guards in.”

I waved the envelope of cash in the air. Kearney held the telephone receiver for a moment longer, then replaced it.

“You misrepresented yourself.”

“I could be waiting out there yet if I hadn’t. Anyway, I never said I was Jack Parland’s son.”

“You were announced as Mr. Parland.”

“That was down to Mrs. McEvoy. With some assistance from the receptionist downstairs. I said I was working for Aileen Williamson on a family matter. Between them, they made two and two equal seven. Of course, my suggestion that there might be a sweetener involved might have helped to force their hands.”

Kearney sucked in his lips and crinkled his eyes up, like an animal shrinking from a sudden blast of light.

“A journalist, is it?” he said, investing “journalist” with an impressive degree of disdain.

I told him who I was, and that I was investigating Councillor MacLiam’s death on behalf of his widow.

“And what were you hoping? That you’d catch me out taking the money?”

“How do you think we were getting on with that?” I said. “You were in the process of remembering some kind of investment you asked the councillor to make for you.”

He took one last, lingering look at the cash, then shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“Don’t remember any such transaction. And I’m pretty certain I have no record of it anywhere.”

Kearney grinned at me suddenly. He was a piece of work, and easy with it.

“Don’t follow much of the rest of your chat either,” he said. “Corrupt payments to councillors, for example. And Peter Dawson being responsible for them. Far as the record goes, an outfit called Courtney Estates owns Castlehill Golf Club, and has applied for the rezoning. The named directors of Courtney Estates are Kenneth Courtney and Gemma Grand. So unless you can tell me how they might be connected to the Dawson family, I don’t know how what you’re saying even begins to add up.”

Kearney snapped the lid shut on his Tupperware sandwich box, picked up his flask, and brought them both back to his desk.

“All we have here is a young man, a self-styled ‘private detective,’ attempting to bribe a council official,” he announced to the space above my head, as if a barrage of television cameras had suddenly arrived in his office for an impromptu press conference. “Grief-stricken client, perhaps understandable they should stoop to desperate measures. In the circumstances, probably best to draw a veil over the whole shabby business.”

And James Kearney was seated behind his desk once more, uncapping a fountain pen, poring over planning applications, every inch the diligent public servant. Out past Seafield Harbour a crane turned suddenly, bisecting the sky with its dark steel limbs. A deafening barrage of drilling broke out in the basement, and the building seemed to shake to its foundations. James Kearney turned from his desk and examined a section of the map of the county that hung on the wall behind him, tapping at it with his pen, master of all he surveyed. Business as usual at the County Hall.

TO THE REAR OF THE ROYAL SEAFIELD YACHT CLUB, THE
dock area is enclosed by high walls topped with four feet of spiked iron fencing. Access is through a heavy metal security gate, which has a smart-card-and-keypad-code-style lock system, the details of which Linda Dawson hadn’t given me. I tried to get in when a couple of wet-haired yachtsmen came out, but they blocked my way and pushed the door closed. They were big wide-necked rugby-looking guys, so when one of them said, “If you don’t have your card” — he pronounced it
cord
— “go in around the front, yeah?” I pretended to do as I was told. But I didn’t want to go in around the front. I didn’t want any more grief from Cyril Lampkin, entertaining though it would undeniably have been. Most of all, I didn’t want Colm the boatman to know I was coming: Colm who had let the Guards think I might have shot Peter Dawson on his boat while he waited a few feet away, Colm whom I’d seen greeting George Halligan in Hennessy’s, Colm who, at very least, knew a hell of a lot more than he was telling.

A guy in blue-and-white-checked chef’s trousers and a white T-shirt was unloading kitchen supplies from the back of a navy Volkswagen Estate and lugging them through the entrance hall of the club: catering drums of ketchup and mayonnaise, giant slabs of cheese, jumbo cans of oil and tomatoes. Once he had vanished for a second time, I walked across and inspected the remaining contents of the boot. There were four crates of “sports” drinks, so I hoisted one on my shoulder, cut briskly back around the side and banged on the security door. A tall old man in royal blue naval-style trousers and matching shirt with a white beard that I guess you’d have to describe as nautical and a pair of field binoculars hanging around his neck opened the door. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes heavy-lidded and cloudy.