The Wrong Kind of Blood (19 page)

“Delivery for you,” I grunted, head down, leading with the crate. He turned his melancholy face away, stood to one side and let me through. To my left lay slipways and moorings, to my right a boathouse. I went straight on toward what looked like the changing rooms and showers, made a show of easing the crate down to the ground and turned around. The old man had vanished, and there was no one else to be seen. Just inside the door of the changing rooms there was a soft-drinks vending machine. I slid the crate in against it and headed toward the slipways.

Seafield Harbour looked like it had just run a very successful closing-down sale: apart from a few bulky cabin cruisers and a couple of ramshackle old trawlers, there wasn’t a boat within its walls. The sun was at its height now, all haze burned away; the bay was a blue and white mosaic of sails and sea and spray; varnished by the sun, it glittered like crystal. The old man with the nautical beard patrolled the slipways and inspected the vacant moorings, his arms folded behind his back. He didn’t have much in the way of company; on the terrace above us, a party of orange-faced blondes with skinny arms and false red nails sucked prawns and crayfish from their shells and swilled white wine; there was no one else about. I went over to the old man and asked him if he’d seen Colm the boatman that day. His thin face looked bewildered with grief, and I thought he was going to start crying. Instead, he peered through his binoculars and then pointed toward the pier, which was thronged with people. I followed the line of his arm but couldn’t make anything out much beyond an old Victorian shelter with a pale blue iron roof, so he passed me the binoculars. With them, I was able to discern Colm sitting on a pale blue bench in the shelter. He was smoking a cigarette and talking on a mobile phone. He looked at his watch like he was waiting for someone. I gave the old man back his binoculars. He nodded, and gave a slight bow, and resumed his patrolling, his lost eyes casting regular trawls across the lapping surface of the water.

I turned to go, and gave a start; Cyril Lampkin was standing behind me, an anxious smile on his plump pink face. He was wearing a fawn cotton drill safari suit and a mustard-colored ascot, and looked, as before, like he was costumed for the stage. But he was playing a different part from the first time I met him.

“Mr. Loy. The Royal Seafield extends its regrets… deepest sympathy and support for the work you have done,” he said, or garbled, in an unctuous, priest-in-the-parlor kind of tone. “If we had any inkling that day of what was to happen, or had just happened… that such a thing should occur at all… not in the collective memory of the Royal Seafield… any way I can now be of assistance to you or indeed to the Dawson family… this very sad time…” he continued, punctuating his broken phrases with a great deal of plaintive simpering and batting of his carrot-colored eyelashes.

“Where’s Peter’s boat?” I said.

“In the boathouse. Once the Guards had finished their… technical inspection, we thought it best to… withdraw it from sight… always the danger of ghouls… prurient interest…”

“Who’s that?” I said, pointing at the old man in the royal blue uniform, who had now come to rest at the waterline, hunkered down by the vacant moorings, staring out to sea.

Cyril Lampkin’s face instantly retrieved the combination of superciliousness and martyrdom that was native to it; he sneered and rolled his eyes at the same time.

“He’s known as the Ghost Captain. He’s the longest-serving member, can’t get rid of him now. You’d have thought he’d get over it after all these years. But if anything, it seems to have become more real to him. Still, at least he only comes around once a year now, on the anniversary.”

“The anniversary of what?”

“His brother drowned. Fell overboard. Both drunk, I think, late at night, shouldn’t have been out at all. Twins, it was their twenty-first birthday, they’d been given the boat as a gift. Just after the war, they’d both been Royal Navy. One was too drunk to swim, and drowned, the other was too drunk to save him, and survived. Mummy told me all about it. How he was jealous of his brother’s fiancée, so he pushed him overboard, then impersonated his twin to marry the girl. And then she found out, and a year later, to the day, she took the boat out at high tide, to search for her lost love, Mummy said. Neither body was ever recovered. The boat vanished too. Not so much as driftwood.”

“So he comes here every year to… what?”

“He used to come here every
day.
But yes, to what? To search for them? Is it remorse, or jealousy that drives him? Because after all, he’s alone, and they are reunited in death. And what about the binoculars? Does he really believe he’ll spot them on the horizon, sailing home together, brother and wife come to forgive him?”

Lampkin’s tone was hushed and tremulous, as if he were reciting the lyrics of his favorite aria.

“And if he did, what would he do? Welcome them, or murder them again?”

“Don’t say murder, Mr. Loy. There were never any prosecutions. And Mummy is such a gossip, she and her sewing circle may have made most of it up. But I suppose every great institution should have a dark secret, and the Ghost Captain is ours.”

“He certainly seems haunted by it,” I said.

“Yes. Well. It’s all very sad, I suppose.”

Cyril Lampkin shook his head abruptly, as if sadness was a luxury busy people simply couldn’t afford. The orange-faced blondes shrieked like a squall of gulls, their shrill laughter scrawling across the afternoon sky like nails against a blackboard. The Ghost Captain looked up at them in sudden fright, then turned back to his solitary vigil, his face staring down into the water now. I wondered whose face he saw reflected back at him, his brother’s or his own. Maybe he couldn’t remember which one he was anymore.

Colm the boatman’s name was Colm Hyland, I learned from Cyril Lampkin. He was still in the pale blue shelter on Seafield Pier when I left the yacht club. By the time I reached the pier, he had gone, but he hadn’t gone far. I climbed the wall that ran along the upper pier and spotted him walking toward the road. I followed, closing the distance between us to about fifteen yards. At first I thought he was going back to work, but he continued on past the Royal Seafield for maybe a quarter of a mile and turned right down toward the sea, crossing the railway bridge and descending to the entrance for the new ferry terminal, a sleek plate glass structure I had never seen before. Taking another right turn, he cut down a lane to a deserted road that had patches of grass and weeds growing in its cracks. A disused railway line lay to one side, behind a low granite wall; beyond the tracks stood a higher wall; beyond that, the harbor. Up ahead by the west pier, I could see the flat-roofed semicircular ferry-house I remembered from years before, and the derelict terminal buildings stretching out on the dock behind it. A white van was parked outside, and as Hyland approached it, two men got out. One of them was carrying two full shopping bags and a two-liter plastic bottle of water. I vaulted the low wall and watched from the overgrown track as the three men knocked on the door of the ferry-house. A security guard in a navy uniform opened the door and let the men in. I moved on down the warped and mangled track, working my way between bramble and nettle, through clumps of ferns and crackling gorse, until I was at the mouth to a blocked-up tunnel: the ferry-bound train used to run the passengers right down to the old terminal itself. I was about twenty yards from the ferry-house door now. I hunkered down behind the wall, batted some wasps away and settled in to wait. It didn’t take long; maybe fifteen minutes later, Hyland emerged with the two men. I thought I recognized one of the men by his blue baseball cap; then he turned around and I could see his face was bruised and his nose heavily bandaged. It was one of Podge Halligan’s crew; the last time I’d seen him was in Hennessy’s, when I broke his nose and he suggested that they should do me in the car park.

Hyland got in the van with Blue Cap and the other man, who no longer had his bags or the water. The white van pulled away. I waited a few minutes, then dropped to the ground and made my way to the ferry-house door. When the security guard appeared, I asked him was this where I could get a boat to Holyhead. He directed me to the new ferry terminal. I thanked him, and walked back the way I came. The insignia on his uniform was the same as on the security gates that enclosed Linda Dawson’s house: George Halligan’s company, Immunicate.

If you know what you’re doing, it’s not too difficult to work your way through the pine forest on the coast side of Castlehill, climb the hill of scrub and gorse and scale the relatively brief stretch of quarry that leads up to Linda Dawson’s house. It’s not as if you have to climb the whole thing, after all, just the last fifty feet. You’d probably be better off with climbing boots, a hammer and some pegs for the quarry ascent itself, but if you find yourself halfway up without the gear, it may be easier to keep climbing than to come back down. And there are enough footholds and handholds in the cliff face to do it too, although you might want to know where they are in advance, rather than casting around for them when you’re two hundred feet off the ground. Still, once you make it up, there’s a barbed wire fence that isn’t much of a trial, provided you haven’t cut or callused your hands too badly on the climb. There’s just another couple of hundred hardscrabble feet to go, and then if you can force your way through a hedge that’s mostly hawthorn and holly, though there is a bit of laurel if you can find it, you’re in Linda Dawson’s back garden and you haven’t breached the security system and Immunicate don’t know you’re there.

Of course, being in the back garden isn’t much use when it’s Peter Dawson’s study you need, and even if you can pick a lock or smash a window to get in, chances are you’ll set the house alarm off, so you won’t have too much time. But maybe you won’t need too much: your police source has confirmed that Peter Dawson’s computer was left unexamined, so it’s the work of minutes to gather up the G4’s white globe-shaped CPU, find a spare set of car keys hanging on the hook in the kitchen and a security gate keypad in the hall cupboard and be out of sight by the time the Immunicate van arrives, even managing to avoid being spotted by Linda’s pudgy, sunburned neighbor as you go.

Then you just want to keep out of sight until the van leaves, open the gates and drive Linda’s red Audi convertible quickly up the hill. The van is out of sight by now, of course, but you play your hunch — you’re always playing hunches, that’s the business you’re in, and you’ll stay in business provided they pay off every now and then — and this time, it pays off, because you get to the top of Castlehill just in time to see the Immunicate van disappear behind the great black metal gates to John and Barbara Dawson’s house.

THE WORST OF A CATHOLIC FUNERAL ISN’T THE DAY
itself, it’s the night before, the removal of the remains; grief that has been a private wound goes on display for the first time; the wound is still raw, and there’s no telling what the air will do to it. When I stood by my mother’s coffin in this church a few days ago, that line in the Nicene Creed about “the living and the dead” kept repeating in my brain, like it was the only distinction that mattered anymore, and the air and light rushed round my head like I was adrift on a storm-tossed sea.

Now Linda Dawson stood by her husband’s coffin, adrift in her own storm; her color was high, and when I filed past the front pew, she looked like she’d been sedated; as I mumbled my condolences, she stared at me without a flicker of recognition. Barbara Dawson thanked me for coming; her eyes seemed engorged, her teeth had aubergine lipstick stains on them; she looked more than half mad. John Dawson, in navy suit and crisp white shirt, gripped my forearm with a liver-spotted hand; his rose-mottled cheeks were moist; his mouth fell open in apparent delight.

“Edward Loy,” he said, as if I were the very man he needed to see. “Edward Loy,” he said again, and repeated my name until his wife took his hand back and gently nudged my elbow to move me on. I looked back to see Linda looking in my direction; the blankness in her eyes hadn’t altered, but I felt at least she knew I was there.

The center aisle was choked with people queuing to pay their respects: locals, many of whom had been at my mother’s funeral, but also a bunch of very well-dressed high-end types I assumed were the golden circle of developers and builders, and maybe more than a handful of rubberneckers come to catch a glimpse of the famously reclusive John Dawson. He had looked older than his years, I thought, old in a way that has little to do with years: his clothes hung from his bones, his brow was heavily ridged, his small eyes looked exhausted, their light nearly expired. Maybe he was ill, or maybe life hadn’t delivered what it had promised; either way, no one who knew John Dawson all those years ago would have expected him to end up looking like this.

I waited outside the church until the family appeared, but it was pointless; Barbara Dawson wasted no time in bundling Linda into the back of a black limousine. John Dawson, head now covered by a black fedora, looked around him blankly; before anyone thought to approach him, Barbara was by his side, guiding him into the safety of the car. She followed him, and the doors sealed them in; the tinted windows added to the appearance of perfect darkness; the car waited until the hearse moved off, then it followed silently, a black shadow in the glare.

I met Dave Donnelly in the churchyard and suggested a pint in Hennessy’s.

“That’d look good, wouldn’t it? And a joint round the back after,” he said, and made a noise that sounded like laughter, but not very much.

“We need to talk, Dave. Now.”

“I’ll see you in the Gut in ten minutes, all right?” Dave said, and strode off.

The Gut had been our childhood’s secret place: three great oaks marked its corners, forming a great triangular riot of bramble and thistle, of hawthorn, fern and marauding fungus, bounded by the railway tracks on one side and the garden walls of newly built housing estates on the other two. You had to cram in through a hole in a hedge to get there, or brave the shards of glass embedded in the wall that ran by the railway, but once you were in, anything could happen. First cigarettes, first beers, first joints, first kisses, too many fights to count; Tommy Owens and I lost our virginity here when we were fourteen to two hard-faced Seafield girls who warned us afterward that if we told anyone, their brothers’d come up and cut our balls off, which, combined with the joylessness of the event itself, made us feel like we’d lost our virginity but not really; I later found out that that’s how it goes for pretty much everyone, even if you don’t do it against the stump of a tree. Charlie Halpin’s brother hanged himself from the oldest of the three oaks when he was seventeen, and Marko Henderson’s brother Barreller did something involving masks and small children, the details of which I was never sure about, but which ended up with him doing five years in jail; when Tommy came to L.A., he’d just been to Barreller’s funeral; Barreller soaked himself in petrol and lit a match. Where? In the Gut, of course. Tommy told me it was called the Gut because it was a perfect midpoint between Castlehill and the sea. And because all the poisons in the area ran through here, waiting to be converted or destroyed, although I think that was Tommy’s own private interpretation.