The Wrong Kind of Blood (29 page)

“Are you going back? We understand you came home to bury your mother.”

“Yes. I don’t know. I… a lot has happened since I got here.”

“You might say trouble follows you.”

You might say that all right. How could I disagree?

“That license doesn’t entitle you to work here. As a private investigator. Not in this
jurisdiction
.”

Geraghty, bullying now, the brow furrowed, the clown after-hours.

“No, I don’t suppose it does,” I said.

“So you admit, you’ve been working in this jurisdiction, accepting money as a private investigator, when you’ve no legal entitlement to do so,” Geraghty said.

“I admit it, yes.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Well — you tell me where I can get a license, and I’ll apply for one.”

“You should have thought of that before you started sticking your nose in, shouldn’t you?”

“I did.”

“What?”

“I did. I rang the Private Security Authority. They’re in charge of regulating the industry. Or at least, they will be, once they’ve reported back from all their committees and worked out how they want to go about it. For now, there’s no such thing as a license for a private investigator in this ‘jurisdiction.’ But sure, you knew that already, didn’t you?”

Geraghty stared at me a moment, the eyes all fire and menace, then he threw his head back and snorted like a bull, whether in laughter or rage it was impossible to say.

“What happened to your face?” said O’Sullivan.

“I tripped,” I said.

“You tripped?” said Geraghty, getting his leering face close into mine.

“That’s right. What happened to yours?” I said.

“Did you kill Linda Dawson?” he yelled.

“You know I didn’t.”

“You’re the great man for what I know and don’t know, aren’t you now?”

“How do we know you didn’t?” said O’Sullivan.

I looked at them across from me: Geraghty’s bloodshot gray eyes bulging, O’Sullivan’s tired blue eyes watching me with interest and full attention. I couldn’t tell whether I was a suspect or not.

“I had no motive, for a start. I had no way of getting away with it, number two. And number three…”

My voice faltered, maybe from emotion. Or maybe because I couldn’t believe what I’d actually been about to say. Was I really about to tell these cops that the reason I couldn’t have murdered Linda was because I loved her? How they’d laugh about that down at the CopBar. They’d include it for light relief in CopSchool. Because the prime suspect is always the husband, always the lover. And he always says, But I loved her. Geraghty was grinning. He wanted me to say it.

“And number three?” he leered.

“You were in a relationship with Linda Dawson?” said O’Sullivan.

“Yes, I… we were only at the beginning, really.”

Get out of there, Loy, there’d be time to mourn what might have been. Plenty of time.

“Did Linda drive herself or take a taxi?” I said. “From the hotel.”

Neither of them said anything.

“Because if she drove herself, then that’s your line of inquiry: Find her car. It’s a red Audi convertible, and it wasn’t there when I got to her house, and it wasn’t in the carport when I was leaving, so the chances are the killer drove away in it.”

“And how did the killer arrive, on foot?”

I shrugged.

“Hey, I don’t even have a license. You’re the guys in charge around here. In this ‘jurisdiction.’”

Geraghty’s eyes flared; O’Sullivan gave me a thin smile. He picked up my statement and tapped it on the table between us.

“We spoke to the night manager at the hotel, and to Mrs. Preston in Fagan’s Villas. They bear out your story. And of course, there’s the text message Linda sent you.”

“He still could have done it,” Geraghty said.

I looked from one to the other.

“You’re right,” I said to Geraghty. “I made it from the Burke house to Linda’s in four minutes. When I got there, she was dead. But she could still have been alive. And I could have strangled her as the police sirens were approaching. Technically, I’m a suspect. But it doesn’t look likely, does it?”

“What can you tell us about Peter Dawson’s death?” said O’Sullivan.

“Anything I find out, I tell Detective Sergeant Donnelly,” I said.

“Like shite you do,” Geraghty snapped.

We sat in silence for a while. I didn’t know whether Geraghty had taken against me, or whether it was an act, whether O’Sullivan’s pained expression was embarrassment at Geraghty’s carry-on or simply concentration on the job in hand. Then something occurred to me.

“Who phoned it in?” I said. “Do you know?”

“It was an anonymous call. No caller ID.”

“What time did the call come through? Was it before the text message was sent to me?”

Geraghty and O’Sullivan looked at each other.

“It was, wasn’t it? And if it was, that text wasn’t written by Linda at all. It was written by the killer. Because — and this has been bothering me — who could have known about the killing? There was no one else in the house. A neighbor might have complained about a car being driven too fast. But that’s not going to bring squad cars with their sirens wailing, is it? And she was strangled, so no gunshots or screams.”

Geraghty didn’t want to give up.

“That means you could have sent the text from Linda Dawson’s mobile to yours. Still puts you in the frame.”

“And then I rang the police anonymously, but waited around so they’d catch me? Whoever texted me was trying to set me up for the murder.”

“Or maybe you took a gamble,” Geraghty said. “Maybe you banked on getting away with it because it looked so like a frame-up. Maybe you were too fucking smart for your own good, Mr. Big Shot Private Dick from Los Angeles.”

I looked at him. He held my gaze and flung it right back at me, his face glowing with a grin in which derision and devilment mingled. He was good at this.

“I’m going to ask you to surrender your passport while our investigation is under way,” D.I. O’Sullivan said.

“Indefinitely?”

“I don’t mean the investigation to last indefinitely. We can review it when we’ve made some progress.”

“Sure, why not?” I said. D.S. Geraghty stood, smiling and stretching his arms, as if we’d just played a hard-fought game of squash and now it was done with and we were all friends again. Then he made a gun of his fist, index finger extended, and pointed it at me.

“Don’t forget, you’ll have to apply for a license to the Private Security Authority soon enough,” he said. “I’d say they’ll be very particular about who they’ll want in the private detective business. Very particular indeed.”

And using his middle finger to pull the trigger, he shot me in the face.

The custody officer gave me back my mobile. A uniformed Guard had driven the 122S from Linda’s house; now he was going to follow me home to collect my passport. We went out together to the car park. It was raining, and we ran to our cars. Dave Donnelly was sitting in the passenger seat of the Volvo. He handed me a brown A4 envelope.

“Phone records. All right, Ed?”

“I think so. Thanks. You? You don’t resent the outsiders barging all over your patch?”

“At least we’ll see some action now,” he said. “And Casey’s going to end up in the shite when it comes out he was trying to block any murder inquiry into the deaths of Peter Dawson and Seosamh MacLiam.”

“I suppose it’s beyond even him to make out how Linda Dawson strangled herself.”

Dave looked at me.

“You spent the night with her. Something there, was there?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” I grunted, and shook my head.

“Sorry all the same,” Dave said, relieved we didn’t have to do any more of that.

“If Casey does end up going, it could work out well for me: Reed could step up, and I could take her job. D.I. at last, not before fucking time, but I won’t resent it ’cause I should’ve had it five years ago.”

The rain was coming down in sheets. I wondered about the windshield wipers: the kind of feature that mightn’t work so well on an old car, the kind of detail Tommy might easily have neglected. I switched them on, and realized I had been unfair to the car and to Tommy: they clacked like knitting needles but they did the job. I filled Dave in on the interview with O’Sullivan and Geraghty, and told him they knew I was dealing directly with him. But I didn’t tell him about the Halligans’ hold over the Dawsons, or about finding Tommy and getting him out of the country; I suggested he have a look around the old ferry-house and left it at that.

The Guard who was to follow me flashed his headlights from across the car park. I told Dave I’d better be off, and he nodded, but didn’t move.

“Ed, I don’t know if this is good news or bad — because I can imagine you’d like to get the whole thing wrapped up one way or another, but — anyway, we got an ID on our concrete corpse, Fitzhugh’s tailor in Capel Street has records that go back thirty years. It wasn’t your da, our party had an address off the South Circular. His name was Kenneth Courtney.”

I GAVE THE GUARD MY PASSPORT AND WATCHED HIM
drive away, then I stood in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. It spumed on the rotting sills, it flashed in sparkles off the flagstone path and drenched the parched grass; it washed the hard green fruit on the apple trees clean of a long dry season’s dust. As a child, I always believed that the male and female trees would grow together, that their branches would touch one day. It didn’t seem likely anymore. Linda’s scent felt stronger on me now: the grapefruit tang, the damp musk, the intoxicating sweet salt reek of her. I kept turning to greet her; the idea that she would not come again wouldn’t lodge in my blood. Finally I went out in the rain and stood between the apple trees until I could smell nothing but the softening earth and the drenched stone. It took a long time.

I went back inside the house. I had a hot shower and dressed. The sky was darkening; even though it was only four o’clock, it felt like a November afternoon. There was nowhere to sit but the stairs, so I sat there and worked my way through Peter Dawson’s telephone records. Two things caught my eye: one was a mobile call to George Halligan’s number at 21.57 on Friday night, the night Peter was last seen alive. The call to George Halligan was the last call Peter Dawson made. The second thing was a number sequence: 3459 showed up as the last four digits of an 086 mobile number Peter called several times over the last couple of months, the last time a couple of nights before he died. I checked it against the numbers I had collected on my mobile, but it didn’t match them. Then I looked at the legend scrawled on the back of the torn photograph of my father and John Dawson:

ma Courtney
3459

I called the number and went straight through to voice mail: a youngish-sounding woman with a broad Dublin accent identified herself as Gemma and asked me to leave my name and number, which I did. As I hung up, I could hear my heartbeat. If this wasn’t a break, it was close to it. But this case wouldn’t break by itself. I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes now, which above all meant keeping out of the Halligans’ way. Twice I had handed them the advantage; twice they had punished me for it. Third time would be for keeps.

I checked my mobile to see if I had missed any calls, and found I had inadvertently turned it off. I switched it on and locked it. I was waiting for Gemma Courtney’s call, but sitting by the phone isn’t good for the soul. Using the landline, I got a number for a waste disposal firm from directory inquiries and ordered a Dumpster to dispose of all the trashed furniture that was piled in the garage; rain like this wasn’t going to do a car manufactured in 1965 much good. I was assembling a bag of clothes that needed cleaning when my mobile rang. It was a woman, just not the woman I hoped it would be.

“Ed Loy? It’s Caroline Dagg here, you remember, Rory Dagg’s wife?”

I did remember, but she sounded like a different woman: chipper, brisk, resolute.

“Mr. Loy?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Rory wants to talk to you, Mr. Loy. He’s remembered something he thinks could be helpful.”

“About his dead uncle, is it?” I said.

“It is about his uncle, yes, and the sooner you know about it the better.”

I said I was free now, and told her where I lived; she said they’d come over straightaway. I drove to the cleaners on Seafield Road and left in a bag of laundry. I picked up some whiskey and beer in the off-license, and some cold food in the fancy delicatessen. On the way back, my mobile rang again, this time to tell me I had two messages in my mailbox.

Message number one: “Ed Loy, this is Gemma Courtney, I’m free tonight nine until midnight, love to see you then, ring me back to arrange a time.”

Message number two: “Ed, what can I say about Podge, something must be done, no hard feelings, wanted to invite you to a breakfast at the Royal Seafield in the morning — I have a feeling the council will make the right decision tonight, and we’ll be celebrating in style tomorrow — and don’t worry, Podge won’t be there. Come along and I’ll make it up to you, big-time.”

When I pulled into the drive, I saw Caroline Dagg’s silver SUV parked on the curb. Dagg held a golf umbrella over his wife for the short walk into the house. We crowded into the living room and stood around in an awkward triangle while I explained about the furniture. Rory Dagg pitched his look somewhere between sheepish and shifty; he hung his head and let his wife do the talking. Caroline Dagg, in a navy suit and candy pink lip gloss and eye shadow, spoke her overenunciated words through a fixed smile that made me feel like she was telling me off.

“Rory is — well, I’m not going to speak for my husband, Mr. Loy, except to say, I think Rory wants to tell you — There I go again!”

She laughed a tinkling, mirthless little laugh. Rory Dagg stared at the threadbare carpet.

“Except to say, Rory was mistaken about his uncle being dead, he is in fact alive, and Rory… actually, Rory knows where he is, in a nursing home, isn’t that right, Rory?”

Dagg grunted.

“The poor man. And I think what Rory wants to say most especially, because the whole point is that you make a clean breast of it, it’s a public program after all, a declaration of intent to the world — and this is why he probably had some trouble coming clean about his uncle, about his
background,
because — Rory?”