The Wrong Kind of Blood (30 page)

She looked toward him, smiling and nodding and gesturing with her hands, like a teacher coaxing a recalcitrant child to apologize. Dagg’s gaze remained fixed on the floor, but his shaking hands balled themselves into fists.

“I’ll let him tell you himself. Nothing to be ashamed of, perfectly treatable. So! There you have it! Now, I have children to collect from a girlfriend who won’t be a girlfriend for much longer if she has to put up with my three on top of her two, so I’ll just leave you boys alone to talk things through, shall I?”

Rory Dagg would not meet his wife’s worried eyes. Her forced brightness hung in the air between them like smoke. She flashed her eyes at me, eyebrows raised, as if her husband had joined the gardener in the ranks of those sent to try her inexhaustible patience, then gave me a very brave smile and left.

Dagg didn’t move until he heard the SUV kick into life. He turned to the window and watched his wife sail off in the rain, high above the ground in her silver chariot. Then he looked up at me, his face a mixture of anger and embarrassment.

“We’ve decided I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “Apparently that’s easier than deciding we just don’t like each other anymore.”

“Would you like a drink then?” I said.

“Fucking sure I would,” he said.

We had glasses of Jameson and chased them with bottles of Guinness. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything that day — they’d given me some kind of rubber chicken and mushy chips combination in Seafield Garda Station, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. I ate a sun-dried tomato, fresh basil and Parmesan pizza, some chicken wings in black bean sauce and a tub of avocado, tomato and red onion salad. It tasted good, which was just as well, as it had cost more than the booze. Rory Dagg didn’t want any food; he poured another whiskey and had to stop himself knocking it back in one. Maybe he
was
an alcoholic; I didn’t care: I wasn’t his social worker, or his shrink. Maybe I’d be an alcoholic if I were married to Caroline Dagg. Maybe I was one anyway. Who gave a fuck? Things could be worse; we could be dead; we would be soon. I joined Dagg in a second whiskey, and began to feel calmer and clearer about everything. Dagg started to say something about how his wife had changed since she gave up her job to look after the kids full-time, how her horizons had narrowed, how she needed something or other to stimulate her, but I wasn’t listening; I was enjoying the bursting illusion of insight that the whiskey gave me. It wouldn’t last, but while it did, it gave the world a pattern and a coherence, an order that made me feel my task was simple, and its accomplishment inevitable. I tuned in when Dagg began to talk about his uncle.

“I wrote down the address of the nursing home,” Dagg said, handing me a sheet of lined paper.

“You’d better come with me,” I said. “They may not let me see him otherwise.”

“I’ve never been to visit him,” Dagg said. He flushed, and reached for the whiskey bottle with a shaking hand. My hand got there first. An alcoholic was one thing, but a sloppy drunk was no use to me. I handed him another Guinness instead.

“I’ve paid his nursing home bills. But I don’t have to see him. That’s above and beyond. After what he put my father through.”

“What was that? Forging his signature on your father’s daybooks for the town hall construction job?”

Dagg looked at me as if he was still weighing whether he’d talk. I wondered whether I should have made his wife stay. Then he turned his head away and nodded briefly.

“How did you know?” he said.

“The signatures in the general daybooks vary a good deal within a certain pattern — that chimes with the way most people sign their names. But the signatures on the town hall daybook are all identical, and they’re identical to the signatures on your father’s framed plans. It makes sense that he’d be more careful over those, since they were going on display. But why should one daybook diverge so substantially from all the others? Because the signatures in it were forged — careful copies, deliberately done. Maybe if it had been just one or two, it would have been a brilliant forgery.”

Rory Dagg gave a quick, sour smile.

“A brilliant forger is not one of the things Jack Dagg was. A brilliant housebreaker, a brilliant extortionist, a brilliant pickpocket — none of those either. He was good at lying though. And he had a real talent for taking advantage of my father’s generosity.”

“By impersonating him, was it?”

“Jack had money troubles all the time, spent it like water, gambled or drank it away. In the early days, when my dad was a general laborer, he’d let Jack stand in for him the odd day, if he was desperate for cash. Then as Dad moved up the scale, got his skills, did his exams, he’d still have to find Jack work. Jack didn’t have the qualifications or the abilities, but when it came to bossing people around, he could always get away with it — he had a lot of swagger, a lot of front — more than the old man, actually — not to mention the common touch, so when Dad was foreman, Jack could slip in and earn a few days’ drinking money. But the town hall job was different.”

“Why? Because he let his brother do it all?”

“For one. And he wasn’t happy about it. I told you before, he went into a depression because I failed my exams and gave up on his big plans for me to be an architect. Well, that was just part of it. The rest was fallout from the town hall. He never spoke to Jack again, wouldn’t acknowledge him in the street.”

“What happened? Could your uncle have blackmailed him in some way?”

“I don’t know. It could have been as much John Dawson’s fault. I mean, he left Dawson’s there and then, having worked with them for years. He wouldn’t tell me. And to be honest, part of me wanted to put it behind me, you know, all this brothers falling out and not speaking to one another for years is from the ark, isn’t it, it’s real old Irish tribal bullshit. At least, that’s how I saw it. Then I got a call about a year ago. Jack Dagg, destitute, no health insurance, no other family — he had a wife and kids in England at one stage, but he left them long ago, and I’ve no idea where they are — anyway, ‘Big Jack’ Dagg has leukemia, he’s asking me to help him. He needs palliative care, a nursing home, whatever. My first instinct was, Not my problem. But… well, it’s blood, isn’t it? I mean, he has nobody else. He’s my father’s brother. You can’t just walk away.”

“Did you ask him about the town hall, what happened there?”

“I tried. He said no one who’d grown up in Fagan’s Villas expected life to be easy. He said he did what he had to do and no more. He said he’d never been a fucking tout and wasn’t going to start now. And if I didn’t like that, I could fuck off.”

“And you still helped him?”

Dagg shrugged, as if he was embarrassed.

“Like I said, he’d no one else. And I suppose a part of me thought, maybe he’d tell me eventually.”

“Why did your wife have to force you to come here then?”

“Because a bigger part of me thought, I don’t want to know, just let the old fucker die and that’s the past done and good riddance.”

I nodded. I could understand that at least.

“But then the nursing home rang last night. Sister Ursula. Uncle Jack’ll be dead in a matter of days. Hasn’t asked for me, but she thought I’d like to see him. And Caroline starts in, Of course you must, it’ll bring you ‘closure,’ all this. And I started to drink. And she won’t shut up, about talking to you again, about my drinking, so on. And there’s some shouting. The kids are there, getting upset. I go out, drink some more, come back, wake everyone up, do some more shouting, break some stuff, pass out on the living room floor, everyone’s crying. And now I’m an alcoholic and I’m joining a twelve-step program, or I can get out of the house.”

I looked at him now, drink sweat beading on his brow, eyes boiling red, hands still shaking. I’d been hasty in dismissing Caroline Dagg’s opinions, just because her manner got on my nerves, or because the last thing I wanted to hear was the notion that simply because a great deal of your life would be unbearable without booze, it meant you were an alcoholic. But I didn’t have time to think about that now.

“Let’s go and see your uncle,” I said.

ST. BONAVENTURE’S NURSING HOME WAS A LARGE VICTORIAN
redbrick villa set in a quiet square on the west side of Seafield. Neo-Gothic in style, with its turrets and stained glass windows, its conical towers and spires, it looked in the rain like a haunted house from a child’s storybook. A stone carving above the front door showed angels guiding a three-masted ship through stormy seas. Sister Ursula was an angular, brisk, gleaming woman in her sixties in a blue-gray uniform that looked like a nurse’s; her gray and white headdress and the silver crucifix around her neck displayed her other allegiance. She led us up a great staircase to the first floor, and along a wood-paneled corridor to Jack Dagg’s room, and brought a still-reluctant Dagg in to see his uncle. I walked back to the stairwell and waited. The stained glass window that lit the stairs on this floor depicted the ninth station of the cross, the third fall; the window at the turn of the stairs had shown the fourth station, the meeting with the Virgin; I wondered if there was a logic to their placement, or if they were scattered about this house of the dying at random. I heard a woman crying, and the sound of a television commentating on a horse race, and the sibilant colloquy of two elderly women hissing about oncologists and tests and a blessed release.

Rory Dagg was out in minutes. As he passed me, he waved an arm back in the direction of his uncle’s room. He didn’t say a word. Sister Ursula joined me on the landing and we both watched as he clattered down the stairs and flung himself across the entrance hall and out the door. When I looked up, Sister Ursula was shaking her head.

“What do you think he’s afraid of, Mr. Loy? His uncle? Or himself?”

“The past,” I said.

Sister Ursula walked me to Jack Dagg’s door.

“That’s where Jack Dagg lives, Mr. Loy, for his sins. The past.”

Her eyes twinkled fiercely. I liked her vigor, her gaiety of spirit; I wanted to breathe it in, to absorb it; I wondered if the dying found it an inspiration or an agony, to be confronted by such forceful life as theirs ran out.

Jack Dagg’s life was running out, and it showed in his sunken cheeks, the waxy pallor of his complexion, the dimming light in his dark eyes. Red blotches marked the glands in his neck; his hair had the dull glow of wet cement; his bony hands sat splayed on the bedspread like two antique fans. His eyes closed and his head lolled. I sat on the chair by his bed, took a naggin of Jameson from my jacket, poured some of it into a glass tumbler on his bedside table and passed it beneath his nose. His eyes flickered open and turned in the direction of the whiskey. I brought it to his mouth and tipped it in. He drank it all down and sighed.

“God bless you, son,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

“Rory told me. Is it the garage?” he said after a while, his voice a thin reed in his throat.

“No,” I said, “it’s the town hall. They found a body.”

He nodded.

“The town hall, yes. Excuse me if I ramble. Blood’s all wrong, you see. They have to give me someone else’s. Right down to the marrow. But they can’t do that now. Too late for that now.”

“Kenneth Courtney,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“I knew them all, son. Knew them all, back in the day.”

“John Dawson?”

“Me and Mr. Dawson. I did a job or two for him.”

“What sort of job?”

“All sorts. Chaps who’d got a tender we wanted. I’d disappear their trucks and mixers, their tools and all. Sometimes, the brickies’d have their arms broken, laborers get warned off. I took care of all that for him.”

“Did you bury Kenneth Courtney in the basement of the town hall?”

“I buried a body all right, but I didn’t know who it was. Ask no questions, isn’t that right?”

“The corpse wasn’t hooded. If you buried him yourself, you’d’ve recognized him. From Fagan’s Villas.”

“He was on his face when I saw him. I just lobbed the concrete in over him.”

“And was that another job for John Dawson?”

“Mr. Dawson rang me up, yeah.”

“What, he rang you up and told you there was a corpse at the site, go down and bury it?”

“Take care of it, yeah. Wasn’t the first time. None of my business who it was.”

“You buried someone else?”

“Beneath the garage, yeah.”

The garage. John Dawson and Eamonn Loy’s garage.

“Do you know who that one was?”

“Didn’t want to know, son. Bad for the health. In a green tarp. Quicklime an’ all.”

“Would you be prepared to swear out a statement about all of this? For the Guards?”

“Would you have any more of that whiskey on you?”

I helped him drink another glass. His eyes were closing as he got to the end of it, but when I asked him a second time if he’d make a statement, his hand gripped my forearm with surprising force.

“If I’m still alive, son, I’ll even tell a copper. Blood down to the marrow’s what I need. But it’s too late to do any good.”

His eyes flared briefly with an afterglow of menace, then sputtered out. He was asleep before I left the room.

I rang Dave Donnelly from St. Bonaventure’s and gave him the details, then I found Sister Ursula and told her to expect a Garda detective. She muttered a quick prayer, touching her crucifix.

“Would he make a confession now, do you think?” she said.

I knew there was only one kind of confession she cared about.

“If he’ll talk to me, and to the police, I don’t see why he shouldn’t talk to a priest,” I said.

Sister Ursula affected to find this shocking and scandalous, and shooed me out the door with one hand over her open mouth, and all the while her eyes twinkled like flint. She told me she’d pray for me, and I thanked her, and felt like I meant it.

The garage my father used to run stood across from a roundabout among the maze of sixties and seventies housing estates between Castlehill and Seafield, about a mile up from the sea. The roundabout was still there, but the garage had been replaced by something called the “House Beautiful Retail Park,” according to a little brass plaque on a granite block by the entrance: there was a DIY superstore, a carpet showroom, a garden center, a bathroom and tiling store, an electrical goods warehouse and outlets that sold furniture and lighting. The forecourt was thronged with determined shoppers loading their cars with crates and cartons. Rapt faces huddled in the stores, studying carpets and gazing at tiles and worshiping fridges and washing machines. The atmosphere was hushed, reverent, devotional. The kingdom of the house beautiful was at hand. I stood there and tried to feel something. I knew my father’s body lay buried beneath all this striplit splendor. For years I had dreamt of finding him, alive or dead, imagined the moment I’d uncover the truth. Now it was here, and I felt nothing; worse, I felt what the bustling congregation around me felt: an overwhelming desire to buy something.