The Wrong Kind of Blood (7 page)

“Police business,” said the Guard again, his lips disappearing into his small mouth. He looked like he was afraid someone was going to steal his teeth. “No entry to the public.”

“I’ve an appointment with Rory Dagg,” I repeated. The Guard didn’t bother to reply to that. I didn’t blame him. We stood there in silence for a while, and then the town hall door opened and two men came out. Both wore hard hats. One wore a fluorescent yellow site jacket over a tan corduroy coat, green and navy plaid shirt, fawn chinos and pale tan Timberland boots. The other was Detective Sergeant Dave Donnelly. Dave saw me and came over at once.

“Ed Loy, the very man. I believe you’re here to meet Rory Dagg. Something to do with an investigation you’re running.”

Dave looked quizzically at me, the expression on his broad, open face poised somewhere between amusement and professional suspicion.

“That’s right, Detective,” I said.

Dave gestured for me to come under the police tape. He led me over toward what I assumed was his car, an unmarked blue saloon that might as well have had “Cop” sprayed all over it in gold paint. He leaned on the roof, lit a cigarette and grinned at me.

“What the fuck are you up to, Ed?” he said, his tone friendly but direct. “What’s all this private cop shenanigans?”

I shrugged. “That’s what I did, in L.A. Missing persons, paper trails, divorce, a little bodyguarding. Bit of everything, really. I started out working for someone, then set up for myself.”

“And now you’re doing it here? Dagg there says you told him Peter Dawson is missing. Why didn’t Linda Dawson come to us with it?”

“That’s what I told her to do. But you know yourself, Dave, grown man disappears for what, five days now, it’s not exactly priority police business, is it?”

“And how did you get involved in this anyway?”

“After the funeral, up at the Bayview. Everyone else went home. Linda stayed and got drunk. She needed someone to look after her. She begged me to look for Peter. She was very upset. Eventually, I said okay.”

“You could’ve done without all that yesterday.”

“You’re telling me.”

There was a silence. We both looked down the hill to the sea. The high-speed ferry was powering briskly out of the harbor, sending great waves of surf billowing across toward Seafield Promenade.

“You don’t have a license to operate as a private detective here, Ed.”

“I didn’t know I needed one. Look, if you want me to tell Linda you’ve warned me off, fine. I could do without all this today as well,” I said.

Dave looked at me again. He ran a hand along the bristles of his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “It’d be something to do, though. Take your mind off the funeral and everything.”

“There’s that.”

“Were you any good at it? You know, out in L.A.?”

“I made a living.”

“And you’d turn anything you found out over to me?”

“Can’t arrest anyone myself.”

“If you step on any other copper’s toes, I don’t know you.”

“And I don’t know you, Dave.”

I had known Dave Donnelly all my life. We were in primary school together, and if the whole class had been asked back then how we’d all end up, the one person we’d’ve got right was Dave. He wasn’t the cleverest, or the funniest, or the best at football, he just had a quiet authority, that Captain of the School quality that made you anxious for him to approve of you.

Dave laughed, took a last drag on his smoke and tossed it away.

“Come in and have a look at this, Ed. This is a good one.” He headed toward the town hall door, and I followed, signaling to Rory Dagg that I’d catch up with him in a minute. Busy on his mobile phone, Dagg waved me on.

Nodding to the uniform on duty in the foyer, Dave gave me a hard hat and we took the lift down. The doors opened and Dave stepped out onto a scaffolding gantry, part of an interlocking grid of walkways that crisscrossed the entire basement. All the walls and partitions had been knocked down, leaving one vast room. The floor above was being supported by great steel girders. “They’re excavating. Lowering the foundations,” Dave said. “Ceilings too low down here, or structural damage or something. But they’ve been ripping up the concrete, and look what they’ve found.”

In the center of the room, about eight feet below us, a police medical team were gathered around a steel gurney, gingerly rubbing clumps of concrete from a partially clothed corpse. A police photographer took snaps, and fingerprint and forensic teams dusted and swabbed, but their presence seemed incongruous. It looked less like a crime scene than an archaeological dig.

“It’s male,” said Dave. “Buried in the foundations, so it goes back to what, ’81, ’82. Earlier, maybe. Came out of a huge slab of concrete intact, like a fossil. And his clothes have been preserved. That’s as much as we know…”

“Dental records?”

“Or false teeth. And we find who was on the missing persons list at the time. Million to one we identify him at all. Mind you, the pressure’ll be on. This is the kind of shit the press love.”

I looked down at the corpse again, a tattered scarecrow caked in gray dust and gravel. Another of the missing. Maybe it was my father. The dates would fit. Maybe if I stared at him hard enough, he might give up his secrets. And maybe it was just another bundle of dry old bones.

“I wonder if Dawson carried out the original construction,” I said.

“They didn’t. I’m not sure who did, but your man Dagg out there has been tut-tutting over the state of the original job. Said it was real cowboy stuff.”

“Shit, Rory Dagg. I’d better go and talk to him. Thanks for letting me see this, Dave.”

“All right, Ed. Take it handy now.”

I left Dave climbing down a ladder to join the team gathered around the body. Descending to the dead to shorten the odds from a million to one.

Rory Dagg was outside sending a text to someone on his mobile phone. When he saw me, he picked up his silver laptop and a transparent plastic tubular case containing what looked like architect’s plans and began to move toward the main gates.

“I’m sorry to have kept you, Mr. Dagg,” I said.

“Walk with me, will you?” he said, his voice a quiet drawl, his manner easy and efficient. “I’ve another site to check in on, and all this has made me late. Donnelly didn’t give you any idea when they’d finish up, did he?”

“He didn’t. But I can’t see it taking too long. Twenty years in a concrete block probably doesn’t leave too much work for forensics,” I said, affecting an insouciance toward the freshly exhumed corpse I certainly didn’t feel.

We headed up the main street toward the old town hall, that is to say, McDonald’s. Dagg’s phone beeped, and he read an incoming text as he walked. He was in his mid-forties, had the wiry build of a swimmer and the high color of a drinker; he wore his graying curly hair short. He looked like a civil engineer, or a university lecturer; in fact, as he told me, he had been both, but had set up in project management when the building boom started because there was money to be made, “and I knew the job. My father was a foreman for Dawson’s years ago.”

“Is he retired now?” I said.

“He’s dead these ten years. Are you working with the police, Mr. Loy?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m investigating the disappearance of Peter Dawson, on behalf of his wife, Linda.”

Dagg looked up from a text he was composing.

“I didn’t know he’d disappeared. I saw him only the other day.”

“Peter was supposed to meet his wife in the High Tide, just after he’d finished with you. You’re one of the last people we know to have seen him. What business did he have with you?”

Dagg sent his text, put his mobile in his jacket pocket and shrugged.

“The usual, I suppose. He came on-site and asked his questions about budget overruns and unforeseen expenses. Each of the site supervisors said his piece. Then he rolled off a bunch of bills to pay for nixers. Last week it was a sparks and a couple of chippies we had to call out when some genius kango-hammered through a fuseboard. The odd unofficial bonus, site security, because tools kept walking. That was it, I think.”

“Was that the usual? I mean, it sounds a bit hands-on for a financial controller.”

“Yeah. Well, truth be told, Peter Dawson isn’t really the financial controller. The real work is done by Hanly Boyle, they’ve been Dawson’s accountants since the beginning. Peter’s title is what you might call an honorific — you know, because he’s the boss’s son.”

“That must be humiliating for him.”

“I don’t think it was initially. Easy money, free house, his boat, a beautiful wife: we should all be so humiliated. But in the last few months, he’s seemed less and less satisfied.”

“Was there anything out of the ordinary about him that day?”

Dagg thrust his chin forward and grimaced in thought.

“He was actually quite — not distracted, preoccupied. Energized. As if he was excited about something. And once we were done, he was off, you know, all business.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Cream chinos, white shirt, navy sports jacket. It’s his uniform.”

Dagg’s phone rang. He found it and checked the number that flashed up on the face. “Sorry, I have to take this,” he said, and then barked into the phone, “I said sit outside his office, not ring his office… that’s ’cause they’re liars, they say the permits are in the post, but they never are… all right, once more with feeling: GO TO COUNTY HALL, SIT OUTSIDE JIM KEARNEY’S OFFICE, DO NOT COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE THE PERMITS.”

Dagg looked at me, still glaring, then raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes and grinned. We had reached his car, a black ’94 Volvo Estate, parked down a laneway leading to an old terrace of small redbrick cottages.

“I know,” he said, “I should have a brand-new four-wheel drive with bull bars and all the rest. But they’re hell to park. And they make you look like a gobshite.”

He loaded his stuff onto the backseat, then looked over the roof of the car at me. “I don’t like spoiled rich kids, Mr. Loy. And maybe it’s not his fault, but that’s what Peter is. He doesn’t understand work, or money, or responsibility. He plays at his life. How he holds on to that wife of his, I’ll never understand.”

“Sounds like you’d like to hold on to Linda Dawson yourself,” I said, my tone light.

“I’m married with three kids,” Dagg said, without indicating whether that was a reason for or against an interest in Linda. He didn’t sound like the most content of family men.

Dagg looked at his watch.

“I’ve really got to go,” he said.

“One last thing. The refurbishment at the town hall. Do you know who did the original work?”

“Whoever they were, they deserve to be in jail. That’s partly why we’re here, there are structural fissures that… the whole place could have caved in by now.”

“Can you remember the name of the builder?”

“Not offhand. But I have the plans back in the office, I can find out for you.”

We exchanged mobile numbers and I walked back down the hill. As I reached the slip lane for the town hall, I was nearly run over by Dave Donnelly’s unmarked blue car. It screeched past me into traffic and swerved around the corner toward Bayview.

THE BARMAN IN THE HIGH TIDE SAID HE WASN’T WORKING
last Friday, but one of the girls who had been was due on in twenty minutes. I ordered a bottle of beer and drank it at the bar. The High Tide was two stories above the Seafront Plaza, and had been decorated in a bland modern style, with large abstract daubs on the eggshell walls and coffee and cream tones in the soft leather furniture and polished granite fittings. At four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, there were three jowly, balding suits drinking brandy, two overdressed women in their forties with a bottle of white wine and a bunch of fancy carrier bags, and a party of women in their twenties clutching pints of lager and bottles of alcopops and making a lot of noise. After they had sung “Happy Birthday” for the ninth time, replete with obscene variations, the barman had a word with them, and after they had sung it a further five times, they tottered out in a cloud of hilarity, heels clicking and phones beeping, their shouting voices echoing back up the metal stairs as they crashed out onto the street.

A church bell began to toll, and I walked over to the side windows and looked up toward St. Anthony’s. A hearse was pulling into the churchyard, and a crowd of people parted to let it pass. I wondered whether the concrete corpse in the town hall would ever be taken to a church, ever be given a name and blessed before it was returned to the earth.

I was about to ask for a Jameson when a short, plumpish girl with blond highlights and too much orange makeup on her pretty face told me her name was Jenny, and that the barman said I wanted to talk to her. I showed her the photograph of Peter Dawson and asked if she remembered seeing him.

“Not really,” Jenny said. “Friday at six? I mean, the place is black at that hour.”

She looked again at the photograph, and shook her head. I ordered the Jameson, a double with water. When she brought it, she said, “He wasn’t with your man with the limp, was he?”

“Maybe. What did your man with the limp look like?” I said.

“Bit of a mess, to be honest with you. He had a combat jacket on, real scruffy like, not a designer one or anything. Long hair, a little goatee. Bit of a shambles, bit of a dope-head.”

“And the limp?”

“Ah it was desperate, poor fella. One of those, you’d think at first he was puttin’ it on, know what I mean?”

Tommy Owens. The T on the list. I drank half the whiskey neat. It seared the back of my throat and filled my nose with its sweet smoke.

“And he was with the man in the picture?” I said.

“I wouldn’t swear to it. But he was a smart-looking, business kind of guy. Big head of curly hair, yeah. I remember thinkin’, they’re an odd couple. Are they cousins, or gay or somethin’?”

“Well, they’re not cousins anyway. What happened then?”

“I don’t know, it was black in here like I said, I was runnin’ around like a blue-arsed fly. Next time I noticed, the guy in the photo had gone, and Scruffy was there with this woman, well out of his league I’d’ve thought.”