The Color of Blood

Synopsis:

Still adjusting to being back on Irish soil, PI Ed Loy finds himself caught up in a deadly web of lies, betrayals and shrouded histories. Shane Howard, a respected dentist from the venerable Howard medical family of Dublin, asks Loy to search for his missing daughter. The only information available is a set of pictures portraying nineteen-year-old Emily in a series of very compromising positions.

Seems like a pretty easy case to Loy… until people start dying. The very same day that Loy meets Howard, Emily’s mother and ex-boyfriend are brutally stabbed to death. But that’s only the beginning.

Loy discovers that the Howard family is not all that it seems. For years their name has stood for progress and improvement within Dublin’s medical community, but that is only what’s on the surface. The true legacy of the Howards is one of scandalous secrets, the type that are best left unearthed. Against his better judgment, Loy is drawn into the very center of the Howards’ sordid family history, and what he finds could ruin more than reputations.

In
The Color of Blood
, Declan Hughes once again brings the city of Dublin to life in all its gritty glory. The dark realities of the streets converge with the lethal secrets of the past in a sinister and graphic thriller that will have readers on edge right up to its shocking conclusion.

To my mother

We from the bridge’s head descended, where
To the eighth mound it joins, and then the chasm
Opening to view, I saw a crowd within
Of serpents terrible, so strange of shape
And hideous, that remembrance in my veins
Yet shrinks the vital current… .
Amid this dread exuberance of woe
Ran naked spirits wing’d with horrid fear,
Nor hope had they of crevice where to hide,
Or heliotrope to charm them out of view.

D
ANTE
,
The Divine Comedy, Inferno
Canto xxiv
Translated by Cary

THE LAST CASE I WORKED, I FOUND A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD
girl for her father; when she told me what he had done to her, I let her stay lost. The case before that, I provided a husband with evidence of his wife’s infidelity; that night, he beat her to death, then hanged himself in the marital bedroom. Now I was calling on a man who by nightfall would be the prime suspect in two murder cases. Maybe one of these days, I’d get a better class of client. Maybe someday. Maybe not today.

The late October sun hung low in the grey morning sky, a silver glare behind the mist that had blown in south of Seafield. At Bayview Harbour, I swung sharp right up a steep lane and parked by a double-fronted stone Victorian house with a brass plaque on the wall that read “Shane Howard — Dental Surgeon.” I opened the low gate and walked along a cobbled path bordered by glistening rowan trees, their berries flaring blood orange through the mist. Crows on the roof beat their wings and made their low tubercular moan. At the heavy green front door, I looked back and breathed in air that was dank and clogged with salt and the musk of rotting leaves. It was the cleanest breath I’d draw until it was all over.

The hall was dimly lit by a dust-stained chandelier with only two working bulbs. Framed photographs of green-shirted Irish rugby players in action hung from the picture rail. The receptionist had snow blond hair and high cheekbones and midnight blue eyes and an engagement ring with red stones that made me think of a crab claw. I gave her a card with my name and what I did for a living printed on it and her eyes widened with anxiety; she compressed her lips and nodded at me gravely and reached for the phone.

“It’s all right, Anita, I’ll deal with Mr. Loy.”

The speaker was a swollen man in his midforties encased in a charcoal three-piece wool suit that bulged like a bull’s pelt. He had a port glow to his full jowls, a plume of dark grey hair swept back from his oily brow and a complacent expression in which boredom and self-satisfaction vied for supremacy. He inclined his head to one side and flexed his protuberant eyes and fleshy mouth in a brisk rictus of acknowledgment. The gesture made him look fleetingly like a gigantic Oriental baby. I looked at the floor and noticed his feet: like those of many fat, self-important men, they were very small.

“Denis Finnegan, Mr. Loy. Mr. Howard’s solicitor. I wonder if I might have five minutes of your time.” His voice was like the quiet oily purr of an expensive car.

“Mr. Howard spoke to me himself,” I said. “He didn’t say anything about a solicitor.”

Finnegan did the Oriental thing again with his face, this time with a lot of blinking and sighing, as if to deplore the free will with which his client had unaccountably been gifted.

I raised an upturned palm toward him and nodded; Finnegan turned on his heel and, beckoning with a nod of his huge head, began to climb the stairway halfway down the hall. Through a glass door, three patients sat around a large mahogany table, leafing through magazines. I followed Finnegan up the stairs and into a small dark sitting room off the first-floor return. A bare yellow bulb hung from the cobwebbed ceiling; there were concertina files and drug company cartons piled against the ocher walls and a dusty three-piece suite arranged around a low table. Finnegan sat on the couch; I took one of the creaking chairs; it was the kind of antique furniture you felt might break if you shifted in your seat.

“I assume my client has told you everything,” Finnegan said, and waited for me to reply. I waited for him to continue. We sat for a while in the ensuing silence. Finnegan crossed an ankle over one knee. His socks were red silk, and his tiny polished brogues gleamed in the yellow light. He raised his eyebrows expectantly, as if it was only a matter of time before I told him what he wanted to know. I stood up and made for the door.

“Mr. Loy, I understood we were going to talk,” he said, his voice yelping a little.

“So did I. But you’re not talking.”

I opened the door. Finnegan stood up surprisingly quickly and waved his hands at me. They were pudgy hands, and they matched his socks.

“Please sit down, Mr. Loy,” he said. “I won’t take up too much of your time, I assure you.”

I shut the door behind me but stayed standing. Finnegan crossed the room, handed me a business card, then retreated to his seat and nodded briskly, ruefully, as if conceding his ill-judged choice of tactics.

“Mr. Howard didn’t ask me to, ah, intercede with you today.”

“No kidding. I guess he hasn’t told you why he wants my
intercession
either. Well, if he hasn’t, I’m not going to.”

Finnegan pursed his lips and raised his eyes, if not quite to heaven, at least to the dirty yellow bulb above his head, and steepled his index fingers together; after an interval of meditation, or silent prayer, he exhaled loudly through his nose and began to speak.

“My client’s mother recently passed away. She leaves a substantial property on several acres adjacent to the Howard Medical Center. That property, and the lands surrounding, are currently the cause of some contention between my client and his wife.”

“And between your client’s wife and your wife. You are married to Shane Howard’s sister, Sandra, aren’t you?”

Finnegan nodded slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes vanishing momentarily into the folds of his crimson jowls.

“You do your homework, Mr. Loy.”

“This is Dublin, Mr. Finnegan. I just keep my eyes and ears open.”

“Yes, I am Mr. Howard’s brother-in-law, but I have no interest — no
beneficial
interest — in his mother’s estate: the property and lands were left solely to Mr. Howard; his sister is not named in the will.”

“So what do you want?”

“My client’s wife, Jessica Howard, is, ahm, a highly spirited personality. If she were to discover that her husband had, for example, hired a private detective to spy on her, in the hope of gaining evidence that might be used against the lady now or at some future date, in proceedings intended to undermine her claim to what she is legally and morally entitled to consider her due…”

“She wouldn’t see the funny side.”

“She might pursue a litigious course which in the short-to-medium term would probably benefit no one except my colleagues in the legal profession. And while strong collegiate impulses are not alien to me, the bonds of family are more tightly drawn; for my late mother-in-law’s estate to dwindle while disputatious solicitors spar, Jarndyce and Jarndyce–like, would, for the family, be to find ourselves in a very bleak house indeed.”

Finnegan unleashed a salvo of self-approving mews and yaps as a coda to his painfully forced literary reference, and his thick lips quivered with near delight at his own facility, and for an instant I could see him back in the university debating chamber, basking in the braying regard of his peers, the legislators and judiciary of the future. He opened his great maw to continue, but I beat him to it. It was a little after nine in the morning, and I hadn’t had breakfast, and another of those ornate sentences that showed how much his father had paid the Jesuits for his education and I was going to have the kind of headache only gin would cure, and it was too early for gin.

“It’s about his daughter,” I said.

“Emily?” Denis Finnegan said.

“That’s right. She’s gone missing.”

“And he wants her found?”

“Or wants to talk about it, anyway. She’s nineteen, so there’s a limit to what I could do, if she’d prefer to stay lost. What I’d be prepared to do.”

“I see. I see. I was under the impression… or rather, I made, in the circumstances, the understandable assumption…”

“You thought he was hiring me to dig some dirt on his wife.”

“I certainly suspected he had something of that character in mind.”

“Is there any dirt to dig?”

“Let’s just say I believed it expedient to inquire a little further into the potential veracity and, so to speak,
density
of any such allegations before deeming it appropriate to conclude that an operative such as yourself might properly be charged with the task of investigating further.”

I had the headache now. My left eyelid was flickering like a lightbulb about to blow. I put my hand on the door and opened it, all the while keeping contact through my right eye with Denis Finnegan, who had narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth in a grimace of farewell. With the bare bulb directly above his head, his great face suddenly resembled a skull swollen and distorted by water.

“We’ll speak again, Mr. Loy, I have no doubt,” he oozed.

The words hung in the air like an emblem beneath a death’s–head. I stepped backward through the door and pulled it shut and went downstairs.

A broad-shouldered sandy-haired man in a white linen tunic had his face bent close to Anita’s pale head. His voice was working in a low rumble, then hers gushed forth in a flow of easy, throaty laughter. It was the kind of laughter that makes a man feel like his luck is in, the kind of laughter you hear in bars and on street corners late at night. When my leather-soled black wing tips hit the tiled hall floor, their heads sprang apart, and the man raised himself to his full height and turned to face me. He was about six three, heavily built like the rugby forward he had been, with a scowl on his open face.

“Mr. Howard,” I said. “Ed Loy. We spoke on the phone.”

Howard nodded slowly and looked at his watch. “You’re late,” he said, his tanned brow frown-ridged, bushy eyebrows shading his eyes.

“Your solicitor thought he needed to speak to me,” I said.

“Is Finnegan here again?” Howard said.

He glared at Anita, who flushed and nodded quickly. Howard flung a meaty hand in my direction.

“What did he want?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t think he knew himself. To listen to the sound of his own voice, it felt like.”

“That sounds like Dinny, all right,” Howard said, nodding. The huge planes of his face slowly began to shift into a smile. Then he laughed, an astonishingly loud, crashing sound, like the engine of a tractor flaring into life. As suddenly as it had started, the laughter sputtered out and he stared down at the black and white tiles and cleared his throat. He lifted his head, leant across the reception counter and patted Anita’s hand.

“I’ll be in the study, Anita. I’m not to be disturbed,” he said, nodded to me and unlocked a door across the hall from the waiting room. I followed. As I passed Anita, she was caressing her ring between finger and thumb. In the faint light, the uncut stones had the bright glow of arterial blood.

“Nice ring,” I said. “When’s the big day?”

“It’s not an engagement ring,” she said. Her accent sounded Eastern European. Color seeped across her pale cheeks like red ink on a blotter. “It’s for protection. A talisman.”

“Protection against what?” I said.

She shrugged.

“You know. Whatever. My sister gave it to me.”