The Wrong Kind of Blood (35 page)

“Dessie Delaney was getting the heroin they were feeding Councillor MacLiam from Larry Knight across in Charnwood,” I said. “And last night, Podge bought a big supply from the same Larry. Story goes he was ready to start dealing all around the southeast. That’s not going to help the blind eye the Guards were turning on the Halligans, is it? And it’s not going to help your business schemes either.”

“How much is Delaney going to say?”

“Everything. How they hooked the councillor, the gambling, the heroin, the potential for blackmail, the need for him to change his vote, the night on the boat, Podge administering the double dose, you supervising the cleanup.”

“That’s the only place I’m connected to it, in the ferry-house. Everything else is Podge, or deniable. And I’m at the ferry-house to collect Peter Dawson and bring him up to his parents’ house. If I’m drawn into it, the Dawsons are as well. And that’s not gonna happen.”

“The NBCI are running the case now. And Superintendent Casey is going to be promoted out. That means the Dawsons are no longer off-limits.”

“What do you want? I don’t even know what I’m doing here, I should be briefing Podge’s solicitor—”

“You’re here because I know more about what happened than anyone else. Because I’m one step ahead of the cops on this one, and if we share information, you’ll be one step ahead too.”

“What information? What do you know?”

“I know that after you brought Peter Dawson up to his parents’ house that night, you hung around. I know that when he killed himself, or when he was murdered, you took the body, or you directed Podge to take the body, and stashed it somewhere and then stowed it on his boat a week later. I know the murder weapon was lying around Podge Halligan’s house, that Tommy Owens stole it, that it was in my rental car, that you got it back when you trashed my house, that you planted it with Peter’s body on the boat. I know that you’re up to your neck in the cover-up of Peter Dawson’s death.”

George Halligan shook his head.

“There’s nothing there. A lot of words, but no case.”

“It’s not about a case against you, George. It’s about finishing you as even a semilegitimate businessman. Do you think all those nice lads from the good schools with the few bob to invest are going to consider you for a second? Bad enough you’ve got a psycho for a brother, but to know the full extent of your connections to how many murders? Three? More?”

“I didn’t kill Peter Dawson. Podge didn’t either.”

“And Linda?”

“Why would we? What’d be the point?”

“She knew too much.”

“About what? I don’t get it. Listen, tell me what you want.”

“I want you to pull the Immunicate boys out of the Dawson house. It’s in your interest too, the cops will be all over there soon enough, and if the place is overrun with Halligan gang members masquerading as security guards, well, that’s another link in the chain that binds you to all this. But whatever about you, I want to go in there alone, before the cops get there. I want an hour with John Dawson, alone.”

“Why?”

Why? Because he started all this when he had an affair with my mother. Because he cheated and bribed his way to a fortune he doesn’t deserve. Because he killed Kenneth Courtney. Because he killed my father. Because he’s sitting there at the top of the hill, waiting for me to come and tell him it’s over at last. “Because I need to know the truth.”

“And you think you’ll get it from him? Good luck.”

George stood up and shook himself like a dog. He took off his coat and wrung it out.

“You know how much these clothes cost? I should have you killed,” he said.

I took the gun out of my pocket and held it out to him. He looked at me uncertainly, then took the gun and pointed it at me.

“Remind me again why I shouldn’t have you killed,” he said.

“Because you’d be caught,” I said. “Anyway, look at all I’ve done for you.”

“What’s that again?” George said.

“I’ve been doing it. I’ve told you about Podge, about Delaney. No one else did. None of Podge’s boys picked up the phone. Neither did Podge. They were all preparing to become smack dealers. That wouldn’t’ve been good for business at all, George. Now you’re equipped to brief your own solicitor. And you’re advised to go into quarantine, and not be making a show of yourself with the kind of people who won’t want to know you. And then in a few months, you can quietly sell the land on again. Now it’s rezoned, it’s not going to drop in value.”

George slipped the gun into his pocket. He ran a hand over his face and through his hair, leaving a grin on his creased features.

“I’d do well with you on my side,” he said. “Situation’s still vacant, I’m not coddin’ you. But I don’t know that there’s enough there for a deal.”

“Delaney’s not going to mention you.”

“In the ferry-house?”

“In any of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked him not to. Of course, I could change my mind.”

“Don’t change your mind.”

George Halligan picked up his mobile and spoke first to his solicitor, and then to someone who took orders without asking any questions. And then he told me what he knew. “It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas,” he began.

By now, the words sounded like the tolling of a bell.

THE BLACK IRON GATES TO JOHN DAWSON’S HOUSE WERE
open. I parked on the road outside, and walked past the granite gate lodge and down the long tree-lined gravel drive. The house was an enormous redbrick mansion in the Victorian Gothic style; it reminded me of St. Bonaventure’s, but it was larger and more forbidding than the nursing home; the towers and turrets were higher and more numerous; the stained glass windows were grander; as I approached it through the mist, the yellow-and-slate-colored brickwork seemed to glow, making it look like some unreal castle in the clouds.

The charcoal Lexus was parked in front of the house; there were no other cars visible, nor were there any Immunicate vehicles. I went to the side of the house where the sheds and outbuildings were. An old-style garage with wooden doors for about six vehicles looked like it had been recently abandoned. Other garages were closed; some with locks on the doors. I spotted three cars: a black Volkswagen Polo, a racing green Jaguar XJ6, and Linda’s red Audi convertible.

The heavy front door was ajar, and I pushed it open and walked into the marble-floored hall, which was of double height; a mahogany stairway rose and turned at the far end, while a crystal chandelier hung from the landing above. The walls of the hall were covered in portraits of dour-looking individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: merchants and professionals, rather than royalty; they wore dark clothes and sported complacent expressions of well-to-do respectability on their well-fed faces. I wondered who they were, and who they were intended to be, and what on earth connection they had to the people who lived in the house.

One of those people stood by the mantelpiece in a living room that was about half the size of a football field. The room was a riot of styles: every twelve feet you moved from Regency stripes to paisley swirls to Chinese patterns; there was leather and silk and wool, ruched curtains and slatted blinds, carpet and rugs and polished boards, sofas and chaise longues and armchairs and, behind a white upright piano, a pink corduroy beanbag. It was as if whoever lived here refused, or had been afraid, to make a decision about what kind of room it was, what kind of house it was. It was a study in visual uncertainty, in social insecurity. It was a mess.

The fire was lit; pine logs crackled and hissed in the grate. The mantelpiece above it was a large, carved wooden affair. The man who was leaning on it wore a houndstooth check jacket, beige cavalry twill trousers and brown suede shoes. I could see his gaunt, mottled face reflected in a gilt-frame mirror, and he could see mine.

“Eamonn Loy,” he said.

“Edward,” I said.

“My apologies,” he said. “Your father was Eamonn. Now why do you think he called you that? Edward being the English for Eamonn. Was he trying to be modern?”

“My mother told me it was because
his
mother had wanted him to be christened Edward. But the priest was a de Valera man and wouldn’t name a child after an English king. So Eamonn it was.”

“And he made it right with you, son. That’s how it should work, the present washing away the sins of the past.”

A smile spread across his worn face, a smile that made his small, watery eyes look even more desolate.

“You don’t look surprised to see me,” I said.

“I’ve been waiting for you. Longer than I realized.”

He made a gesture toward a white sofa that sat before the fireplace. I shook my head, took the photograph Gemma Courtney had given me and showed it to him. He sat down in the white armchair to the side of the fire and studied it.

“The Three Musketeers,” he said, fondly. “I don’t remember who the women were.”

“That’s ’cause you only had eyes for me, John,” said a woman’s tart, sarcastic voice. The accent was broader than I’d heard Barbara Dawson use before; maybe she didn’t feel the need to disguise it when she was carrying a gun.

“There’s no need for that, love,” the man said. “Nothing to be gained at this late stage.”

“I like the feel of it in my hand,” she said.

Barbara Dawson, in a black trouser suit with an aubergine scarf around her neck, sat in a white armchair at the other end of the fireplace, a dull blue-black SIG Sauer compact in her hand.

“George Halligan has one of those too,” I said to Barbara. “He’s been good about keeping you supplied with firearms, down the years. First the Glock 17, now that.”

She weighed the pistol in her hand, her face giving nothing away.

“Do you remember a Mrs. Burke, from Fagan’s Villas?” I said to Barbara.

Barbara shook her head.

“Well, she remembered you. Remembered you running around with two men. John Dawson, and Kenny Courtney. Couldn’t tell them apart, she said. I’m not sure if I knew then, or when I realized someone didn’t want me to see a photo of Dawson and Courtney together, or when I found out that Courtney had abandoned his wife and daughter not long after my father disappeared. He had a second chance with the love of his life, he said. To be honest, I don’t think I knew for certain until I saw his face in the mirror a minute ago.”

“Knew what?” Barbara said.

“That John Dawson is dead, his body buried under concrete in the town hall. That the man who’s been impersonating him all these years is Kenneth Courtney.”

The room was still after I had spoken those words, the silence roaring in my ears like wind through a tunnel. The first sound I heard was the spitting of the fire; then the click of the safety being removed from a gun; then outside, a sudden squall of gulls, keening in the distance.

“Good,” said Kenneth Courtney quietly. There were tears in his eyes. “Good man. At last.”

“The Guards have identified the body found in Seafield Town Hall as Kenneth Courtney,” Barbara said.

“Courtney was identified by the clothes he was wearing. They’re running a check on John Dawson’s dental records now. I think they’ll match.”

Kenneth Courtney smiled.

“I know they will,” he said.

The mist swirled against the great sash windows, and I had a flash of the Ghost Captain, waiting on the shore for his twin brother and his lost love to return.

“Shut up,” Barbara hissed at him. “Not another word.”

“What’s the point? It’s all coming out now. Least we could do is tell the poor lad where his poor father is buried.”

“I don’t know where he’s buried.”

“We should have found out, before we—”

“Shut up, I’m warning you.”

“Or you’ll what, shoot me? I’m happy to go at any time, you know that.”

“And leave me here alone, in a house full of ghosts?”

“So then. No threats, if you don’t mind. And put the safety back on that thing, please.”

Kenneth Courtney got up, went to an ornate table beneath a great sash window, and collected a black-and-white-labeled bottle of whiskey, a bottle of water and three crystal tumblers. He poured whiskey into each glass and handed them around.

“Laphroaig,” he said. “Like drinking burning turf.”

He drank his off in one. Tears appeared in his eyes again. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling, but the smiles had nothing to do with happiness, or pleasure. He looked confused, like an actor without a script, an impostor in a life that was no longer his. He poured himself a second drink. Barbara ignored hers, but she did put the safety back on the gun. I didn’t feel I should drink, but I couldn’t resist. The taste brought me back to the night I drank with Tommy Owens, the night of my mother’s funeral. It seemed like a very long time ago.

“John Dawson did kill my father, didn’t he?” My voice nearly cracked.

Barbara looked into her drink and nodded. I knew it, had known it for some time, but to have it confirmed made me realize I had still been holding out some kind of hope. I took a belt of whiskey and kept talking.

“You see, that’s what I couldn’t figure. If John Dawson was prepared to kill my father to be with my mother, how could he spend the rest of his days with the wife he had abandoned, had spilled blood to leave? It wouldn’t add up.”

“That’s what he thought he could do,” Barbara said. She had begun to drink, and it had moved her to speech. “He thought he could come crawling back here because his precious Daphne had rejected him. And me with a nine-month-old baby in my arms. Thought he could take whatever advantage he liked. Found out he couldn’t.”

Courtney stared at her in surprise.

“Is this your ‘Not another word’?” he said.

“I’m tired keeping it in,” she said. “It’s been hard for me too, all these years.”

“Harder than for me, perhaps,” he said sadly. “Harder than for me.”

They looked at each other and smiled. There was still a strong charge between them, whether of love or hate or simply shared guilt I couldn’t divine; as they reached back in time, I began to feel they were doing it for each other as much as for me: the past was food and drink and sex, was life itself to them now.