The Wrong Kind of Blood (36 page)

“We’d moved up here, and we’d had the baby — Peter — and suddenly John wasn’t around. Well, he was working, and when a baby comes, there’s often little room for a man, at least that’s how it was back then. I didn’t suspect a thing to be honest with you until it was over, the affair. He burst out crying one night right over there by the window, told me how he’d been seeing your mother. I was so stupid, I kept asking why, what did he mean seeing, had he been going into Arnotts? He had to spell it out to me. And then he blurted out how he had a fight with your da, and it escalated, and he ended up killing him.”

“Like it was an accident?” I said.

“That’s what he tried to make out. But sure that’s what they all say, isn’t it? He knew what he was doing. And then your ma gave him the heave-ho.”

“Did he tell her he killed my father? Do you think she knew?”

“Oh no. Don’t get me wrong, even though she’s in her grave, I could never forgive your mother for taking my man from me. But she had a lot to put up with in your da, and anyway, she would never have… she wasn’t—”

“Daphne Loy was a real lady,” said Courtney. “Always was.”

Barbara stared at him, her lips set, her eyes blazing with sudden rage.

“And so Dawson came back to you,” I prompted.

“Crying back to me,” she said. “And my first instinct was, put it from you. Sleepless nights, crying baby, your man took a little walk and now he’s back. But I couldn’t let it go. He killed a man for love. And not for love of me, for love of another woman. I couldn’t let him near me after that. I wasn’t born to be second-best. And how could I know it was over? I began to hate the baby he gave me. And it was one night, looking at that photograph — we had a print of it too — it was then I had the idea.”

“She waited outside my house,” said Courtney. “I’d forgotten she knew where I lived.”

“You put it on a Christmas card, when you moved back from England.”

“She had me under her spell.”

“I knew I’d made a mistake, that Kenny was always the one.”

“It was wrong to leave herself and the little one, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care.”

“We killed Dawson here, against that fireplace.”

“Not that exact fireplace, we had to get a new one built.”

“And the plastering redone, and the carpets thrown out, and the floorboards sanded. There was so much blood, you see.”

Their faces glowed with passion as they brought it back to life, the crazed music of their shared blood-crime sounding like a lovers’ duet.

“You threw up,” Barbara Dawson said, not unaffectionately, to Kenneth Courtney.

“I didn’t expect there to be so much blood. I thought I’d have the guts. Especially since I knew he had killed Eamonn, your da. Killed my friend. I thought I’d be up to it — but you never know whether you’ll have the stomach until you’re in the thick of it. I fired the first shot.”

“I had to finish him off.”

“And then we cleaned it all up.”

“Dawson told me Jack Dagg took care of your da’s body, so we got him to do the same thing. Kenny called Rory Dagg to tell him he wanted his brother on board.”

“I was nervous on the phone,” Courtney said. “But why would they have suspected anything? They were used to doing what they were told.”

“Where was the baby that night?” I said. “Where was Peter?”

Barbara looked irritated at my question.

“Here, I suppose.”

“Did he not cry? On account of the gunshots?”

“That child was always crying on account of something or other, he didn’t need gunfire as an excuse. I’d just leave him, he’d always drop off again. If you pick them up when they cry, it becomes a habit with them.”

Barbara shook her head, as if to dispel the inconvenience of having to think of her son, and looked toward Courtney again.

“So we took a long holiday in America. And while we were there, Kenny gained the bit of weight — he’s lost it again — and he had some plastic surgery.”

Courtney pointed to the photograph.

“They thinned out the lips a little, took some furrows around the eyes away. Minor stuff. But combined with the weight gained, I was a ringer. I was John Dawson.”

“You
are
John Dawson,” Barbara said.

Courtney shook his head.

“It’s all over, Barbara. Too many dead.”

“You didn’t have the guts back then, you don’t now,” she spat.

“You heard Loy here, the Guards know.”

“We can deal with the Guards. We always have. There’s plenty more like Casey. Sure who’d believe a story like the one we’ve just told in anyway? They’d never take it to a jury, it’d be laughed right out of court.”

The whiskey had given Barbara renewed confidence. Courtney seemed relieved to be escaping the prison of their shared past. But Barbara still thought they were free. I needed to make her see clearly the bars of the cell she had made for herself.

“Let’s talk about the night Peter came up here — the night Podge Halligan murdered Councillor MacLiam,” I said. “He wanted to call the Guards. He was in a panic about MacLiam, about the Halligans, about all the mistakes he had made on the Castlehill rezoning project.”

“He went off half-cocked,” Barbara snapped. “Offering bribes before he knew what time it was.”

“He was just following his father’s example in that,” Courtney said. “John Dawson never made a penny without making sure the right palm was greased first. Council officials, building inspectors, local and national politicians. Jack Parland wrote the rule book back in the sixties, and Dawson copied it all the way. Just, he didn’t use the Halligan family for anything other than the occasional hired muscle.”

“Peter had run up massive gambling debts as well,” I said. “He probably felt he had no option but to give George Halligan a piece of the company. He was getting drawn in deeper and deeper. And then that night, after MacLiam’s death, he wanted to confess it all. You couldn’t let him do that, could you?”

“He could have been persuaded out of it,” Barbara shrugged. “That wasn’t the problem.”

“The problem that night was, on top of everything else, Peter was onto us,” Courtney said. “George Halligan brought a blue plastic bag full of photographs up to the house that night. Photographs Peter had with him on board the
Lady Linda
.”

“Photographs he had stolen out of this house,” Barbara said. “Photographs I had kept hidden in case he’d find them. Not that they were hard evidence. But I was afraid, when he was older, and maybe he began to have doubts about his da — I mean, these days kids wonder about their parents even when there’s nothing up — so I never let him see those snaps.”

“So needless to say, he was a bit interested in his past,” Courtney said. “The only thing was, he had it all wrong.”

“He thought John Dawson was my father,” I said.

“That’s what he said that night—” Courtney started.

Barbara interrupted him. “You don’t know what he said. You went to bed with a pill. You don’t know what happened that night. No one does — except me.”

There was a gleam in her eyes that scared me. She was teasing us with the riddle of how her son died. She clicked the safety on and off the handgun like it was a cigarette lighter. It was time to bring this to an end.

“I know what happened, Barbara. George Halligan was supposed to leave the house that night. But he didn’t, he hung around the grounds. It was a hot night, the windows were open. Easy to hear a scene played out between mother and son. Especially when both parties are screaming their heads off.”

Barbara was shaking her head, Courtney was nodding his.

“Peter’d had enough, hadn’t he? He was fed up being told what to do. He knew how his father played the game: crooked. He didn’t mind that. But he balked at murder. Maybe he could be persuaded not to go to the police. Maybe he could be persuaded MacLiam’s death was an accident. But he knew the Halligans were scum. And who had suggested he use them? His mother. Barbara Dawson said the Halligans were useful men to have around when the going got tough. Well, he told you you were wrong, didn’t he? And he told you why. ‘It’s no surprise you should think that way,’ he said. ‘You’re a Halligan yourself. Everyone knows. It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas,’ he said.”

“No!” Barbara cried out. “No, no, no, no, no!”

“‘God only knows what’s kept my father with you all these years. You’ve poisoned his life, just like your filthy Halligan blood has poisoned mine,’ your son said, and then there were two loud shots.”

Barbara was sobbing now, repeating the word “no” softly through her tears.

“I couldn’t be sure until now,” I said. “The Glock 17 that killed the body in the town hall also killed Peter. If that was my father, if that was Kenneth Courtney, there was no connection. But if it was John Dawson who was dead, then the same gun killed father and son, and chances are the same person pulled the trigger. Chances are it was you, Barbara.”

Barbara Dawson’s eyes burned defiance; her face was gray.

Courtney poured another whiskey, drank most of it down, and stood, swaying but possessed, accusatory finger pointing at Barbara Dawson’s shaking frame.

“Your own son,” he said, his voice shaking. “Your own flesh and blood.”

Barbara wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his sudden bid for the high ground.

“I thought it
was
suicide,” he said, turning to me. His weak eyes pleaded for understanding, for forgiveness, for an absolution nobody could grant. He drained his glass and refilled it and sank back into his chair. I turned to Barbara.

“Why Linda?” I said. “Why did you have to kill her?”

“She knew. Or she was close to knowing. Or she would have led to you knowing,” Barbara said.

“I know, Barbara,” I said. “And the Guards know. They know about the faked text message, so it would look like I did it. What they’ve been looking for is Linda’s car. And now I’ve told them where that is, they’re ready to bring you in.”

“I didn’t intend to…” Barbara said, and faltered.

“To what? To strangle her?”

“I just wanted to talk to her. To try and explain. She screamed at me to leave. She turned her back on me, began to call the Guards on her mobile. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You didn’t know what else to do but murder her. That was a cold place to find yourself, wasn’t it? Or did you notice? Let me guess how you did it. Easy, really. You always wear a scarf around your throat, don’t you? Plastic surgery can’t fix that. You took it off and strangled her with it,” I said.

Barbara’s lips quivered, and tears glistened in her huge eyes.

“Poor Linda,” Courtney announced loudly, as if he had just woken up. “I loved her very much. She was like a daughter to me.”

His voice was hollow, hoarse with booze; the words sounded like a prepared statement. Whiskey tears slipped down his blotchy face.

“You should cry for Gemma, the real daughter you left behind,” I said.

“Don’t you think I do? Don’t you think I regret the choice I made every single day?”

“She needs your help,” I said. “Gemma Grand. Does that mean you knew where she lived, in that hellhole down by the canal, and still you did nothing?”

“I’ve taken steps to look after her, once I’m dead,” Courtney said. “I would have made it up to her long ago, but I was prevented by this woman, this Barbara Dawson, Barbara Lamb — or should I say, because Peter spoke nothing but the truth, Barbara Halligan.”

Barbara lifted her head and looked at Courtney, her tearstained face riven with hurt. Courtney crossed the room and bore down on her now, his words jabbing hard, wanting to finish her off.

“We
all knew.
Barbara Lamb, that’s Old George Halligan’s little bastard. That’s why she was so wild, that’s why she had so much go. That’s why you’d get more off her than you’d ever get from the rest of the Holy Marys around the Villas. Let you ride her, she would, when none of the others’d give you a decent kiss. But deep down, beneath the looks, she was rotten. And she’s rotten still. When it’s deep in the blood, you never escape it.”

There was a moment when I saw what was going to happen but before it happened; a moment where Barbara Dawson’s face seemed to collapse back through time until it was the tearstained face of a child again, hurt and smarting from yet another humiliation; a moment when Barbara’s journey from Fagan’s Villas to the top of Castlehill finally ended, right back where it began.

Barbara Dawson shot Kenneth Courtney three times. Her first two slugs hit him in the chest, the third cut his throat, and drove a sluice of blood out the back of his neck. He was dead seconds after he hit the floor.

She stood up and turned to me, her eyes ablaze, her lips engorged.

“I’m not,” she said, shaking her beautiful head. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.”

She kept repeating it, a threnody of denial and shame, a negation of — what? her birth? her life? Still it kept up:
I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

Outside, for the second morning in a row, police sirens echoed around the slopes of Castlehill. I got up and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“I’m going home,” I said.

I was at the door to the hall.

“I am Barbara Dawson. I am at home,” Barbara Dawson announced to no one. “I am Barbara Dawson. This is my home.”

I heard the shot, but I kept on walking. There was a muffled sound, like a coat falling to the floor. I walked through the hall hung with Barbara’s imaginary ancestors and pushed past the front door into the mist and light of day.

EVERYONE WAS THERE: DETECTIVE INSPECTOR REED AND
Detective Sergeant Donnelly of Seafield Garda, D.I. O’Sullivan and D.S. Geraghty of the NBCI, any number of uniforms. Once they’d taken a quick look in the house, the tape came out and the scene was secured. While they were waiting for the Garda Technical Bureau and the state pathologist to arrive, we stood in the front garden and I gave an account of what had happened. I left out my meeting with George Halligan. Geraghty kept interrupting me, trying to get me to implicate myself, until O’Sullivan told him to shut up. It was either that or Dave Donnelly would have hit him. After that, Geraghty contented himself with scowling and throwing shapes at me, trying to psych me out. Given what I’d just been through, Myles Geraghty was kid stuff. When I was done, two uniforms were summoned to take me to Seafield Garda Station, where I could make a formal statement. D.I. O’Sullivan, who had senior management stamped all over him, assured me that I would be advised about a range of counseling options. This was too much for Myles Geraghty, who snorted, wheeled away and stalked off down the drive in disgust, but not before he had said, “Counseling? A good boot in the arse’d be more like it.”