The Wrong Kind of Blood (37 page)

For some reason, this cheered me up enormously, rooted as it was in a world where all problems had simple solutions; as I waited in the great tree-lined garden for the uniforms to collect me, I found myself pining wistfully for it, that place and time where nothing was so grave that it couldn’t be sorted out by a good boot in the arse. A couple of times Dave Donnelly said he needed to speak to me but I told him he could get me later. I was losing my sense of urgency. There was no one left to die, was there?

In Seafield Garda Station, I was dealt with swiftly: they taped my statement, I waited until it had been typed up, and then I signed it. Then they gave me a lift home.

There was a yellow skip in the drive; I had signed for it that morning between handing Dessie Delaney over to Dave and meeting George Halligan. I had thought I should try and get some rest, but there was nowhere in my house to sit down, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I rolled up my sleeves and opened the garage doors and began to load all the broken furniture and upholstery and other debris from the house into the Dumpster. It took me a couple of hours. There was plenty of room left in the Dumpster, so I went upstairs and threw all the beds out too; the Halligans hadn’t really set on these with such determination, but they were in a bad way as it was: ripped and sagging with protruding springs and mold stains. Out they went, and the homemade plywood and chipboard bedroom furniture with them. There were hordes of old toys and children’s books my mother had never thrown out: I stashed them in boxes to take to a charity shop, along with the paperbacks and magazines my mother had accumulated.

It felt good to do this, to strip the house down; or if not good, it felt fit, like the only possible course I could take. I got some tools from the garage and set to taking the carpets off. This wasn’t as easy as it seemed; the carpet tacks were rusted and bent, and the batons that held them down splintered or stuck, and the carpets and underlay were filthy; my fingers were soon cut to ribbons and my nose and chest were clogged with dust. But I got them out, and rolled them up in the front garden and tossed them in on top of the rest. Mrs. Fallon, the lady who had found my mother on the doorstep, went past with a Pekingese; she nodded and smiled at me, and I waved and smiled back. The mist had lifted, and while it was still overcast, the day didn’t feel quite as notional, quite as fragile as it had.

There was nothing left in the house to throw out, unless I made a start on the kitchen and the bathroom; I figured it was a bit too early to start thinking about that level of refurbishment. I went upstairs and collected the tools — hammer, chisel and a crowbar — and brought them out to the garage. I closed the garage doors at the front. There were tools hanging on the walls, and a few metal toolboxes piled by the back door. I wanted to check what was there, but I couldn’t see properly; there was a bulb in the light fixture, but it didn’t work. I went inside and took a bulb from the back room downstairs. I went back into the garage, piled the toolboxes beneath the fitting, balanced on top of them, and fit the new bulb in. I switched on the light and laid the toolboxes out on the floor. The third one was heavier than I remembered, and I was at an odd angle, and it came down with a great crash. Only for that, it might have been years until I’d notice — and by then, maybe I wouldn’t have made the connection. The floor beneath the toolbox that fell had cracked, and some of it came off in a cement sheet, about a centimeter thick. Beneath it lay another floor. I prized some more of the cement away: it lifted in shards. The floor it revealed was made of concrete. I chipped away some more, then looked around and saw a sledgehammer hanging on the wall.

I went into the house and telephoned St. Bonaventure’s and asked to speak to Jack Dagg. I waited for a while, and then Sister Ursula came to the phone.

“Mr. Loy, it’s so kind of you to call, but you’re a few hours too late. Poor Jack died in the night, no trouble at all, just drifted away. And do you know, I think your visit made a big difference — and I’m not just talking about smuggling in the whiskey, for which you should be ashamed — after you’d gone, and that nice Garda detective had come and gone, he asked for a priest. Made a full confession, took the Blessed Sacrament, dropped off to sleep like a happy infant. So you may have played a part in helping to send a soul to his Savior, Mr. Loy — there’s some credit in the ledger for you!”

“When you say a full confession—”

“To the priest of course, to Father Ivory.”

“Sister Ursula, I’m afraid as a Catholic, I’ve been stalled for years now at a station somewhere between lapsed and out of practice, but I don’t suppose the Church has relaxed its strictures any on the sanctity of the confessional?”

“Ah go on out of that, Mr. Loy, you’re a terrible chancer so you are, almost as bad as poor Jack; I see I’m going to have to pray a lot harder for you than I thought. God bless now.”

I wasn’t going to find out from Jack Dagg, alive or dead. I went back down to the garage. Using the sledgehammer, I loosened up the remainder of the cement floor, and then cleared it into a corner with a shovel. With a yard brush, I swept the dust into the corner too. I still couldn’t see what I was looking for, so I went out into the back garden. An old garden hose lay coiled up against the back wall of the house. I attached it to the kitchen cold tap, turned it on, ran it around the passageway, and sluiced it over the concrete floor. And there it was, in the midst of the concrete, a stretch of cement about eight feet long and about three feet wide. The shape of a grave. The shape of a man.

I turned off the hose and went back inside and started in with the sledgehammer. I worked around the concrete at the edges. I didn’t know how deep the cement was laid, and I didn’t want to puncture it. I cracked the concrete around the perimeter, then worked it loose with a garden fork, picking out chunks and tossing them in the corner with the cement until I saw a flash of green. I started to prize up cement with a claw hammer and chisel now, chipping and cracking until it lifted, and I saw the green tarpaulin in the shape of a shroud.

Dagg
had
told me. In a green tarp, he said, in the garage. Not Eamonn Loy’s motor garage, his garage in Quarry Fields. Dave Donnelly had tried to tell me too; Dagg must have included it in his statement.

I knew I should call the Guards in. But the Technical Bureau would be busy up in Castlehill for hours. And anyway, I wasn’t going to stop now.

Jack Dagg probably thought quicklime destroyed corpses. In most cases, it has the reverse effect: there’s some superficial scorching, but then the intense heat dries out the body and preserves it in a mummified state. It doesn’t smell great, but it doesn’t smell like a putrefying corpse. It doesn’t look perfect, but it can still look like the person.

There were stab wounds all over the body, which was weathered and browned; the face was slashed and twisted in pain; the eyes were gone. There was a gold wedding ring on his shriveled left hand. It came off easily; inside the ring was engraved the name Daphne. My mother’s name. I put the ring back on the man’s finger.

It was my father.

THE GARDA TECHNICAL BUREAU LIVED IN MY GARAGE
for about a week. They prepared diagrams and graphs that charted the patterns of the various bloodstains. Comparing these with the angle and depth of the various wounds as described by the forensic pathologist’s team, they were able to figure out pretty much how John Dawson’s attack on my father proceeded: the variety and sequence of the wounds, the duration, and so on. One forensic chap who had seen me so often in Seafield Garda Station and hanging around crime scenes that he must have confused me with someone who didn’t give a fuck, told me excitedly that there were six kinds of bloodstains, and that Green Tarp’s crime scene (that’s what they called my father, Green Tarp) exhibited all six, and did I know how rare that was. I said I didn’t, and he told me that it was very rare.

It’s all on file, should I ever want to reconstruct my father’s murder, blow by blow.

I spent a lot of my time talking to the Guards, and a lot of the rest of my time at funerals. One of these was Jack Dagg’s. I went back to the house afterward. Caroline Dagg smiled glassily at me as if I was there to steal the silver. Rory Dagg was drinking sparkling water. He told me senior management at Dawson’s were organizing some kind of takeover, and that he would do very well out of the shake-up. He said he regretted he hadn’t told me all he knew earlier. I said it wouldn’t have made any difference. He said anytime he could do me a favor, he’d be happy to. I said how did right now sound.

We drove to Quarry Fields. The Technical Bureau had pulled out. The only trouble was, they’d had to leave the garage behind. We stood in the drive, and I pointed to the garage.

“I want to get rid of it,” I said.

He looked at the garage — flat concrete roof, attached to the side wall of the house on one side, a side lane on the other — turned to me, and nodded.

“Not a problem. What about the floor?”

“Especially the floor,” I said, and he flushed. “I want earth there.”

“Once we pull out the concrete — and there’s probably some hardcore down there, whatever — we’ll turn whatever’s left. It’ll probably be very sandy though, so we’ll throw in some topsoil for you. That’ll work well if you want grass, or plants, whatever you want to grow.”

“What’s it likely to cost me?” I said.

“You’re not paying for it,” he said. “I should have told you what I knew first thing. This is my way of not feeling guilty.”

“Not feeling guilty,” I said. “Sounds good to me. How do you think that’s going to go for you?”

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said, got into his battered black Volvo Estate and drove away.

I looked at the garage, and tried to imagine what it would look like, just a patch of earth, and what I would grow there. Whatever I wanted. I didn’t know how to grow anything. I was going to have to learn.

On Bayview Strand, George Halligan had almost been embarrassed talking about his putative blood tie with Barbara Dawson. He told me that when his father was dying, he summoned George to his hospital bed in private and made him swear that if ever Barbara Dawson needed anything, George was to supply it, no questions asked. Hence the Glock 17, years ago. He’d never tried to exploit the relationship until Peter came to him with the golf club deal. He didn’t know whether she was his father’s half sister. He didn’t have an opinion one way or the other. Family was a pain in the bollocks.

Barbara had asked him to take half a dozen files out of Peter’s office, and to wipe anything recent off his computer. There was a cold room in one of the outbuildings on the Dawson property in Castlehill. That’s where they’d kept Peter’s body. It was Podge’s idea to move it back on board the boat. George had simply asked him to retrieve the gun, and, again at Barbara’s request, take any photographs he could find in Loy’s house. Podge took it upon himself to make a clumsy attempt to set me up. They’d’ve been better off dumping the body in the woods. Trouble always started whenever Podge started to think he had brains.

George had told Colm Hyland to tape the bribe money on Councillor MacLiam’s body. Deflect attention away from the councillors who actually had taken backhanders. Spread the blame around a little: if everyone was on the take, it canceled itself out; as good as if no one was. According to George.

The Guards found Barbara Dawson’s prints all over Linda’s Audi. Linda’s mobile phone, the one Barbara sent the text from, was in a drawer in her bedroom. The mobile also registered the call Barbara made to Seafield Garda Station reporting a murder that morning. And the tape of that call was Barbara Dawson with her grawndest accent on. In another of the Dawsons’ myriad sheds and outbuildings they found the contents of the box files that had gone missing from Peter Dawson’s home office: the photographs from Family 1 and 2, the Golf Club papers, and all his bank statements, itemized telephone bills, share certificates and mortgage statements. They found all my family photographs too. They also found, printed out on white A4 and put in envelopes with labels addressed to the editors of newspapers, prominent politicians, every detective in Seafield Garda Station, and assorted other community leaders and public figures, the following letter.

To Whom It May Concern
I, Peter Dawson, only son of John Dawson, builder, have been following a family tradition in recent weeks. I have been attempting to secure the rezoning of the Castlehill Golf Club lands, which my family owns, by means of bribery and corruption. This is how my father built up the business all those years ago, himself following the illustrious example set by Jack Parland and his merry men back in the sixties. I have succeeded in bribing Seafield County councillors Eithne Wall and John O’Driscoll so far. Each cost thirty thousand; for this, it is understood that they will support, or if you’re reading this after the vote has taken place, have supported, the application to have the land rezoned from agricultural to high-density residential. I have hopes for other councillors, especially Councillor Seosamh MacLiam, Jack Parland’s son-in-law, as at the time of writing the vote is still in doubt. I have not neglected my mother in all of this. In attempting to further my business ambitions, she advised me to involve George Halligan, best known as the head of the Halligan crime family. My mother places no trust in what she calls such scurrilous rumors. This is probably because she is the illegitimate daughter of George Halligan’s grandfather. Therefore she is a criminal by blood, as opposed to my father, who became one by inclination and greed. There isn’t a great deal of difference between the two; you might say they are just around the corner from each other. Of course, the Halligans are very dangerous, and do as they please, and George’s brother is a disturbed and volatile individual who should be in some kind of institution. But I wouldn’t make any great claims for the degree of sanity in my own family either. In any case, if anything happens to me, or to my family, then it may well be the fault of the Halligans. But equally, it may be that we Dawsons have brought it on ourselves.