The Wrong Kind of Blood (38 page)

I remembered the receipt from Ebrill’s Stationers I found in the trash at Linda’s house. Dave Donnelly told me the friend in the Garda IT division who was going to scour Peter’s hard disk had gone on sick leave; the virtual version of the above letter, under the file name “twimc,” was eventually located and printed and sent to Dave three months to the day after Peter’s body was found.

There was a reference in Peter’s letter that only a few of us would have got: when he says that criminality by blood is “just around the corner” from criminality by greed, he was thinking of John Dawson in Fagan’s Villas, just around the corner from the Halligans in the notorious Somerton flats. And Barbara somewhere between the two, or rather, with the worst of both. Peter’s letter was never made public. There was something glorious about its recklessness and its honesty, something terrifying about its nihilism. I think he wanted to die, but only if his family was publicly shamed in the process. But it’s sometimes hard to imagine what would be deemed shame in Ireland: financial crimes don’t seem to figure. Murdering your son and daughter-in-law would certainly qualify. But at the inquests into each death, despite the best efforts of Seafield Garda, the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and Edward Loy, private detective, juries returned open verdicts. Nobody wanted to believe a mother would do such a thing, so nobody did. All the papers Jack Parland controlled wanted to steer clear of any Halligan-Dawson connection for fear that the papers he didn’t control would revive the charge sheet against Jack Parland’s adventures in the property world. So nobody reported it. It was as if it had never happened. Whatever you say, say nothing.

The documents and computers were taken for examination by the Garda Fraud Bureau and the IT division, and the Criminal Assets Bureau prepared to launch another investigation into George Halligan’s wealth. Dave told me if CAB believe you are living off the proceeds of crime, and you can’t prove you’re not, they can confiscate your assets.

Before that happened, George’s solicitor released a statement saying George wanted to cooperate fully with any Garda investigation, that he regretted any stain of impropriety surrounding his legitimate business dealings with the Dawson group, and that his holdings in the Castlehill Golf Club lands and other properties were all legitimate and aboveboard. What came next was inevitable: Podge’s solicitor, who happened to be George’s solicitor’s partner, in life and in practice, announced that her client would be pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Seosamh MacLiam. The Director of Public Prosecutions hadn’t felt confident in Dessie Delaney as a witness to pursue a murder charge; the murder weapon had Delaney’s prints all over it; now Delaney was surplus to requirements. There would be no trial, no public account of any of the details of the case, or any of the embarrassing connections with George Halligan. Just a drunken party on a yacht, with tragic consequences. George Halligan’s black sheep brother. No story here. Dave said Leo Halligan, who makes Podge look stable, had sent word down; otherwise Podge wouldn’t’ve gone for it. Leo is due out next year.

Colm Hyland wouldn’t say a word, he just stared at the wall. He got five years for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. His solicitor has lodged an appeal.

Councillor Seosamh MacLiam, or Joseph Williamson, as the priest referred to him, was buried after a funeral service in the Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street in the center of Dublin. The Palestrina boys’ choir sang Duruflé’s Requiem, and everyone was there. At least, I assumed everyone was there; I hadn’t been home long enough to know who everyone was, but to go by the coats and the suits and the cars, they looked as rich and powerful and quietly pleased about it as that type of everyone everywhere else. And if I hadn’t recognized the type, I would have suspected some high-profile folk were abroad when I got out onto the street to find it barred to traffic. The Pro-Cathedral has no churchyard, so there’s usually no place to hang around after a funeral to commiserate if you’re just an acquaintance who’s not going to the grave afterward. Aileen Parland’s family got the street sealed off so people could do just that. I waited while she was surrounded by mourners paying their respects. She noticed me, and made a gesture with her hand, beckoning me to her. She didn’t look any different from when we had first met: all in black, no makeup (or no-makeup makeup), the silver crucifix in place.

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Loy,” she said.

“Accepted,” I said.

“But you don’t know what it’s for,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ll save it up, and next time I need one, I’ll cash it in.”

“I shouldn’t have fired you. I should have trusted your methods, however… unorthodox. I was wrong. Detective O’Sullivan of the National Bureau told me it was your work that led to the arrest of my husband’s killer.”

“I’m only sorry we couldn’t get a murder charge.”

“If there’s ever anything I can do to help, I’d be glad to.”

There was, and I told her what. I thought she would balk at the price, but the deal must have attracted her do-gooder instincts.

“Isn’t that the person whose arm you broke?” she said. “I’d have to meet the family first, to see if they’re… and if they are, I’ll do it.”

Seventy-five grand, just like that.

Nice to be rich.

See if they’re what?

Dave Donnelly had a party to celebrate being promoted to detective inspector. Fiona Reed had a party the night before to celebrate being promoted to superintendent. I wasn’t at that one, and I wasn’t at the one the whole Seafield Station held to celebrate Superintendent Casey being moved to some made-up job in Garda Headquarters while he sat out the eighteen months to his pension. But I was at Dave’s party. There was a wind in off the sea that made it too cold to be out in the garden, and the barbecue wouldn’t start and then flamed too much, and most of the cops there were too partied out to handle another big night and left early, until eventually all that was left was a hard core of three: Dave and Carmel and me. We sat by the big outdoor heater and ate underdone meat and drank too much beer. In no particular order, we had a laugh, a cry, and a fight. The laugh I can’t remember. The cry came when I broke under questioning about my romantic history in L.A. I heard myself telling them that I had been married, that there had been a daughter and that she had died. Carmel burst straight into tears. Dave set off and started laying into one of the giant rosebushes that stood at the bottom of the garden. He was shouting and kicking at it. The neighbors looked out their bedroom window, and Carmel had to go quiet him down.

The fight came because we began to drink whiskey to cheer ourselves up. It was between Dave and me, after Carmel had fallen asleep. I can’t remember exactly what it was about, but I think it went something like:

How much of a bottle of whiskey can two Irishmen drink before they have a fight?

This much, you fucker.

No, this much, you cunt.

I woke up in the garden. All Dave’s kids ran away when I sat up and opened my eyes.

I had a DNA test. I am Eamonn Loy’s son. Better to know.

I wondered a lot about how much quicker I might have gotten to the truth. Courtney had left clues: calling the property company that bought the golf club lands Courtney Estates. Making the directors Kenneth Courtney and Gemma Grand. And Barbara had denied knowing anyone named Courtney when she visited me at home.

But I couldn’t have made the connection with Gemma Courtney until I had Peter’s mobile records, and matched her number with the digits scrawled on the back of the fragment of photograph I had found on the boat.

And then a finger-sized scrap of the photograph, just large enough to show Kenneth Courtney’s face, showed up when the Guards went back to take one last look at Peter Dawson’s boat to see if they could find any fingerprint or DNA connections to Colm Hyland. It had been wedged tight between two seat cushions, and had evaded the first forensic trawl and my examination. It had been there all along: the third musketeer. If I had found it first off, Linda might still be alive.

There was no sense in thinking that way. If Linda had told me everything she knew straight off, she might still be alive too. If the Seafield cops hadn’t been corrupt, if Peter hadn’t joined forces with the Halligans, if my mother and John Dawson hadn’t been lovers, if it hadn’t all gone back to Fagan’s Villas.

No sense in thinking that way. But in the long nights that followed, that’s the way I thought.

My father’s funeral was the last. Linda’s funeral was the worst. I was living among the dead, in the church, at the gravesides. The scent of incense in your nose, like gorse.

Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

MY MOTHER HAD LEFT ENOUGH MONEY FOR HER GRAVE.
How she did this was, she part remortgaged the house. She must have had money problems. She never told me. Or it’s possible she did tell me, and I was too drunk to take it in. She hadn’t spent all of the money she’d borrowed, so once I’d paid for the grave and a headstone, I returned the rest of the money to the bank and took the mortgage on myself. David McCarthy ushered me gingerly through the process like I was some kind of chemical experiment that might erupt at any moment. It worked out that I owed the bank six hundred a month for the next twenty years, so I’d need a job soon. I asked Aileen Parland to recommend me to all her wealthy friends. She thought I was teasing her. I wasn’t; who else could afford me? She said she thought I’d have too much integrity to make a habit of taking money from the rich. I said I preferred my integrity with a roof over its head, and anyway, who better to take money from than people who had too much of it?

The Dawson/Courtney estate was a shambles, with hordes of lawyers setting siege to it all; David McCarthy told me with barely suppressed glee that it would be twenty years before anyone sees a penny, and by that time, the lawyers will have it all anyway. I still had eighteen grand of the twenty Barbara Dawson had given me. I subtracted the remainder of what I was owed for finding Peter’s body, and then his murderer, and sent the rest by courier to Gemma Courtney on the Charnwood Estate, with a note giving her a broad outline of what happened. She rang me and we agreed we should stay in touch. That’s what cousins always say.

Tommy rang me one night from Wales, cartoonishly drunk, to tell me that he’d remembered where my rental car had been dumped, only that was earlier in the evening, and by the time he got around to phoning me, he’d forgotten again. I hung up, and he rang back and repeated what he had said before, word for word, as if the first call hadn’t taken place, so I hung up again, and left the phone off the hook. The next day, I reported the car stolen from outside my house. The truth, if not the whole truth.

Aileen Parland flew to Galway where Sharon was staying with her sister Collette. It turned out that, in a brief flirtation with egalitarianism during Aileen’s childhood, or as a reaction to Jack Parland leaving her, her mother had sent her for two years to a non-fee-paying convent school — the same school Sharon had attended fifteen years later. So they had nuns in common. And a certain lack of sentimentality. And so Dessie Delaney got his rehab, and his family got their fifty-grand stake in his brother’s restaurant, and I got a postcard from a Greek island I’ve still never heard of, and someone got a happy ending out of all this.

The cemetery lies between the sea and the Wicklow hills, a couple of miles south of Bayview along the coast. My father’s coffin had gone into the same grave as my mother’s, and the earth was packed in a fresh mound above them both, with a wooden cross as a marker. I had ordered a roughcast oval granite headstone, and when it was ready, they would take the cross up and put the stone in.

It was one of those bright, cold nights that tell you summer’s turning. I threw my cigarette away and left my parents’ grave and cut across to the path that leads from the cemetery down to the sea. A fresh breeze was churning surf up in the dark blue water, and gulls raised a clamor that sounded like keening.

I walked along the pebbled shore toward Bayview and thought of all the dead: of Barbara Dawson and Kenneth Courtney, of Linda and Peter Dawson, of Seosamh MacLiam, John Dawson, and Jack Dagg. And my mother and father, Daphne and Eamonn Loy. It was like the weekly litany read off the altar at mass, the priest urging prayers for the repose of each soul, and then “for all the dead.”

For all the dead.

Dagg had died of leukemia. His blood was all wrong, he said. Maybe that’s how they all died. Maybe everyone connected to Fagan’s Villas had the wrong kind of blood, right back to Old George Halligan’s little bastard daughter Barbara. Either their blood was corrupt, or they weren’t the person they claimed to be, or thought they were.

But that wasn’t all the dead.

I thought of how we had been in the mountains on vacation, my wife and daughter and me, and my baby girl, Lily, her name was, had put her hand through a pane of glass and opened an artery, how I tied her arm above the wound with strips of my shirt as we drove to the hospital, how they told us in intensive care how rare her blood was, how they didn’t have any blood of her precise type for a transfusion, how I said they should check to see if mine would match, and my wife immediately said no, it wouldn’t, not to waste time, and I tried to argue her down, both of us shouting now, scared ourselves, scaring everyone around us.

“Test my blood,” I said, “it’s worth a try.”

“It can’t be a match,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because she has O-type blood, and you have type AB.”

The nurse looked quickly at my wife, then she left the room.