The Color of Blood

“I don’t think so, Sean. I don’t think so.”

Emily and Jonathan were silent on the drive back to Shane Howard’s surgery. There was nobody there except Anita, who told me Shane had called her at lunchtime to cancel the afternoon’s appointments. Of course, there were two patients she couldn’t contact, so she had to stay here to face them when they showed up. She didn’t look very happy, and although she smiled and blessed herself when I told her I had found Emily, she seemed like a woman with a lot on her mind.

I swung around the harbor and up the steep drive to “Howard residence.” The Porsche wasn’t there, but Emily had a key. When we got inside, Emily announced she was going to bed. I said I didn’t think that was a very good idea and she erupted again and said she didn’t care what I thought, I was just another flunky bought and paid for by her father and now I’d done my job I should crawl back down beneath the stone I’d slithered out from. Jonathan had helped himself to a brandy from a drinks table and was sitting on the sofa watching us. He was very skinny and his eyes were red and his expression flickered from a disdainful glare to an eye-rolling smile, as if at the appalling comedy of the situation. I wondered that he could find comedy in what had happened, but evidently he could: occasionally he would laugh, as if remembering an especially amusing moment, and then his eyes would narrow, and his hand would flash up to cover his mouth, as if he was afraid he might suddenly give the game away.

“I don’t know that I’ve done my job yet. I need to get your side of the story,” I said to Emily.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and walked out of the room. I followed her down the hall.

“In that case, I’ll have to ring the Guards and tell them that you and your cousin participated in pornography that may have been filmed by the recently murdered David Brady. I have the photographs, and the other film Jonathan was in, and it’s starting to look like I’ll have no option but to turn them over,” I said to her retreating back.

She stopped, but didn’t turn around.

“There’s also the question of whether you were being held against your will, or whether you were willing players. If the latter, there might be charges of blackmail and extortion to consider.”

“I’m really really tired, Mr. Loy,” she said in her best sulky-spoiled Daddy’s girl voice.

“I’m not feeling too chipper myself, but since neither of us is three or eighty, I think we can probably make it through another hour or so without needing a nap,” I said.

Her shoulders began to shake. More tears, I thought, but when she turned around I saw that she was laughing.

“All right, fair enough, you’re not like the usual twats Daddy sets on me,” she said. She shook her red hair, then nodded at me with those deep dark eyes, her sullen pout fully restored.

“What are the usual twats like?” I said, as we went back into the living room.

“Big ex-cops in anoraks with beer bellies. They’re supposed to be inconspicuous, I mean, hello? In a pub full of scrawny students, and a fat culchie with a big red face trying to blend in? I don’t think so.”

Emily sat down beside her cousin, slapped her hand on his knee and ran it up his thigh. Jonathan rolled his eyes back in his head as she did this; when she reached his crotch, she squeezed, and he shot his tongue out. I went to get a brandy for myself. The house was cold, and what the kids were doing was annoying, and what I feared lay behind it was disturbing me. There was Jameson, so I had a glass of that instead. It was suddenly dark, dark the way it gets at three thirty on a dull misty Halloween, darker than night it seemed.

Emily was poking Jonathan in the side now, and he was juddering and grimacing and giggling. I sat down opposite them and waited for them to stop, and after a while, they did.

“Whose idea was the porn?” I said.

There was silence for a while, then Jonathan pulled his hand from his mouth.

“David Brady’s,” he said.

Emily hit him in the face so quickly that it was difficult at first to take in what had happened. She was wearing several rings, and they raked across Jonathan’s cheek and temple, drawing needle sprays of blood. He yelped in pain and cowered away from her, but quickly tried to retrieve himself, shaking his head and contorting his grimace of pain back into the mask of detached amusement he seemed to wear for protection. Just as quickly he was on top of Emily, his hands around her neck, and she was writhing beneath him on the sofa, her motorcycle boots kicking in the air. I grabbed his head by the hair and tugged him off her, then hauled Emily to her feet and clasped her flailing wrists in one hand. Jonathan recoiled on the couch, hands up, head bowed, cowering, a dog who’d been beaten too often; Emily was kicking at my shins, dragging me across the room.

“That’s enough now, enough, do you hear me?” I shouted. Emily’s face was flushed with rage, her lips compressed, her breath coming hard through her nose. She bent down and sank her teeth into my hand, and I had to use all my will not to slap her face. I put the flat of my hand against her chest and pushed her hard across the room. She fell back onto the couch, winded. There was blood on my torn hand; it tasted of metal, and of fear.

Emily was staring at me in astonishment.

“No one pushes me around,” she said. “No one treats me like that.”

“No one bites my hand unless I ask them to,” I said. “But here’s the thing: if you take a walk on the wild side, be prepared for the unexpected.”

“Do you-actually-know who I am?” Emily Howard said, with all the contemptuous hauteur a private education and an exclusive south Dublin address afford.

“I’m scared to find out, sweetheart,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while after that. Jonathan drained his brandy, and Emily clicked the rings on her right hand against the rings on her left. Somewhere across the bay, fireworks crackled and shot their plumes of light through the murk; like a relief diagram of nerves and synapses in the body, they seemed to give the falling night scale and dimension. I felt like there was a gulf between me and these damaged, spoiled, feral kids; I feared that if I asked the wrong question or said a word out of place, it might tip them over an edge they were clearly teetering on. I could call Denis Finnegan and leave them in his charge. That would possibly have been the smart play. But I knew I wasn’t going to let any of this go until I got to the bottom of it.

“All right,” I said. “For starters, neither of you was forced to do anything against your will, is that so?”

“You mean, fuck?” Emily said with a big leering grin.

I nodded.

“No, we weren’t forced. Were we, Jonny?”

Jonathan shook his head, his smile back in place, his eyes in his lap.

“We did it all for love, Mr. Loy,” Emily said, and waggled her tongue at me.

“Why was David Brady shooting pornography? How did that come about?”

“How do you know it was David?” Emily said.

“Jonathan told us,” I said.

“Jonny is mistaken, aren’t ya, babe?” Emily said.

Jonathan pushed a kind of sputtered laugh through his nose.

“I make many mistakes,” he said in an arch, ironic tone, as if he was quoting a line from a movie.

“Also, there’s a shot of his wrist in the movie Jonny made with, what’s this they were called, Wendy and Petra?”

“Kylie and Stacey more like,” Emily said in a bad Dublin accent. “Hayley and Kelsey.”

“And on his wrist was his 2JS2 bracelet-no one but David Brady has one. And he had the films and the photos on his home computer. So we all know it was him. What we don’t know is, why.”

“Are they still there, on his computer, for the Guards to find?” Emily asked, her tone suddenly urgent.

“You first. Why were you making porn films with David Brady? And why were you doing it in Honeypark?”

Emily looked to Jonathan, down the corridor that led to her bedroom, and then toward the door, but there was no way out. She sighed laboriously and began to speak.

“Back when DB and I were going out, during the summer, we went through this phase of doing E and kind of like, getting off with other people in front of each other. It was like, we’d give each other marks out of ten, don’t