any charges were brought, but Finnegan was hoping they could avoid this. He said he’d be in touch in the morning. There was a message from Sandra asking me to call her, but I didn’t. I’d had enough of the Howards for one day.
When I got home, I poured an absurdly large Jameson and opened a bottle of Guinness and drank them standing in the dark of my kitchen. The back garden was washed in the ghostly spray of a neighbor’s security light. The male and female apple trees were bent beneath their weight of ripe and rotting fruit. I knew how they felt. On the upside, I had found Emily, and I had identified at least some of Shane Howard’s blackmailers, even if one of them was a friend of mine; on the downside, my client was in police custody, being questioned over two murders, and I wasn’t at all sure he didn’t deserve to be charged with them. I wondered whether Shane Howard had suddenly discovered his wife had been having an affair with David Brady and killed them both. I wondered whom David Brady had e-mailed Emily’s sex film to. I wondered if Brock Taylor had anything to do with any of it, and if Sean Moon really had paid the Reillys, if he was a major player and not the overgrown child he appeared to be. And I wondered who had sent me the mass card for Stephen Casey, and who he was to the Howards, and how he had died.
I sent Dave Donnelly a text message reading: 1. Sorry about that, Chief. 2. Stephen Casey RIP All Souls’ Day 1985. Any bells? Loy.
There was a light blinking on my home phone. The message was from my ex-wife’s new husband. She wanted me to know she had gone into labor. She wanted me to hear the news before anyone else. I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to hear the news, and I didn’t drink to her or him or the child they would have together or the happiness I didn’t wish for them. I just drank, until finally the whiskey made me think there was almost something funny about it all. Then I almost laughed at it. Then I remembered I had tossed the Reilly brothers’ gun in a holly bush, and went outside and retrieved it. Then I lay on the living room couch that was long enough to pass out on without fucking up your back, kicked off my shoes and went to sleep.
Part Two. ALL SAINTS’ DAY
When there’s trouble in a family, it tends to show
ROSS MACDONALD, Sleeping Beauty
Eleven
THE BEATING OF WINGS WOKE ME AT SIX; THERE HAD been crows on the chimney stack and on the windowsills the past few mornings. I lay there for a while listening to the asthmatic sound of their breath, waiting for the cawing to begin, but they kept their counsel. I undressed, showered and, with some difficulty, shaved; my face bled a little, but it was in one piece, although the wound did make me look a little like the bad guy in a black- and-white movie. I dressed and cut two oranges into quarters and ate them while I scrambled three large eggs with butter and chives and had them with a few slices of smoked salmon and two cups of coffee. I took two Nurofen Plus for my hangover and another two for my face and for the ache in my hand where Emily Howard bit me.
Outside was dawning the kind of day I always remembered All Saints’ Day as having been: the overcast morning after, grey and gloomy and precarious, as if the world was a smoke-filled globe made of fragile glass that could shatter at any moment. The pungent smell of fireworks lingered, like cordite after a shoot-out. Above the low rumble of traffic I heard the brisk rustle of crows in the holly bushes; black and grey against the glistening red berries, they took my appearance as a cue to begin their arrhythmic dirge. The newspapers had been delivered; I picked the pile off the doorstep and put them on the passenger seat of the car. The phone rang as I left the house; it was Denis Finnegan to say the Guards had extended Shane’s period of detention for another six hours. At lunchtime, they could either charge him or release him. I had a lot to do before then. Grey dawn bled imperceptibly into day as I got the Volvo on the road.
The stop-start motion of cars on the N11 to Ranelagh gave me plenty of time to scan the headlines, which, in the tabloids, were dominated by the two murders. Jessica Howard took precedence, of course, and a couple of the tabloids printed her photograph alongside a shot of an Esther Martin, a woman who had been killed in her home a year or so back. The Guards had arrested her husband several times but had been unable to bring charges: placing the photographs of the two murdered women side by side made it clear, not only that the Guards believed Shane Howard to be guilty, but that they had no qualms about leaking their beliefs to the media. Amidst the appropriately pious tone of the reports, there was considerable leeway for a more salacious emphasis: Jessica had played Sally Bowles in
There was an ostensibly sympathetic account of Jessica’s career in the Irish Independent that read as if written in code, with references to the “exceptionally close professional relationships” she had formed with her directors.
David Brady’s rugby achievements were recorded and several ex-players-including some of Shane Howard’s former international teammates-pitched in with their eulogies; a couple suggested that perhaps latterly, Brady was beginning to see his future outside full-time professional rugby, a tactful way of saying that he hadn’t lived up to his youthful promise-or that he had blown his talent up his nose.
I turned left on Appian Way and cut up through Ranelagh village and stopped at the corner of a leafy square on the way to Rathmines. David Manuel lived in a Victorian three-story redbrick house with stained-glass panes in the front door and a tangle of bicycles and rucksacks and trainers in the wide hall and a wife with salt-and-pepper curls and purple dungarees who directed me up the bookshelf-lined stairs to his attic-floor office, which was decorated in cream and oatmeal tones with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves too and had roof windows that would have let in all the morning light if there had been any.
David Manuel, waiting, in his fifties, wore a three-quarter-length cardigan in assorted shades of green and a pale green collarless linen shirt and matching trousers and olive green Birkenstocks; his silver hair was shoulder length, his tiny face was lined but soft and unmarked, like a nun’s; he steepled his fingertips and smiled thinly at me through silver-framed glasses. I mopped my brow with the back of my hand; the sweat stung the teeth-shaped wound Emily Howard had left there.
“Dr. Manuel, Ed Loy.”
“I’m not a doctor-”
“I know that,” I said. Sweat smarted in my eyes, and I wiped them with my sleeve. Manuel looked at me quizzically.
“Maybe you need a doctor. Are you ill?” he said. His voice was high-pitched, querulous and amused. “You look
