Fourteen
SANDRA HOWARD RANG; HER VOICE WAS HIGH AND urgent.
“Ed, Emily’s gone. I went down to the clinic to take care of a few things, and when I got back she had gone.”
“Is there any sign of forced entry, or of a struggle?”
“No. Oh my God, she’s been kidnapped again.”
“I don’t think so. Shane has just had another ransom demand. It just used the film as a threat. Why risk taking her when they have the film as a bargaining chip?”
“You’re right, I suppose.”
“She probably just wants some time to herself,” I said, wishing I were as confident as I sounded. When I ended the call, I had to go through it all again with Shane; by the time I had him reassured that Emily was in no danger, I was convinced she was.
Denis Finnegan was gone when we got back inside the house. I asked Shane Howard to use a mobile phone with an earpiece and to wear a hat so that I could contact him when he was waiting outside the church with a bag full of money. He said he didn’t have a shopping bag, so I looked around and finally found a silver and blue bag advertising some drug company’s latest product. Then I asked him to give Anita the rest of the day off so I could follow her. He was offended that I didn’t trust her; I reassured him that I didn’t trust anyone, including him, that not trusting anyone was my job. He thought I was being funny. I wish I had been. I didn’t tell him I thought she looked far too frightened to be trusted, or that she bore a striking resemblance to the blonde in the porn film with his nephew Jonathan. Shane Howard told me Anita had come into work today driving a blue ’98 reg Fiat Punto-he hadn’t noticed the car before-but he wasn’t sure where she lived or what her second name was. I waited in my car while he found her address in his files; by that time she had taken off, and I was on her tail. I hoped I wouldn’t have to follow her all the way to the North Circular Road, as that’s where Shane Howard said Anita Kravchenko’s flat was. I didn’t. She went through Bayview and along Rathdown Road straight onto upper Seafield Road, then took the third exit off the roundabout by the DIY retail park, straight down into the Woodpark Estate. I was hanging back, keeping my distance, but I misjudged the roundabout; two buses crunched in front of me, and a stream of traffic followed them, and by the time I’d reached Woodpark, I’d lost her. I drove around for a while, aware it was most likely a futile exercise; trying to find a nineties reg Punto in a council estate was like trying to find someone in a grey and navy tracksuit, or a girl with snow blond hair, for that matter; I was on my third car and my fourth blond when I decided to give up. And then I saw a small terrace tucked away in a corner between the church and the high wall the council had built to placate the residents of the adjacent, nonlocal authority houses, and I glimpsed a flash of blond hair and a blue car, and I pulled into the church car park and got out and walked across to the sycamores and beech trees and the low three-bar metal fence that marked the boundary between church and houses, and slipped among them and saw Anita Kravchenko knock on the front door of a two-up two-down grey pebbledash midterrace house, and look over her shoulder as a man opened the door and smiled in what looked like surprise and Anita looked in my direction and I tucked my head in behind the broad fungus-flecked beech trunk, and then looked out again to see her talking intensely to the man in the doorway, the man I had last seen in the Woodpark Inn, singing about Blood on the Wind. Jerry Dalton, who was the right age to be Eileen Casey’s second son, the right age to be Stephen Casey’s half brother, the right age to return and claim his inheritance. He stepped aside and looked at the traffic and the cars in the car park and Anita went into the house and someone else approached the door and spoke to Dalton. Dalton half turned and said something over his shoulder, and the person moved fully into the doorway to continue the conversation. She had dyed her hair black, and she looked very pale, but there was no question that it was Emily Howard.
I walked back through the churchyard. An early-evening mass had finished, and a straggle of old ladies was emerging, the fleet helping the lame down the church steps; they grabbed their shopping trolleys or their walking frames and trundled off unsteadily into the falling night. A board mounted in the porch told me it was the Church of the Immaculate Conception, that the parish priest-and the only priest-was Father James Massey, and that tonight there would be Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in an all-night vigil leading into dawn mass on All Souls’ Day. Years ago, a parish this size would have had two or three priests; now they were probably doing well to have one to themselves. I went around to the side chapel entrance at the rear of the church and knocked on the sacristy door. It pushed open under my hand, and I went in; to my right was a small office area with a desk and chairs and a filing area; ahead, stretching around the corner I could see Formica counters, a sink and shelves with church ornaments and hangings.
“Father Massey?” I said.
A tall, stooped, balding man of about seventy appeared, drying his hands and face on a towel. He had removed his vestments and was wearing the black shirt priests favored for day wear; without the clerical collar it looked incomplete, and so did he.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice sibilant, slightly high.
“I was wondering if you remembered a parishioner of yours, she would have had a son here maybe twenty years ago. Eileen Dalton, her name was. She may have been married here too. Her maiden name was Casey.”
“It wasn’t, but no matter. Yes, I remember her. What connection have you with her?”
His manner wasn’t unfriendly, just direct, guarded, maybe even protective.
“My name is Edward Loy. I’m a private detective, working for the Howard family. Eileen Casey was the mother of a boy who was thought to have murdered Audrey O’Connor, the first wife of Sandra Howard’s husband Richard. Eileen was in service with the Howards at that time. Stephen Casey then was believed to have killed himself. Not long after, Eileen was in a position to buy a house in Woodpark, where she married a man called Dalton.”
“And what do you want to know?”
“Where Eileen Casey, or Dalton, is now. And what she can tell me about her son.”
Father Massey looked at me appraisingly.
“When you say you’re working for the Howards…”
“It means Sandra Howard is paying me. But I’m bound by the laws of the land. Her money doesn’t buy her family a free ride.”
“Because I saw the awful news about Jessica Howard on the television last night. Are you saying what happened twenty years ago has something to do with that?”
“I’m almost certain that it does. I don’t know how yet. But anything you can tell me could be vital.”
Father Massey turned and disappeared from sight. When he returned, he had put his collar on and a black jacket over his shirt; he carried two heavy, leather-bound books under his arm. He laid them out on the desk and opened one to December 1985.
“This is the marriage register entry: you can see here, December twelve, Eileen Mary Harvey married Brian Patrick Dalton, their signatures there.”
He passed me the marriage register and opened the second book and quickly found the page he was looking for.
“Now, here it is, after what we are no longer allowed to call a positively indecent gap, twenty-eight March 1986, a son christened Jeremiah John Dalton.”
He passed me the second volume. I took it, glanced at it and set it down.
“That was very easy,” I said. “If all information was that simple to obtain, I’d be out of a job.”
Massey’s wan face warmed to pink.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I come in out of the blue asking about a marriage and a christening from twenty years ago and you just happen to have the registers at hand and find the entries in seconds. Surely you can’t remember everyone you marry, every child you christen, off the top of your head.”
Massey had flushed red now. He turned his face away from me, and when he spoke, his light voice wavered.
“Ah but poor Eileen was a special case. None of us could forget Eileen.”
