The Color of Blood

“And why is that?”

“Because young Dalton ran out on her a month before the baby was born. And a month after the birth, Eileen herself couldn’t take any more. She left the baby in the porch you entered, then slipped back home, sealed up the kitchen, turned the oven on and gassed herself. The strain of it all, the son dying, the young husband leaving, she may have been depressed after the birth…God only knows what darkness haunts one of His children when they feel driven to take that decision.”

Massey turned to me, and I saw that there were tears running down his smooth, unlined face.

“Such a beautiful girl…too beautiful, now, too trusting, too quick to sit on a handsome lad’s knee, too much life in her, more than she could manage, and no one she could trust to help her cultivate it, help it grow. Such beauty…such a waste.”

He shook his head and wiped his face with a large white handkerchief.

“Forgive me. You’re absolutely right, there are people I married last year and I would probably not recognize them if they walked through that door this minute. But you couldn’t forget Eileen Dalton.”

“What happened to the child?”

“Oh, the Howards took care of everything. They paid for the funeral, such flowers, and they arranged adoption for the child with a family they knew.”

“How’d they manage that? I mean, didn’t they have to go through some kind of agency?”

“In theory. In practice, John Howard was chair of the board of the Adoption Authority, and two of the board members were ex-students of his, and another was the chaplain at the Howard Medical Center, and the adoptive father was a senior colleague of Howard’s, so the whole thing went through on a hush-hush little nod. A nice respectable family the baby went to though, a very good family.”

There was something sardonic about the way Massey said this, which, combined with the obvious affection he had had for Eileen Dalton, made me like him immensely.

“Did they take the house too?”

“Oh no. The Dalton fellow’s name was on the deeds, you see. And there was no mortgage. After a while, the council boarded it up; kids were having cider parties and all sorts up there. It’s only this last eighteen months it’s been done up; I heard it was sold, and the new owner has rented it out. Which I suppose means Dalton was out there all along, the blackguard.”

“The house,” I said. “Is it the second in the terrace just past the church?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Pearse Terrace. How did you know? But you’re a detective, I forgot. I suppose you dug it up, Mr. Loy.”

I rose to leave, and he gathered the registers together.

“By the way, you were absolutely right about something else too,” he said.

“And what would that be?”

“Deducing that I had shown these books to someone recently.”

“Was it a young man, slim build, long black hair, good-looking?”

Father Massey laughed and said, “Oh dear me no, I’m afraid not,” in almost a camp way. “Quite the opposite, old and red and fat. Solicitor for the Howard family, he said he was. Nice person, just not at all easy on the eye. I’m sure you know him. Denis Finnegan.”

In the churchyard, there was someone standing by my Volvo. As I got closer, I saw that it was Jerry Dalton, and that he was putting something beneath my windscreen wipers. I walked a little slower then, trying to creep up on him, but the blare of a car horn alerted him to the danger; he looked back at me, then bolted for the road; I chased him, but he had too much of a lead, and twenty years, on me; Anita was waiting across the road in the Punto; Jerry Dalton got in beside her and they took off. No sign of Emily. I jumped the three-bar fence and knocked on the door of the Dalton house, once, twice, three times. No reply. I opened the letterbox and shouted through it.

“Emily? Emily, it’s Ed Loy.”

“Go away.”

“Emily, your father’s worried about you. Sandra too. I’m just checking that you’re okay.”

“My mother’s just been murdered and the cops think my dad did it; of course I’m okay.”

“Can you open the door? Can I talk to you?”

“No. Please, just leave me alone.”

“We have to believe Shane is innocent.”

“Why? I’d’ve killed her if I were him. They hated each other.”

“I don’t know that that’s true.”

“Who the hell are you? What do you know about any of it?”

“As much as you’ll tell me. I know about Stephen Casey, and Eileen Dalton being Jerry’s mother. I know you and Jerry are trying to get to the bottom of it all. That’s what I want too. But I need your help.”

There was a long silence, and then the sound of sobbing.

“Emily?”

“All right. I’ll ring Daddy. But please don’t tell him where I am, I just need some time alone. I’m safe here.”

The sobbing continued. I let the letterbox close.

I walked back to my car, picked the envelope from the windscreen and put it in my pocket; I didn’t have time for it now. Shane Howard was going to be outside St. Anthony’s Church at six with a bag of cash, and I needed a partner if I was going to track whoever was going to make the grab.

The fact Tommy Owens went to great lengths to hide-you could say he’d dedicated his entire life’s work to its concealment, if the phrase “life’s work” was one you could fit alongside Tommy with a straight face-was that his mother was a teacher, his family owned their own semidetached house, and, while his father had drunk himself to death by the age of forty-three, he was an alcoholic civil servant, not some drunken laborer. In other words, Tommy grew up lower middle class, or what passed for it in Ireland in those days (it didn’t always have much to do with money). But from the word go, Tommy wanted to be with the kids who were trouble, with the troubled kids, and his teachers went from telling him that they expected much better to eventually being relieved that his behavior wasn’t a lot worse. Everyone liked to say there was no real harm in Tommy, but that wasn’t true; he did his fair share of things to other kids that, looking back, were as vicious and mean as it comes; so did I; so did a lot of us. But Tommy always did stuff that seemed guaranteed to backfire, to land him in even greater trouble: when it comes to the various working definitions of a loser, Tommy Owens fit the bill in this regard: you always felt that, deep down, Tommy wanted to get caught. Not a man you needed on your side in a crisis. On the other hand, I hadn’t made enough friends since I’d been back to have many-all right, any-alternatives. Except for a few Guards, and they weren’t what I needed for a ransom grab, or, after last night, for anything else right now.

Sadie Owens greeted me with a hug.

“Ah Ed, the boy. I hope you’ve come to take him out of this,” she said. “The rages at least provide entertainment; the sulks are the worst thing.”

Sadie had looked about fifty when she was thirty-five, with paint flecks in her hair and colorful “ethnic” skirts and an absentminded air that never quite concealed how sharp she was; now she was seventy, she still looked fifty, but the paint flecks were grey hairs now, and the skirts were just a little wider at the hips. She rolled her eyes behind the thick Nana Mouskouri glasses she had always worn, opened the living room door, whispered “Light Blue Touch Paper” and disappeared into the kitchen.

It usually took a long time to talk Tommy out of a sulk, even when-especially when-the bad blood had been his fault. In that respect, it was like having a girlfriend, but without any of the advantages. But I didn’t have a long time. So I turned off whatever quiz show bollocks Tommy had been watching, sat down in front of him, put the sports bag I was carrying on the floor and said: “Tommy, I think the Reillys, working with Sean Moon or independent of him, have pressed ahead with an attempt to blackmail Shane Howard. They’ve set a pickup for six tonight, outside St. Anthony’s in Seafield. I want to follow them back to wherever they go once they’ve got the cash. Will you help me? And we’ll call it quits.”

Tommy’s valiant efforts to keep his sulk in place dispersed on the word “pickup.” He was grinning in