they call you?”
“Don’t disrespect me, Mr. Loy-I have full regard for what my par-I call them my parents, because they behaved like they were-full regard for what they did for me, I’m not dishonoring or disowning them-”
“All right, all right. So what did they call you? What was your name for most of your life?”
“Scott. Alan Scott. Son of Robert and Elizabeth. Robert no longer with us, cancer, doctor, gastroenterologist, hill-walker, nice man, Elizabeth thriving in her prayerful way, housewife, bridge, church, garden. Sutton, by the sea.”
“How did you find out? Did they tell you when you were eighteen or something?”
“This is the…the only bit that made me angry…and my father, Robert, was dead by then, and getting angry with Elizabeth, it’s not a place she can go, she doesn’t have the muscle. It’s pointless. But apparently, the Howards swore them to secrecy, they were to do everything they could to preserve the fiction that I was their child.”
“So how did you find out?”
“I began to get this stuff in the post. Stuff about Stephen Casey. Loads of stuff about the Howards, I couldn’t really make sense of any of it. That went on for a while, and then one morning, I got a copy of Jeremiah Dalton’s baptismal certificate, from the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Woodpark. Well, one of the things about being no good at anger is, Elizabeth is no good at lying either, so as soon as I showed it to her, she told me everything, or at least, everything she knew.”
“How much further have you gotten?”
He shook his head, ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair.
“Not much. I’ve been trying to sound out the Howards. I proceeded from the position that they wanted to keep it a secret, so I’ve avoided confrontations.”
“Did you work through Emily? Do you think she might have been the person who was sending you the information?”
“No. I was the one who told her about Stephen Casey. I think I might be responsible for getting her agitated about the whole…family plot. I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to tell with Emily. She’s got a lot of stuff going on herself, many issues.”
I sensed his caginess. He wanted to find out more without giving too much away. I understood that, it was practically my job description. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him who Brian Dalton had turned out to be, at least not while there was the chance he could still be his father.
“So you’re looking at the possibility that this mystery Dalton character-”
“Brian Patrick Dalton.”
“Was your father.”
“Jessica Howard doesn’t remember him. Didn’t remember him. She said Shane’s mother didn’t like her, so she avoided Rowan House. Whether she would have met him up there, I don’t know. And the subject of Stephen Casey was avoided by everyone.”
“Shane told me he remembers getting a lift on Casey’s motorcycle.”
Dalton nodded.
“Some of the Woodpark oul’ ones, I got talking to them down the pub, the ones who remember love to rabbit on about how awful and tragic it all was, and they said he was this guy in a leather jacket with a motorbike.”
“How did you come to rent the same house?”
“Again, it was sent to me in the post, the item in the newspaper advertising it for rent.”
“So there’s someone pulling your strings.”
“It feels like that. But I feel I’m ready to push hard now, to start confronting people.”
“When you say people, you mean Shane and Sandra.”
“There’s no one else, is there?”
“Emily. Jonathan. If you’re a part of that family…Denis Finnegan…someone has been feeding you the information, it must be that one of them wants you to get at the truth. For their own reasons, as much as yours.”
“I guess that’s right.”
The bouncer came over to where we were sitting.
“JD, Barnesy said to give you the call, okay?”
Dalton got up.
“Two things before you go. Jonathan O’Connor ever drink here?”
“Sure. He comes in with Denis Finnegan. And I’ve seen him with the Reillys as well, out in the car park. Last question.”
“If your father’s not Dalton, who might it be?”
He shrugged.
“Who were the available males in the Howard household at the time? Shane? John Howard himself? Which is why Emily and me never got it together, or at least, haven’t yet.”
“Howard was a dying man.”
“Stranger things have happened. I mean, there are too many unanswered questions: Why did the Howards go to the lengths they did to cover things up? Why did they buy a house for Eileen Casey? She’d been living on her own for a long time with her son Stephen, seems to have been a tough cookie. Why did she suddenly crack up and commit suicide?”
“Postnatal depression, abandonment by another partner, on top of the grief around losing her first son. It’s not an impossible place to get back from, but even the toughest cookie would find it hard.”
Dalton looked out over the fog-drenched night.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just think of him as a black rider who took off into the dark, never to be seen again, and leave it at that. Is that what you’d do?”
I thought about it. I didn’t have to think very long.
“No, that isn’t what I’d do.”
“Well, it isn’t what I’m going to do either. ’Course, the possibility that Emily and I are blood relations has something to do with it too. Because I really like her. So I’m kind of hoping the old black rider option is true.”
“JD! People’re dying of thirst here!” called the bouncer.
“All right, I’m coming.”
He turned back to me.
“The funny thing is, you’re searching for one thing, and it eventually becomes about everything, do you know what I mean?”
I nodded. I knew only too well what he meant.
“So the thing is, if I were you, I’d check the graveyard.”
I drove through Woodpark to the Church of the Immaculate Conception. On the way, I called Martha O’Connor.
“Martha, it’s Ed. Just wanted to check you’re okay. Hope it’s not too late.”
“I’m in the office, working. Didn’t see how I was going to sleep after the load you dumped in my lap.”
“I’m sorry. But-”
“No, it’s my fault. I’ve dealt with it by avoiding it for so long. One of the downsides of therapy, you can make yourself feel okay, or at least, less bad, just by talking. But you don’t get anywhere. I thought the only way I could survive living here was by avoiding it all. Hey, it seems to work for most Irish families, right?”
Her laugh seemed tiny over the phone, like a struck match against the night sky.
“I think maybe you were ready to head in that direction anyway,” I said. “I mean, the investigation into John Howard, the fact that you looked at him at all…that could only have been the start of something.”
“Mmm. Maybe. Anyway, what’s up? I value your concern for my welfare, but what the fuck do you want?”
“Two things, if you can get to them. Where’s John Howard buried? Is it a family plot?”
“Can do that, it would have been in the death notices. Thing two?”
“I’m looking for the name of an eyewitness to a suicide by drowning. It would have been off Seafield Pier, late April 1986.”
“Not much of a story.”
“Apparently there was a big search and rescue attempt, all the emergency services were out.”
