boots beneath the bed. There was a drug company notepad but no notes had been made, or at least, if there had, there were no indentations to tell what the content might have been. I did the usual trawl: drawers, cupboards, bedside table, mattress, bed linen, came up with nothing. All I could find was, on the windowsill, a line of rowan berries spread across from edge to edge. There was another line on top of the lintel, and another layer on the carpet just inside the doorstop. Maybe, like heliotrope, it had some special meaning. Or maybe Emily had just become very bored, and had left before she coated the entire room with the red and green fruit.
Back in Rowan House, all was quiet. I walked down along the rear corridor, which was hung with horse-racing prints and had a tiny marble holy water font wall-mounted beside each door. I saw two grandly decorated sitting rooms in a Victorian style, all heavy drapes and mahogany furniture and chintz, and the inevitable portraits of John Howard, who must have had artists queuing up to paint him. A couple of doors were locked, a couple opened onto musty bathrooms, there was a bedroom with a brown leather chaise and a rolltop desk and a wall of diplomas and degrees that I imagined was Howard’s, then a room where the light didn’t work. I pushed the door open and went across to the window and opened the curtains. It was a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper. There was a beautiful old dollhouse, and a teddy bear and a blue pig with only one ear lay on the pillow, as if waiting for the girl who owned them to come to bed. The wardrobe was full of dresses and skirts that might fit an eleven-or twelve-year-old girl, including school uniform pinafores and kilts in red and green tartan; the chest of drawers was packed with tops and shorts and underwear for the same. There wasn’t a speck of dust; everything was fresh and clean and smelled of lavender. I crossed the room and looked at the dollhouse, which sat on a table near the window. It was a model of Rowan House, just as I had seen in Emily’s room, with two differences: there was no garden plinth beneath it, and the roof opened. I turned it around and lifted the roof and looked underneath when the door flew open behind me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing in here? Who gave you permission to wander about the house?”
Sandra Howard stood in the doorway in a white cotton shift, hair pulled up and back, face drained of blood, eyes ablaze.
“I was just having a look around,” I said, working hard to get the words out. “Was this your room?”
“Of course it wasn’t my room…yes, yes, it was, ages ago, now come on, out of here-”
“Why is it preserved like this? It’s as if-”
“It’s not ‘preserved,’ I went away to school, that’s all, it’s not ‘as if’ anything, now for God’s sake, will you get out?”
Her voice had become a shrill, hard, screech, with the grace notes of hysteria. I walked past her in the wide doorway. She wouldn’t meet my eye.
In the hall, I waited for her to say good night, but she didn’t come.
I shut the great doors of Rowan House behind me, two images vivid in my brain. One was of the haunted expression in Sandra’s eyes, the shadow across her suddenly gaunt face, as she said, “We all had our troubles, you know.”
The other was what I saw beneath the dollhouse roof: Mary and Joseph and some wise men and an angel from a child’s crib in a ring around a Barbie doll on all fours with a hole punched between her spread legs and red painted around the hole and an Action Man doll kneeling behind the hole, between her legs. On the inside of the roof in red were daubed the words “I should be ashamed of myself.”
Part Three. ALL SOULS’ DAY
He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowring.
Matthew 16: 2-3
Twenty-one
I DROVE TO HENNESSY’S IN BAYVIEW, WHERE EVERYTHING is available at a price, and Tommy met me in the car park and gave me a small bottle of GHB.
“Be careful with it man,” he said. “Very easy to OD, specially mixing with booze.”
“Okay. Thanks, Tommy.”
“Are you sure this is the right way to go?” he said. He was so used to my being the reliable one that, whenever it looked like I was getting wayward, Tommy got very grave and paternal. It always made me smile, and I was always glad of it.
“I’ll only use it in an emergency,” I said.
GHB in small doses works a little like Ecstasy; in conjunction with booze, it can knock a man out. I didn’t like using it, but I could hear the clock ticking.
I drove through the night with the windows open and the damp night air blowing in, trying to breathe, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. I remembered what David Manuel had said: It’s what happened twenty, thirty years ago that counts; I wondered how much he knew, and what more Emily had told him: would she confirm that Sandra had been abused by her father? What might she add about herself? I called Manuel, but his phone was off; I left a message saying I was on my way, but I would be late.
When I turned into the square I could smell the smoke clearly; no confusing it with fog this time. I got out of the car and saw it pouring out the top of Manuel’s house. There was no fire brigade, no ambulance or police, just a few neighbors gathering, and what appeared to be Manuel’s hysterical family running up and down the garden; I recognized his wife standing in the doorway.
“Mrs. Manuel, I’m Ed Loy, I saw your husband this morning. I’m a detective.”
“He’s trapped up there. Please, can you try and reach him?”
A tall girl of about fifteen with the same dark coloring as Manuel’s wife was crying. She turned to me.
“The flames are coming down the stairs.”
I went into the house and started up the stairs; by the third floor, the smoke was too thick to see, and the heat was unbearable; I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t see the flames but I could hear their rumbling crackle, like some infernal engine.
I went down and out through the kitchen into the back garden. An old metal fire escape ran from the first floor to the third; I shinned up onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension and climbed the spindly ladder until the pitched roof lay above me. Through the dark window of the attic room, I could see the red flames glowing like trammeled rage. I couldn’t see David Manuel, and reckoned he must have passed out from smoke inhalation; the roof tiles were concrete, and I thought if I could work a few loose and hurl them at the window, I might break it, let some air in and hopefully bring him back to consciousness; I worried that the air would drive the flames higher; as it turned out, plan and worry were all in vain. I flung one tile at the Velux window; it almost bounced off the double-glazed glass, skittered down the roof and fell the long three stories to smash on the paving stones below. As if this was some kind of occult summons, Manuel suddenly rose up in the window, an apparition in green, arms and shoulders on fire; his hands reached for the window’s release bar, and the red flames behind him danced higher as he forced the window open and there was a roar from within like a beast in torment and Manuel came out headfirst onto the roof above me. His back and his long hair were on fire now, his movements agonized, staccato, like an insect on a grill; I called to him, but he was beyond hearing, beyond vision. He moved on hands and knees down the roof, and looked like he might crawl right off the edge; I tried to reach across and grab him, but just then he stood up and stepped out into the night and fell like a burning angel, down into the garden below.
