The Color of Blood

“Hasn’t worked out very well so far, has it?”

Emily rubbed the rings on her fingers together.

“We live in hope, Ted. We live in hope.”

Twenty-four

PAT TRACY LIVED IN ONE OF A TERRACE OF THREE SMALL houses that opened onto the street just around the corner from the Anchor Bar. Martha O’Connor’s text had assured me that he stayed up late, and sure enough, his lights were on when I got there. I identified myself through the letterbox, and he opened the door and looked me up and down. We recognized each other immediately, or at least, I recognized him: he was a regular in the Anchor, where he was to be found consulting a newspaper for times of the tides, dispensing the occasional piece of information about alterations in ferry timetables, or gale warnings, or how EU fishing regulations were endangering the entire industry. Silent John called him the Captain, but I think the name was derisive in intent. He had a lined face and false teeth that didn’t fit properly that he liked to work back and forth on his gums, and he wore a flat cap that shone with grime. I sat in his tiny front room at a battered Formica table, and with great ceremony he poured the remainder of the pint bottle of Guinness he had open into a grimy half-pint glass he unearthed from his scary kitchen. I didn’t really want it, certainly not from that glass, but you couldn’t turn down a man’s hospitality. An old paperback copy of Sink the Bismarck! was open by his place at the table; a pale terrier slumbered in a cane basket; the house smelled of stale bread and damp dog.

“I worked the piers most of me life,” Pat announced, “night watchman for coal importers, yacht clubs, lobstermen, engineering works, outboard motor sales, ships in for repairs, watched over the lot. Eyes and ears. That’s what they paid me for, son, eyes and ears.”

“I wanted to ask you about a woman called Eileen Harvey. She was also known as Eileen Casey and Eileen Dalton.”

“She had a few aliases, is that what you’re telling me?” He pronounced it “al-aye-asses.”

“Something like that. You were the chief, in fact the only, witness to her disappearance.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Oh, was I now?” His tone had assumed a knowing, skeptical quality, as if to warn me that he was not a man who liked to be summed up in such narrow terms. “Was I indeed?” he said, giving equal weight to each word, like a prosecuting counsel in a television film.

“You were. According to you, she left her clothes in a pile on the East pier and took a flier into the water, and you called Air-Sea rescue and who knows what else, and they never found her, and that was the end of that.”

“And how do you know all this, Mr. Loy?”

“Because it was in the newspapers, and on the TV as well. Because you told everyone.”

Pat sat back at this and gave his dentures a good flex, then appeared to concede the charges.

“And if I did?” he said, as if throwing the gauntlet back to me across a crowded courtroom.

“I was wondering,” I said, “just how much the lady paid you. I take it she was pretty. What was the story, a boyfriend who beat her?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then looked away, then stared at me again. At first I thought he was having trouble remembering who I was, and it occurred to me that I had never been in the Anchor without his having been present. That kind of intake over years leads to all sorts of short-term memory issues, and can make the drabbest evening home alone a thrill ride of unexpected sights (A door there? I don’t remember that!) and surprise treats (A drink for me, freshly poured? Don’t mind if I do!). But then it emerged that this was merely part of his adversarial strategy.

“The point is,” he began, and then paused for what presumably was intended to be dramatic effect. The pause went on for so long, however, that it began to look like he had forgotten what the point was. Even the slumbering terrier seemed to yawn in his sleep. Suddenly, and at terrific volume, Pat shouted: “NOT! The point is NOT!” I wondered whether I’d have to go back to the beginning and start again, when, in a completely different voice, at once milder, more flexible and altogether cannier, as if Pat himself had fallen asleep and his twin brother had emerged from another room to help out, he said, “The point is not whether I saw her, or what she paid. The point is why you’re looking for her, and what’s it worth to you.”

Stated as plainly as that, the comedy seemed to bleed quickly from the scene. As often in situations like this, I found I couldn’t think of anything but the truth.

“I think she can help me with the unexplained death of a twelve-year-old girl. I think she can explain how this girl came to die. I also want to reunite her with her long-lost son.”

It was nothing but the truth, yet I could see its effect on Pat Tracy in terms of the melodramas it evidently reminded him of. His eyes glowed with excitement; he rocked back and forth in his chair, his gums working his teeth rhythmically, like maracas underwater.

I produced a ten-euro note and laid it on the table. He glanced at it, then inclined himself away from me by forty-five degrees, picked up Sink the Bismarck! held it in front of his nose with one hand and began to read. The effect of this move was undermined a little by his holding the book upside down. I added a twenty to the ten, which he appeared to look on with more favor, before returning to his “reading.” I decided to employ some strategy of my own by whipping both notes away, standing up and walking to the window, as if in high dudgeon. I could see his reflection in the glass. He was peering at the table, as if the money was still there but had somehow been absorbed by the wood. I turned slowly and deliberately, and then walked back and slapped a fifty down, leaving my hand on half of it. He looked at it, tried to pick it up, looked at me and nodded. I let it go, he snaked it away in a pocket, and I sat down again. Pat looked cautiously about the room, then leant in close to me.

“She was a looker all right,” he said. “Said she was the victim of her da. Wanted to marry her off to some fat oul’ fella, so he could get the use of some land the oul’ fella had. But she was in love with a young lad, and since her da wouldn’t give his consent, she was going to elope with him, and what’s more, never see the da again.”

“It sounds very harsh on the da,” I said.

“Sure the da was beating her black-and-blue,” he said. “And other things.”

“And you believed all that, did you?”

Pat looked around again, then leant in and said, “I believed the twenty quid. Twenty year ago, twenty quid was twenty quid.”

“And what else can you remember?”

“About her? Nothing. She brought the clothes, left them in a heap, gave me the money and went off on her boyfriend’s motorbike.”

“Did you see the boyfriend?”

“Not really. He had one of those crash helmets on, you know the ones with the full-face visors.”

I got up to go. I was pretty sure I knew who it was anyway. The final thing Pat Tracy said confirmed it.

“I can tell you what make the bike was though. A Norton Commando. British engineering. Fair play to the Brits, they knew how to build a fucking motorbike.”

I had parked down by the pier. As I headed down toward the car, I checked my messages; seemed a sure way of getting people to call you, no matter what time of night, was to turn off your phone: Dave Donnelly had rung five minutes ago; I called him straight back.

“Dave, you’re working late.”

“Thought you might be up worrying.”

“Why would I be worrying?”

“That we’d get some more CCTV footage of the Waterfront Apartments for the time leading up to David Brady’s murder.”

“And did you?”

“We did. There’s a camera across the street.”

“And how is it looking for me, Dave? Should I invest in a solicitor? Or a helmet?”