The narrow drive to what Anita Kravchenko called “Howard residence” ran up from Bayview Harbour. It was still dark, but the clouds had peeled away; the sky looked like it had been polished and come up shining, like a dark mirror. Shane Howard was standing in the window of the front room, looking out to sea; he saw us arrive and opened the door to let us in. Emily was sitting on the sofa, her pile of photograph albums and journals around her.
“You can put those away now, Emily,” Shane barked.
His daughter laughed at him.
“Dad, it’s too late for that.”
“Your daughter’s right, Shane. It’s too late to keep secrets anymore. Especially when you and your sister don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
Shane scowled at me.
“Who’s this?” he said, pointing at Jerry Dalton.
“Well,” I said. “There’s a number of ways I could introduce him. I could say he’s a friend of your daughter’s from university. I could say he’s Eileen Casey-you remember Eileen, your old, what would you call her, au pair? Nanny?-I could say he’s Eileen Casey’s son. But I think we should get it over with and say he’s your half brother, Shane. John Howard was his father.”
I thought Shane would explode, would demand proof, would wave his fists around and rail against me, against us all. Instead, he looked at Dalton and nodded his head and stared at the floor. He knew. He knew all along. The rage seemed to pass out of him like the fire of youth, and he slumped in a chair by the cold grate. Emily stared across at Jerry in astonishment. I looked at their faces and wondered if they’d been telling the truth, or if they had already slept together. This case was full of questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.
“What else did you know, Shane? Back then, what did you know about Marian? And about Sandra?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t tell you…I made a promise.”
“To Sandra?”
He nodded.
“That must have been a long time ago.”
“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. I made it. I can’t break it.”
“Not even for the sake of your own child? She’s desperate to know the truth, Shane.”
“I’ve always tried to protect her. That’s what we said we’d do, protect the kids,” Shane said in a hoarse whisper, his eyes glued to the floor.
“Did you find anything in Mary Howard’s journals, Emily?” I said.
“There’s no reference to Marian’s death. The journal stops about six months before. And after that, it’s just a stream of bile about Granddad, right up until his death. She really hated him.”
Emily leafed through a particular journal until she found a particular passage.
“Here, this must refer to Jerry’s mother, listen:
Eileen came to me tonight and told me she was in trouble, and who by. I didn’t doubt it for a second, she’s always been a good girl and would never lie. God damn that man to hell. The girl has found a chap to stand by her. We must do our best nonetheless. How I’d love to tell the world the truth. But Shane mustn’t be hurt any more than he has been already.
Still Shane Howard sat with his head bowed. It was like he had begun to fear the worst. That was healthy. I needed to play on his fears.
“Shane, I want to ask you about Denis Finnegan. Tonight, Brock Taylor was killed. Before he died, he confessed to the murders of Audrey O’Connor and Stephen Casey.”
“Brock Taylor? The reformed crook? Hangs around SRC?”
“He’s the fellow you remember as Eileen’s boyfriend, Brian Dalton, the one on the Norton Commando?”
“And you say he killed her son?”
“That’s right. But he said he did it for someone who paid him. Someone who idolized you and Sandra, who wanted the best for her-what he thought was the best for her.”
“Dinny?”
“Denis Finnegan, yes. And Taylor said there would be a payback coming, that soon he would be set to inherit, big-time. I took that to mean via some scheme of Finnegan’s. Do you have any idea what that might be?”
“I don’t. I mean, I don’t have any big share portfolio or anything. I’ve this house, and the surgery.”
“And Rowan House.”
“That’s it. And I’ve seen the mother’s will, it’s all straightforward. The property comes to me, end of story.”
“But if you were genuinely disposed toward sharing it with Sandra in order to build the last tower, in order to fulfill the Howard family dream, the completion of the Howard Medical Center at last-”
“Who told you that?”
“Denis Finnegan. He said that’s what you all wanted. For the family. But your wife was opposed to it.”
“I was opposed to it too. I didn’t want to build a load of apartments, but I didn’t want a fourth tower, like it was some fucking
He looked up at me, his eyes red with rage.
“What I’d like best, is if the house was burned to the ground. After that, we could think about what came after. But best for everyone…best for Sandra above all…if the whole place was dust and ashes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’ll have to ask Sandra. I won’t say any more.”
“And what about Finnegan? Do you think there’s some way he envisaged getting his hands on the whole project through Sandra? If you were going to go into it on an equal basis-”
“But I wasn’t-”
“What if you were in jail for killing your wife? Your resolve might not be quite so great then. You’d need money for appeals, you’d need to take the advice of your sister and your solicitor.”
“What are you saying, Dinny had something to do with Jessica’s death?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Try and remember. You got a call yesterday, or rather the day before, Halloween, someone telling you your wife was having an affair with David Brady. Now, two people rang your number that morning. One of them was Denis Finnegan. Do you remember the call? It would have been after I left, you went back to the surgery. Your patients were getting, ah, impatient.”
Shane scowled in concentration.
“Yeah. Because it was the mobile, in my pocket. Dinny asking about you, was there anything he needed to know. Always such a fussy fucker. You can hardly say, would you ever fuck off, with some oul’ one in the chair. So I said no and hung up.”
“Right. So the other call was the anonymous call.”
“That’s right. Prissy kind of voice, I thought, but trying to sound tough. Why? Do you know who it was?”
Keep stirring, Loy.
“The Guards traced the number. It was your nephew, Jonathan.”
The telephone rang, and Emily went to answer it. Shane Howard was on his feet and breathing like a man who’s just remembered how. Jerry Dalton’s eyes never left me. Emily came back into the room.
“That was Granny,” she said. “They’re at the airport. They’re staying at the Radisson. I wrote the number on the pad.”
For a moment I had trouble moving my lips. Finally, I got them to work in conjunction with my tongue.
“Your granny,” I said.
“Yes. Mum’s mum. And Granddad. They retired to the Algarve. Awful journey, to bury their daughter’s body.”
“What did Jessica’s father-your granddad-do?” I asked. “He wasn’t an actor, was he?”
“Oh, God no. Mum said she had the biggest rows with him when she wanted to go into the theater. No, he ran a business, a…carpets? What was it, Dad?”
“Contract cleaning,” Shane said, his mind elsewhere.
Sandra’s lie had been a detailed and elaborate one-about Jessica’s father being a failed actor, and a widower, and a drunk; about Jessica being her father’s little wife when she was thirteen, for eighteen months; about how
