The Wrong Kind of Blood (2 page)

“They’re still shooting. These houses here have doubled in value in the five years since they were built. It’s wild.”

I had barely been forty-eight hours in Dublin, and quite a few of these had been spent either in the funeral home or in the church, but Linda must have been the fifteenth person to reassure me about the vibrancy of the local property market. It was like being trapped at a real estate agents’ convention. Everyone took care not to appear too triumphalist; the boom was spoken of as an unbidden but welcome blessing, like the recent stretch of unexpectedly good weather. But boasting was boasting, however you tried to dress it up. At least Linda had the excuse that her father-in-law, John Dawson, was one of the city’s biggest builders. Cranes bearing the Dawson name seemed to be trampling at will all over Bayview and Seafield; I could see three from where we sat. My first view coming in on the plane wasn’t of the coast or the green fields of North Dublin; it was of four great Dawson cranes suspended above a vast oval construction site. It looked like they had just dug up the Parthenon, and were laying the foundations for another shopping mall.

“Peter’s the company accountant?”

“Financial controller, they call it. Same difference.”

“So if business is booming, what’s his problem? Gambling? Drugs?”

“Gambling, I doubt. Drugs, occasionally. But for fun. No more than anyone else we know. He’s not an addict. He probably drinks too much. But I’m no one to talk.”

“So what did he need money for?”

“He said something about having to be ‘ready for opportunities as they arose.’ I don’t know what that meant.”

“Has he any other business interests?”

“A few apartments dotted around the city. Tax-incentive investments. They’re rented through a property agency. And a bunch of stocks and shares, a whatdoyoucallit, portfolio. Although maybe he’s cashed them in. He was in a panic, like a controlled panic, the last few times I saw him.”

“In a controlled panic?”

“I know, aren’t we all? I know it sounds a bit vague, but…”

She shrugged, and let her words trail away.

“When was he last seen?”

“He went on-site at the Seafield County Hall renovation on Friday last. He had to go through the budget with the project manager, then he was due to meet me for a drink in the High Tide. I was about twenty minutes late, by which time Peter had gone. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Does he have a cell phone?”

“A mobile? It just rings off.”

A swollen, dark-tanned blond man in a white bathrobe appeared in his doorway and waved his fat hands at the silver cat, who ignored him. The man padded to the edge of his driveway, folded his pudgy arms across his belly and frowned across at my car. I returned his frown until he broke eye contact. When he saw Linda, he turned and retreated into his house, red-faced and breathing deeply from his night’s work.

“Fucking busybody,” Linda said. “It was his idea to have the gates built, but since they went up, the fall of a leaf has him rustling his curtains or lumbering down his drive. Try and give a party, he’s reporting every strange car to the police.”

“How are things between Peter and his father, Linda? Do they get along?”

“They don’t see a great deal of each other. John Dawson doesn’t concern himself with the day-to-day much anymore. Only time he ventures out in public is to the races. Otherwise, he’s like a recluse, himself and Barbara, rattling around that huge house at the top of Castlehill.”

“So no great father-and-son rivalry?”

“Not really. Not that Barbara hasn’t tried to drum some up. She’s always said Peter should have made his own way, that his father had come from nothing and made it to the top, that Peter had it easy all his life. At least his father didn’t have to put up with you as a mother, I always want to reply.”

“I saw Barbara at the removal. She looks well for her age.”

“She’s discovered the secret of eternal youth. Goes to a clinic in the States every summer, comes back looking five years younger.”

“Did Peter take what his mother said to heart?”

“I think so. I know it hurt him. And maybe… I mean, buying the apartments and things, that’s only recent… maybe that’s an attempt to strike out on his own. His ‘opportunities.’ But for God’s sake, he’s only twenty-five years old, I mean, give him a chance, you know?”

“Anything else you can think of?”

“Well. That Friday, Peter and I were actually meeting to… Talk About Things, you know?”

“What, a divorce?”

“God, no. Maybe a… a trial separation, isn’t that what we used to call it? Back in the days when we were young, and it didn’t really matter. But Peter still
is
so young. Which is great in some ways,” said Linda, baring her teeth in a hungry grin which left me in no doubt which ways she meant.

“But outside the bedroom?” I said.

“Outside the bedroom, we had nothing left to say to each other.”

The silver cat settled on Linda’s porch and began to howl. Linda turned to me and took my arm.

“Can you find Peter?”

“I don’t know. To start with, I’d need his bank and phone records and a bunch of other stuff. But the truth is, most likely, he doesn’t want to be found.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t. But adults who go missing, it’s usually because they want to. And if they don’t want to be found, well, it can be very difficult. But I’ll think about it. Okay?”

Linda leaned across and kissed my cheek, and crinkled her face into a smile, as if to reassure me she was being brave. Then, having agreed that we’d talk again in the morning, she got out of the car and walked up her drive. The cat leapt to his feet and rubbed himself against her slender, black-stockinged calf. She pointed at the security gates to open, and I turned the car and headed back up the slip road. In the rearview mirror, I could see Linda in her doorway, smoking a cigarette. When I made the turn onto Castlehill Road, she was still standing there, moonlight pale on her face, her bright hair wreathed in smoke. Her sweet smell clung to my skin, and her salt taste to my lips, and I realized how much I’d wanted her all evening, how much I still wanted her now. I gripped the wheel and hit the gas and drove away without looking back.

MY MOTHER LIVED IN A REDBRICK SEMI-DETACHED HOUSE
at the foot of Quarry Fields, a leafy road halfway between Bayview and Seafield. Quarry Fields wasn’t much of a neighborhood when I was growing up. The Somerton flats were around the corner, and Fagan’s Villas, where my mother and father had been brought up, or dragged up as they put it, was just across the main road. Now Somerton was long gone, Fagan’s Villas had a four-wheel drive on every inch of curb, and a house in Quarry Fields was worth more than I’d believe, or so assorted mourners had been keen to assure me.

Yet for all that had changed, the streets felt familiar, as if they had been expecting me, as if I had never left. Familiar but strange: I was driving back to my mother’s house, but she didn’t live there anymore; she was spending her first night alone in a freshly dug grave, in sight of the stony beach at Bayview she used to take me to as a child. When they lowered her coffin down, I looked out to sea and remembered the first time she visited me in L.A.: how I took her to Zuma Beach, out past Malibu, how she smiled when she smelled the ocean, and clutched my hand in excitement, how we swam together the way we always had, and never would again.

I parked the rental car outside the house and opened the rusting black gate. An unruly hedge of holly, yew and cypress shielded the overgrown front garden from the road, while untended rosebushes sprawled across the drive. Crumbling brickwork and rotting window frames and missing roof tiles told the same story: the place had become too much for my mother long before the end. Not for the first time that day, I thought I should have come back sooner; not for the first time, the mocking futility of the thought made me flush.

As I tried the keys in the storm porch door, I heard a shuffling on the gravel behind me. In the glass of the door, I saw a shadow move. Over my left shoulder, something glinted in the moonlight. Threading the keys through the fingers of my left hand, I drove my right elbow as hard as I could into the center of the shadow. At the same time, I slashed out with the keys in the direction of where I figured the shadow’s arm was.

A thick grunt, a scream of pain, and a crash of metal on concrete later, and I turned to see Tommy Owens on his knees, vomiting into a rosebush. His left hand was soaked in blood, and a semiautomatic pistol lay in a bed of night-scented stock by the boundary wall.

Tommy Owens, having damned me for a fascist and a psychopath, having cleaned and bandaged his wounds and rinsed his mouth out with Listerine, and having refused to concede there was anything remotely reckless in his brandishing a gun in my ear, was sitting in the living room making light work of my duty-free Laphroaig.

The squat hunk of black gunmetal that sat on the coffee table beside the whiskey was a Glock 17. Next to the Glock sat a magazine chambered for 10 rounds of 9 mm ammunition. Unlike the Laphroaig, the magazine was full.

“Where did you get the gun, Tommy?” I said, not for the first time.

“It’s nothing. Fuck sake man, state of this gaff. Hasn’t changed since I was working for your oul’ fella, what, twenty years ago? More.”

“It’s not nothing, Tommy. It’s a gun.”

“I mean, your old lady had some money, didn’t she? Arnotts couldn’t’ve paid that badly. She’d’ve got a staff discount anyway. Carpets, curtains, it’s like the B&B from hell. And these radiators, I mean, no disrespect, but I bet they sound like a fucking whirlpool when you turn them on.”

Tommy finished his scotch and reached for the bottle. I got there first. I’d babysat enough drunks for one day.

“Hey, come on man, I’m in shock here, and it’s your fault.” The “man” unstressed, in the Dublin way; ages since I’d heard it.

“Tommy, tell me what you’re doing with the gun. Or I’ll call Dave Donnelly and ask have you a permit for it.”

Tommy’s face contorted into a sneer of scorn that, combined with his narrow eyes and wispy goatee, made him look even more like a weasel than usual.

“I saw the pair of you in the churchyard today, very cozy with the cops all of a sudden. Detective Sergeant Donnelly.”

“He was paying his respects, Tommy. More than you bothered to do.”

“I can’t do the church, man, can’t hack the whole church thing. But I was around, you know, watching you all after. Visited the grave this afternoon too.”

“Did you? Why didn’t you come down the Bayview?”

“Hotels? I don’t do hotels, man. Churches, hotels, no way.”

Tommy had always been like this. Anything mainstream, anything aimed at the people Tommy probably still referred to as “straights,” any venue that seemed, however implicitly, to endorse the way the world worked, and Tommy would have none of it. This ruled out not only hotels and churches, but supermarkets, nightclubs, restaurants, pubs (with the sole exception of Hennessy’s), and cafes. When he came to stay with me in L.A., after his marriage had fallen apart, he refused to go anywhere except an illegal late night shebeen in Culver City that was noteworthy (a) because we were the only white faces there, and (b) because there had been five murders connected with it in the nine weeks of its existence. That I knew of.

“Very sorry though, Ed. Your old dear. A real lady, she was.”

“The gun, Tommy.”

“Yeah. I was gonna tell you anyway, man. Because I was hoping you could, like, mind it for me.”

“I could what? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“All I want you to do is hide it somewhere, for a few weeks, till all the malarkey dies down.”

“What malarkey? Tommy. Where. Did. You. Get. The. Gun?”

“It’s just a… I’ve been doing a bit of work… for the Halligans. I know, I know, but it’s nothing, just a bit of… delivery work, you could call it, collecting a package in Birmingham and bringing it home type of thing.”

There was a phrase I remembered from my childhood. In fact, I probably heard it first, like so much else, from Tommy Owens. It went, “I may be thick, but I’m not fucking stupid.” I sat there and stared at Tommy grabbing the bottle and pouring more whiskey, and as he gulped it down, I wondered just how fucking stupid he could be to get involved with the Halligans.

“They’re not that bad these days, you know, man? Well, Leo is, Leo’s still the same animal he ever was, but Leo’s in jail and everyone hopes he rots there, even his brothers. And Podge is Podge, fair enough. But George is sound, know what I mean?”

“George Halligan sound? The same George Halligan that broke your ankle by stomping on it?”

“Ah, that was ages ago. We were only kids. I stole his bike, for fuck’s sake. Anyway, drugs, it’s all just a business thing. I mean, if people wanna take coke or E or whatever, they do, middle-class people” — (the venom Tommy reserved for the word “middle-class” was still impressive to behold) — “whoever, it’s supply and demand, it’s no different from working in the, in the drinks industry.”

“Except people working in the drinks industry don’t get maimed and murdered as a matter of course.”

Tommy drained his glass, grimaced and said, “I know, that’s the fuckin’ problem, that’s why I need you to hold the gun.”

I took charge of the whiskey bottle again, and told Tommy that the bar was closed and wouldn’t reopen until he told me the whole story. After a great deal more railing and vituperating, Tommy finally explained that his invalidity benefit wasn’t enough anymore, that his ex-wife was screaming for higher maintenance and if he didn’t up the payments she was going to stop him seeing his daughter no matter what any court said. He’d tried to go back to work but had only lasted a day and a half; it wasn’t that he couldn’t work on cars anymore, he was a mechanic to his fingertips, he had just gotten too slow for any garage owner to employ. Then he’d been in Hennessy’s one teatime trying to cash a benefit check but the right barman wasn’t on, and when his ex came in for the cash and he didn’t have it, she started screaming at him in front of everyone, calling him a loser and a malingerer and all this, in front of his daughter, I mean, fuck sake, and George Halligan walked up to him, “The shekels I owe you, Tommy,” like old buddies, and through to the bar with him. Five hundred notes. That shut his ex up. So Tommy asked Podge Halligan how he can repay the debt, and the trips to Birmingham began, very straightforward, different location each time, collect a package, fly home from another airport, Manchester, Liverpool, wherever. Hand the goods over, get paid, everyone’s happy.