The Wrong Kind of Blood (31 page)

I bought a box of white candles. I took one and set it on the granite block by the gates, and lit it. By the time I reached my car, it had blown out in the wind.

KENNETH COURTNEY’S DAUGHTER GEMMA LIVED IN
Charnwood, just off the Grand Canal, a couple of miles southwest of the city center. I took the N11 north toward the city. My jaw ached where my teeth had been kicked out, and my left ear throbbed, and my left eye had a twitch I couldn’t seem to shift. I tried to focus on the pain; it felt better than thinking about Linda. I drove through Donnybrook, turned onto Grand Parade at Leeson Street Bridge, and followed the slow evening traffic along the canal until I came to Fogarty’s pub. I found a parking spot and fed the meter. Past Fogarty’s there was a chipper, a bookie’s, a two-euro shop, a newsagent’s, an off-license and another pub, the Michael Davitt. Breaking the terrace between the news-agent’s and the euro shop, a pedestrian lane ran down to a gate that led into a small park. The rain had eased off, was little more than a thick mist now; the sky was a dirty white, like coal dust in milk; there was a burr of cold in the air, the first evening chill I’d felt since I’d come back. The park was a desultory affair that looked like it had been put together late on a Friday afternoon: laid mostly with broken flagstones and surrounded by high mesh wire fencing, it had a small children’s playground with swings, slides and climbing frames, a couple of vandalized wooden benches, some parched green lawn and a few clumps of hardy shrubs, Hebe and Saint-John’s-wort. Most of the space was clogged with garbage: crisp and cigarette packets and sweet wrappers, discarded condoms, cigarette butts, dog shit, beer cans, broken bottles, plastic bottles, plastic bags full of bottles. Through a second gate at the other end of the park I crossed a narrow lane to the wide pedestrian entrance to the Charnwood Estate. Footpaths at either side led down to a square of small terraced houses built in sandstone with shabby off-white cladding on their upper stories. Eight redbrick pillars were positioned at three-foot intervals between the two footpaths, and a badly kept oval patch of grass and mud lay beyond them, running a third of the way down the square. The pillars were about three feet high, and a bunch of teenage kids in navy and white sportswear were hanging around smoking and drinking Rolling Rock long-necks and tossing the bottles in the mud. They muttered something about me as I passed and cracked up laughing.

I was in Charnwood Square; a lane at the bottom left-hand corner led me down onto Charnwood Drive. The breeze-block walls of the lane were daubed with slogans: ira, and drug scum out, and niggers go home. Charnwood Drive was a bigger square with a larger patch of sun-blasted grass and mud in its center. Some of the houses I passed were clean and well cared for, with flower gardens and new cars out front; others were dilapidated, crumbling and oozing neglect; others still had front gardens full of garbage. The garbage was everywhere: along with the paper and plastic and glass, there were discarded buggies and children’s bicycles, bedsteads and electrical equipment, a coiled-up rug and a wooden tea tray, all just tossed in the street. Small kids were running about kicking water out of puddles at each other and screaming. A very fat woman in a burgundy robe and blossoms to match on her greasy face stood in her front doorway smoking and drinking cider from a can; behind her, a stereo played “A Nation Once Again.”

There was another lane at the end of Charnwood Drive; I thought I saw Dessie Delaney standing in it, but it was just someone who looked a bit like him, dressed in the inevitable navy and white tracksuit. Two men stood with him: one, in black leather jacket and jeans and thick-soled boots with a boxer dog on a lead, looked like an off-duty bouncer. The other was about fifty, with silver hair swept back, black track pants and a snow white hooded top; he had gold on his fingers and around his neck, and looked like the Boss.

“All right, brother? Looking for something are you?” said Tracksuit.

“Charnwood Avenue,” I said.

“Right at the bottom of the lane, hook back around and you’re onto it. Bit of a maze round here, isn’t it?”

“Thank you,” I said, and made to move on.

The Bouncer crowded me as Tracksuit barred my way. I looked at the Boss, who shrugged. Tracksuit quickly frisked me, up and down, and I stood and took it; I had no choice. He leaned into me.

“You’re not a copper in anyway. Know how I know?”

“How?”

He held my jacket between finger and thumb.

“They wouldn’t spend the steam off their piss on a decent swatch of cloth, man.”

He looked at the Boss, who nodded, then looked back at me and grinned.

“Number 52 and 53. Brown on the left, white on the right. You look like a white man yourself, but Liberty Hall, whatever. All right, bud?”

“All right,” I said.

Tracksuit stepped aside, and I walked on down the lane. On a sodden patch of green to my left, amid the dog shit, someone had dumped a beige-and-brown-and-yellow-striped three-piece suite. It looked like an outdoor room, and I found myself wondering what had happened to the family who lived there.

At the end of the lane, a final terrace of a dozen houses sat opposite a bus shelter; the road curved up to a roundabout; overhead, great trucks and container vehicles thundered along an old main road of industrial estates and service stations. I wheeled around to the right and doubled back into the estate, this time along Charnwood Avenue. Gemma Courtney lived in number 36: she didn’t have garbage all over her front lawn, but she didn’t have a flower garden either. A weak stream of yellow light trickled down onto her door from a lamppost that had bent from upright like a young tree in the wind.

Gemma Courtney was twenty-four, or forty-nine, or eleven; it was hard to tell. She had huge Bambi eyes, full, prominent lips and short snow blond hair; she was skinny and tall with heroin cheekbones. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt and what I thought at first was a red bra-top, but which turned out on closer acquaintance simply to be a red bra; it took a while for my eyes to adjust, because there were only two lamps in the tiny living room, and both were swathed in red silk scarves; there was incense burning also, and smoke from her cigarette, so it was only when Gemma Courtney sat back on the sofa and spread her legs to reveal lace stocking tops and red pants that matched her bra that I worked out what was going on. She parted red lips to smile, and patted the seat beside her.

“I’m not a client, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

Gemma Courtney’s smile disappeared. She looked at her watch.

“You’re what? I could be earning, this hour. You said an hour.”

She didn’t sound angry; if anything, she seemed relieved.

“I’ll pay you for your time. What do you normally charge?”

“A hundred,” she said.

I doubted whether Gemma Courtney normally charged a hundred an hour, but I didn’t think bargaining with her would get me anywhere, so I gave her the money and asked her to turn the lights on. She put the kettle on too, then she went upstairs — the stairs were in the middle of the living room — and came down in a tight pink velour tracksuit and pink sandals to match. With her face wiped clean of makeup and her rail-thin body without buttocks, hips or breasts, she definitely looked eleven; in the harsh light, the lines on her face told an older story. While she was in the kitchen making tea, I looked around the small living room: magnolia stipple ceiling and walls cobwebbed with damp at the corners, cheap veneer floor split and buckling, flame-effect electric fire, TV and VCR, furniture shabby but clean. The only individual touch was a set of framed photographs lying facedown on the mantelpiece; I sat them up and saw they were of a child at different stages: as a baby, a toddler, a smiling three-year-old boy. When Gemma Courtney saw me looking at them, she came across the room so fast I thought she was going to hit me. She scooped the photographs up and laid them facedown on the sofa, then sat beside them, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out quickly, as if it was some kind of physical exercise.

“So what do you want then, Mr. Detective?” she said. Her legs were crossed at the ankles; her feet tapped against each other.

“There’s no easy way to say this: your father, Kenneth Courtney, is dead. His body was found a week ago.”

I explained the circumstances in which the corpse was discovered, and how long that meant he must have been dead. All the while, she stared at me, her head nodding, her huge eyes expressionless. When I had finished speaking, she set her lips and shook her head.

“And what do you think this has to do with me?” she said, her voice like a whip.

“He was your father, wasn’t he?”

“What if he was?”

Her eyes narrowed. A mantilla of smoke veiled her face. She was closing down on me. I needed to reach her, fast.

“I… my father vanished around the same time as yours did. His body hasn’t been found yet, but I believe he’s dead, that he was killed by the same man who murdered Kenneth Courtney. They were all great friends once upon a time. But something happened, and I still don’t know what. I’m trying to find out. You could help me. I need you to help me.”

Something that looked like human feeling rippled across Gemma Courtney’s wide mouth and flickered in her eyes. She breathed deeply for a while, as if she was working up to a decision. She rubbed her wrists together suddenly, ferociously, as if she hoped to break the skin. And then, with her head nodding and her feet tapping and her eyes blazing through the smoke that wreathed her pale head, it all came tumbling out, words that sounded like they’d been waiting years to be spoken.

“Kenneth Courtney was not my father in any way that counts. I never knew him. He left when I was a baby. Left my ma to cope. And she couldn’t, could she? She fell apart. We had a house back then — I don’t remember it, but Ma always did — a proper house, up off the South Circular. ’Course, Ma had a nervous breakdown when Courtney took off, couldn’t pay the mortgage. She lost the house, and we ended up having to be ‘housed.’ That’s what they call it, not having a house, being ‘housed.’ Abandoned mother with a baby, top of the list. And this place had just been built, lovely new houses, green spaces, all this, so they lobbed a load of people on the priority housing list in here together. Trouble was, number one, too many families that had been evicted from other estates for antisocial, they thought, stick them in here when it’s new and there’s no one to object, the place was like a fucking zoo; trouble was, number two, cheap heroin then and now, went through the place like a scythe through corn; trouble was, number three, even if there hadn’t’ve been troubles one and two, my ma wasn’t able for a place like this, where you can hear your neighbors whispering through the walls, if anyone round here ever whispered, she was raised to better so she was, and she couldn’t cope with the shame of it. Not that she was the only one on pills round here, sure there still does be women in their bathrobes at lunchtime, even in the midst of our great economic boom, but Ma made it clear she thought she was a cut above, so they started calling her Lady Muck, and Queenie, and all this, only slagging, they’d say, when what they were doing was twisting the knife, if you’re so great, why are you down here with the rest of us? And I grew up with all that, the girl with the mad ma, the girl who thinks she’s it, little princess posh pants, only slagging, only slagging. Grew up to be ashamed of her, to see her illness as weakness and hate it, wishing my da had never left but understanding why he had. But that’s the wrong way around. And now you say he was murdered, what am I supposed to be, sorry? Because he left Ma before that, he was gone a while before anything happened to him.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“He wrote her a letter. Said he was sorry, but he had to go away. Said someday, he’d try and make it right.”

“Do you still have the letter?”

She stared hard at me, as if double-checking I was on the level, then she clopped up the stairs for a second time.

Outside I heard shouts and commotion and the screeching of brakes. I went to the front window and pulled the curtain to one side. Farther up the way, the Avenue swung left into another square, and that seemed to be the source of the rumpus. Gemma Courtney joined me at the window and replaced the curtain.

“Rule one, don’t twitch the curtains round here. What you don’t see can’t hurt you,” she said. “Specially if it involves Larry Knight.”

“Is that Larry Knight’s setup in 52 and 53?” I said. “Smack on the left, coke on the right?”

“Pass a checkpoint in the lane, did you?” she said.

“Chap with gray hair and a white hoodie looked to be in charge.”

“That’s Larry himself,” Gemma said. “Must be something big on tonight if he’s gracing us with his presence.”

“Why? Does he not live in Charnwood?”

“He does like fuck, he’s a big house in Ranelagh and kids in fucking boarding school. He used to, he started off in 52, but Larry’s moved up. He’s got some cousins in there now, running the day-to-day, while he plays golf and goes racing and whatever. That’s what a lifetime in the smack trade gets you. But no one’ll say a word against him here. We’re all bought and paid for. Or scared to fuck, what’s the difference? Now come here and have a look at this.”

I followed her back to the sofa, where she showed me a large brown paper carrier bag with cloth handles full of photographs.

“The letter’s in there somewhere.”

She thrust the bag at me. Her hands were shaking. I took the bag, and held on to one of her hands, gently, but firmly. She didn’t try to pull it away. Her wrist was red raw. I pushed up the sleeve of her pink top. Her forearm was a mass of scabs and sores, some open and bleeding.

“Are you still using?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“No difference to me one way or the other,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

“I open them myself. To feel something. Anything. I won’t let them heal.”

She sat down hard on the couch and pulled the photographs of the little boy into her lap.