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The Wrong Kind of Blood

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband. Now she was lying dead on her living room floor, and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills. Linda had been strangled: a froth of blood brimmed from her mouth, and her bloodshot eyes bulged. The marks around her neck were barely perceptible, suggesting the murder weapon had been a scarf or a silk tie. Cyanosis had given her already livid skin a bluish tone, deepest at the lips and ears, and on the fingernails of her hands, which were clenched into small fists. They lay stiff in her lap, and her eyes gaped unseeingly through the glass wall toward the sky; her corpse looked like some grotesque parody of the undertaker's art.

The siren's howl reached a deafening crescendo and then stopped. As the car doors slammed, as the Guards stomped up the drive and began to pound on the front door, my eyes looked out past Linda's, out at the gray morning sky, then down along the cliffside, down between the stands of spruce and pine, down among the great Georgian houses, the Victorian castles and modern villas of Castlehill, down to where this all began, barely a week ago. •••

We were standing on the terrace of the Bayview Hotel, watching a bloated old moon hoist itself slowly above the sea. Out in Dublin Bay, the city lights flickered in the haze. Across the road, framed by gorse -- thatched cliffs and a scrubby pebble beach, the railway station stood deserted, the signal stuck on red. Everyone else who had been at the funeral had gone home, and I was waiting for Linda to finish her drink so I could drive her home. But Linda didn't want to go home. She untied her hair and shook it down, then back from her face. She narrowed her dark eyes, forced her brow into a frown and set her red lips in a small pout, as if, all things considered, she definitely agreed with what she was about to say.

"I can't take it," she said. "I can't take another night on my own in that house."

Something in my eyes must have warned her that now was not necessarily the best time to be making her problems my problems.

"Oh, Ed, I'm sorry," she said. "To-night of all nights, this is the last thing you need." She began to cry suddenly, deflatedly, like a lost child too sad to panic. I took her in my arms and lent her my shoulder. The sea was silver gray beneath the moon, and it glistened like wet granite. The railway signal changed from red to amber. A mild breeze blew the clean balm of eucalyptus up from the hotel garden below. I could feel Linda's cold cheek brush my neck, and then her warm lips were on mine, and she was kissing me. I kissed her back, and then moved her cheek alongside mine and held her. Her body went rigid for a moment, then she tapped me twice on the back, like a wrestler ready to submit. We separated, and she finished her drink, dabbed her eyes and lit a cigarette.

"I'm sorry."

"No need to apologize."

"It's just . . . I'm really worried about Peter."

Peter Dawson was Linda's husband. I'd been at school with Linda; her husband had been a child of three when I left Ireland. I hadn't seen either of them for over twenty years. Kissing another man was an unorthodox way of expressing concern for your husband, but then Linda had been known for doing exactly as she pleased, and nothing I could see in her face or figure suggested much had changed, in that regard at least.

"You said he was away on business."

"I don't know where he is. He's been gone four days now. He hasn't called me, they haven't heard from him at work."

"Have you told the police?"

"No, we . . . I didn't want to."

"Why not?"

"I suppose . . . I suppose I thought the police would make the whole thing more real, somehow. And I've been half expecting Peter to just walk back in the house as if nothing had happened."

A fresh drink suddenly materialized in Linda's hand; she must have snagged a waitress by means I didn't notice, or understand. I gave in, ordered a large Jameson from the girl and lit one of Linda's cigarettes.

"You say that as if it's happened before. Has Peter disappeared like this in the past?"

"Not for four days. But occasionally . . . well, we do have the odd row. And Peter's favorite response has always been to storm out. You know how marriage is. Or do you? It's been so long, I don't know if you . . . I don't really know very much about your life, Edward Loy."

"I was married, yes."

"And?"

"It didn't take."

"Were there children?"

"A little girl."

"I suppose she's with her mother. You must miss her. But of course you do, what a stupid thing to say."

An express train crashed out of the cliffside tunnel and blazed through the station. The carriages were brightly lit, and crammed with passengers. I wished I was one of them, and that I was on that train now, hurtling into the night.

My whiskey arrived. I splashed some water into it and knocked half of it back.

Linda was still talking.

"Tommy Owens was saying he visited you out there."

"I wouldn't have thought you kept up with Tommy Owens."

"I saw him in Hennessy's the other night. And no, I don't go there much either, just when I'm feeling . . . even more trapped than usual."

"Hennessy's. Is it still the same dump?"

"What-ever you want, you can get it in Hennessy's. God knows how they never closed the place."

"We used to think Hennessy had a friend high up in the cops."

"If he has a friend. Anyway, Tommy said you found people who were missing. You helped a family locate their daughter."

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes Copyright © 2006 by Declan Hughes. Excerpted by permission.
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