The Color of Blood Read Online Free PDF

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    “Jessica, was Emily in therapy of any kind?”
    “No. At least, not that I know of. But I wouldn’t be surprised if… no, actually, Shane wouldn’t have kept that from me. No, she wasn’t.”
    “Are you?”
    Her slender figure crooked against the cold rain that had started to fall, Jessica Howard flashed a grin at me as she walked toward her car.
    “I’m beyond therapy, Ed,” she said, without turning around. “I’m out the other side.”
    She got in the Porsche, pointed it down the hill and vanished into the mist.
    I walked back up to my car. I drove a racing green ’65 Volvo 122S. It had been my father’s, and although we had never seen eye to eye, I somehow felt driving it was keeping faith with his memory, though I’d be hard put if called upon to explain exactly what I thought that meant. Beneath the windscreen wiper someone had left a white envelope, which was now damp with rain. I pulled it out, sat into the car and opened it. Inside was a mass card. The name on it was Stephen Casey, and the date of the requiem mass was set as All Souls’ Day, 1985. All Souls’ Day was November 2, two days from now. I put the card in my jacket pocket. Before I had a chance to turn the car, a black Mercedes the width of the road swept past me, with Shane Howard at the wheel.
     
Three
     
    TOMMY OWENS HAD GIVEN UP BOOZE AND DOPE AND coke and E because he was broke because he couldn’t hold down a job because of all the booze and dope and coke and E he’d been doing, and his ex refused to let him see his daughter until he cleaned up. Being sober all the time wasn’t easy for Tommy, and Tommy being sober wasn’t easy for me either, since he’d asked me to act informally as his sponsor. I explained that, since I had no intention of stopping drinking, that mightn’t be the wisest idea, but he insisted, maintaining that having to put up with some sanctimonious bastard thrilled with himself for having given up booze would drive him to drink. In practice, it didn’t mean a lot more than my letting Tommy hang out at my house, sleep on my floor and generally make himself at home whenever it suited him, as well as helping him out of whatever scrapes he inevitably found himself in. All of which I’d been doing anyway. The new development was Tommy wanting to be involved with the cases I worked, to talk them through and offer me advice. At first I resisted this because my work was complicated enough, and depended a lot on instinct and intuition, capacities that were easy to undermine, especially if exposed to the chaos of Tommy’s mind. Not to mention client confidentiality. But his thinning, wispy hair and tufty straggle of beard weren’t the only ways in which Tommy resembled a beady old lady: he knew everyone in Seafield, Bayview and Castlehill and outlying areas, and everything about them, always had, since we were kids, who lived where and who lived there before them; who was rising, who falling, everyone’s business but his own. So when I checked my phone and found three messages from Tommy asking what the deal was with Shane Howard, I called him and gave him the bare skeleton — it was always a fine line, because I had the persistent suspicion if he heard something juicy enough, he’d trade it in for a night in the pub and a gram of coke. Not this time though. Immediately he heard David Brady’s name and the word “porn,” he said I should meet him at once at my house in Quarry Fields.
    Although I had grown up in the house, I hadn’t been back in it long enough to get used to calling it mine, despite a hefty standing order on my bank account reminding me that I was the only one paying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn’t live to see. A fifties semidetached, it had seen better days, and I had done nothing to the exterior to improve it, other than have the side garage demolished and a gated wall built to connect the back line of the house to the perimeter. The earth