The Wrong Kind of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

come over and get them?”
    I told her I’d see her later and hung up. But I didn’t want to see her later. I wasn’t sorry we’d slept together, far from it, but I knew if I set out to find the husband of a woman who had just shared my bed, we would both be sorry soon enough. Besides, I had a train to catch.
     
     
    The DART — Dublin Area Rapid Transit, as nobody calls it — shares thirty miles of the railway track that runs up the east coast of the country, from Rosslare in the south to Belfast in the north. I took a train to Pearse Station. I crossed Westland Row and followed the horde of office workers filing in the back gate of Trinity College. The campus doesn’t exactly provide a shortcut to the city center, but I guess a walk through an Elizabethan university first thing in the morning might not be the most stressful way to start your day. As I strolled through College Park, past the Old Library and across the cobbles toward Front Gate, I thought about what my life would be like if I had studied medicine here like I was supposed to, all those years ago. The road not taken.
    On College Green, I turned south past the provost of Trinity’s house (dream address: number 1 Grafton Street) and walked through Dublin’s upmarket shopping quarter. It had a sleek sheen to it now, a brash, unapologetic confidence about itself that had been thin on the ground in Ireland twenty years before. It also had a derelict in every doorway: most stores hadn’t opened yet, but security personnel were beginning their patrols, so the homeless were gathering up their cardboard boxes and bedding, ready for another day of whatever you did when you had nowhere to go and nothing to do once you got there.
    At the corner of South King Street and Stephen’s Green, I was expecting to see Sinnott’s, where Tommy Owens and I once drank, and which I had dreamt of over the years, but it had been replaced by a towering white shopping mall with fussy decorative work around the windows and roof that made it look like a giant wedding cake. Sinnott’s had migrated down the street, transforming itself during the journey from an atmospheric old Victorian pub with a long dark bar counter into a generic North American–style sports lounge.
    I passed a sleek brushed-chrome-and-glass tram standing on the corner of the Green, cut across the Green onto Leeson Street, checked the address on the card I had been given at the funeral and climbed the steps of a Georgian terraced house. There was only one bell, for Doyle & McCarthy, Solicitors, and I pressed it.
    After a short wait at reception, I took a lift to the second floor and was greeted by the slim, rangy, navy-suited figure of David McCarthy.
    “Edward Loy, good morning, sir,” he said, his tone crisp and breezy. I followed him into a large conference room and we sat across from each other at a long, polished table. Light streamed in through the high sash windows and reflected off the diplomas and degrees that hung behind glass from the picture rail on the opposite wall.
    “Nice to see you this fine morning,” David drawled, taking a black Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket and laying it on a pad of lined A4. “Do I take it this means you want me to sort out the old house for you?”
    David McCarthy’s older brother Niall had been in my year at secondary school, and they had both shown up at the funeral. Niall was an accountant, David a solicitor in his father’s practice. Both possessed to the full the exemplary traits of the South County Dublin professional: an obsession with rugby and golf, an all-year tan, a complete lack of imagination, and a tendency to precede every other noun with the qualifier “old.”
    “You do indeed, David,” I said. “I want to sell up and move back to the States as soon as I can.”
    “Right. Well, we’ll try and make that as soon as possible for you. First off, even though both parents died intestate, it’s a straightforward old chain: your