“Mr. Loy? Sandra Howard,” she said.
“They’re inside,” I said.
She walked down the hall and smiled sadly at the sight of Emily and Jonathan curled up together on the couch. Thanking me, she put her cold hand on mine and drew me out to the front of the house, where we stood in the rain and mist, like the last mourners in a deserted churchyard. A volley of bangers crashed out like gunshots; after a hissing silence, the voices of dogs were raised in response; their barking and howling echoed through the hills.
“Poor dogs,” Sandra Howard said. “Halloween is always a bad night for them.”
I nodded.
“Denis told me you were searching for Emily. I hadn’t realized Shane was so worried about her.”
I nodded again, and told her a little about where I had found her son and her niece, and what they had been doing, and the part David Brady had played in it, and how he had ended up. She took it all in without seeming surprised or ruffled by anything except Brady’s murder. While I waited for her to respond, I looked at her milky skin, the laughter lines around her green eyes and her full red lips, the unlined brow and the fine high bones and I thought, even in distress, this is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I probably fell a little in love with her then and there. Maybe if I hadn’t, we’d’ve gotten to the truth a lot quicker. Then again, maybe if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten to it at all.
Sandra Howard had been looking out in the dark toward the sea, toward where she knew the sea to be; you could hear the roar in the rising wind. She turned back to me and took my hand again and began to speak.
“I’ve been trying to find Shane all day, ever since Denis told me he’d hired you. He’s not been answering his phone.”
“He’s not at the surgery either. His receptionist hasn’t seen him since this morning.”
“What did he hire you to do, exactly?”
“To find his daughter. And to bring her home if she wanted to come.”
“What about the people behind this? Did he not want you to put a stop to them?”
“Since the main man I understand to be behind this has photographs of Emily in a threesome with his thirteen-year-old daughter, I don’t know that we have a great deal of leverage. I mean, we could try and nail him for blackmail, but the reason Emily took it on herself to go along with the porn film in the first place was to avoid underage-sex charges, and all the attendant disgrace for her and the family. That hasn’t changed.”
“But those films are still out there. That means Shane is still susceptible to blackmail.”
“As are you,” I said. “Jonathan’s in both films.”
Again, there was no reaction that I would have expected from a parent: no expression of disgust, no shudder, no sense of disappointment. Just a shrewd, appraising glimmer in those flashing green eyes and a toss of her dark red head as she came to a decision.
“I’d like to retain you, Mr. Loy-as long, that is, as you’re still available. I want you to sort this out. If that means getting hold of the tapes, or films, or negatives, or whatever they are, fine. If you have to pay for them, I’ll make a deal. But we can’t have that waiting in the long grass for us. Not for the children, and not for the Howard family.”
She looked at me full on then, and smiled, as if to apologize for the rhetoric, and I smiled back, mostly because I found it impossible not to, impossible to refuse what she had asked. I nodded, and she went inside to the children, and I stayed outside and smoked a cigarette. They were normal kids, I told myself; troubled, sure, a little oversexed, maybe, but normal. I said it to myself again: normal kids, a normal family. Above the noise in my head of first cousins having three-way sex at all, not to say on camera, and their aunt and mother barely registering either fact, it was hard to make out exactly what I was saying.
Six
I CHECKED MY MOBILE PHONE, WHICH I WAS IN THE HABIT of leaving turned off. There was a message from Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly of Seafield Guards, saying he looked forward to talking to me about my most recent client, Shane Howard, and his daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That hadn’t taken long. So Dave had the case. I still didn’t feel right about removing evidence from the Brady crime scene. Last time we had spoken, Dave had accused me, only half in jest, of becoming part of the luxury service industry: someone who carried rich people’s bags for them and eased their burdens. He had finished his pint, so he used it as an exit line, which was just as well, as I couldn’t think of much to say in reply. “Rich people have their troubles too” sounded kind of lame, even if it was true. “Rich people pay my bills” was closer to the truth, though I didn’t like admitting it. Had I compromised a murder investigation just so I could keep Emily Howard’s life tidier than she took any care to make it? Maybe. But I took that risk because I knew I would get to the truth faster than the Guards. If I didn’t believe that, then I would be as bad as Dave had painted me. And if it involved serious criminals from Honeypark, even Brock Taylor himself, I could make those connections before anyone else. And Dave wasn’t above taking my help when he needed it.
Meanwhile, here I was, smoking a cigarette on top of Bayview Hill, waiting for a woman who drove a black ’06 Reg Mercedes-Benz S 500 to tell me what to do. She came out of the house with Emily and Jonathan, whom shock continued to age in reverse: they looked like a pair of frightened children, bloodless and numb. Jonathan had retreated behind iPod headphones; Emily carried an overnight bag and a worn stuffed dog. Sandra Howard opened the car for them, then came across and stood beside me. Her hood was down, and her red hair glistened in the thick damp air. She was wearing black, some combination of cape and cowl that came to her ankles. She took the cigarette from my hand and drew hard on it.
“Jesus, this is such a mess,” she said. “Mr. Loy-”
“Ed,” I said.
“Ed. I’m bringing Jonny and Em up to Rowan House, that’s the family home. Would you come with us?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll follow you there.”
She held the cigarette up as if to give it back; I gestured to her to keep it; she caught my hand again and held it in her cool grip. Her red nail polish was chipped, and her nails were bitten to the quick; she wore a red-and-green-braided band on her wrist; she smelled of smoky salt earth and the sweet tang of spice. She looked straight at me, and I looked straight back; I thought I could feel her green eyes searching mine, like she could see inside my thoughts, see my doubt, my suspicion, see how little I really trusted her, or anyone else. But I wanted her to believe I could trust. Looking in her eyes, I wanted to trust her.
Lord, I believe, oh, help my unbelief.
She brought her hand up to my face. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but I wanted her to keep doing it. Her crooked finger rested cool in the hollow of my cheek.
“Something is happening to us, Ed. Emily vanishing, David Brady-the Howard family is under threat. You’ll help us, won’t you?”
I nodded. I felt at that moment as if I were under her spell, as if I would have done whatever she asked me. A firework raked across the sky like a searchlight in the dark and caught us for a split second, frozen in its glow. I sometimes thought of it later as a strobe flash that captured Sandra Howard as she had been, before the fall-but of course it was no such thing; the high saga of the Howards was plummeting to its close, and whether she knew it or not, Sandra wasn’t just caught up in its descent, she was fanning the flames that sped it down.
I followed the roll of the great black Merc, feeling dragged in its imperious tide, as our cortege made slow progress through the rush-hour traffic on the narrow roads south of Castlehill. Once we joined the M50 northwards we picked up speed against the flow. The Merc turned west on Exit 13 and climbed through Sandyford and Kilgobbin, then cut up through narrow twisty roads to the foothills of the mountains. I followed along a road bounded now on one side by a high stone wall; on the other, gorse and ferns gave way to marsh and shallow bog. At a junction high above the city, great iron gates within the wall marked the entrance to Rowan House; I waited while they swung open, and then followed as the Merc crunched up a track lined with ash and rowan trees to a house I had seen already that day, in miniature, on a plinth beneath Emily Howard’s bed.