The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes Page A

than she had all day.
    “But you know Jerry Dalton.”
    “He’s a barman in SRC. Seafield Rugby Club? And he’s in my class at college. And he has this metal band. Everyone knows Jerry. He’s a really nice guy. A friend. At least, I thought so, but if he’s hooked up with whoever is doing all this — is it the same guy who killed DB?”
    “Could be.”
    Jessica Howard had called Brady an absolute ride, and said she certainly would have.
    “Emily, might there have been anything going on between your mother and David Brady?”
    She shook her head but didn’t look very convinced.
    “Is that why you broke up with him, Emily? Because he was having an affair with your mother?”
    “
No
, Jesus… whatever was going on… and I’m not saying anything was, but whatever… the whole thing with DB just got to be too much… too much E, too much porn… just too fucking… greedy… it wasn’t about love at all anymore, if it ever had been; it was just about us
gorging
ourselves… too fucking gross.”
    She put her head in her hands and a convulsion of weeping surged through her, like a great wave. When it had crashed, she tipped her head back and shook it, as if she could dispel grief the way a dog shakes off salt water. I plowed on, trying to get as much as possible from her before she went under for the night.
    “Sandra told me she fixed up some therapy for you. Do you still go?”
    Emily looked at me cagily, then smiled.
    “I do go. I go to Dr. Dave. Who says, I’m not a doctor, and don’t call me Dave.”
    “What does he call himself? And where does he live?”
    “David Manuel. He works from his house in Rathgar. But there’s no point. He won’t talk to you.”
    “Maybe I’ll talk to him. Isn’t that the idea?”
    I smiled at Emily, but she didn’t smile back. She had laced her fingers and was working her rings together, grinding the stones in an insistent rhythm. They were the same stones I had seen on a bracelet in her room, the same green-hued, red-flecked stones that were inlaid in the pool in Shane Howard’s back garden.
    “Nice rings,” I said. “What jewel is it?”
    “Bloodstone,” she said.
    “Bloodstone? What’s that?”
    “Heliotrope is its other name. Bloodstone sounds better. It’s a mythological stone, Ted. It possesses magical properties.
Man.
”
    She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly twinkling, as if aware of the hippy-dippy nature of what she was saying, but willing herself — and me — to roll with it. Suddenly, I saw all her intelligence and wit being used in aid of herself for once. At last, I found myself liking her enormously. I smiled back, and she scrunched up her face as if she was embarrassed, and unused to people liking her for herself, or at all.
    “Aunt Sandra gave me them, years ago. They say… ‘they say’… they never say who
they
are, but…
they say
if you soak the bloodstone in a certain kind of water, for a certain amount of time… it can turn the clouds the color of blood. The other thing is better though…
they say
… if you clasp it in the right way, it can make you completely invisible.”
    And with that, Emily slid back down in the bed and pulled the cover right over her face, but not quite so fast that I didn’t see a quiver in her lips, a glisten in her eyes, the bloodless pall of fear in her cheeks. I stood there a moment, and she poked one hand above the covers, just far enough to show the rings, and gave me a little kid’s closed-hand wave.
    Sleep well, I thought. Whatever the hell it is, it seems to be coming down hardest on you.
    I shut the light out before I left.
     
     
    In the living room, Sandra and Shane Howard and Denis Finnegan were sitting around the big table, talking in murmurs; they went quiet and looked up at me as I approached. Sandra made an expectant face, as if waiting for a report. I nodded to her in reassurance. Then I took the mass card out of my pocket and laid it open on the table, and said “Who was Stephen