The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes Page B

paid for by her father and now I’d done my job I should crawl back down beneath the stone I’d slithered out from. Jonathan had helped himself to a brandy from a drinks table and was sitting on the sofa watching us. He was very skinny and his eyes were red and his expression flickered from a disdainful glare to an eye-rolling smile, as if at the appalling comedy of the situation. I wondered that he could find comedy in what had happened, but evidently he could: occasionally he would laugh, as if remembering an especially amusing moment, and then his eyes would narrow, and his hand would flash up to cover his mouth, as if he was afraid he might suddenly give the game away.
    “I don’t know that I’ve done my job yet. I need to get your side of the story,” I said to Emily.
    “I don’t
think
so,” she said, and walked out of the room. I followed her down the hall.
    “In that case, I’ll have to ring the Guards and tell them that you and your cousin participated in pornography that may have been filmed by the recently murdered David Brady. I have the photographs, and the other film Jonathan was in, and it’s starting to look like I’ll have no option but to turn them over,” I said to her retreating back.
    She stopped, but didn’t turn around.
    “There’s also the question of whether you were being held against your will, or whether you were willing players. If the latter, there might be charges of blackmail and extortion to consider.”
    “I’m really really
tired,
Mr. Loy,” she said in her best sulky-spoiled Daddy’s girl voice.
    “I’m not feeling too chipper myself, but since neither of us is three or eighty, I think we can probably make it through another hour or so without needing a nap,” I said.
    Her shoulders began to shake. More tears, I thought, but when she turned around I saw that she was laughing.
    “All right, fair enough, you’re not like the usual twats Daddy sets on me,” she said. She shook her red hair, then nodded at me with those deep dark eyes, her sullen pout fully restored.
    “What are the usual twats like?” I said, as we went back into the living room.
    “Big ex-cops in anoraks with beer bellies. They’re supposed to be inconspicuous, I mean, hello? In a pub full of scrawny students, and a fat culchie with a big red face trying to blend in? I don’t
think
so.”
    Emily sat down beside her cousin, slapped her hand on his knee and ran it up his thigh. Jonathan rolled his eyes back in his head as she did this; when she reached his crotch, she squeezed, and he shot his tongue out. I went to get a brandy for myself. The house was cold, and what the kids were doing was annoying, and what I feared lay behind it was disturbing me. There was Jameson, so I had a glass of that instead. It was suddenly dark, dark the way it gets at three thirty on a dull misty Halloween, darker than night it seemed.
    Emily was poking Jonathan in the side now, and he was juddering and grimacing and giggling. I sat down opposite them and waited for them to stop, and after a while, they did.
    “Whose idea was the porn?” I said.
    There was silence for a while, then Jonathan pulled his hand from his mouth.
    “David Brady’s,” he said.
    Emily hit him in the face so quickly that it was difficult at first to take in what had happened. She was wearing several rings, and they raked across Jonathan’s cheek and temple, drawing needle sprays of blood. He yelped in pain and cowered away from her, but quickly tried to retrieve himself, shaking his head and contorting his grimace of pain back into the mask of detached amusement he seemed to wear for protection. Just as quickly he was on top of Emily, his hands around her neck, and she was writhing beneath him on the sofa, her motorcycle boots kicking in the air. I grabbed his head by the hair and tugged him off her, then hauled Emily to her feet and clasped her flailing wrists in one hand. Jonathan recoiled on the couch, hands up, head bowed, cowering, a