Read Online The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes - Free Book Online

dog who’d been beaten too often; Emily was kicking at my shins, dragging me across the room.
    “That’s enough now, enough, do you hear me?” I shouted. Emily’s face was flushed with rage, her lips compressed, her breath coming hard through her nose. She bent down and sank her teeth into my hand, and I had to use all my will not to slap her face. I put the flat of my hand against her chest and pushed her hard across the room. She fell back onto the couch, winded. There was blood on my torn hand; it tasted of metal, and of fear.
    Emily was staring at me in astonishment.
    “No one pushes me around,” she said. “No one treats me like that.”
    “No one bites my hand unless I ask them to,” I said. “But here’s the thing: if you take a walk on the wild side, be prepared for the unexpected.”
    “Do you —
actually
— know who I am?” Emily Howard said, with all the contemptuous hauteur a private education and an exclusive south Dublin address afford.
    “I’m scared to find out, sweetheart,” I said.
    We sat in silence for a while after that. Jonathan drained his brandy, and Emily clicked the rings on her right hand against the rings on her left. Somewhere across the bay, fireworks crackled and shot their plumes of light through the murk; like a relief diagram of nerves and synapses in the body, they seemed to give the falling night scale and dimension. I felt like there was a gulf between me and these damaged, spoiled, feral kids; I feared that if I asked the wrong question or said a word out of place, it might tip them over an edge they were clearly teetering on. I could call Denis Finnegan and leave them in his charge. That would possibly have been the smart play. But I knew I wasn’t going to let any of this go until I got to the bottom of it.
    “All right,” I said. “For starters, neither of you was forced to do anything against your will, is that so?”
    “You mean, fuck?” Emily said with a big leering grin.
    I nodded.
    “No, we weren’t forced. Were we, Jonny?”
    Jonathan shook his head, his smile back in place, his eyes in his lap.
    “We did it all for love, Mr. Loy,” Emily said, and waggled her tongue at me.
    “Why was David Brady shooting pornography? How did that come about?”
    “How do you know it was David?” Emily said.
    “Jonathan told us,” I said.
    “Jonny is mistaken, aren’t ya, babe?” Emily said.
    Jonathan pushed a kind of sputtered laugh through his nose.
    “I make many mistakes,” he said in an arch, ironic tone, as if he was quoting a line from a movie.
    “Also, there’s a shot of his wrist in the movie Jonny made with, what’s this they were called, Wendy and Petra?”
    “Kylie and Stacey more like,” Emily said in a bad Dublin accent. “Hayley and Kelsey.”
    “And on his wrist was his 2JS2 bracelet — no one but David Brady has one. And he had the films and the photos on his home computer. So we all know it was him. What we don’t know is, why.”
    “Are they still there, on his computer, for the Guards to find?” Emily asked, her tone suddenly urgent.
    “You first. Why were you making porn films with David Brady? And why were you doing it in Honeypark?”
    Emily looked to Jonathan, down the corridor that led to her bedroom, and then toward the door, but there was no way out. She sighed laboriously and began to speak.
    “Back when DB and I were going out, during the summer, we went through this phase of doing E and kind of like, getting off with other people in front of each other. It was like, we’d give each other marks out of ten, don’t think much of yours, total minger/total babe type of thing. And then sometimes we’d bring someone back to his. It was a bit of crack, a bit pervy, a bit fucked-up. And we’d be in control of it all, so the next morning, or even the middle of the night, if we decided we’d had enough, we’d just throw them out. Anyway, we were at this Saturday-night bash in Seafield Rugby Club and the usual parade of