Free The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes Page B

metal H; another spot found the plain cross on the round tower’s peak.
    The entrance hall was a great white rotunda with a sweeping circular staircase in pale wood to the right and a corridor at left that served the ground-floor front rooms; assorted portraits of Dr. John Howard hung at every turn; ahead, an arch through which Sandra Howard had already swept led to another, slightly smaller hall, with stairs down to the basement level and a further corridor for the back rooms and yet more paintings of her father. At the far end of this hall stood double doors that might once have led down to the garden; now they opened onto a windowless corridor whose ceiling was only about twelve feet high, whose walls were crisp white and unadorned by portraits of any kind, a corridor that emerged into a modern rectangular open-plan living space with great plate-glass walls and no hint of baronial grandeur: the corridor and living room of a house built maybe in the 1970s, seemingly grafted onto the rear of the fake castle. There was a fire burning in a big open grate, with a brushed-steel vent to take the smoke; the flames drew everyone to huddle in their glow.
    Two maids in black-and-white uniforms had materialized when we first entered the house. After brisk instructions from Sandra Howard, they’d vanished; now they were back with drinks and cold cuts and salads, which they set on a long table at one end of the room. The sudden pang in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day; Jonny fell on the food like a starving man, and, once I had reassured myself that Sandra and Emily were okay, I followed suit. Sandra sat on a long couch at the end closest to the fire; Emily lay curled up with her head in her aunt’s lap, her stuffed dog pressed to her cheek and her left thumb in her mouth. The maids, who were both tiny and looked Filipina, swirled around collecting coats and filling cups and pouring glasses of water and setting out bottles of spirits and mixers and tubs of ice and asking if there was anything further before silently dispersing. I ate smoked salmon and rare cold roast beef and tomato and avocado salad and potato and hazelnut salad and drank a cup of coffee and halfway through my second bottle of Tyskie, a very strong Polish beer that I had pined for during my month on the dry, I began to feel faintly human again. Jonny had put steel-rimmed granny glasses on; he kept flashing anxious glances through them at his mother before looking at me and gulping air through his mouth. Finally, his mother rose and led Emily out of the room, and he got his chance to speak.
    “You won’t tell, will you?” he asked. “Tell Mummy, I mean.”
    “Tell her what?” I said blankly.
    “About, y’know. The porn. And the whole thing with Emily.”
    He had one of those voices that sounded as if it hadn’t completely broken, and was always struggling to find its correct register, like a radio station that isn’t fully tuned in. Combined with pale stubble that looked like thistledown and gangling limbs that seemed not to fit him properly, he could have passed for fourteen.
    “Emily’s father thought she had gone missing. Did your family not worry?”
    “I don’t live with Mummy; I have rooms in Trinity.”
    And an old-style Trinity accent to go with them.
Rums in Trin’ty.
    “What age are you, Jonny?”
    “Nineteen. Same as Emily. I got Schol — a Foundation Scholarship — in mathematics. Which confers all sorts of perks. I can eat in the Dining Hall, and wear an academic gown—”
    “And graze your sheep in College Park?”
    “They didn’t apprise me of that privilege, but if it’s available to me, I shall certainly take it up. As soon as I get the sheep.”
    He gave a sniffing, snorting, yelping laugh, the kind of sound teenage boys who learn Monty Python routines by heart make, maybe the kind maths geeks make too; then he blinked unhappily at me, his anxious eyes enlarged by the powerful lenses.
    “I need you to tell me a few