Read The Wrong Kind of Blood for Free Online Page A

them himself, or that she was already so out of it that she didn’t care what had happened to them. Then she nodded her head violently, as if ordering herself to get a grip, and sat forward, staring at the floor, her hands clenched in small fists between her knees. It was exhausting watching her change personality and mood every thirty seconds, and impossible to know if it was guilt, or fear, or just the blithe shape-shifting of a drunk.
    “Can I see his office?”
    “It’s upstairs, last door along.”
    The white hall curved in a spiral up the stairs. I walked to the end of the landing and opened the door to Peter Dawson’s office. The wooden blinds were closed, so I flicked the lights on. An entire wall’s worth of shelving was crammed with box files encompassing every aspect of Peter’s life. There were files dealing with school, university and work; files labeled Swimming, Tennis, and Sailing; there were even files devoted to stamp collecting, football cards and the Boy Scouts, and two files stamped “Scrapbooks — Pop” and “Scrapbooks — Sport.” Linda was right: Peter had his entire life filed away up here. I worked my way through each box, checking the contents off against the labels. The only other files that were empty, apart from a couple of unmarked boxes, were two labeled “Family 1” and “Family 2,” and another marked “Golf Club.”
    The desk was a pale oak table with no drawers; an Apple Mac G4 computer sat on it, its semispherical white base and floating monitor looking stridently last-word-in-design. While it was booting up, I looked around the rest of the office. Two-year planners hung on one of the side walls, marked with things like “Argus Vale — 64 Apts., Town Houses — Sept. 2006” and “Glencourt Comm’ty C’tre — 18 months.” The shelf full of books housed mostly sports and business biographies and a few sailing manuals.
    There was a photograph on Peter’s desk, of two men and a racehorse. One of the men was plump and tanned and looked pleased with himself; he wore a waxed jacket and a tweed cap. I couldn’t remember his name, but he hit it big in property in the sixties; the papers used to call him “Ireland’s First Millionaire.” The other man was thinner than when I saw him last, and his small, cold eyes peered suspiciously from beneath the brim of a black fedora: John Dawson, Peter’s father.
    I sat at the desk and gave the Mac a quick once-over, but the files seemed almost entirely work-related: spread sheets and profit-and-loss accounts and so on. If the secret to Peter’s disappearance lay buried in any of that, I’d have to hire a specialist to wade through it all. I opened Word and worked through the Recent Documents option. Most of them — saved under titles like “hhhh” or “lllll” — had evidently been trashed, provoking the message: “The alias ‘hhhh’ could not be opened, because the original item could not be found.” The most recent document had been saved as “twimc,” but it opened to a blank page. I wondered whether Peter had saved the title without getting any further, or if its contents had been deleted by another hand. I located it within the documents folder and checked. Date Created: Fri. July 16, 1:27 p.m.; Date Modified: Tues., July 20, 12:05 p.m. Just after midday yesterday, someone had wiped whatever had been written there, but hadn’t put the document in the computer’s virtual wastebasket.
    I got down on the floor to see if there was any interesting litter, but the whole place looked spick-and-span, as if it had been cleaned and dusted that day, and the stainless steel wastebasket was empty, but for the fossil stain of an apple core on its base.
    I had a quick look in the other upstairs rooms: a large white-tiled bathroom, two bedrooms furnished in a spare, impersonal style that suggested they were for guests, a third bedroom full of art books, a silver Apple laptop, oil paints, sketch pads and canvases stretched