Mr. Flood's Last Resort(12)
*
HALFWAY THROUGH Inspector Morse, when I could have sworn she was asleep, Renata pipes up.
“Something else happened today, Maud. Something you didn’t tell me about.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You’re acting shifty, darling.”
“I am not.”
“You are. You’re biting your nails. And when you’re not biting your nails you’re looking in your handbag.” Renata is scrutinizing me; she has even put on her varifocals. “Well?”
I glance over at the standard lamp. St. Dymphna seems to have melted back into the wall.
“Out with it,” says Renata.
Where’s the harm?
*
“IT’S SO deliberate, malicious.” Renata looks up from the photograph. “And you found this just by chance, in the downstairs cloakroom?”
I keep scrupulous eye contact. “When I was cleaning.”
Renata seems satisfied. “And the old boy’s wife has passed over?”
“She died, yes.”
“He was disgruntled, when you talked about her?”
“He was.”
Renata bites her lip. “Then he hopped and pointed? When you spoke about his son?”
“He hops quite a lot.”
“But does he point, Maud?”
“Not usually so vehemently.”
“How did the wife die?”
I hesitate. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
For a moment I wish for a straightforward coronary, an innocuous bout of pneumonia, a nice, seemly stroke.
“A fall, up at the house,” I say.
Renata throws me a look. “A fall killed her, is that so?”
“That’s what it says in the care plan. Mr. Flood suffered from depression after Mrs. Flood’s tragic and untimely death. It was held to be pertinent.”
Renata is riveted. “When did this happen?”
“Twenty-odd years ago.”
“And I suppose it was properly followed up, Mrs. Flood’s fall?” I notice that Renata is using her investigatory tone of voice, somewhere between hectoring and badgering.
“Now, Renata.”
She reaches for a bottle behind the footstall.
I groan, but I know better than to protest, so I get up and go to the sideboard for two of the smallest glasses I can find.
I was hoping to avoid the krupnik tonight. Especially this krupnik, a unique variety aged in oil drums in the shed of the painter and decorator named Józef, who lives at number seven. The resulting concoction is strained against rust through Józef’s wife’s pop socks and decanted into plastic juice bottles. The result is considered by Renata to be a powerful tonic promoting health and vitality; it’s certain that Józef also uses it to clean his brushes.
I pour us both a shot.
Renata motions to me to sit next to her on the sofa, and when I am seated, with the devil’s own cocktail in my hand, she begins.
“And do we know who the mystery girl is in the photograph?”
“We don’t.”
“But we know the identity of the little boy?”
“Mr. Flood’s son, Gabriel. He’s referred to in the care plan.”
“The son the old man didn’t like you mentioning?”
“The same.”
“I smell a rat, Maud.”
“I smell nothing of the sort.”
“You just haven’t a nose for crime,” she mutters. “A hated son, a defaced photograph, and the tragedy of Mrs. Flood’s fatal fall.”
I look at her and she looks back at me with an expression of wily playfulness. I feel suddenly weary. “I know what you’re thinking.”
She smiles.
I study the glass of krupnik in my hand: it is an unwholesome yellow, like something distilled in a renal ward. I wonder how I should approach it.
“What am I thinking?” Her smile widens.
“It was an accident, Renata. It says so in the care plan.”
“Heaven forfend that the care plan be wrong. I’d want to look into that if I were you.”
“Not a chance.”
She raises her eyebrows at me.
I raise mine back, haughtily.
I nod at the bookcase where popular crime novels with mauled pages and cracked spines slump in dog-eared rows.
“Do you not think you read too much in the way of crime?” I say. “Real life isn’t like that. You really think people are out there murdering the hell out of each other like they do in your novels?”
“Don’t be flippant; drink the krupnik.”
I look at the glass in front of me. “It will kill me.”
Renata points at it. “It’s good for the intellect. It burns the fat from the brain. Detectives have lean minds, honed, you see.” She pulls in her cheeks for emphasis. “From herding clues all day long.”
St. Dymphna laughs from somewhere just above the fireplace. It’s not a nice laugh. St. Dymphna doesn’t approve of Renata for reasons unknown to me.
If I finish my drink I can leave. If my legs no longer work I can go on my elbows; I can slither up the stairs to my flat by increments. I will have peace and the cessation of this lunacy. I steel myself and manage half the glass with no more discomfort than a melted esophagus.