Mr. Flood's Last Resort(18)

I glance at my chips, getting cold in their wrapper. “You’ve never even been inside a caravan, have you?”

“That’s hardly the point.” Renata throws me a caustic look and picks up the latest photograph. She dangles it between her thumb and her forefinger. “So what do we do with this evidence?”

“Nothing.”

“Maud—”

“If it’s a trick I’ll have played into his hands.”

“And if it’s not a trick?” asks Renata.

“I can’t think of any other way this photograph could have got there. It wasn’t there before I went into the garden. If Mr. Flood didn’t put it there who did?”

“So whoever planted this photograph was already in the house?”

“I suppose there would have been time for someone to slip inside, but I was only outside for moments.” I remember Sam. “I did meet Sam Hebden when I was leaving, but that was hours later.”

Renata frowns. “Sam Hebden?”

I nod. “Mr. Flood’s last care worker.”

Renata looks delighted. “The care worker the old man threatened? He was at the house?”

“He was outside, waiting at the gate.”

“Living proof of Mr. Flood’s murderous rage.”

“Not entirely murderous if Sam’s still living.”

“He had a breakdown or went to Hull. Isn’t that what the agency said?”

“Whatever happened he’s back again,” I say breezily. “And he wants to talk to me.”

Renata sits up in her chair. “Does he indeed?”

I try to appear nonchalant. “I gave him my address, told him to come round.”

There’s an expression of high intrigue on her lovely painted face. “He found something out, up at the house.”

“Now, he didn’t say that.”

I finish my chips and Renata’s saveloy while she studies the disfigured photographs with her magnifying glass.

“It’s so deliberate, malicious,” she remarks. “The old man is very sick.”

“We don’t know he burnt them.”

“Oh, he burnt them all right,” Renata says coolly. “And much worse.”

“Let’s not get carried away. After all, what’s to suggest that there isn’t some kind of innocent explanation?”

Renata fixes me with a steady gaze. “Instinct.”

*

I CLEAR the plates and make coffee whilst Renata lays a length of black velvet on the kitchen table and gets out her tarot cards.

“They would have burnt you as a witch for that, Renata.”

“Lillian still would. She’s never liked them.”

“Is that the root of her antagonism?”

“The cards?” Renata raises a penciled eyebrow. “No. Jealousy. I stole all her boyfriends. I was twice as pretty and five times more fun. Anyway, siblings usually hate each other, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say.

“You’re blessed to be an only child.” Renata holds her cards to her chest and closes her eyes. “Sisters are the worst, like a bag of close-knit snakes, all venom and envy.”

Squaring the cards, she puts them down. “Do you want a reading?”

“Do I have to?”

“It can’t hurt.”

I secretly love to watch Renata read her cards. A kind of languorous grace comes over her, a happy abstraction. Her movements are serene and easy, the fears that rule her waking moments, keeping her trapped and grounded, forgotten for a while.

“Don’t you ever want to go outside?” I once asked, watching a shadow pass across her immaculately made-up face.

“I do go outside.” She smiled wryly. “Have you ever heard of astral projection? It is when your spiritual body leaves your material body to wander freely on the astral plane. In my case it started with my feet.”

“Astral feet?”

She nodded with complete sincerity.

“Sounds like the name of a prog rock band,” I said, and we laughed together.

I once asked Lillian what had happened to Renata to cause her to stay inside. Lillian, red-faced and tearful from an afternoon of arguments and oven cleaner, stopped scrubbing the grill. She straightened up and pulled her mouth down at each corner, carp-like, as if she were mulling something complicated and bitter.

I waited for some kind of insight.

She narrowed her eyes and delivered her verdict with the same spiteful delight as a cat getting sick on the carpet.

“The real world,” Lillian said. “He’s too good for it.”

There was a world of venom in that pronoun.

Renata asks me to cut the cards into three piles and pick one. She lays out the cards in a cross on the table and frowns at them.

Enigmatic characters go about their business in a palette of glowing colors. The cards are thick, black and edged in gold. They are worn and scuffed and a little dog-eared. I look out for the Devil and Death. These are my favorites: the Devil for his leather gimp mask, sexy abdominals, and the flames of hell leaping round his hairy goat flanks; Death for his skeletal smirk and luminous blue scythe.

Neither are there, but I recognize a mounted figure Renata calls Mr. Darcy, the Knight of Swords. This is a man with a fast horse and a keen intellect who is prone to dogmatism and aloofness. I also spot the Tower, a large stone phallus on a rocky outcrop being struck by lightning. Two jesters in tights fall grinning through the air.