Mr. Flood's Last Resort(25)
“Loafers are a murderer’s choice of footwear. Don’t you know that, Maud? Quiet footsteps and hardly a trace of a print, especially when you tie plastic bags around your feet.”
Her makeup is more extravagant than usual too. To her workaday face she has added shimmering cheekbones and fake eyelashes, which give her the appearance of having harnessed a pair of fitful spiders. I vaguely wonder what the occasion is.
“A nice smart flat-soled loafer is easy to hose down. None of those grips you get on a trainer that just hog the DNA,” Renata continues, sure in her convictions.
“Now Gabriel is a murderer too?”
Renata fixes me with a glare, as if I’m willfully annoying her. “I didn’t say that. But murdering usually runs in the family; it’s an inherited condition, like a squint.”
“Is that really the case, Renata?”
She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs her forehead. Wigs often make her overheated and bad-tempered.
“It’s a scientific fact,” she says. “So the old man is right: his son probably does want to kill him.”
“Then he can get in line,” I murmur.
“You have to ask why his son wants to kill him?”
“Because his son is a psychopath, like his daddy?”
“He still needs a motive, Maud.”
I take a biscuit from the tin on the kitchen table. “Since when do psychopaths need a motive?”
“Since always; even if it’s because it’s a Thursday or the voices just said so. Gabriel’s motive is easy.” Renata is solemn-eyed. “He wants to kill Daddy in retribution for murdering his mummy and the little faceless girl.”
“The girl Gabriel has no recollection of?”
“He’s lying. You said yourself, Maud, that the children look like siblings.”
“Conjecture only.”
Renata frowns. “Well, both Mary and the little girl have had their faces erased on the photographs. Mary met with a fishy accident. It stands to reason that the girl was wiped out too.”
“And you’d put your money on the savage old misanthrope up at the house there?”
Renata looks superior. “Bluebeard? Why not?”
“Two defaced snapshots and Mr. Flood is a serial killer. Really, Renata?”
Renata smiles benignly. “Don’t believe me. It is only a matter of time before more clues surface. The identity, perhaps, of the little girl.”
“Don’t bank on it.”
“Or her whereabouts.” She waits for me to take the bait. When I don’t, she continues. “Bluebeard is guarding far more than just rubbish.”
“I don’t want to discuss this, Renata.”
“Corpses are like stones, Maud. They want to be found. Ask any farmer and they’ll tell you: stones always rise. Look at the victims of Arctic Bob.”
“Renata—”
“Arctic Bob: the Colorado truck driver who kept his victims in chest freezers. When he went on holiday to Florida one year the electricity supply to his carport broke down. His neighbors found the remains.” She glances at me. “It was the smell.”
“That’s enough,” I say.
“Some of his victims broke their fingers trying to get out. Even grown police officers cried when they found those poor people defrosting, all twelve of them. It was the terror in their eyes, you see, staring out through the bags of discounted chicken wings. And the air thick with flies and the ground awash with the worst kind of melt water.”
“I’m leaving—”
“Has Mr. Flood got a chest freezer? Maybe the little girl is in there? You should check the outbuildings.”
“I’ll do no such thing. There are no dead children in chest freezers.”
Renata roots around in the biscuit tin. “Would it kill you to search around the place a bit? You know, be proactive and not wait for Mary Flood to drop hints in your lap?”
She avoids my eyes, picking out a garibaldi and dipping it in her coffee. She is a picture of indifference.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To prove you are right and I am wrong and that the little faceless girl is alive and well and Mary really did take an accidental tumble. To lay this case to rest, darling, so to speak.”
“And then you’ll stop harassing me with your fictional crime case and telling me your horrible tales of murder?”
Her grin is lavish. “Absolutely.”
“You swear on the immortal soul of Johnny Cash?”
Renata looks gravely up to Heaven. “May God Preserve and Keep Him.” She crosses the glittery breast of her jumpsuit, just like a good Catholic would.
*
TRUE TO her word Renata refrains from discussing murder and we enjoy a peaceful evening. Now and again she peers over at me and bites her lip as she sits on the living room sofa knitting gloves for retired fishermen. It is appropriate that Renata cares for old seafarers; sometimes I wonder about her rolling landlocked gait and her black brigand’s eyes. All she needs is a parrot and an eye patch.
I close my eyes. The room is silent but for the television on low and the pernickety click of Renata’s needles.
Mostly Renata knits to keep her hands busy when she misses her pipe. To her credit she stays off the Borkum Riff these days, although now and again I catch a bitter smoky waft and I feel sure that Renata has kept her pipe carefully stowed away where her sister can’t find it. Pipe smoking was a habit Renata developed hanging around shipyards during her Rotherhithe boyhood, along with her ability to eat eels with relish. Renata’s past is complicated and surprising; I have never asked where she learnt to knit.