Mr. Flood's Last Resort(44)

“No. I was a gallery of a man.” He smiles back at me bitterly. “She had this face you’d never forget. These green eyes; there was great piety in those eyes looking up.”

He puts down his brush, shuffles to the corner of the room and searches through canvases. He pulls one out, brings it back and props it near my chair.

In the painting Mary is very young; she wears a high-necked, short-sleeved blue dress with her searing red hair coiled over one shoulder. Her eyes are averted, gazing up to the heavens, like those of a saint. A fox cub sleeps curled in the crook of her arm, a froth of fur and snout. Behind them, perched by an open window, is an owl with a heart-shaped face and dappled feathers.

“The fox and the owl,” I murmur. “Have you ever heard of a girl called Maggie Dunne?”

He goes back to the easel and picks up his brush. “I haven’t.”

“She went missing from a village called Langton Cheney in August 1985. She was fifteen. You took your caravan there a few years previously.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Are you sure, Cathal?” I ask softly.

He leans over the canvas. “We’re done,” he says. “Get out, go home.”

His eyes are terrible, lupine, a sudden searing blue. For a moment I fear he’ll vault his easel and have my throat out. Instead he looks away, fumbles the key from his coat pocket, and stalks over to the door of the conservatory.

“You want me to leave?”

“That’s what I said.”

“But your meal—”

“Get out, I said.” His face is white, as closed and hard as a fist.

I don’t argue. I’m relieved to step out into the garden and hear the lock turn behind me.

*

I WALK round to the kitchen door; it’s latched still.

There’s nothing left to do but go home. I look up at the house. There’s a balcony outside what could be the white bedroom, if I could just find a ladder— A shadow passes across one of the newspapered windows and an eye draws nearer to a peephole.

Or that could just be my imagination.

*

ST. MONICA (disappointing children, victims of adultery) is waiting for me outside the gate. She nods curtly and falls in beside me as I walk to the bus stop. We exchange no words, for she appears to be deep in thought. She’s a pensive, abstracted kind of saint, given to drifting and staring into the distance. She has shadow-ringed eyes that look inwards and a thin, pained line of a mouth, lips pressed together as if to stop flies getting in. St. Monica would be a little dreary if it wasn’t for her robes: they are cream, with a nice pale glow to them.

I form sentences in my head about missing schoolgirls and wives that have fallen to suspicious deaths but find I can’t speak any of them. St. Monica seems to understand, because now and again she glances up at me with a sour smile.

At the bus stop she arranges her robes around her feet with peevish delicacy and surveys the traffic.

“I don’t know what to do.”

St. Monica rolls her eyes.

“Is Maggie Dunne dead?”

St. Monica frowns.

“If you could just let me know one way or the other? You don’t have to say it out loud if it’s against the rules. You could just cough once for yes, twice for no.”

St. Monica folds her arms and looks disenchanted.

We wait in silence and I listen, just in case she decides to cough anyway.

After a while I say, “Have you any practical advice for me? On finding Maggie and saving the cat?”

St. Monica is staring out past the bus shelter. A muscle twitches in her jaw and the ghost of a grimace crosses her face as if some deep memory has suddenly snagged.

“I could do with backup in there,” I say. “It’s not likely though, is it?”

St. Monica shrugs; there’s a whole world of disinterest in her gesture.

“So that’s it, then. It’s just part of my life’s rich tapestry?”

St. Monica, with her eyes on some dim distance, smiles. It’s not a nice smile.





CHAPTER 16


I didn’t know who Deirdre was meeting, who was at the beach, who wasn’t at the beach, who drove a car out of the car park, and what the number plate on that car was.

I couldn’t remember what my sister was wearing. All I was certain of was what she was carrying: a red leather heart-shaped bag.

Mammy moved from the sink to the table and pointed her cigarette at me and asked if I had eyes in my fucking head.

We looked at each other in surprise, Mammy and me. I had never heard her swear before. Then she took up the ashtray and threw it.

*

I COULD hear Mammy crying next door. Granny was in with her. I went over my spellings.

*

THE LADY guard opened the car door for me. I sat in the back and we waited for the man guard to come out. They were taking me back to Pearl Strand to see if my memory could be jogged.

“Will you put the sirens on?” I asked.

The lady guard smiled into the back, her hazel eyes tired and kind. “It’s not an emergency, Maud.”

As we drove along they asked me questions about school. Had I settled in all right now?

My old school was over three hours away, where our own house was. Jimmy O’Donnell could drive it in less than two, I said to the guards. The guards glanced at each other in the front seats. Then I remembered I didn’t love Jimmy anymore. So I stopped talking and looked out of the window, watching the wet fields go by.