Mr. Flood's Last Resort(49)
On the chaise, upholstered in black velvet, a chorus of Pierrot dolls regard me balefully. A heavy black teardrop rests on every white cheek and each wears a wilting ruff. Every red mouth is painted with a downturned smile. And there it is: the Pierrot with a torn ruff and a malevolent stare, with its cap gone and a fuzz of fair hair. Bandages trail from its wrists.
I sit down at the dressing table and open the drawer. Inside a velvet box I find a remarkable piece of jewelry. A spider, its abdomen a bulging garnet, feeds on a fly held in the cradle of its mandible. I touch it and the fly falls out of the spider’s grip to hang on a fine chain, swinging beneath, free again. There is a tiny pin on each so that the wearer can grant the spider a meal or allow the fly to hover under its predator’s nose. I put the brooch back, alongside a brush and comb set inlaid with polished jet and smoky glass bottles with moldering contents.
I get up and open the door to the dressing room. There’s a mirror and an ebony bentwood chair.
The wardrobe is disappointing. Inside there are no bright gowns, only a few coats smelling of mothballs. Big buttoned and fur trimmed and uniformly bedraggled.
But this room is a mirror image.
Something must be hidden in this wardrobe. Some counterpart to the Mass cards: another clue. I take out the coats and lay them on the chair, methodically checking the pockets, feeling around the lining.
Then I hear a bang.
*
I AM intact.
Not dead.
I come out of the dressing room.
On the bed, broken apart, is the moth-filled frame. I open the door a fraction and peer out into the hallway. There is no sign of Cathal roaring up the stairs yet. I close the door and turn back to the bed.
The glass has shattered extravagantly, as if the frame has been blown open by an incendiary device. It has landed moth side up with some of the insects thrown clear of the wreckage. The mother of all moths lies in the middle of the bed; she has lost part of her wing and her legs on one side. With the glass gone she looks even more horribly alive. As if, at any moment, she might start limping over the counterpane, trying out her tattered wings.
Something catches my eye. Just under the broken frame, a wisp of ribbon. I pull it and beneath the blasted moths something comes slithering. The string is attached to an envelope: medium-sized, manila.
I work swiftly, pulling up my shirt and tucking the envelope into the waistband of my jeans. I pick up the counterpane, knot the ends together, and, moving the broken glass as quietly as I can, bundle it up and put it in the bottom of the wardrobe. I straighten the bed and hang the remaining coats back up unchecked.
As I step out of the room I look towards the dressing table mirror.
It’s undisturbed. It appears I’ve got the message now.
CHAPTER 21
I look at Renata and she looks back at me. We both look at the manila envelope on the coffee table.
An unlit pipe is between her lips. She’s promised not to light it, only that she needs something to clamp her jaw around to calm her nerves.
“Open the envelope, Maud,” she murmurs.
I don’t think I want to.
I stand up and walk over to the kitchen window. She is still there, St. Dymphna, flitting after the neighborhood cat.
She has abandoned her crown and veil and her sandals. They lie shining on the rockery. Her brown hair flies behind her; now and again she stops, catches up her unraveling plait and chews the end of it absorbedly, watching for the cat’s next move. Then the nimbus of light that surrounds her lovely head sparks and flares and her face glows with delight and she makes a grab. There’s a flash of bare feet and a peal of wicked laughter.
*
THE FLAP is taped down. I walk the knife carefully along it. Inside there are newspaper cuttings. I unfold them, smoothing them down and laying them out on the table.
Picture after picture of Maggie Dunne.
There are other pictures too. Of the police searching a furrowed field, of a wooded copse with tree roots gnarling the banks, and of an old sanatorium set in lawned gardens.
I pick up a cutting towards the top of the pile and read it out loud. “Thursday, 29 August 1985, ‘Chief Constable Frank Gaunt has confirmed that Dorset police are widening the search for Maggie Dunne amid increasing concerns for her welfare. Maggie, a resident of Cedar House children’s home, was last seen around midday on Tuesday, 20 August.’?”
As I flick through the rest of the cuttings I notice the articles getting smaller, dwindling to no more than a line in the Dorset Echo six months later reporting an unconfirmed sighting of Maggie in Dover. There the trail ends.
“So Maggie was in care?” says Renata.
“Looks like it.”
I glance out of the window. St. Dymphna is nowhere to be seen. An uneasy feeling is growing in my stomach: a queasy sense of excitement, with a dash of inevitability about it.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that Mary kept these cuttings?” asks Renata.
“Perhaps no stranger than your collection of true-life crime magazines. What’s stranger is that she went to such lengths to hide them.”
St. Dymphna peers in at the window; she presses her face through the glass and frowns. Then she stalks into the room and flops down in front of the television.
Renata turns to me, her expression solemn. “Mary was onto something. She was trying to solve the mystery of Maggie’s disappearance. She couldn’t save her own child, Marguerite, so she was driven by a need to save someone else’s, to try to set things right on some level, in some way.”