Mr. Flood's Last Resort(56)
“I don’t see—”
“Mary knew something, or suspected something, that’s why she kept the newspaper cuttings. That’s why she took such trouble to hide them. Everything started with Maggie’s disappearance.”
Sam takes a sip of his coffee.
“You wouldn’t let it go, would you, Sam?”
He puts his mug on the table and throws me a look, and for once I know what’s coming next.
CHAPTER 26
Sam sleeps with his hair across his face. I watch him until his eyes open. At first a lazy swimming gaze, a sweet beguiled smile. I wait for his expression to change. For that slow-dawning realization then that quick flood of horror.
It’s a look I know well, the look of an ambushed goat on a rope. I wore it myself once when I woke up next to an archivist I’d met on the bus. He had dry papery hands, enjoyed reading about canals, and winced whenever I spoke.
Yes, he would love a coffee, Sam says, the scaffold of his smile just about holding.
When I pull the door behind me the panic will set in and he’ll be up out of the bed, searching the room for his things, hopping into his cowboy boots. He’ll be swearing softly to himself and cursing the perils of kindness and proximity.
So long, Pardner.
I put the kettle on and get into the shower.
*
I DON’T have to check that the flat is empty; I know as soon as I get out, as soon as I wrap the towel round me.
St. Valentine is lolling around outside the bathroom door, swinging his dingy rope belt. “That went well with your man,” he says.
I throw him a caustic glance. “And you can keep your opinions to yourself.”
He grins. “He was very shook looking, coming out of your bedroom. But then he recovered himself and by God he put the good leg under him. I’ve never seen a man move so fast.”
“And you the saint of love saying this? And I’ll thank you not to be loitering in my hallway, uninvoked and uninvited.”
“Leaping and hopping out that door.” St. Valentine fixes me with one eye; the other wanders at will. “Like a rabbit he was. No, like a fox, running with the pack an inch away from his arse.”
“Breaking and entering no less.”
“He left a note.” St. Valentine nods towards the living room.
Propped up on the coffee table, my telephone pad. I wander over, feigning indifference. In a hasty scrawl:
Sorry M. Have to run.
“He’s slipped your hook.”
“I wasn’t trying to hook him,” I utter through gritted teeth.
“Well, you’ll have more chance of hooking a dose of the clap the way you’re carrying on.” St. Valentine wags a dim finger at me. “How long have you known him? Five minutes? He gives you the soft eye and you drop your knickers.”
I glare at him. “There must be some way I can report you?”
“Fair play to you though for getting a go on that. Jesus, who’d have thought it?” He gives me a jaunty wink and drifts off through the wall.
“YOU’RE LATE. Half the morning has gone.” Cathal glowers through his eyebrows at me.
He’s wearing a smoking jacket and a beret. I almost laugh. But I don’t. Not with the recent communications from Mary Flood on my mind.
“A bit of dry cake and not a drop of fucking custard,” he growls. “Tardy little fecker, are you coming?”
He heads off down the hallway and I follow him.
He stops outside the door to his workshop. I notice that he has reinforced his fortifications overnight. On each side of the doorway there is a wooden hat stand topped with stuffed animals, totem-pole-like. Surrounding this Mr. Flood has made a corral of plastic storage boxes filled with jumble. I recognize much that has been stolen back from the bins under the cover of darkness.
“Have you anything in your pockets?” he mutters.
“No.”
“Then keep it that way.”
He unlocks the door and flicks on overhead strip lights, illuminating a large cluttered workshop. A workbench runs the length of the room. Above it, a thousand dismembered creatures gather dust on shelves, like a taxidermy accident and emergency unit. Beneath the workbench lie boxes of cogs and levers and half-stripped mechanisms. Tools hang on the wall, between strange carved marionettes. There are princesses and witches, crocodiles and clowns. In the center of the room there is a glazed booth about the size of a Punch-and-Judy show. Red velvet curtains are drawn inside the window. Above it is a sign, painted in dull gold letters: Madame Sabine
Tomorrow’s Fortune Today.
Cathal rummages in a jar on the shelf and hands me a coin. He nods at the slot at the front of the machine. “Put a penny in.”
The coin drops and there’s a whirring noise. The curtains open jerkily, getting stuck halfway across the window with a plaintive drone.
Cathal swears under his breath, takes a hammer from the bench, and wanders round the back of the booth. The curtains sway open to reveal a terrifying life-sized automaton. A small-waisted, plump-bosomed woman, dressed in a corseted gown of black bombazine. She has long necklaces of jet, huge lustrous eyes, and a disproportionately small mouth with tiny white teeth. Over her dusty coiffure she wears a coin-spangled veil. Between her be-ringed fingers sits a crystal ball. The painted backdrop is of a gypsy caravan. There is a little stove with a bright kettle on the hob and a line of patterned plates. To her right is a wire birdcage containing two fat taxidermy chaffinches. A stuffed black cat at her left elbow looks on.