Mr. Flood's Last Resort(58)

His voice, when he finally speaks, is soft, uncertain. “I did.”

“I’m sorry. It’s hard, losing someone.”

He frowns. “People are easily lost.”

“What was she like?”

He looks up at me with his pale, pale boreal eyes and he smiles, suddenly and guilelessly. “A fine forthright girl. She gave Gabriel a run for his money.”

“You were close?”

He nods, puts down his paintbrush, and selects another one.

He turns back to the canvas. “Now, hold still, Drennan,” he says. “This is the tricky bit.”





CHAPTER 27




There is a change in the air tonight at Renata’s maisonette. The jokes are fewer and we drink our home-brewed krupnik the way it’s supposed to be drunk: arduously and without pleasure.

Renata’s rock collection is boxed up and her bookcase is empty; her walls are scrubbed and stained and there are cigarette burns on her carpet.

But this doesn’t explain our mood.

We are weighed down by one feeling: this thing is too big for us. It is larger than one of Renata’s crime stories. This is real: the true-life story of a missing schoolgirl and an innocent woman who may have met with a questionable death.

The ribboned comb sits on the table; from time to time our eyes return to it. Renata has checked every newspaper cutting in case Maggie Dunne was pictured wearing it. She wasn’t.

“It could have been Marguerite’s?” I say.

But this doesn’t seem to make us feel better.

The saint pacing the floor over by the window does little to help; I’m glad Renata is spared the sight of her. St. Rita of Cascia is paler than she’s ever been, with an anxious look in her kind hazel eyes. She flickers and glows intermittently, like a strip light on the blink. The wound on her forehead burns a fierce red.

What we really need is some kind of celestial truth drug, a bolt of revelatory lightning strong enough to unearth Bridlemere’s secrets. I imagine the house hurling all manner of clues at us: train timetables, diaries, a full range of murder weapons. Ghosts would drift out from every corner, grave-eyed and rubbing their cold little hands, ready to give sworn statements. Every last one of the family’s skeletons would be accounted for: out they would come, with their bones numbered, chattering their teeth, and pointing their bony fingers.

Cathal Flood would be there, with his hand clamped over his mouth and his eyebrows raised in astonishment at the words of disclosure spilling out of him. And Gabriel too, heaving up confessions involuntarily, with his upper lip wet and his shark eyes blank with panic.

And Maggie Dunne, would we finally find her?

Slumbering unquiet under the floorboards, shut down and hopeless in the cellar?

For here are puzzles we don’t understand and jeopardy that may return at any moment, wielding crowbars. The windows are locked and the chain is across the door. Renata has the police station on speed dial.

I wonder if our nerves will hold.

I glance at my friend. Renata smells strongly of pipe tobacco and her headscarf is lopsided. From time to time she absently rolls up the sleeves of her kaftan. She doesn’t ask where Sam is and when it gets way past the time he’s supposed to arrive she sets the plates out on the coffee table and we eat the food she has reheated in the microwave.

We both know there are more important matters than Sam Hebden’s whereabouts.

If I could find the words I would tell Renata that she shouldn’t expect to see Sam anytime soon. But then maybe I don’t have to. Renata has had her share of doomed romances and with the hard-won wisdom of the scarred at heart she won’t ask me where Sam is, or if he’s coming back. For this I love her.

I could pretend I’d dreamt him, if it wasn’t for his cigarette ends in a saucer and the smell of him on my sheets.

The film shows again, a little skewed now, for one night only.

Slow-motion molten glances. Cinematic moments and those less rehearsed. The awkwardness of clothes and the stilted tripping journey from sofa to bed. Then the freedom, the joyful rolling, plotting boundaries and finding landmarks, directions cut off midsentence. I see it again, or some version of it: involving limbs and hair, saliva and teeth, the electricity of fingertips and skin scorched into an awful fervent feeling. The urgent consensual stare and the act of near violence that followed; the screwed-down, locked-down grind of tension to a point here and now and no other never.

Then parachuting into sleep. Me, folded silk, strapped to his back. He held my hand fast, as if his life depended on it.

With a pull of the rip cord he’s gone into the still, gray light of morning. He tied back his hair, fired up the Ducati, and headed back to— Renata collects our plates.

St. Rita stops pacing and stands looking out of the window with her shoulders hunched.

We finish our krupnik in silence and I reach for the bottle and pour us another. Renata raises an eyebrow.

“For the fat on our brains,” I say.

We drink in silence, then Renata rummages in her handbag. “Lillian left these for you.”

A rape alarm and a family-sized pepper spray.

“What for?”

“I asked her to get them, in case Mr. Flood gets frisky and attempts to murder you.” Renata purses her lips. “You should charge your phone too, in case of an emergency.”