Mr. Flood's Last Resort(59)
“It doesn’t work at Bridlemere: there’s no reception. Look, it’s kind, but I don’t need these.”
Renata purses her lips. “I’d feel better if you took them.”
I roll my eyes.
“Maud, I am sleeping with a bread knife under my pillow.”
“And Bernie.” I nod at the ornamental urn on the mantelpiece. “He’s well and truly out of the spare room now?”
“My love stays close by me. Thank God those bastards didn’t find him.” She wears an expression of deep revulsion. “Who knows what they would have done with him.”
“Don’t go there.”
“Please be careful, Maud.”
“Cathal won’t hurt me.”
She looks at me closely and says, not unkindly, “What makes you think you can trust him? What makes you think you are safe around that old man?”
It’s a fair question. One I should be asking myself: Why trust any man alive?
“He paints you and tells you stories. He charms you with words so that you can’t see he’s evil. He is the spider and you are his fly.”
I think about the brooch in the red bedroom, the garnet-bellied spider reeling in his prey. “I’m no fly, Renata.”
“You must be guarded, Maud. Learn to tell your enemies from your friends.”
The phone rings in the hall.
*
RENATA IS angry. I can tell this by the way she tugs at her headscarf as she retakes her seat.
My heart flounders. “What is it?” I immediately think of Sam.
“Cedar House.” She smooths down the folds of her kaftan. “The children’s home Maggie Dunne was living in when she went missing. Only now it’s called Holly Lodge.”
“What about it?”
“They refused to comment.”
“What did you ask them?”
She shakes out her bangles and inspects her fingernails. “The ins and outs of Maggie’s case.”
“You told them who you are?”
We look at each other. Taking a moment to consider who Renata really is.
“I said I was a journalist.”
“There’s probably all sorts of rules in place to stop them talking about ex-residents.”
“Even so.” Renata frowns. “I said I wrote for a reputable newspaper and I was doing a tasteful piece on unsolved missing-persons cases; you’d think they’d oblige.”
“Perhaps you sounded shifty?”
Renata takes it well. “It’s possible.” She pours us both another shot. “They’re not like this on the television, investigations, are they? Two downcast women in a maisonette with a bottle of krupnik.”
“It wouldn’t make good television.”
She studies her glass disdainfully. “Not when there are car chases and procedures and DNA.”
“You got out your flip chart. That was very exciting.”
Over at the window St. Rita raises her head and starts walking the floor again, slowly at first and then picking up speed to a decent stride.
Renata nods. “So we’ll keep on?”
“We will.”
“We’re beavers after all.”
“I thought you were a goat?”
She downs her drink in one, her eyes hardly watering. “I’ve defected.”
CHAPTER 28
It is raining in Cathal Flood’s kitchen. Droplets fall from the ceiling in sudden scattered showers or else drip ponderously. I scurry about with buckets and bowls to catch the worst of it, noticing with surprise that pale-green shoots of ivy have begun to emerge between the cracks in the kitchen tiles and ramble up the walls, stretching up towards the dusty cornices.
A fell wind howls in the capped chimney in the scullery, hitting high notes a banshee would be proud of. An earthy smell rises from the linoleum and up through the sink. The room has darkened, so that I would switch the light on but for the steady dribble through the light fitting.
While outside it is dry and bright and hasn’t rained for days.
The smell makes me think of the icehouse and I wonder if I should go back with a torch. But even the idea of it makes my heart turn over.
Cathal sails into the kitchen wearing a raincoat over his pajamas.
I point to the buckets. “Will I get someone out? For the leaks?”
“Not at all; it does this from time to time.”
“It rains in your kitchen?”
“Somewhere a crow is dropping too many stones in a pitcher,” he says cryptically.
Cathal is in a good mood. This is not unusual. Nowadays he smiles more and roars less and has started to whistle. We eat breakfast together in the kitchen and, newly domesticated, he grooms his fierce white mane with the brush-and-comb set I found for him.
But then there is that glint in his eye and that curl to his lip and that sarcasm in his voice. The savagery is still there, only it has dropped below the surface, for now.
He settles at the table. “We’ll go ahead with the bath today.”
I stare at him in mock surprise. “Good man yourself.”
He dips his toast in his runny egg like a good old boy. “If you promise to desist with your fecking nagging.”
I pour him a juice. “So you’ll let me go upstairs and get the bathroom ready? Through the Great Wall of National Geographics, along the hallway and up the stairs, first floor, third door on the right. Just the one room, as agreed.”