Mr. Flood's Last Resort(69)

“I’m going to get to the bottom of what happened to Mary and Maggie. I’m not going to stop.”

His face reddens. “You’ve been warned to steer clear—”

“I’m not surprised your sister tried to drown you. I’ll be tracking down Marguerite to find out what she has to say.”

The color drains out of Gabriel’s face. It turns from pink to white, as if a tourniquet has stopped his blood. Even in my distracted state I find this remarkable.

“Marguerite cannot be contacted,” he says. “She went away.”

“I’ll find her and bring her back. With any luck she’ll want another pop at you.”

“This is not a family to mess with,” says Gabriel with a look of wholesale horror on his face.

“Or else? You’ll send round more criminals? We’re not scared.”

Gabriel narrows his eyes. “You really don’t want to escalate this; you won’t know what hit you.”

“Neither will you, you bollix.” I bend down and pick up a brick with which to knock Gabriel’s head off. By the time I straighten up to take aim he’s gone.

*

CATHAL SITS silently at the kitchen table. It’s not a position of defeat, not quite. It’s one of introverted thought: eyes lowered, breathing quiet.

I expected roaring, shouting.

I reach forwards and take his hand. He glances up at me, his eyes watery under still-dark brows. He covers my hand with his big paw.

“What will you do?” I ask.

He smiles. “I’ll have a birthday to remember; you’ll still come?”

I nod. “I will of course.”

“Then God blast the rest of them to hell.”

“What about all this? Your house, your things.”

He laughs. “Jesus, don’t be so mournful, I haven’t left yet.” He squeezes my hand.

He looks tired, fantastically frail, his eyes puzzled, blinking, startled. He gets up from the table and walks across the kitchen with an uncertain tread, as if he’s testing to see if the ground is still real.

I should tell him about Mary and Maggie and Marguerite. Tell him what I know and what I don’t know, before he is kidnapped into geriatric care and permanent sedation. But when I look at him, I can’t. Not right now, when the man has just found out he’s losing his home from under him.

At the door he looks up at me. “You never lost your temper, Drennan, and wasn’t that a good thing for the both of us.”

He pats the door frame and wanders off down the hall.





CHAPTER 33


Jimmy O’Donnell looked out through his thick girl’s eyelashes at me. This usually made me laugh, only not today. It didn’t make him laugh either. I believe his heart wasn’t in it.

We sat in Granny’s kitchen looking out at the weather collecting all around the bungalow. The sky was petrol-dark, banked with great sulking rain clouds. But then there was a sudden rift, and the sun, heavy with the molten gold of a summer evening, came lancing through it.

The sun shone on the clothes that dripped limp on the washing line (wetter now than when they were put out to dry) and the empty birdfeeder on the patio. It spilled through the kitchen window and alighted on the table, on the sticky oilcloth, the sauce bottles with claggy tops, the trails of crumbs left by other, earlier, meals. It lit Jimmy O’Donnell brightly and almost entirely (with the exception of his right hand and the parts of him under the table). So that, in a way, you could imagine that illuminating Jimmy O’Donnell was the sole purpose of this last ray of evening sun. He was burnished to the sheen of a saint: his eyes shining in his heart-shaped face, his hair lustrous bronze in the radiant dying last-ditch light.

Jimmy had a cast-iron alibi: he was at his uncle’s house in Ballyshannon plumbing in a bath. Even with the speeds Jimmy drove he couldn’t have been back at Pearl Strand in time for Deirdre to go missing. Wasn’t that the case?

He told me this with his hand shaking, as his cigarette traveled from the table to his mouth and then back again. And then flick, flick, flick, worrying the end of that cigarette with his thumbnail, ash in the sugar bowl, ash everywhere.

Jimmy looked at me and I looked back at him.

Behind him his shadow changed shape on the kitchen wall, malformed and five times the size of him. Jimmy with brooding shoulders and hooked claws for hands. I watched his shadow creep and slouch, grow and retract, with every movement he made. It was easier than looking at his face. For in that resplendent light Jimmy didn’t seem himself. He seemed tired and scared.

He’d had threats, people spitting at him on the street.

When the guards gave him the all clear he’d leave town, no messing, no forwarding address, just like Deirdre had.

Only, unlike Deirdre, Jimmy had no one to hand him an envelope full of cash.

Jimmy grimaced. He ran his fingers through his hair. “You know why she had to go, don’t you?”

I nodded.

He looked relieved. He screwed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “And you haven’t heard from her yet?”

“No.”

“She’s taking her bloody time,” he said, his eyes on the drive.

It was a big risk, him being here. Mammy and Granny would be back soon. They were down in the town putting posters up. Jimmy had waited at the end of the lane for them to leave.