Mr. Flood's Last Resort(70)

I no longer loved him but I promised him anyway, as I had promised Deirdre.

“We never saw Jimmy O’Donnell on the beach,” I repeated to him. “There was only ever us.”

He squeezed my arm as he got up from the table. “Good girl yourself.”





CHAPTER 34




Renata doesn’t flinch. She listens carefully, without interrupting. She smiles grimly at the part where I pick up a brick and looks thoughtful when I relay Biba’s description of Sam Hebden.

St. Dymphna listens too, leaning forwards in the easy chair, her legs crossed under her and her veil slipping down. She smiles too, more than Renata and sometimes at the wrong moments.

When I’ve finished talking Renata gets up and rambles out of the living room, returning with her pipe. She puts the stem of the pipe in her mouth and sits back down.

“Just pretend,” she mumbles.

St. Dymphna throws Renata an evil look, then turns to squint at the television, chewing the end of her plait. The sound is turned down on Inspector Morse. I wonder if normal life will ever resume.

“Have faith,” says Renata, in a doubtful voice. “This is a case where nothing is as it seems. We are walking on shifting sand. But really it is perfectly simple if we remain focused.”

“Well and good,” I say. “But there’s another pressing problem.”

“Which is?” Renata strikes an invisible match and sets an imaginary flame to nonexistent tobacco.

“If I didn’t sleep with Sam Hebden, then who in the world have I slept with?”

St. Dymphna smirks in my direction.

Renata mimes a succession of deft puffs on her pipe. “Biba’s description was not so clear.”

“That Sam is average as well as in two different places simultaneously?”

Renata shrugs. “Biba only knows where he should be, not where he is.”

“Maybe,” I say doubtfully. “But would you consider Sam to be average?”

Renata smiles. “Darling, is he a slice of chocolate fudge cake? No? Then to Biba he is average.”

Renata is a picture of effortless elegance today in her knotted headscarf and kimono with her kohled dark eyes, the effect skewed a little by the pipe clamped in her teeth and her air of dogged determination. “All is not lost, Maud.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask. “The case is in tatters. How are we going to solve it when I’m not even allowed near the house?”

“We talk to Doreen Gouge. We tell her about your incontrovertible communication from the afterlife.” She nods at Mary Flood’s notebook, open on the coffee table.

“Who the hell is Doreen Gouge?”

Renata fishes down the side of her armchair and hands me a slim book.

I glance at her. “Where did you get this?”

Renata smiles slyly. “I sent Lillian to the spiritualist church.”

I inspect the cover. The book is titled The Reluctant Clairvoyant: A Spiritual Awakening. There is a photograph of a fluffed blonde in a peach sweater. She has a lipsticked grin and an expression of committed insanity in her wide blue eyes.

“Lillian must have given you hell for this.”

Renata adjusts her headscarf. “At least she didn’t read chapter four.”

I immediately turn to chapter four.

Many psychics first meet their spirit guides in dreams. They will fly through the air or swim through water to be with you, metaphorically of course! The real substance they move through is celestial space and time.

I think about my nightmares, remembering Mary Flood in her nightie, and I wonder . . .

Your spirit guide is your dedicated escort through the realm of the afterlife. They are uniquely bound to you. You do not choose your guide; your guide chooses you. My spirit guide, Johnny Big Tree, is an Apache warrior who died fighting the Spanish in the 1850s. Johnny first came to me in a dream wearing no more than a pair of moccasins and a crow feather in his hair. He fixed me with his enigmatical dark eyes and held out his hand. With Johnny I always feel safe, he leads me with his silent step and his head held high through the ranks of the departed. They dare not touch us as we pass through the desolate murk of the otherworld. Bringing messages from the dead to the living.

I cast Renata a caustic look. “And you’ve read this shite?”

She nods. “I found it very informative. It explains why I feel Bernie’s constant presence.”

I try not to glance at the urn on the coffee table. Renata and Bernie have become inseparable since the visit from Gabriel’s henchmen. She even pours him a glass of krupnik from time to time.

I read on.

In most cases your spirit guide will be of the opposite sex. They will be well-matched to their psychic in terms of physical attractiveness and interests. For example, Johnny and I have a mutual love of good conversation, food cooked outdoors, and ecstatic dancing. My good friend and fellow medium, Stacey Barrett-Mold, has published widely on the subject of the psychic–spirit guide relationship. Stacey has a profound love of numbers and order. Her spirit guide, Mr. Sidney Curd, an accountant who was stabbed to death with a letter opener in 1954 by a bankrupt client, shares these interests. Mr. Curd doesn’t have a bow and arrow like Johnny; he rather deflects unwanted attention from unsavory spirits by opening his briefcase and rustling spectral tax returns.