Mr. Flood's Last Resort(81)

I had been on the gravel for twenty minutes the day Granny caught me. I told her I was doing penance but she made me get up and took me inside and sponged my knees with disinfectant. As she dipped the sponge in the bowl she glanced up at me from time to time with a strange expression on her face, like she was trying to work out a difficult sum.

She dried me off with a clean tea towel while the boiled sweet in her mouth made a series of quick clicks as it ricocheted around her teeth. I never knew Granny not to have a sweet in her mouth and I could usually gauge her mood by her consumption of it, for she sucked sweets faster when riled and was known to crunch them when furious.

Granny straightened up and pulled down the hem of my skirt and patted my leg. She told me it wasn’t my fault that Deirdre had disappeared, that I should know this and remember it. Granny sounded exactly the same as she did the time she lied to Mrs. Walsh over the church flower rota.

Deirdre was gone but that wasn’t my fault. I had been left behind but that wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault.

The guards would find her. Or Deirdre, being Deirdre, would slouch through that door scowling at any minute, saying, “Surprise! It was all a joke.”

I sat up at the table and Granny gave me a tub, a scraper, and a pile of carrots. Then she stood by the sink looking out, at the empty bird feeder, the weather, and the road leading up to the bungalow. The sweet in her mouth clicked faster and faster as it reached warp speed—soon it would disappear too.





CHAPTER 39




It’s late but Renata is up waiting for me.

“Don’t let me think,” I say. “Just talk.”

“What about, darling?”

“Anything.”

And she does. For almost an hour Renata holds forth on subjects as diverse as mail-order kimonos, the wonder of Steve McQueen, and fondue. I look down at my hands on the kitchen table.

I feel Renata’s eyes roaming over me for signs of attack: pulled hair, slapped face, unbuttoned clothes, bruises and bite marks and fractures, snot and tears.

St. Dymphna wanders up and down the hallway. Now and again she casts me a look; I’m not sure whether it’s pitying or mocking.

Renata keeps talking. Halfway through an in-depth analysis of the merits of the tanga over a full brief I start to cry.

Renata takes my hand in hers and waits.

Then, in an easy, downy voice she says, “Tell me about it, Maud. Tell me everything.”

Everything.

Lightly, quietly, she says, “This is not just about Flood, is it?”

“No.”

St. Dymphna looks up at me from the hallway; an expression of dismay streaks across her face and she’s gone.

I don’t have to look around to know where she is: she’s right behind me. Quick as a ghost. So real I can feel her standing next to my chair; her robe brushes against my arm, her breath moves my hair.

She holds her hand an inch from my mouth. I see it before me.

I smell that medicated soap Granny always bought, and perfume stolen from the chemist, and the sickly strawberry sweetness of bubble gum.

If I try to speak of it, she’ll stop me with the pale flat dead palm of her hand.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I say. “Nothing happened.”





CHAPTER 40


I follow her, the red-haired woman. She leads me across a furrowed field, through a wooded copse, and on, deeper, deeper, into the trees, her white feet sinking into the loam. Above me, light-dappled branches, leaves saturated with color—a vivid living green—and beyond a sky of cloudless blue. I wade through bracken and stumble over tree roots.

I am not frightened while I hear birds sing. For I remember that birds fly away when something bad is about to happen: they sense what’s coming. And the birds are singing all around us, brightly, persistently.

Here’s a clearing and there’s a stream. On the bank opposite, two children play in the water, sailing acorn cups. When they hear me they look up and smile. A dark blond boy and a bright blond girl with the same slow, wide grin.

As I smile back I realize that the birds have stopped singing.





CHAPTER 41




St. Valentine sits next to my weekend bag in the back seat of Sam Hebden’s green Golf with a dented passenger door. We’re making good time down the M3; with St. Valentine’s intercession we will no doubt be in Langton Cheney by lunchtime. The saint travels with his head out of the window like an excited dog, blessing vehicles traveling below the speed limit and gesticulating at van drivers as they pass by texting.

Sam is quiet, distracted. Perhaps surprised at my last-minute invitation, at my change of heart. Or perhaps it’s because with every mile we draw nearer to the place where it all began. I wonder when he will admit he’s not who he says he is.

Someone will recognize him. Surely there’ll be someone in the village who knew him as a child, who knew his sister?

You just have to watch his face—wait for it—there’s the same wide grin as Maggie’s.

Only he’s not smiling now.

I glance at him, in his T-shirt and trainers with his lovely gray eyes on the road. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I know what he has done.

He took the job to get close to Cathal. To investigate, in his own way, his sister’s disappearance, knowing that the Floods were somehow involved. He had revealed his identity to the old man, or perhaps Cathal recognized him; either way it led to the assault.