Mr. Flood's Last Resort

by Jess Kidd

  I close my eyes and listen to the slap and rasp of brush on canvas.

  At the bottom of the staircase Mary Flood has survived the fall, but only just. She lies on her side. Her fingers twitch; her breathing is ragged. A red peony flowers on her temple. She mouths a name. As Mary loses consciousness perhaps she was reunited with her daughter. It is said that the dead always come to the dying, to help them cross into their world.

  Perhaps she met Maggie too.

  The smell of earth comes up through the floor of the conservatory to vie with the smell of turpentine. The clouds move overhead. Silence falls over us, so that when I finally speak my voice sounds unfamiliar and overloud.

  “Tell me about Marguerite.”

  Cathal stops painting.

  “You had a daughter, Cathal.”

  He starts to paint again. I wait.

  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.”

  “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.”

  “That’s where the bathroom is. I’ve locked all the other doors on the landing against your beak.” He glances up at me. “And you can keep your eyes in your head and your hands to yourself. I don’t want you touching my curiosities.”

  “I’ve no interest in your curiosities. When did you last have a bath?”

  “1998.”

  “A while, then. Let’s just pray the boiler behaves itself.”

  He sips carefully from the glass, as if he’s getting accustomed to using his paws.

  I wash up, glancing at his long thin back bent to his breakfast. Sometimes I wish there were no mystery; sometimes this is enough. There are moments when I don’t think about Mary or Maggie Dunne; I just get on with my job here. The process of packing and sorting, scouring and cooking, having the cats come and go after the mice.

  “Is there no fecking toast in this house?”

  “If you’ve manners there is.”

  He throws me a look of disgust and sucks his dentures. I butter the old man more toast and put it down in front of him.

  “It’s my birthday soon,” he says to his egg.

  “It is.”

  “I don’t want to spend it alone. I’m a tragic old bastard.”

  “That you are.”

  He frowns. “Would you have dinner with me, Drennan?”

  Without thinking, I say it, “I will of course.”

  He beams down at his plate.

  * * *

  THE BATHROOM is a vast dusty space, as inviting as a mortuary. I was expecting greater opulence: a roll-top bath with lion’s feet and gold dolphin-shaped taps. Something showy, like the red and white bedrooms with their doves and fountains on the walls, their secret passages cats can disappear down.

  This bathroom feels too real.

  A tall window disseminates a cheerless light. Everything is cold to the touch and the whole place asserts itself with a fierce smell of unbridled mustiness.

  There are two sinks, both cracked, a lavatory and a bidet, along with a massive trough of a bath: a giant’s bath. Everything is spaced out, as if the pieces of sanitaryware are avoiding one another. The tiles that cover the walls and floor are white, veined with varicose blue. Dead moths, flies, beetles, and the hollowed-out carcasses of wasps litter the room, particularly the windowsill, which is swagged with cobwebs. I turn on the sink tap and it chugs with disuse, vomiting rust. I rinse the sink out and move over to the bath.

  And I see her.

  Her pale toes are curled over the lip of the bath, the nails unpolished, almond shaped. The ends of her hair are wet, dampened to dark blond, fair at the crown where it’s still dry. Her eyes are glazed, unseeing, gelid marble. She raises her hands in a languid kind of gesture, a kind of sleepy backstroke, and slips down into the water. Feet, legs, narrow chest: all are submerged. I see them float under the surface.

  Maggie Dunne raises her arms again then stops midstroke and I see: her arms are ribboned with red; it runs down her arms, twisting patterns. She looks up at me, her face a pale pearl. Then it is under too. She drowns in gore.

  * * *

  I’M HALFWAY out the door before I look again. There is nothing in the bath but dust and desiccated spiders.

  Cathal shuffles in wearing a dressing gown. “Just so you know. There’s no way I’m going to let you stand there gawping at my flute.”

  “I’ve no interest in your flute.” I look around me, dazed.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  I run the water until it’s clear, find a plug, and check he has towels, sponge, and soap. I set up the portable hoist I’d ordered last week, in case his arse gets stuck in the bath.

  He frowns at it. “What’s that contraption for?”

  “In case your arse gets stuck in the bath.”

  “What kind of a gobshite gets stuck in a bath? Why would I get stuck in my own bath? Aren’t I nimble yet?”

  “You can certainly sling your leg over your rubbish.”

  He looks at me blankly. “What rubbish?”

  “All right so, I’ll leave you to it.”

  He takes off his dressing gown.

  * * *

  I’M WAITING in the hall outside the door. This is what we have agreed. Cathal has set out a chair for me and left me a pile of magazines. I can hear the echoes of his splashing, the squeak and groan of t
he bath as he moves his long limbs in it.

  My eyes feel sore, tired.

  In the next room Cathal farts, then starts to sing a dirty song.

  I glance across the landing at the painting but Mary won’t meet my eyes. She has faded into the dark backdrop: a dim white blur of face and hands.

  * * *

  MRS. CABELLO, from the big house next door, is standing on the back doorstep with her nostrils flaring impressively. She looks at least twenty years older close up. Her hair is blow-dried into cascades of black waves and scraped back from her high-domed forehead by designer sunglasses. Her lipstick carries way beyond her lip line and her eyes are ringed with black kohl. I think of Renata and how she would appreciate Mrs. Cabello’s gloriously embellished outfit, from her gold sandals to her tight black cigarette pants.

  Mrs. Cabello has a wide emotional range, from furious and distraught to angry and venomous. Despite her erratic mix of Spanish, English, and lyrical profanities, I have ascertained two things.

  One: she hopes the old man will be buried alive by an avalanche of rubbish.

  Two: the old man has stolen her valuable sphynx cat.

  She has seen Mr. Flood’s gaunt shape flitting around her property late at night. She has found empty boxes of cat biscuits in her bushes.

  “He has been trying to lure my baby outside for weeks,” she says. “He waits for me to slip up and leave a window open. Manolete is a house cat. One of a kind.”

  She curses the eyes in Mr. Flood’s head and demands an interview with him.

  “He’s in the bath at present. Is Manolete one of those bald varieties of cats?” I ask politely.

  Mrs. Cabello stops mid-rant and stares at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Flood has a lot of cats,” I say patiently. “What does Manolete look like? Is he bald?”

  Mrs. Cabello blinks. “No, he has down. Like fine chamois.”

  “And he usually lives inside?”

  Mrs. Cabello nods and, perhaps reminded of Manolete’s singular beauty, begins to cry, making resentful little sobs. She rustles in her handbag, finds a photograph, and passes it to me. It is of a singularly ugly cat. A pale gray alien with protuberant yellow eyes crawls over a satin cushion, wrinkling its brow glumly.