by Jess Kidd
I put the tray on the occasional table next to her and sit down on the plastic sheeting she spreads on the sofa for visitors.
Renata lifts the lid of the teapot and pokes warily at the tea leaves. “So, how was Flood today?”
“He said my name.”
“See You Next Tuesday?”
“No,” I say. “He used my actual name and then he sort of smiled at me. I was cleaning cat shit off his hob.”
“You bear these crosses.”
“Not as many as you, with your mortifying corns.”
“I’m a martyr to fashion footwear.” She waves a feathered mule.
“We never learn. How was your day?”
Renata closes her eyes and tilts her head up to the light. Her eyelids are a vivid shade of blue. “Blended sockets.”
“Arresting. So a full and productive afternoon, then?”
“I could do your roots for you and sort out your eyebrows, a little makeover. Put yourself in my hands.”
“If I were mad I would.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “You could do so much with yourself; you are really not as plain as you look.”
This is true. Physically I am small with a negligible chest and commonplace backside, although I’m a great catch for a leg man, for I have a pair of those. My face is pale with an overly strong jawline and a habitual look of confusion. Eyes are standard-issue with a tendency to squint. My hair is long, thick, and wayward; a romance novel would describe it as my chief beauty. Sometimes I plait it like Mona Darkfeather. And my ears are small, inordinately sweet, and neat to the sides of my head. With training and effort I could be a siren.
“Would it kill you, darling, to put on a little lipstick?”
“No makeup. I can’t risk inflaming my clients,” I say.
Renata wrinkles her nose. “Balls.”
“Have you forgotten old Mr. Polya’s stroke event? That was the day I went to work wearing a push-up bra.”
“Pervert.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Touching himself?”
“Usually.”
Renata shakes her head. “And still refusing to wear pajamas?”
“Always. Although that’s largely due to his sweat-induced eczema: his daughter refuses to buy him cotton.”
Renata looks thoughtful. “He’s a marked man. Why would his daughter waste her inheritance on new pajamas?”
“It would be a waste, with him being not long for the world.”
“You see why it’s better not to have children?” she says. “For one day you will be worth more to them dead than alive.”
“It’s likely.”
“It’s inevitable. Pretend to be dead in the chair and they are happy. Pretend to wake up . . . disappointment.” Renata pulls a disappointed face.
“They’re delighted when you trip on loose stair carpet.”
“Gleeful when you break your hip on greased linoleum,” adds Renata.
“Before your rigor mortis sets in they’ll be arguing over your premium bonds.”
Renata looks smug. “I am glad I have no vultures waiting to strip me.”
“What about Lillian? She’ll be in here with her elbows out.”
“Before they’ve even swathed me in my shroud. Just look at all I have.”
I glance around the room. There is a wide-screen television, a sideboard with a built-in cocktail cabinet containing at least six half-empty bottles of Advocaat. There is a bookcase full of crime novels and a Moroccan leather pouf. Above the fireplace there is an ugly picture of two fighting cockerels made from string. On the opposite wall there is a mirror in a gilt frame and, next to it, a glass cabinet full of rock samples.
“Your moon rock alone is worth a fortune,” I say.
“My rocks are yours. All of them.” She wiggles her fingers and her fake diamonds reflect the light.
“Thanks. Change your will, then; I don’t want your sister coming after me.”
She smiles. “Mr. Flood will get you first.”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
She studies me with a mournful regard. “I don’t know why you do it, Maud; you’re such a clever girl.”
“I’m hardly a girl. I’m slaloming towards forty.”
“Nonsense. You’ve barely cleared thirty. Besides, you’re very young-looking.”
“Thank you, back at you.”
Renata’s smile is munificent; either an even greater compliment is coming or a shining ingot of wisdom. “You look after all these people because you think you’re a bad person.”
At the words bad person St. Dymphna emerges from the chimney breast. She moves out across the carpet, treading slowly, carefully, as if she’s testing every step with her pale, sandaled feet. She holds her face like a martyr, with her mouth pursed and her eyelids heavy.
“Your job is a kind of penance,” says Renata, who is happily oblivious to the saint trailing through her coffee table.
At the word penance St. Dymphna glances over at me meaningfully.
I frown. “Let’s change the subject.”
“I’m right though, aren’t I?” Renata frowns. “You always say you are a bad person. You, bad, really?”
St. Dymphna drifts over to the corner, where she stands with her hands tucked up the dim sleeves of her robe and her head drooping piously.
“I can’t believe you have anything to atone for, Maud.”
St. Dymphna shoots me a scathing look from under her veil.
I choose my words carefully. “There’s always something to atone for.”
Renata leans across and pats my arm. “Go easy with the old man. You can’t save them all; you’ll break your heart trying.”
“You get me wrong. I don’t set out to help anyone; I’m in it for the money.”
“That is not true. Look how kind you are to all people, even spiders,” she says in a soft kind of voice. “You’ve helped me so much in my life.”
Detecting a note of impassioned daytime television confession, I dive for the remote control and the blessed distraction of Inspector Morse.
* * *
HALFWAY THROUGH Inspector Morse, when I could have sworn she was asleep, Renata pipes up.
“Something else happened today, Maud. Something you didn’t tell me about.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You’re acting shifty, darling.”
“I am not.”
“You are. You’re biting your nails. And when you’re not biting your nails you’re looking in your handbag.” Renata is scrutinizing me; she has even put on her varifocals. “Well?”
I glance over at the standard lamp. St. Dymphna seems to have melted back into the wall.
“Out with it,” says Renata.
Where’s the harm?
* * *
“IT’S SO deliberate, malicious.” Renata looks up from the photograph. “And you found this just by chance, in the downstairs cloakroom?”
I keep scrupulous eye contact. “When I was cleaning.”
Renata seems satisfied. “And the old boy’s wife has passed over?”
“She died, yes.”
“He was disgruntled, when you talked about her?”
“He was.”
Renata bites her lip. “Then he hopped and pointed? When you spoke about his son?”
“He hops quite a lot.”
“But does he point, Maud?”
“Not usually so vehemently.”
“How did the wife die?”
I hesitate. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
For a moment I wish for a straightforward coronary, an innocuous bout of pneumonia, a nice, seemly stroke.
“A fall, up at the house,” I say.
Renata throws me a look. “A fall killed her, is that so?”
“That’s what it says in the care plan. Mr. Flood suffered from depression after Mrs. Flood’s tragic and untimely death. It was held to be pertinent.”
Renata i
s riveted. “When did this happen?”
“Twenty-odd years ago.”
“And I suppose it was properly followed up, Mrs. Flood’s fall?” I notice that Renata is using her investigatory tone of voice, somewhere between hectoring and badgering.
“Now, Renata.”
She reaches for a bottle behind the footstall.
I groan, but I know better than to protest, so I get up and go to the sideboard for two of the smallest glasses I can find.
I was hoping to avoid the krupnik tonight. Especially this krupnik, a unique variety aged in oil drums in the shed of the painter and decorator named Józef, who lives at number seven. The resulting concoction is strained against rust through Józef’s wife’s pop socks and decanted into plastic juice bottles. The result is considered by Renata to be a powerful tonic promoting health and vitality; it’s certain that Józef also uses it to clean his brushes.
I pour us both a shot.
Renata motions to me to sit next to her on the sofa, and when I am seated, with the devil’s own cocktail in my hand, she begins.
“And do we know who the mystery girl is in the photograph?”
“We don’t.”
“But we know the identity of the little boy?”
“Mr. Flood’s son, Gabriel. He’s referred to in the care plan.”
“The son the old man didn’t like you mentioning?”
“The same.”
“I smell a rat, Maud.”
“I smell nothing of the sort.”
“You just haven’t a nose for crime,” she mutters. “A hated son, a defaced photograph, and the tragedy of Mrs. Flood’s fatal fall.”
I look at her and she looks back at me with an expression of wily playfulness. I feel suddenly weary. “I know what you’re thinking.”
She smiles.
I study the glass of krupnik in my hand: it is an unwholesome yellow, like something distilled in a renal ward. I wonder how I should approach it.
“What am I thinking?” Her smile widens.
“It was an accident, Renata. It says so in the care plan.”
“Heaven forfend that the care plan be wrong. I’d want to look into that if I were you.”
“Not a chance.”
She raises her eyebrows at me.
I raise mine back, haughtily.
I nod at the bookcase where popular crime novels with mauled pages and cracked spines slump in dog-eared rows.
“Do you not think you read too much in the way of crime?” I say. “Real life isn’t like that. You really think people are out there murdering the hell out of each other like they do in your novels?”
“Don’t be flippant; drink the krupnik.”
I look at the glass in front of me. “It will kill me.”
Renata points at it. “It’s good for the intellect. It burns the fat from the brain. Detectives have lean minds, honed, you see.” She pulls in her cheeks for emphasis. “From herding clues all day long.”
St. Dymphna laughs from somewhere just above the fireplace. It’s not a nice laugh. St. Dymphna doesn’t approve of Renata for reasons unknown to me.
If I finish my drink I can leave. If my legs no longer work I can go on my elbows; I can slither up the stairs to my flat by increments. I will have peace and the cessation of this lunacy. I steel myself and manage half the glass with no more discomfort than a melted esophagus.
Renata savors her drink awhile, then she turns to me, her eyes lit. “A case is unfolding, I’m sure of it.”
My lips, mouth, teeth, tongue: all benumbed. I manage a groan.
“Let me have my dream,” she says, gazing coquettishly through dark eyelashes. “A house, a labyrinth of rubbish, a crazy old man, and a message in a bottle: all the ingredients of a twisted crime story.”
“In future I’ll be telling you nothing about my day.”
“That’s cruel. You’re my eyes and ears, Maud, my window onto the world. You tell me everything; you always have.”
I never have.
There’s a note of wistfulness in her voice. Perhaps she’s aware of this holding back, of the unreported elements of my workaday life. I study her face. She’s wearing a knowing expression, but that’s habitual.
I knock back the rest of the krupnik, wait until I can speak, then say, “Wind your beak in, Renata. I’m there to do a job only.”
Renata pours us both another glass and makes a joyful toast. “Here’s to you doing your job only, up at Bluebeard’s castle.”
* * *
IN MY mind I stray, as the television flickers and murmurs with the sound on low and Renata dozes in her wing-backed chair, a slumbering silver-screen siren. Her lovely face illuminated by the glowing embers of the coal-effect gas fire. A milk bottle stands motionless on the coffee table with its genie furled inside. And a long-gone, invisible saint sits cross-legged on the hearthrug, picking the soles of her sandals.
In my mind, I stray to Bridlemere.
Not to the known spaces: the kitchen, the hall, and the downstairs cloakroom.
Tonight I step through the Bridlemere of my imagination.
I’m holding an oil lantern, which is in no way practical (sudden drafts, inconstant light, malfunctioning wicks). I’m barefoot and wearing, of all things, a voluminous white Victorian nightie, which is just asking for trouble.
I start at the bottom of the house, below stairs, for this is where secrets usually lie, approaching the cellar door down a flight of overgrown steps. The ivy peels back from the door frame, sucker by sucker. The padlock swings open; the chain snaps and falls. I hardly even have to touch the handle.
It’s just a step over the threshold (feeling the cobwebs brush against my face and arms) and I’m in, padding through subterranean hallways. The lantern in my hand flares and burns brighter, sending shadows dancing into corners. Above me hang the dusty curls of unrung servant bells.
I take in the cellar, where undrinkable wines lie entombed in catacombs. Forgotten bottles, shrouded with dust, their sediments settling and corks rotting. I see the marble shelves in the pantry, which are for the mice to skate on, and a Belfast sink in the scullery, where colossal powdery moths go to die.
I track up through hidden stairways and corridors, emerging through secret doors (clad in tapestries and wallpaper—you can hardly see the join!). This backstage trickery is the cause of every vanishing maid and materializing butler.
Luckily every door I try is unlocked, as I carry no key. I’ve checked, of course; the pockets of my imaginary nightdress are empty.
There is a library full of black leather–bound esoteric books, with an easy chair by the fire and a skull on the hearth. There is a dining room set for dinner where the only guests are the rats that gnaw the napkin rings and the spiders that swing from the candelabra.
The staircase that coils up through the house is dark wood and the wallpaper that peels down from the landing is crimson flock, as bright as a blood surge above the lacquered black wainscoting. There are portraits too: of ladies in silk dresses, of children with big heads and men in tights with jaunty hand gestures. I lift my lantern to see them. They pretend to stand still but their eyes follow me. There are endless bedrooms where four-posters sag and chamber pots squat and windows are swagged with moldering velvet. There is a nursery with china-faced dolls and a still-creaking cradle. I watch it rock with blithe interest.
I tiptoe over to the window seat and press my face against the bars at the nursery window. I see the fountain below in the moonlit garden. The nymph clutches her shell and hunches her shoulders against the night. In the pond, at her feet, something turns in the water.
I climb the last set of steps.
At the very top of the house there is an attic. With trunks full of pin-tucked dresses, furs with glass eyes, and the yellowed gowns of long-ago brides. Where bats nap amongst the rafters, wrapped in the scent of dusty voile and the perpetual incense of mothballs.
Across the room is the very last door. But it is locked.
&n
bsp; A sudden heaviness in my pocket: what could it be? I look down and see a key in my hand—a fairy-tale key!
A key made of bright-black iron, heavy and long-shanked. The head of it adorned with an emblem: a flower maybe, or a mouth, or a mollusk. The key glows a sudden red and whispers to me in the hot rushing tongue of the forge:
Here is a door that we mustn’t open.
The key blazes. Searing pain. I drop it.
My palm is branded. A pattern—not a flower or a mouth or a mollusk, but intertwined letters: a monogram.
M F
CHAPTER 5
I have added Mr. Flood’s downstairs cloakroom to my domain, the precarious realm claimed back from the wilderness by the civilizing effects of bleach and bin bags. My domain measures approximately one-sixth of the ground floor of Bridlemere, an area that spreads from the kitchen, pantry, and scullery and out along the hallway. Up to, but not including, the Great Wall of National Geographics.
The Great Wall of National Geographics is the gateway to the rest of the ground floor, the staircase and beyond. This remarkable structure is not only a barrier to my progress but also a fitting monument to compulsive collecting. It is over twelve feet high and formed by close-packed strata (yellow spines aligned uniformly outwards) of the widely informative magazine. Each copy has been placed carefully, with aptitude and instinct, so that the whole has the arcane strength of a dry stone wall.
At the dead center there is a mended breach, a gap in the defenses backfilled by VHS cassettes.
Over this repair a sign has been pasted up:
By Order of Cathal T. Flood
PRIVATE
STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE
The wall is patrolled. Run your fingers across it, give the magazines the smallest tap, and you’ll see what I mean. The door to Mr. Flood’s workshop, lying just across the hallway, will fly open. And from this door he will emerge with the uncanny speed of a trap-door spider.
During the raid on Mr. Flood’s hoard it is alleged that council workers broke through this wall. No doubt with the same trepidation as Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon knocking on Tutankhamen’s tomb. One party of stalwart volunteers lured Mr. Flood away from his lair with malt whiskey and endeavored to keep him distracted. The other party jimmied away at Mr. Flood’s defenses. Eventually the wall yielded and they were through with a rush of stale air, and, as the dust settled, a nervous troop of men in high-visibility jackets briefly glimpsed the wonders beyond.