The Hoarder

by Jess Kidd

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inexplicable noises?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Renata narrows her eyes. ‘Strange behaviour from the animals in the house, barking or hissing?’

  ‘Hissing, definitely.’

  ‘A brooding malignity?’

  I glance at her, wondering where she gets these words. ‘Only when Mr Flood is about.’

  ‘What you have to realise is that a poltergeist has almost always had a traumatic end. Being pushed down a flight of stairs would do it.’ Renata lowers her voice, undoubtedly for dramatic effect, and puts her hand on my arm. ‘Don’t be frightened. Poor Mrs Flood is only making herself known, avenging her death and all that.’

  ‘Let’s not have any more avenging spirits tonight, Renata,’ I suggest.

  I am mindful that one type of spirit might lead to another and I may not survive another evening of Józef’s home brew. But Renata pays no mind. She carefully takes the photographs out of their plastic bags and lays them on the table. Then she squints at them: first one, then the other. Then she gets up and wanders into the sitting room and returns holding the magnifying glass she keeps in the magazine rack for spot the differences.

  After a while she says, ‘Look here, there’s a child in the doorway.’

  I take the magnifying glass from her.

  She’s right. Just inside the caravan, behind the multicoloured fly-strips, stands a child in a blue dress. Her face is obscured by a pinned-back swag of plastic ribbons. She holds her fist outstretched as if to catch the loose strips that blow in the wind.

  Renata looks triumphant. ‘You said the Floods only have the one son?’

  ‘That I know of: Gabriel.’

  Renata taps the photographs. ‘So these little girls—’

  ‘It’s the same girl,’ I say, inexplicably sure. Then I think of St Dymphna’s comment. ‘They look like siblings, the two children.’

  ‘The colour of their hair?’

  I nod. ‘Just like Mary’s.’

  Renata sighs. ‘None of this is normal. Who finds photographs in milk bottles and stuck to windows? And why are these faces burnt away?’ She purses her lips. ‘And what kind of person stays in a caravan?’

  I laugh. ‘I don’t think you can consider caravanning pathological behaviour.’

  ‘No?’ Her face wears an expression of profound disgust. ‘A wealthy family who live in a great big mansion, going to – where is this place even?’

  ‘Dorset, it’s in Dorset. I looked it up in your road map of Great Britain.’

  She grunts. ‘A caravan, Maud, is that a holiday? If you loved your family would you make them stay in a caravan?’

  I glance at my chips, getting cold in their wrapper ‘You’ve never even been inside a caravan, have you?’

  ‘That’s hardly the point.’ Renata throws me a caustic look and picks up the latest photograph. She dangles it between her thumb and her forefinger. ‘So what do we do with this evidence?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Maud—’

  ‘If it’s a trick I’ll have played into his hands.’

  ‘And if it’s not a trick?’ asks Renata.

  ‘I can’t think of any other way this photograph could have got there. It wasn’t there before I went into the garden. If Mr Flood didn’t put it there who did?’

  ‘So whoever planted this photograph was already in the house?’

  ‘I suppose there would have been time for someone to slip inside, but I was only outside for moments.’ I remember Sam. ‘I did meet Sam Hebden when I was leaving, but that was hours later.’

  Renata frowns. ‘Sam Hebden?’

  ‘Mr Flood’s last care worker.’

  Renata looks delighted. ‘The care worker the old man threatened? He was at the house?’

  ‘He was outside, waiting at the gate.’

  ‘Living proof of Mr Flood’s murderous rage.’

  ‘Not entirely murderous if Sam’s still living.’

  ‘He had a breakdown or went to Hull. Isn’t that what the agency said?’

  ‘Whatever happened he’s back again,’ I say breezily. ‘And he wants to talk to me.’

  Renata sits up in her chair. ‘Does he indeed?’

  I try to appear nonchalant. ‘I gave him my address, told him to come round.’

  There’s an expression of high intrigue on her lovely painted face. ‘He found something out, up at the house.’

  ‘Now he didn’t say that.’

  I finish my chips and Renata’s saveloy while she studies the disfigured photographs with her magnifying glass.

  ‘It’s so deliberate, malicious,’ she remarks. ‘The old man is very sick.’

  ‘We don’t know he burnt them.’

  ‘Oh, he burnt them all right,’ Renata says coolly. ‘And much worse.’

  ‘Let’s not get carried away. After all, what’s to suggest that there isn’t some kind of innocent explanation?’

  Renata fixes me with a steady gaze. ‘Instinct.’

  I clear the plates and make coffee whilst Renata lays a length of black velvet on the kitchen table and gets out her tarot cards.

  ‘They would have burnt you as a witch for that, Renata.’

  ‘Lillian still would. She’s never liked them.’

  ‘Is that the root of her antagonism?’

  ‘The cards?’ Renata raises a pencilled eyebrow. ‘No. Jealousy. I stole all her boyfriends. I was twice as pretty and five times more fun. Anyway, siblings usually hate each other, don’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say.

  ‘You’re blessed to be an only child.’ Renata holds her cards to her chest and closes her eyes. ‘Sisters are the worst, like a bag of close-knit snakes, all venom and envy.’

  Squaring the cards, she puts them down. ‘Do you want a reading?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘It can’t hurt.’

  I secretly love to watch Renata read her cards. A kind of languorous grace comes over her, a happy abstraction. Her movements are serene and easy, the fears that rule her waking moments, keeping her trapped and grounded, forgotten for a while.

  ‘Don’t you ever want to go outside?’ I once asked, watching a shadow pass across her immaculately made-up face.

  ‘I do go outside.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Have you ever heard of astral projection? It is when your spiritual body leaves your material body to wander freely on the astral plane. In my case it started with my feet.’

  ‘Astral feet?’

  She nodded with complete sincerity.

  ‘Sounds like the name of a prog rock band,’ I said, and we laughed together.

  I once asked Lillian what had happened to Renata to cause her to stay inside. Lillian, red-faced and tearful from an afternoon of arguments and oven cleaner, stopped scrubbing the grill. She straightened up and pulled her mouth down at each corner, carp-like, as if she were mulling something complicated and bitter.

  I waited for some kind of insight.

  She narrowed her eyes and delivered her verdict with the same spiteful delight as a cat getting sick on the carpet.

  ‘The real world,’ Lillian said. ‘He’s too good for it.’

  There was a world of venom in that pronoun.

  Renata asks me to cut the cards into three piles and pick one. She lays out the cards in a cross on the table and frowns at them.

  Enigmatic characters go about their business in a palette of glowing colours. The cards are thick, black and edged in gold. They are worn and scuffed and a little dog-eared. I look out for the Devil and Death. These are my favourites: the Devil for his leather gimp mask, sexy abdominals and the flames of hell leaping round his hairy goat flanks; Death for his skeletal smirk and luminous blue scythe.

  Neither are there, but I recognise a mounted figure Renata calls Mr Darcy, the Knight of Swords. This is a man with a fast horse and a keen intellect who is prone to dogmatism and aloofness. I also spot the Tower, a large stone phallus on a rocky outcrop being str
uck by lightning. Two jesters in tights fall grinning through the air.

  Renata glances up at me. ‘A tall dark handsome stranger will come into your life and turn it upside down.’

  I think, briefly, of the quarried slate of Sam Hebden’s eyes. ‘I think we’ve heard that one before, Renata.’

  ‘And the satellite TV repairman came, didn’t he?’

  ‘He was short and bald and you sent him upstairs.’

  ‘Details, darling,’ says Renata stiffly.

  ‘So, no murdered wives and faceless children, no communications from beyond the grave?’

  Renata wrinkles her nose. ‘No, but there’s something else: this.’ She taps the card second from the top. A man in a cape is waving a wand. ‘And this.’ A naked woman dances with a curtain pole in each hand.

  ‘There’s a lot of wand-waving going on there.’

  ‘Of course, there’s a magician in our midst and a riddle to be solved; whether the two are linked or the outcome is favourable I cannot tell.’ She peers up at me with mischief in her eyes.

  ‘Before you start, I’m not giving Mrs Flood another thought.’

  ‘Just answer one question, Maud. When did Mr Flood’s hoarding habit start?’

  ‘Around twenty-five years ago I think.’

  ‘After Mrs Flood took a tumble? I’d put money on it.’ Renata is triumphant: I can tell from the uplift of her eyebrows. ‘It’s grief, you see, Maud.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That causes people never to throw anything else away, ever again. Not even a crisp packet. They can’t take another loss. Believe me. I’m no stranger to bereavement.’

  ‘Not with the late Bernie Sparks in an urn in your spare room.’

  We sit in silence for a while, looking at the cards.

  She straightens the edges of the black velvet cloth, smoothing invisible wrinkles. ‘It could have been very simple,’ she says, ‘a crime of passion. Mary was planning to leave him and in the heat of the moment Cathal killed her and made it look like an accident.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  Renata nods. ‘He didn’t want to part with her.’

  ‘Like a crisp packet?’

  ‘With his history of violent mood swings, I think murder is the most likely outcome for Mrs Flood.’

  ‘You would.’

  ‘And as for the girl . . .’ Renata bites her lip.

  I narrow my eyes at her. ‘Don’t even think it.’

  ‘Maud,’ she says, her voice a steely purr. ‘You and I both know that something isn’t right up at that house. Just have a little poke around, eh? See what else floats to the surface.’

  I look at the magician on the card. He’s about to let rip with some powerful conjuring; he has his wand gripped tight and one eye narrowed. This is someone who means business.

  Chapter 6

  Dr Gabriel Flood has joined us for afternoon tea. He says he normally visits at night, which is why I thought he was selling conservatories or Jesus; else I would have been more polite when he materialised on the back doorstep. He could easily be a confidence trickster or God-botherer, but right now he’s masquerading as a college lecturer with a leather manbag. He tells me to call him Gabriel and gives me a handshake of unnecessary firmness.

  It is not unusual for relatives to turn up unexpected; they do this in order to catch care workers pocketing heirlooms and beating their loved ones senseless. Today, Gabriel was disappointed, because on his arrival I was making sandwiches and Mr Flood was doing a sudoku in a cleared corner of the garden.

  I have finally lured the old fecker outside where I can see him, in the same way that you would encourage any wild creature into the garden: by providing a suitable habitat. I set out a sunlounger and on a table next to it I left a half-ounce of tobacco, a puzzle book and a flask of tea. Sure enough, after a while, Mr Flood landed there and began to roost, enjoying a bit of fresh air as he squinted at the book and picked his dentures. I was confident that if I made no sudden movements he might stay.

  Gabriel sits down at the kitchen table and sets his manbag on the chair next to him. He doesn’t look a bit like his father; there’s no trace of bedraggled Irish giant in him. Neither are there echoes of the pale little boy scowling in the photographs. Grown Gabriel is a small man and a discordant amalgamation of the doughy and the angular. A sharp nose and pointed chin protrude from an otherwise round, flabby head, which, together with his close-set eyes, give the impression that Gabriel’s features are being irresistibly drawn to the middle of his face. Gabriel’s body runs with the doughy theme, although he seems light on his feet for all that. As if he’s a nimble weasel of a man dressed up in a plump man’s skin. His hair is black, not the searing red of his childhood, and badly thinning, although it has been artfully heaped into a peaked cone to make the most of it. Gabriel colours his hair then. I can just imagine him dripping dye under plastic.

  He offers to help, so I set him slicing tomatoes at the kitchen table and study him out of the corner of my eye as I mash the eggs. He approaches the tomatoes fussily, getting up, moving the chair further round the table, inspecting the chopping board, making a big show of taking off his jacket and rolling up his cuffs. He is unused to manual labour and it’s all a great novelty for him, chopping.

  He picks up a tomato. ‘Maud,’ he says, ‘you are working wonders, really you are. I can’t believe the old man has let you clear all of this.’

  He waves the tomato at the kitchen.

  Gabriel has a generic doctor-lawyer-teacher-airline pilot voice. A voice calibrated to suggest trustworthiness and serene authority when some sort of shit is going down. I don’t buy it, not least because his voice is at odds with his eyes, which dart from one door to the other.

  Then I realise: he’s not supposed to be here. The old man will scour him if he catches him in the house.

  Gabriel’s smile is strained. ‘Really, it’s incredible what you’ve done. Others have fought him for a week to throw out a milk bottle top.’ He lowers his voice conspiratorially. ‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have you here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Gabriel picks up another tomato and studies it. ‘May I speak plainly, Maud?’

  ‘If you want.’

  He starts to slice the tomato with a peevish kind of face on him. ‘How can I say this?’ He glances up at me. ‘The agency will have told you that my father sometimes gets enamoured with female staff.’

  I frown.

  He gives the tomato his undivided attention. ‘And of course you know there have been incidents.’

  I know nothing of the sort.

  Gabriel continues, pushing the tomato into a bowl. ‘In the past my father has made strenuous advances on female care workers, district nurses, meals-on-wheels volunteers, that sort of thing. Which is why the agency usually send a male carer.’ He smiles lugubriously. ‘I was surprised to find out that you aren’t male.’

  I think of Biba Morel wedged behind her desk, cackling over her list of expendable care workers, with my name at the top of it.

  Gabriel bayonets the last tomato, carves it deftly and then puts down the knife. ‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here. The agency no doubt thinks you can handle the old man, or else they wouldn’t have sent you.’

  ‘Of course.’ I smile grimly. In my mind I am getting ready to give Biba a kick right up her extensive arse.

  He wipes his hands gingerly on the edge of my clean tablecloth. ‘I’m sure your manager wouldn’t put your personal safety at risk.’

  ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t.’ Biba is squealing as I take a run up.

  ‘I just wanted to warn you to be careful.’ He adopts an expression of concern. ‘My father is not normally as tractable as this, you see.’

  I withhold a snort.

  ‘I just hope, Maud, he isn’t getting – notions.’

  I withhold a laugh.

  Gabriel’s brow furrows. ‘Perhaps the threat of the residential home is making him behave? Perhaps he fin
ally understands that he needs to comply with support to remain living independently.’

  ‘So a residential home is on the cards?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he says quietly. ‘The old man mustn’t leave Bridlemere.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The knife on the chopping board at Gabriel’s elbow twitches.

  ‘It would kill him, Maud.’

  The knife begins to wobble imperceptibly.

  ‘But it’s very hard for me to help him,’ says Gabriel. ‘He has quite a dislike of me.’

  The knife turns, infinitesimally slowly, on the pivot of its handle.

  ‘He often denies I’m his son.’

  The knife stops with its blade pointing in the region of Gabriel’s important organs.

  ‘He’s told people I’m dead before, or that I’ve come to value the house.’

  ‘That’s bleak,’ I venture.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if his mind is going. He’s so often on his own.’ Gabriel smiles at me brightly. ‘But not now that you’re here with him, practically every day, going through his worldly goods.’

  His smile is a long way off reaching his eyes.

  We look at each other for a long moment.

  While we do, I think about the spurious shade of Gabriel’s dye job, the defaced photograph of two children standing next to a fountain and whether or not I should try to pick up the sentient knife.

  ‘Do you happen to have a sister, Gabriel?’

  This happens, in this order: a cat jumps through the kitchen window and slides the length of the work surface, the knife flies off the table and Gabriel leaps up from his chair.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ cries Gabriel, pointing at the cat. ‘How do you put up with this shit?’

  I head Burroughs off before he reaches the hob and shoo him to the back door. He slinks out on bony haunches, snaking his whip-thin tail.

  With the knife stuck fast in the lino I try again. ‘Do you have a sister, Gabriel?’

  ‘No.’ He eyes the kitchen door. ‘I hate cats.’

  ‘I found a photograph of Bridlemere dated 1977. In it you and a little girl hold hands next to the fountain. Only her name is crossed out on the back.’ I choose my words carefully. ‘And it’s damaged where her face should be.’