The Sin Eater(4)

‘None of Declan Doyle,’ said the one who had fainted in the church. ‘Pity. I’d be interested to see what he looked like.’

‘I think there are some of him upstairs,’ said someone else.

‘Are there? Then I might have a look presently. My grandmother said he was one of the handsomest men she ever met.’

‘Handsome’s all very well,’ said one of the uncles. ‘I heard you couldn’t trust him from here to that door.’

‘Declan Doyle was your great-grandfather,’ said Aunt Lyn to Benedict. She was handing round sandwiches and she looked flustered. Benedict wondered if he was supposed to help her.

He felt a bit lost. Everyone seemed to be huddled in little groups, all talking very seriously. He still did not like the house, but he was curious about it, mostly because of what his father had said that time.

‘It’s still there . . .’

Whatever ‘it’ was, his father had seemed to find it frightening, but his mother had not believed in it.

Benedict slipped out of the room, wondering if he dare explore. But if it would be his house one day, surely he was allowed to see the rest of it.

But to begin with, the rooms were not especially interesting. Benedict looked into what must be a dining room and into a big stone-floored kitchen. The nicest room was on the other side of the hall: there was a view over the gardens and bookshelves lining the walls. A big leather-topped desk stood under the window. It could have been his grandfather’s study; people who had big houses like this did have studies. Benedict tried to picture his grandfather sitting in one of the deep armchairs reading, or writing letters at the desk. Old people often wrote letters. They did not text like Benedict and his friends did, or email, because there had not been texting or computers in their day. Benedict thought it must have been pretty fascinating to have lived in that long-ago world, although he would miss texting and computers.

There was a calendar in a brass frame on the desk and a big desk diary with a page for each day of the week. On both of these the 18th January was marked in red and a time – three p.m. – was underlined. Whoever had done it had not just drawn a circle round the day, but had made an elaborate shape like a little sketched figure. Benedict stared at the marks, feeling cold and a bit sick, because the 18th was the day of the crash and three o’clock was the time it had happened. Aunt Lyn had said so. Benedict could not bear thinking about that, so he went out of the study, closing the door firmly, and hoping no one would see him.

He paused for a moment in the hall to listen to the sounds from the long room where everyone was eating and talking. One of the aunts was trying to find out where Benedict’s parents had been going in the middle of an icy blizzard, insisting there was something peculiar about it.

‘Because I can’t imagine what was so important as to send them on a car journey in the depths of winter. Half of London had ground to a halt and all the television news programmes were warning people not to travel unless absolutely necessary.’

‘Like in the war,’ said an elderly man, who was wandering around with a bottle of brandy. ‘“Is your journey really necessary?”’

‘Yes, and I don’t see how that journey could have been, do you? They were very insistent that it couldn’t be put off, and they were very secretive about it as well.’

Benedict went up the stairs. There would not be much to see up here, but anything was better than hearing people say horrid things about his mother and father.

There seemed to be a lot of bedrooms, with ceilings spotted with damp and faded wallpaper, and furniture draped in sheets so you imagined people crouching under them. Had his grandfather lived here on his own, with all these rooms and dusty windows and the drifting cobwebs that reached down to brush against Benedict’s face like thin fingers?

At the end of this landing was a second flight of stairs. Benedict hesitated, but he could still hear people talking and no one seemed to have missed him, so he went up the stairs, which creaked as if the house was groaning. There was another landing at the top; it was very dark and, as he looked doubtfully about him, a door on his right swung slowly open. Benedict froze. Was someone in there? He took a deep breath and went up to the door, but the room was empty except for an old dressing table and a desk pushed against one wall. Or was it empty? As he stood uncertainly in the doorway, the long curtains billowed out as if someone was standing behind them, and something seemed to dart across his vision. He gasped and was about to run back downstairs when he realized that what he had seen was only the glint of a silver photograph frame on the dressing table. There were several photos, but this one must have caught the light when he opened the door. He let out a whooshing breath of relief, then went up to see the photo. It was one of the faded brown ones, but Benedict could see the man in it had dark hair. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes and he was only partly looking at the camera so that half of his face was hidden.

Benedict stared at the man, his mind whirling and panic gripping him in huge wrenching waves.

The man in the photograph was the man who had looked at him from his bedroom mirror four days earlier.





TWO


After a long time Benedict picked up the photograph and turned it over. Photographs often had things written on the back to tell who the people in them were. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped the frame, but eventually he managed to peel off the sticky tape on the backing and take out the photo.