The Sin Eater(57)

Did they skid, Benedict? Or did they swerve their motor car to avoid hitting someone they thought was standing in the centre of the road . . . ? Someone who seemed to be walking towards them . . . Someone who wore a long dark coat, the collar turned up to hide the face . . .

I’m not listening, said Benedict to Declan in his mind. You aren’t real. With a tremendous mental effort he pushed Declan away and went into the house. The minute he stepped through the door the atmosphere of old memories and new hauntings closed around him. Then, prompted perhaps by the same impulse that compels a person to probe an aching tooth with a tongue tip, he half closed his eyes and deliberately tried to see the big hall as it might have been in his great-grandfather’s day . . .

For a moment it was there, like a double-exposed photograph, or an old cine film projected on to a living background. Gas lamps burning, flock wallpaper, cumbersome plants in brass pots . . . A raddled woman presiding over a small harem of kitten-faced hussies with painted cheeks and rouged lips, who lay on beds ready to perform any exotic tasks the gentlemen might require . . . And the scents – smoke from coal fires and tallow candles, and the body sweat of people for whom daily baths and deodorants were unknown. Benedict had just time to think that the romantic view of the Victorians and the Edwardians never seemed to encompass stale sweat or breath tainted by lack of dentists, when the vagrant pictures dissolved and there was nothing but the slightly damp smell of a house too long empty.

He crossed the hall, glanced in each of the downstairs rooms, then ascended the stairs. Here was the half-landing where Declan and Colm had their whispered conversation after visiting Cerise’s room. Which room had that been? Which room had been Romilly’s? No means of knowing.

In the second-floor room, the bureau with the press cuttings was exactly as he had left it, the desk flap down, the jumble of pens and old calendars and envelopes strewn on the floor from his previous visit. He had half fallen, he remembered; that had been because Declan dragged him out to the watchtower and he had heard the screams of agony as Nicholas Sheehan died, and smelled human flesh and old stones slowly burning. Dreadful.

The newspaper cuttings were among the spilled debris; his great-grandfather’s face stared up at him from one of the yellowing scraps, under the heading ‘MESMER MURDERER ESCAPES’.

‘I’m ignoring you,’ Benedict said to him, putting down the envelope with the Title Deeds and scooping up the newspaper cuttings and scattered papers. The pens and calendars could be taken out to the dustbins, but he could not bring himself to destroy the accounts of the Mesmer Murders, although nor could he bear to reread them. He folded them carefully so as not to tear the brittle paper, and put them in a spare envelope which he placed at the back of the desk.

There had been three cuttings – he remembered that quite clearly. But a fourth lay near the wall, as if it had been dislodged from the desk when he had tumbled into that sinister unconsciousness. Benedict hesitated, then saw it was much more recent than the 1890s pieces, so it could not have anything to do with Declan. It would be quite safe to read it.

The cutting was dated twelve years earlier and had been clipped from what looked like a semi-provincial newspaper, covering this part of North London. It was an account of the inquest findings on the death of his parents and his grandfather. With the sense that a different shard of the past was spiking into his mind, Benedict began to read.





TRIPLE DEATH TRAGEDY


Small inner mystery within multiple fatality

A verdict of death by misadventure was today recorded on the three people who died in a dramatic road smash at the height of the recent freezing blizzards that brought most of the country to a standstill last month.

Jonathan Doyle (34), his wife Emma (31), and Jonathan’s father, Patrick (82), died when the car being driven by Jonathan skidded from the road and crashed into a brick wall. No other vehicles were involved, and the coroner said it could be assumed, with reasonable certainty, that the treacherous conditions were the cause of the crash.

However, two witnesses who had been travelling some distance behind the Doyles’ car, stated, independently, that they had seen a pedestrian in the road, who had seemed to be walking towards the doomed car. Both described the figure as male, wearing a long dark coat.

‘I thought he must be drunk,’ said one of the witnesses. ‘He seemed to weave in and out of the blizzard, very uncertainly.’

The second witness told our reporter afterwards that she thought the man might have been confused or have mental problems. ‘Because no one in their right mind would walk down the centre of a main road in a raging blizzard, would they?’ she said. ‘No one would even be out in that weather if they could help it. We were only travelling ourselves because my daughter had just had her first child.’

The coroner told the court that police had tried to trace the unknown man, but had not been able to do so. No hospitals, nursing homes or retirement homes had reports of a patient missing, and there had been no accidents involving a pedestrian in the area.

The small inner mystery of the unknown man who appears to have caused these three deaths, then to have vanished, remains unsolved.

Benedict stared at the cutting, his mind tumbling with confusion. They saw him, he thought. Those two people saw Declan. I’m not ill – I’m not suffering from that dissociative personality condition – I’m being bloody haunted! It can’t be coincidence. It must have been Declan. He deliberately caused them to swerve and crash. But why?