The Sin Eater(71)
I’m glad you came, Nell . . .
He was there, standing on the half landing, lit from behind by the narrow window, looking down at her. Nell’s heart performed a somersault, and excitement laced with apprehension coursed through her.
In as normal a voice as she could manage, she said, ‘Hello. How did you get in?’ Then, as he did not reply, she said, ‘You were here the day Benedict was taken ill, weren’t you? You were with him when I found him.’
Still he did not say anything. Nell waited, seeing that even standing outside the lamp’s glow, he was exactly as she remembered him. The eyes, the dark hair, the way he had of tilting his head as if he was listening very intently. If he would come down just two or three stairs, she would be able to see him properly.
But he stayed where he was, and from feeling uneasy, Nell began to feel frightened, because she was in an empty house with a complete stranger, and she had no idea how he had got in. Did he have a key? Had he been hiding somewhere, waiting to creep out? That was surely not the action of a sane person and clearly it would be as well to make a polite, but swift retreat. Trying to avoid any sudden action that might spark off something unpleasant, she began to move cautiously back down to the hall, feeling for the stairs with her foot, not daring to take her eyes from the man.
There were only a few stairs to the bottom; once she was there she could be across the hall and opening the door – she had not locked it. She held on to the banister with one hand and went down two more steps. Was he going to follow her? No, he was staying on the half-landing. Good. And here was the last step. Now for a quick sprint to the door . . .
It was not the last step. She had miscalculated and there were three more to go. There was a moment when Nell tried to stop herself falling, but she fell hard against the edge of the banister, banging her head with such force that lights splintered across her vision. There was a moment of blurred dizziness, then she was aware of lying in a painful jumble on a hard tiled floor. The world was still spinning, but the jagged lights seemed to have retreated. Nell drew in a shaky breath, but the blow to her head seemed to be still echoing inside her brain, and she was not entirely sure what had happened or where she was. She tried to sit up, but the dizziness seized her again and a sickening pain shot through her ankle. Sprained ankle and bang on the head? Whatever had happened she could not lie here like this – there was something she had to do, only she could not quite pin down what it was . . .
She had been cataloguing some house contents – an old shadowy house – something for Nina Doyle, was it? Yes, Holly Lodge, that was it. Was she still in the house? She must be – she could hear a muddled sound of traffic nearby.
Nell made a huge effort and this time managed to half sit up. She was in a big hall, lying at the foot of a wide stairway with a carved banister. Shadows clustered in the corners, but a table lamp was casting a pool of light – she remembered switching that on. Had she been about to go up to the bedrooms? And fallen down the stairs? Whatever she had done, she could not possibly get to the tube like this – her ankle was sending out waves of wrenching pain and she was not sure if she could stand on it, never mind walk. Could she manage to get out to the street, though? The traffic sounded quite heavy – there would surely be taxis.
Taxis. Traffic.
It was then that Nell began to think the bang on her head might have affected her hearing, because the traffic did not sound quite right. It sounded more like wheels rattling over uneven ground than cars whizzing along a London street. In addition, she could hear voices and music, and these did not sound right, either. Oh God, thought Nell, I’m suffering from concussion or something – I’m hearing things. But there was nothing odd about hearing traffic and voices in the middle of London. Except there was something very strange about the sounds. The voices were speaking English, but it was an odd, unfamiliar English. Sharper, with different emphasis on words and different vowel sounds. It was speech that Nell thought confusedly she should recognize. If the pain in her foot would ease and if she could overcome the sick dizziness, she might be able to think more clearly.
And then quite suddenly, the spinning fragments of sound and memory fell into place, like the colours in a child’s kaleidoscope, and with a cold feeling of panic Nell knew what she was hearing. It was the speech of the nineteenth century. It was the street patois that long-dead authors had reproduced for readers. She was hearing the raucous calls Charles Dickens had written for his beggars and urchins, and the speech Conan Doyle assigned to the Baker Street Irregulars when they related their findings to Sherlock Holmes . . .
No, of course it was not. She was confused from the fall and the pain of her sprained ankle, and there was probably a party of angry foreigners out there – maybe tourists whose minibus had broken down.
But the sounds came again, more vividly, and with them was the memory of something someone had said recently. Memory clicked a little more firmly into place. Benedict Doyle had talked to her about researching crime from the end of the nineteenth century and he had said London would sound different. It’s always noisy, he had said, but it would have been noisy in a different way. Hansom cabs rattling over the cobblestones, and people shouting and quarrelling.
That’s what I’m hearing, thought Nell. Those are wooden wheels bumping over unpaved surfaces – and horses’ hooves. And that music . . .
Overstrung, out-of-tune pianos played in smoky pubs. It was exactly what the music sounded like. But it could not be that. It must be somebody’s radio or television with a Victorian play on it. Something with particularly good sound effects. Please let it be that.