The Sin Eater(79)
‘Arthur of the walrus moustache and the tardy manliness?’
‘Don’t you mock ’im. He’s in a very good way of business. Tea importers down Canonbury Road. And he’s likely to be made an alderman or some such. He’s setting a lot of store by that. He might not want ’is wife nor his ma-in-law knowin’ what he gets up to here, but it’s Lombard Street to a china orange that if he thought he could ’elp the police lay a murderer by the heels, he’d do it. If I told him I believed the murderer had been inside this ’ouse all the time – maybe was still here – I think he’d feel he had to tell the rozzers. Citizen’s duty, ’e’d call it.’
‘Yes,’ said Colm slowly. ‘Yes, I see, although you’re jumping to a very wild conclusion, Cerise. But whatever story you’ve spun for yourself, neither of us want to be part of it. We have no money and anyway we haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You’d been smoking opium,’ said Cerise. ‘I saw it by your eyes. People can do terrible things in the grip of opium, and they don’t always remember afterwards. So I wouldn’t judge a man for doing somethin’ – even somethin’ really bad – if he’d been in an opium dream when he did it. You understand that, do you?’ She waited, then, as neither of them answered, said in a harder voice, ‘But as for money, old Floss had a lot, all locked away. Hundreds of pounds it must be. She di’nt trust banks – she said they rooked you ten times over.’ She stood up. ‘And ’ooever killed the poor old trout could’ve got his hands on her money at the same time,’ she said. ‘Which means he could give me a very generous present for keeping this partickler secret. You think about that, both of you and I’ll come back later. Couple of hours maybe. I just heard St Stephen’s chime one o’clock when I came up here, so I’m going downstairs for a bit of dinner. Zelda an’ Ruby are bringing in some hot pies.’
As Cerise went out of the room, an insouciant swing to her rump, Declan saw with a cold chill that Colm’s eyes were starting to darken to the swollen insect-black once more. He thought, Oh, Cerise, don’t go on with this, don’t . . .
The present
‘Cerise, don’t go on with this, don’t . . .’
It was several moments before Benedict realized it was no longer Declan’s voice he was hearing, but his own, and that he was in his own room in Nina’s flat.
But Declan’s thoughts were still reverberating in his mind, and he found himself whispering them. Don’t go on with this, Cerise, don’t . . . Because, thought Benedict, if you do, you’ll be his third victim – he’ll need to silence you. He’ll never let himself be blackmailed, and he’s killed twice already.
The newspaper articles had said all the victims except one had been found on river steps. Would Colm get Cerise out there to that disused sewer outlet? Perhaps he would ask her to meet him so he could give her the money with no prying eyes to see them.
Benedict had no idea if he was thinking logically, and he was finding it difficult to think at all, because his head was aching as badly as if it was being forced wide open then smashed closed again. He felt slightly sick, but he found Nina’s paracetamol in the bathroom, and gulped down two. After this he splashed his face with cold water and felt a bit better.
Cerise had been the third victim. There had been five altogether, according to the newspapers, and Benedict had already seen two of them killed. The abortionist Harold Bullfinch, and Flossie Totteridge. How had Colm arranged the meeting with Bullfinch?
Stupid, said the soft voice. I sent the villainous old slug a note asking to meet him . . . I wrote that I had been told he could help a girl out of a ‘very particular kind of trouble’. He came to the river steps like a lamb.
And over everything lay the explosive knowledge that it had not been Declan who killed those people. It had not been Benedict’s great-grandfather who stalked victims through London’s fogbound streets and butchered them. It had been Colm.
And that being so, it must have been Colm who had haunted Benedict since he was eight years old. But why? What did Colm want from him?
TWENTY-THREE
The chiming of a clock somewhere close by broke into Benedict’s tumbling thoughts. The sound startled him, because it was odd to hear a clock chime; he did not remember ever hearing that in Nina’s flat before.
He glanced at his watch and saw it was half past one. Then it must have been a half-hour chime he had heard. That fitted with what Cerise had said about it being one o’clock . . . No, that was Declan and Colm’s world. Oh God, was he starting to confuse the two? He absolutely must not do that. But the knowledge that Cerise had given Colm and Declan two hours to make a decision thudded a tattoo in his brain.
He left a note for Nina, saying he would be back for supper, collected his coat and went out of the flat. Going down the stairs he was aware of a feeling of dislocation – almost as if his head had been divided into two. Perhaps it was the result of the paracetamol on top of the stuff the hospital people were giving him. When he got out to the street the pills seemed to be affecting his eyes as well, because the light seemed wrong. A heavy mist was muffling the traffic and shrouding the modern shop fronts, but leaving visible the older buildings. Perhaps there had been a factory fire somewhere; he would look in the local evening paper later to see.