The Sin Eater(8)
‘Well, can you unlock the front door and let me in?’ called Nell, pleased to have found him, although feeling a bit ridiculous to be standing in the middle of a garden, shouting to someone she could barely see. ‘Or is there a door open somewhere?’
He pointed downwards to the French windows. Nell gestured an acknowledgement, and tried the handle. It turned, the door swung open, and she stepped inside.
Benedict had managed to keep Declan Doyle out of his mind for almost the entire journey from Reading. Instead, he concentrated on Christmas: on the parties he would be attending, and on an essay he had to write over the Christmas holiday on unusual and unpublicized crimes in the nineteenth century. If he could find some really quirky cases, and if he did try for a PhD later on, it might form the basis of his doctorate.
He had allowed sufficient time to have a couple of hours on his own at Holly Lodge, and had bought a pack of sandwiches and a can of Coke at Paddington so he could have some lunch while doing some preliminary sorting out.
It was midday when he reached the house. Over the years he had built up an image of it in his mind, until it resembled a cross between Sauron’s Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings and a pied à terre belonging to the Addams family. But standing outside now, he saw it was perfectly ordinary – perhaps a bit more decrepit than it had been twelve years earlier, but nothing that could not be cured by a few coats of paint and several sessions with a mower.
As he unlocked the door he reminded himself that his mirror ghost was nothing more than an unusual experience during a tragic time in his childhood. A rogue image, half-seen in an old glass, created by any number of peculiar, but explicable, circumstances.
As he stepped into the big hall, the house’s empty staleness breathed into his face. Ghost-breath, thought Benedict. No, it’s more likely to be damp or mice. But the sensation that something inside the house was breathing and living increased. Declan, he thought, and unease stirred his mind, like hundreds of glinting needle-points jabbing into it.
The furniture in most of the rooms was shrouded in dust sheets, making them seem eerie and slightly menacing. Benedict’s footsteps echoed as he walked through them, recognizing them from that long-ago afternoon. Here was the big drawing-room where Aunt Lyn had dispensed sherry and coffee that afternoon, and people had speculated as to why his parents had been driving through the blizzard that last day. Behind the drawing room was the study where he had seen his grandfather’s calendar and diary, with the 18th marked so vividly and so strangely. He had always thought he would one day try to find out what that appointment had been, but he never had.
He went up to the first floor. As he reached the main landing there was a blurred movement at the far end, as if someone who had been standing there had darted back into the shadowy recess of a deep, tall window. The curtains moved slightly, and Benedict’s heart came up into his mouth. Someone here? Maybe it was an ordinary, down-to-earth burglar. Given a choice, Benedict would rather meet a housebreaker than a ghost. He took a deep breath and went forward, reaching out for the curtains, and snatching them back before he could beat a cowardly retreat down the stairs.
There was nothing there. There was just the window, smeary with dust and damp with condensation. Or was there the faint imprint on the faded window seat, as if someone had been crouching there? And had someone traced a faint ‘D’ in the moisture on the glass?
Benedict looked down at the monochrome gardens, then stepped back from the window. The doors of the main bedrooms were all open, and nothing stirred within any of them. He would look at them in more detail later; for now he would go up to the second floor, where the solicitors had stored the valuable contents of the house. They had sent Benedict an inventory, along with the keys for the two locked rooms. Initially, they had wanted all valuables to be removed; however much care was taken over tenants, there was still a risk that valuable contents might get damaged, they said. But no one in the family had room to store them, and professional storage for the years until Benedict was twenty-one would have been ruinous, so this compromise had been agreed. The solicitors visited the house two or three times a year to make sure none of the tenants had loaded the entire contents on to a van at dead of night and made off with it to the nearest fence.
There were four rooms on the second floor, including the one where Declan’s photograph had been. Benedict had intended to leave Nell West to explore the room’s contents and take whatever might be valuable to sell in her shop, but now he was here, he was aware of a strong compulsion to see what the room might yield. There might be clues to his great-grandfather’s life – things that might prove, or disprove, those details about Ireland and the ancient watchtower on the Cliffs of Moher. As he unlocked the door his heart was beating furiously; he thought if he had been seeing Holly Lodge as Tolkien’s Mount Doom all these years, he had certainly been seeing this room as Bluebeard’s seventh chamber. Or would it turn out to be Looking-Glass land after all?
But the room was bland and ordinary and, if there were any ghosts, they were keeping a low profile. There were five or six large boxes and tea chests, and a few pieces of furniture. He would go through the boxes with Nell when she got here, but he already knew he would not want any of the furniture – he particularly would not want the big dressing table with its triple mirror which had given that disturbing reflection all those years ago. But there was a small bureau which was rather nice. He pulled an old kitchen chair across and sat down to take a closer look. The front flap was stuck with the accreted dust of years, but it eventually dropped down into a writing-desk-top, and the scent of old wood and dust drifted up.