The Sin Eater (13 page)

Michael sat looking at them for a very long time. Because the king was the exact replica of the piece Nell had brought home from Benedict Doyle's house.

The macabre core of the tale could not possibly be true, of course. Eithne had no doubt existed, and it seemed that Kilderry Castle and the Wicked Earl and his chess set had also existed. But that was as far as it went. The story of the devil bartering chess pieces with humans for sinister reasons of his own would be a legend spun by the imaginative, dramatic Irish, who loved a good tale and never allowed the absence of facts to stand in the way of a story. This particular story was the plot of the old Faust legend in a different guise –
Dr Faustus
and Mephistopheles and the ill-starred Marguerite – and it was a plot that had made its appearance in a dozen darkly romantic works of fiction over the last four centuries.

But just supposing
, said a small voice in Michael's mind,
that there's a grain of truth in it somewhere? You dismissed an ancient legend once before, remember?
He frowned and pushed several cold memories firmly away. To tangle with one grisly myth, as he and Nell had done in Shropshire, could be regarded as misfortune – even just about believable. But to tangle with a second was downright incredible. And this particular legend was so off the wall it could not possibly contain any reality.

Even so, he was annoyed to realize that Eithne's tale had disconcerted him, to the extent that he spent most of the Dean's lunch trying to decide whether or not to tell Nell about it. He wanted to do so, but he baulked at upsetting her. And there was a strong possibility that the piece she had found was just a copy of the original. How likely was it that a fragment of an ancient Irish chess set had found its way to an innocent-sounding house in Highbury? Not likely at all, thought Michael determinedly. And even if it was the original king from the macabre set, it was probably not worth a row of beans without the other pieces.

Nell had said she would get the chess piece assessed by a specialist, so it was probably sensible to keep quiet until she had done so. Then Michael could pick a suitable moment to relate the story to her, although he could not think what would constitute a suitable moment for telling somebody that a chess piece was supposed to have belonged to the devil – and that the last time it had been used appeared to be during a match between a wicked Irish Earl and an enigmatic-sounding nineteenth-century priest.

The Dean's Christmas lunch ran its customary and convivial course, treading the usual path between slightly pompous traditionalism which gave way to subdued raucousness by the time the brandy circulated.

Nell appeared to enjoy herself. Michael was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to look so striking: she had on the copper-coloured jacket she had worn for her London trip, with an amber pendant and earrings. Her hair was brushed to a shining cap and she listened to everything with the eager absorption that Michael always found so attractive. It looked as if the Dean found it attractive, too; at least twice during the pre-lunch drinks he leaned forward to pat her shoulder. The third time he did it, Nell caught Michael's eye and gave him a half-wink.

Owen's solemn recital of the fifteenth-century form of grace was received with the respect proper to the occasion, although Michael afterwards heard several of Owen's more acerbic colleagues muttering that wouldn't you know Professor Bracegirdle would come up with something so bloody obscure nobody could check its provenance.

It was nearly four o'clock when the meal ended. Nell arranged to meet Michael next day for lunch at one of their favourite trattorias, then went off to collect Beth from the school friend's house where she had been staying. Michael felt slightly at a loss, until he was swept along by Owen and several members of the History faculty who were bound for what they said was a wine-tasting event, but Owen said would be an excuse to get potted. Nonsense, of course Michael must accompany them, they said, cheerfully. They were going on to a Greek restaurant afterwards to blot up the vino.

Owen's view turned out to be right, and what with the wine-tasting and the moussaka that followed, it was after midnight when Michael got back to his rooms. He was let in by the porter, who had been lying in wait to recount Wilberforce's latest piece of devilry.

Wilberforce, it appeared, had gone to sleep unnoticed on the bed of a nervous first year. Nobody knew how he had got in, because nobody ever knew how Wilberforce got in anywhere. But it seemed that when he tried to get off the bed he had found himself so entangled in the bedclothes he had reared up under the sheets with an angry yowl. The student, who was writing an essay on the Victorian Gothicists and had gone to bed just after eleven with a copy of
The Castle of Otranto
, had been so deeply immersed in the world of phantoms and apparitions, he had thought a ghost had come to gibber at him, and had dashed on to the landing in a panic and yelled for help, resulting in several of his neighbours mounting a grand ghost hunt. No, said the porter crossly, he had no idea whether anyone actually believed there was a ghost; what he did know was that there had been cavortings across the quad after midnight, and six people were due to see the Dean next day, never mind it nearly being Christmas, college rules was college rules, Dr Flint.

Michael, called to account next morning, did his best to apologize, and was tetchily told by the Dean, who was fighting a hangover, that if he could not control his turbulent cat, Wilberforce might have to be banned from College for good.

‘I'll lace his milk with bromide,' promised Michael, and retired to his room, where he spent three hours detailing the fictional Wilberforce's exploration of a haunted house, to which the gleeful and inventive mice had lured him, dressing up as white-sheeted ghosts to stalk him through the cobweb-draped rooms. This seemed to take care of the requested three thousand words, and he emailed the document to his editor so it could be dealt with before the world closed down for Christmas. After this he went off to his lunch with Nell, which was followed by a shopping expedition to equip Beth for her forthcoming trip to America where she was going to spend two weeks with Michael's god-daughter in Maryland.

As Christmas drew nearer, Nell seemed to have what Michael thought of as her inward look. He usually put this down to something having triggered an unexpected memory of her dead husband. He never pried, but he sometimes wondered if she would ever get over his death. It was nearly three years since Brad West had been killed in a motorway pile-up, but three years was not so very long, and Christmas could be difficult and sad for bereaved people.

The day before Christmas Eve, Michael received an email from his editor to say that much as she had enjoyed Wilberforce's outing with the ghosts, she thought it was a bit too scary for seven year olds, and please could Michael think up a different adventure because they still had that three-thousand-word space to fill by the second week of January.

‘You'll think of something,' said Nell, when Michael reported this. ‘You always do. Or Wilberforce will provide copy. Did I tell you I'm meeting Nina Doyle after Christmas? She thought I might like to meet Benedict – I mean properly meet him. Which I would, of course.'

‘How is he?' Michael's mind switched from Wilberforce to the chess set.

‘Bored with being kept in hospital, according to Nina. They haven't found what's wrong yet; they just keep doing dozens of tests. I hope he doesn't have to stay in hospital over Christmas. It won't be very festive for him.'

‘It won't be very festive for us if I don't manage to bash out three thousand words on that pestilential Wilberforce.'

B
enedict's Christmas was very far from festive. He had been allowed out of hospital, but he must not, said the doctors firmly, be on his own, until they had got to the root of this. Was there someone he could stay with?

‘He can stay with me,' said Nina, sweeping aside Benedict's suggestion that he could go back to the house in Reading where at least two of his fellow students would probably be around. ‘No, don't argue, Benedict, there's a spare bedroom in my flat, and I can keep an eye on you.'

Benedict did not want an eye keeping on him, at least not by Nina who would read up on all the things that might be wrong with him, and offer a new diagnosis every day. He wanted to get back to a semblance of normality, to join in any Christmas parties that might be going, and to get back to his work. He particularly wanted to make a start on his criminology essay and the hunt for interesting Victorian criminals to use as its base. The thought flickered that he had found a very interesting Victorian criminal in his own family, but he pushed this away.

But he was allowed home on Christmas Eve only on the strict understanding that he would be staying in his cousin's spare room. Four students sharing a ramshackle house near Reading University did not, it appeared, constitute the kind of aftercare the infirmary was prepared to countenance.

Before leaving, there was a discussion with the consultant neurologist who had been overseeing his case, which Nina insisted on attending. Benedict, fuzzy from the drugs they were giving him and feeling as if he was not quite connecting with the rest of the world, had not had the energy to ban her from the consulting room.

‘We still need to do more rounds of tests and will monitor you for a few weeks, but as you know we've been able to rule out anything actually physiological,' said the neurologist.

‘Yes.' Benedict had been massively grateful to the doctor who had told him this two days earlier.

‘At the moment we're tentatively ascribing your condition to a form of dissociative personality disorder.'

At first the words danced crazily and meaninglessly in Benedict's brain, but then they arranged themselves in a more comprehensible pattern. This means Declan isn't real, he thought, a huge relief unfolding inside him. He's something I've conjured up because I've got this thing, this illness. He had not heard of dissociative personality disorder and it sounded alarming, but it was nowhere near as alarming as believing his great-grandfather's spirit had haunted him since he was eight years old.

Nina said, rather sharply, ‘D'you mean schizophrenia? Split personality?

‘Schizophrenia and split personality are somewhat different,' said the consultant. ‘Perhaps a more easily understood term in this case is multiple personality.' He glanced at Benedict and said, ‘It sounds terrifying, doesn't it?'

‘It does, a bit.' Not as terrifying as ghosts though, thought Benedict. He said aloud, ‘The word “multiple” is worrying.'

‘It doesn't need to be.' The neurologist, who had a slightly creased face that looked as if he had stolen it from somebody much older, said, ‘We're still filling in details, but I'm fairly sure DPD will be the eventual diagnosis.' He glanced down at his folder of notes. ‘How much do you remember of that day you came in here?'

‘Hardly anything. It's mostly a blur.' It was as well Benedict was not wired up to any of the terrifying machines they had been using to identify his illness, because this was a whopping lie. He clearly remembered being in Holly Lodge that day and feeling his dead great-grandfather – or what he thought was his great-grandfather – pull him down into that long-ago Ireland. But none of it was real, he thought. Not Declan or Colm, or that Irish village or Nicholas Sheehan.

Nicholas Sheehan. There was the chess set, he thought, in sudden panic.
And I found the black king at Holly Lodge.
But there would be an explanation for that, as well – perhaps he had seen the chess set that day of his parents' funeral, and woven the memory into the fantasies.

Even so, he did not want to tell anyone the extraordinary depth of those encounters, so he said firmly, ‘I don't remember any of it. And you've kept me tanked up on sedatives and tranquillizers and God knows what since I got here, so I haven't really been able to think about anything very much.'

The doctor made a gesture as if to say this was to be expected. ‘It's sometimes useful to trace what we call the alter ego – the second self – to its source,' he said. ‘To find out where it's come from or what sparked it into life. You talked quite a lot about Ireland that first day. You weren't entirely conscious, but you were quite lucid. You believed you were actually there – the west coast, I should think it was. And you talked about meeting a priest who died in a fire.'

Benedict felt as if something had punched him in the throat. I told them all that, he thought. All those details . . . But he only said, ‘I don't remember any of that.'

‘Have you ever lived in Ireland?' asked the doctor. ‘Or even stayed there for a holiday?'

‘He's never been to Ireland at all,' put in Nina, bossily. ‘At least, not unless he's sneaked over there without anyone knowing.'

‘I haven't,' said Benedict shortly.

‘Have you had this kind of experience before?' asked the neurologist. ‘Ever? Even very slightly?'

This was difficult, because Benedict had no idea how much their graphs and computers might have found out. But it was clearly important that they had all the information, so he said, guardedly, ‘Maybe one or two extremely vivid dreams.'

The neurologist studied him for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, I see,' and Benedict thought he did see – that he understood Benedict had had other experiences but did not want to talk about them. He suddenly liked the man very much for respecting this.

‘If we're going to accept DPD as our diagnosis,' said the neurologist, ‘it seems as if your alter ego hails from Ireland. In fact he – it sounds like a “he” by the way – apparently knows Ireland quite well.'

He did know it well, thought Benedict. He lived there until he was about twenty. No, I mustn't think like that – none of it was real. But oh, God, how much did I tell them when I was zonked on their loathsome pills? He forced himself to listen to Nina who was demanding to know how Benedict would know about a country he had never visited.