The Sin Eater (23 page)

But we did, Benedict . . . You know we did . . .

Holly Lodge looked perfectly ordinary. It's all right, thought Benedict, pausing at the gate and looking up at it. There's nothing here. Or is there? For a heart-stopping second he thought something darted across an upstairs window, then realized it was just the reflection of a cloud. And ghosts could not actually hurt people – they could frighten them, but nothing worse.

Are you sure about that, Benedict? What about your parents . . . ? Your grandfather . . . ? How do you suppose they really died in that blizzard . . . ?

They skidded on the icy roads, said Benedict. But the memory of his father saying, ‘Benedict must never go to that house,' came back to him.

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.

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?

For the first time he reached for Declan with his mind, but there was nothing. And that's exactly like you! thought Benedict angrily. To step back into whatever shadowy world you inhabit, just when I start asking awkward questions. But I'm still not taking this as proof that you're haunting me. I'll need more than this.

He put the cutting in the envelope with the others, then, with an air of decision, took the solicitor's package of Holly Lodge's deeds from his bag. If he was going to look for proof, he would start with the house and its owners.

The legal phrases and familiar headings steadied him. This is what I know, thought Benedict. This is the kind of thing I've been studying for the last two years. Property law and the rights of ownership and the complexities of land transfer.

Holly Lodge, it seemed, had been built in 1820. There was a record of the purchase of some land by a Mr Simcox, described as an importer of fine teas. Benedict imagined a genial gentleman, making a modest success in business, building himself a fine new house in a smart part of London, indulgently tolerant of his wife's aspirations.

A proliferation of later Simcoxes seemed to have inherited the place after the importer's death, but they appeared to be a weakly breed, because there were five separate deeds of transfer, and each time a note was appending saying, ‘On the death of Alfred – on the demise of Octavius – of Leviticus – the freehold messuage and lands known as Holly Lodge in the district of Highbury, County of London, were transferred absolutely . . .'

Benedict liked seeing how a house was passed down in a family or – in this case – passed across, from elder brother to younger brother, or perhaps cousin. It was interesting as well to see reference to the old geographical boundaries of London – there had been no Inner London in those days. He spared a moment to consider this, then turned to the next document.

This was an H.M. Land Registry certificate, stating that the land on which Holly Lodge stood had been registered in 1870 when the last of the Simcoxes had sold the house to a Mr Aloysius Totteridge, described as an accountant. Clipped to this was a further transfer of title, dated 1888, recording that on the death of Aloysius, his entire estate, including Holly Lodge, had passed to his widow.

Mrs Florence Totteridge.

So she was real, thought Benedict, sitting back. The raddled harridan who ushered hopeful and priapic gentlemen to the bedrooms of Cerise and Romilly and several others, was real. But does that mean the rest of it's real? That stuff about sin-eating and the watchtower?

The murders had been real, though. Declan had already killed one man, and if those newspaper accounts could be trusted, there were four more still to be killed.

He closed the bureau, thrust the Deeds back into his bag and went down the stairs and out into the street.

Michael's Oxford career to date had not included tracking down elusive Irish priests, whose provenance seemed dubious and whose probity was certainly questionable, but if Father Nicholas Sheehan had existed, it should be possible to find him. If he could not do so at Oxford, where research into arcane byways of the past was the norm, he might as well give up.

The start of Oriel College's Hilary Term was, as he had told Benedict, a bit crowded. Michael was caught up with energizing his students after the exigencies of their various Christmas festivities, and with the demands of his editor for Wilberforce's various adventures, and it was a week before he could focus properly on Benedict's story.

He began by way of Oxford's Theology Faculty, strayed into the Ian Ramsey and the MacDonald Research Centres as a matter of course, (both of which proved to be dead ends), and found his way to the Faculty's library in St Giles. He liked St Giles and he liked the library, which had a pleasingly unassuming air.

It was eleven o'clock. He would work for two hours, then have lunch in one of the nearby restaurants that scattered this part of Oxford. Several had looked interesting – he and Nell might have a meal here sometime.

The time passed without him noticing it. He was not on very familiar ground, and he wound a tangled path through learned treatises on the Old Testament, the New Testament, and on Doctrines and Ethics of various flavours and persuasions. It was all no doubt deeply interesting, but it was not what he wanted. He wanted books listing ordained priests – almanacs and year books and directories. Even privately printed memoirs from obscure and long-defunct parishes and people.

Then, shortly after twelve, he found a bookcase tucked in a corner of one of the rooms with twelve editions of Thom's Irish Almanacs. They reposed on the lowest shelf, neatly stacked in date order, and the dates ranged from 1860 to 1899. If Nicholas Sheehan had existed, according to Owen he would be recorded in Thom. Michael seized the books, disturbing a cloud of dust and dispossessing half a dozen indignant spiders of their homes, and carried them, armful by armful, to the quiet reading room before they could vanish and render Nicholas Sheehan as ethereal as ever.

At first he thought he was not going to find anything. He leafed through pages upon pages of entries, poring over the small print until his eyes ached. The lists were arranged alphabetically, which was one mercy, and there were columns showing the date of each priest's ordination, the place where he had actually been ordained and, in a few cases, a name indicating who the presiding bishop had been.

By the time Michael reached the 1860s, he was almost prepared to give up, and he was certainly in a mood to throw the estimable Alexander Thom and his entire works across the floor.

And then, quite suddenly, there it was. Nicholas Luke Sheehan. Admitted to St Patrick's Monastery near Galway in 1870, where his Abbot had been Fergal McMahon. In September 1874, Nicholas Sheehan had been admitted to Holy Orders by Bishop John Delaney.

He existed, thought Michael. And it all fits – the dates, the name. But one of the basic rules of research was to find at least two primary sources, so he made notes of everything, then headed for the index section. This was mostly on computer, and Michael keyed in a request for any material on Abbot Fergal McMahon of St Patrick's Monastery, and Bishop John Delaney.

There was nothing on the Bishop, but the request for the Abbot turned up one entry.

Memoirs of an Irish Monastic Life. Fergal McMahon, Order of St Benedict. Father Abbot of St Patrick's Monastery, in the County of Galway. Privately printed by the Irish Catholic Press, 1904.

The book won't be here, thought Michael, scribbling down the reference numbers. It'll be long since pulped. Or it'll be on long-term loan to some absent-minded academic who's studying nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism, and lost it weeks ago. Or – here's a likelier scenario – it won't be the right Fergal McMahon, because how many Fergals and how many McMahons must there be in Ireland? And how many monasteries dedicated to St Patrick! But what if it
is
the right person? What if this is the man who knew Nicholas Sheehan and saw him through training for the priesthood? And then, in later life, wrote his memoirs, perhaps referring to some of the ordinands in his care? No, he thought. It won't be. Of course it won't.

But it was. There in the flyleaf was a short introduction written by Abbot Fergal himself.

‘In my life of service to God I came across many interesting people and events,' the Abbot had written. ‘I believe it to be but a small indulgence to make a record of my life before He calls me, and trust I have done so with brevity, modesty and clarity and that my memories will be of value and interest.