The Sin Eater (28 page)

‘The Monkey's Paw,' said Nell, belatedly identifying this allusion.

‘That's the one,' said Nina, and dived for the phone.

It was half past nine when Nell emerged from Highbury & Islington tube, and she collected rolls and fruit at a delicatessen so she would not need to go out for lunch. At a newsagents' she bought a box of light bulbs. The electricity had certainly been on at the house last time, but most of the bulbs had gone, and Nell was blowed if she was going to fumble around in a darkening house on a grey January day. She would not be able to reach many of the ceiling lights, but there had been several table lamps which would give plenty of light.

Here was the road and the house, slightly shabby, and with the same sad feeling of neglect, and the faint smell of damp. She went systematically into each of the rooms before starting work, opening cupboards and drawing back curtains. This was not being neurotic; it was sensible to make sure an empty old house really was empty. It was certainly not that she was visualizing a ravening axe murderer ready to erupt from the linen cupboard. Or, said her mind cynically, expecting a mysterious man with vividly blue eyes to walk out of the shadows . . . ?

But despite her resolve, she found herself standing on the upper landing, her heart skittering with half-fearful, half-hopeful expectancy. There was no one here, of course . . .

Or was there? Standing on the second-floor landing, she had the impression that something moved in the room at the far end – the room where she had been working when she saw Declan. As she hesitated, there was a soft creaking sound from within the room. Nell jumped, then realized the sound was too rhythmic to be man-made; it was more the kind of sound the house itself might make – such as a door swinging to and fro on sagging hinges. But what would cause a door to move by itself in a silent and still house?

‘Declan . . . ? Are you here?'

Nell had not intended to say this aloud, but the words whispered into the shadows of their own volition. Her skin prickled with apprehension, then common sense kicked in, because she was behaving like some wimpish heroine from a bad horror film – tiptoeing ingenuously round the haunted house, artlessly enquiring if anyone was here. And what would you do, my girl, if your sinister blue-eyed Declan whispered back at you from the shadows?
Here I am . . . I've been waiting for you . . .

‘Rubbish,' said Nell very loudly, and went noisily and decisively towards the room, opening the door wide. And of course there was no one there, only the same packing cases as before and the old dressing table with the oval mirror. Nell touched the mirror's frame lightly, and it moved. At once the creaking came again, and Nell let out a breath of relief. That was what she had heard.

She went down to the long sitting room and started listing the contents. Anything she could not identify or evaluate herself would be photographed so she could check with colleagues. Like the chess piece? Measuring a Victorian bureau, Nell allowed herself a brief daydream in which she found the entire set, and made a killing at Christie's or Sotheby's.

The morning was very dark and towards midday she hunted out the table lamps and screwed in the light bulbs she had brought. There was an old-fashioned standard lamp lying in a corner, as well, which cast a friendly pool of light. Nell worked on. Three quarters of her mind was absorbed in what she was doing – categorizing what was clearly junk, setting question marks against stuff that might be worth placing with a good second-hand dealer, trying to put a figure against items that would be sellable in her own shop. There was a beautiful desk that had the elegant lines of the late 1700s, and a set of very nice dining chairs with petit point covers. Nell wondered if Benedict's grandfather had bought them, or if previous owners had simply included them when selling the house. However they came to be here, she would certainly like to have the desk and the chairs in the window at Quire Court.

In a room overlooking the back garden were four framed charcoal sketches of local scenes: two views of Highbury Fields, a church, simply labelled as ‘St Stephen's', and a detailed drawing of an old music hall called Highbury Barn. Nell liked these and she liked the links they provided to an older Highbury. The sketches were dated 1863 and 1864, and looked as if they had been done by an amateur artist. They would not be worth a massive amount, but a local dealer might take them because people living in the area would like them.

She worked for another half an hour, then went through to the kitchen where she ate the ham rolls and the apple at the big table. The kitchen was a large room, and although it did not have the newest designer cupboards or fittings it was perfectly acceptable. While she ate, she looked through the notes she had made so far, then fetched her Filofax so she could write names of one or two contacts against a couple of the items, for possible consultations. There was a large mahogany dining table that was too big for most people's houses, but might sell as a boardroom table.

It was very quiet, probably because this was the back of the house, although when she went through to the main part of the house, the creaking of the mirror came again from overhead. She would wedge the hinges in place later. For the moment she would finish listing the dining-room furniture in company with a cup of tea. There was tea and dried milk in the cupboards; Benedict would not mind if she took a spoonful of each.

As she filled the kettle, she was glad that she had not fallen into the trap of listening for a knock at the door or the crunch of footsteps or tyres on the drive. Declan, whoever he was, had simply been playing a game that day.
Come on the eighteenth
– for pity's sake, did he think he was a character in a slushy romance or a teen magazine story? Perhaps somebody had told him he had hypnotic eyes, or perhaps there had been some sort of squiffy bet at a Christmas party.

She switched on the kettle and left it to boil while she carried one of the table lamps into the hall, which was in semi-darkness. The shadows were raggedly edged with the deep red of the stained-glass fanlight over the door, but the lamp, plugged in and switched on, chased the shadows back to their corners. She glanced up at the stair, and tilted the lampshade slightly so that it shone up the stairs. That was better. She glanced towards the front door, then opened it and peered out. The gardens were drenched in gloomy January greyness, and it must have rained earlier, because the shrubs were dripping with moisture. But it was a perfectly ordinary, unthreatening garden with an entirely normal London street beyond. Nell closed the door. She would finish in the dining room, then make a start on the upper floors. She was not expecting to find a great deal in them, but the packing cases on the second floor must be gone through thoroughly. Would she find the rest of the chess set in one of them? She had just started to go up the stairs when a whispered voice came out of the darkness on the half-landing above her.

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 . . .

O
v
erstrung, 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.

Very slowly she turned her head to the door that led to the drive and out to the street. Even the light was different. And if she could reach that door and open it, what would she see?

Open it, Nell . . . Take a look at my world . . . Just a glimpse, where it's trickling into your mind from mine
. . .

The final shards of fragmented memory dropped into place and Nell turned to look at the stair. Declan, the man of shadows and mystery, who had somehow compelled her to come here.

He began to move down the stairs and, as he reached the lower stairs, he stepped into the edge of the light from the lamp. He drew back at once, putting up a defensive hand, but it was too late. Nell gasped, because his face, oh God,
his face
. . . What had done that to his face?

She managed to scrabble a couple of feet towards the door, because surely if she could open it and call for help, someone would hear her. Someone in that alien street? The street that was filled with the sound of horses' hooves and wooden wheels clattering over cobblestones and people shouting in a form of English that no one in the twenty-first century had heard . . .

But Declan's hands were reaching for her, and his eyes were no longer the piercing blue she remembered; they were black, huge, like the eyes of some monstrous insect . . .