The Sin Eater (17 page)

Or as fragile as the footsteps of creatures who tread with a boneless print and leave no footprints . . .

The words were so distinct that for a moment Nell thought they had been said aloud. But there was no one here. She looked about her. Behind her was the reassuring buzz of traffic and the calls of people setting off for their evening and groups of students heading for the pubs and bars. Ahead of her, in Quire Court, was an older Oxford, and for the first time that older Oxford did not feel reassuring. She shivered, and unlocked the shop.

Once inside, the familiar, reassuring scents of old wood and beeswax closed round her. It's all right, she thought, locking the door. It was probably nothing more sinister than a pair of teenagers using a dark corner of the courtyard for a spot of furtive sex. At the very worst it would have been a couple of burglars plotting a break-in. Nell reminded herself that all the shops, including her own, had efficient and extremely loud alarm systems, and went through to the back room which she used as an office. She would see if there was an email from Beth, then she would photograph the chess piece in order to mail the details to one or two of her contacts.

Beth had sent a happy email, full of all the things she and Ellie Harper had been doing. Nell read it with enjoyment. Liz, Ellie's mother, had emailed as well, saying the girls were having a great time and they were loving having Beth to stay. She also sent a photo of Beth and Ellie in the garden of the Harpers' Maryland home. Beth was wearing a crazy sun hat which Liz must have given her, and she was laughing and squinting slightly against the sun. Her father used to narrow his eyes in exactly the same way. Nell touched the screen with the tip of her finger, as if by doing so she could touch Beth and through her reach Brad, then frowned and dashed off a bright email to Beth and another to Liz Harper.

She crossed to the safe, which stood in a rather dark corner, and unlocked it, swinging back the thick door, then reaching inside, feeling for the chess piece. There was a moment of apprehension because the figure, which she had wrapped in soft cotton waste, did not seem to be there. It must be, though; she remembered locking it away. She was just telling herself there was no need to panic, when, from within the darkness of the safe, a hand – small, dry,
scaly
– closed around hers.

Nell cried out and shot away from the safe, nursing her hand as if she had scalded it, her eyes on the safe. Terror engulfed her in sickening waves. Something had got in there. An animal – maybe a rat. But rats did not clasp your hand in that dreadful human way; rats did not have small rough fingers with nails at the tips that dug into your skin . . .

The safe door was still half open, and she had to break out of this frozen terror and slam it hard, turning the lock before whatever was in there could get out. Then she would get help. But from who? Police? RSPCA? Nell had a wild image of herself saying, ‘Something's hiding in my safe and it's just clutched my hand.'

Whatever was in there was not moving. Dare she switch on the overhead light? No, that might alarm whatever it was. She went nearer, moving slowly, and with a shaking hand, grasped the edge of the door. In doing so, she stepped to one side of the desk lamp, and its light fell across the safe. The only things in there were the wrapped chess figure, exactly as she had left it, a small box containing some Victorian jewellery she had recently bought, and the digital camera, which she usually left there for safety. There was nothing else – absolutely nothing. There was no way a hand could have reached out and taken hers. Except that it had.

She looked round the office. Had it darted out of the safe, and was now skulking in a corner? But she had not taken her eyes from the safe, she knew that.

Her hand felt odd, as if it had been slightly burned, and she held it under the lamp, expecting to see some indication of what had happened – indentations, even, from that dreadfully small hand that might have been a baby's, except that a baby's hand would not feel dry and shrivelled. But her own hand was unmarked. Had she imagined it? Could it have been some kind of nerve spasm? There was something called neuropathy – an elderly aunt of Brad's had had it and Nell thought it gave you quite unpleasant crawling sensations over your skin.

The best thing was to continue as if nothing had happened. She unwrapped the chess piece and set it on a small table, against a plain section of wall. Studying it again, she thought she might have been wrong about the eyes being jet; there was a distinct crimson glow to them. Rubies? Surely not.

She switched on the overhead light. In its glare, the chess piece threw its own shadow on the wall; the shadow was several times larger than the actual piece, and the outlines were sharply defined. Nell moved round the table so as not to pick up the shadow on the photos. She took half a dozen shots, some of them close-ups of the details, some using the flash. The chess piece's eyes glittered – they
were
red. I don't like you, said Nell, pausing for the flash to recharge. I don't know how old you are – you might be anything from a hundred years old to five hundred. I don't care if you're a thousand years old and worth ten thousand pounds, I still don't like you.

She squared the camera's viewfinder again, and as she did so something happened that made her heartbeat skip with fear. The shadow had moved. Nell took a step back, still holding the camera. The shadow could not have moved, of course; it was only that she had moved around to get shots of the details from all angles.

But as she stared at it, the shadow's head began to turn, very slowly. It's turning away from the light, thought Nell, one hand going to her throat in the classic gesture of fear and defence. It doesn't like the light. There was a glint of crimson from the eyes, and then Nell gasped and almost laughed aloud in relief. The shadow had not moved at all; what she had seen was the mirror on the near wall picking up the light when she moved. Your trouble, my girl, said Nell severely, is that you listen too much when Michael starts spinning his romantic tales. She was aware of a sudden longing to hear Michael's voice. Would he have eaten yet? He had tentatively suggested they have a bite to eat somewhere, but she had declined because of wanting an early night. Should she phone him to suggest he came over to share a meal? No, she would not be such a wimp.

She locked everything away, and went across the small walled garden. There was a small annexe at the rear; a previous owner had fitted it out as small, but perfectly adequate living accommodation. Nell would have preferred to live separately from the shop, but although she had sold her Shropshire antique premises quite profitably, property prices in Oxford were terrifyingly high, so for the time being she was compromising.

She was unlocking the annexe door when the sounds she had heard earlier in the court came again. It's nothing, thought Nell. Just the footsteps of someone crossing the court.

But there are footsteps that it's sometimes better not to hear . . .

The whispering faded, but before it did so, the words came again.

The eighteenth . . . Don't forget . . .

Nell half fell into the tiny hall, slamming the door and turning the lock. Imagination, that was all it had been. She drew a shaky breath, switched on the light, and went into the low-ceilinged sitting room. Everywhere felt safe and ordinary, and the rooms which she and Beth had arranged so carefully were welcoming and familiar. Brad's photo regarded her quizzically from its place on the bookshelves and Nell experienced an uncharacteristic spurt of anger towards it. ‘Why aren't you here to stop me being frightened to death by shadows?' she said to his image. ‘If you were here I wouldn't take any notice of peculiar shadows or whispering voices. Or of scaly hands clasping mine . . .' On that thought she went into the kitchen and spent several minutes washing her hands and scrubbing the nails. Then she put some pasta to heat, and poured a glass of wine while it did so.

After food and drink she felt better. There would be a logical explanation for what had happened. Simple tiredness even – it had been quite a long day. The feeling of that sinisterly small hand would be cramp or muscle spasm, and the sounds could have had any number of innocent causes. Sounds travelled in a peculiar way late at night, and the court might be some kind of freak echo chamber.

The eighteenth
. . . The words whispered through her mind again.

I won't go, of course, thought Nell. I will have to go back to Holly Lodge and I'll have to do that fairly soon, but I'm blowed if I'll go on that particular day.

But she knew she would.

B
enedict knew that when Michael Flint had made that offer of help, he had not meant with the criminology essay. He knew Dr Flint had somehow sensed Declan's presence.

Of course he didn't. Don't be stupid, Benedict.

‘I'm not,' said Benedict. ‘But I'm not listening to you any longer. You don't exist.'

Don't I? Can you be sure? Can you be sure you know the truth about me?

‘What is the truth?' said Benedict, softly.

Ah, truth. “What is truth, asked Jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” Francis Bacon said that. I could probably quote the whole section if you wanted to hear it. You wouldn't have me marked as a scholar, would you, but we had to learn a fair amount of the classics when I was a boy. The monks taught us – they thought it prepared us for the big bad world, although I'd have to say they'd have done better to give us a few clues about how to deal with the temptations lying in wait for the innocent.

Benedict said impatiently, ‘Stop showing off. I know exactly what you're doing – you're rummaging around in my mind as if it's a—'

‘Ragbag?'

‘—and coming up with things I learned or read years ago. Those people – Nicholas Sheehan and all the rest – they aren't real. They never lived. This is all just a projection of some deeply buried guilt I have, which might even explain all that sin-eating stuff . . .' He broke off, frowning, struggling with this new idea, then said, uncertainly, ‘But what am I guilty about?'

It's not your guilt, Benedict. It's mine. Because Nick Sheehan existed and I existed, as well. If you don't believe it, look for my birth certificate. And, of course, my death certificate.

‘That wouldn't prove anything.'

Wouldn't it?
A jab of bitterness and anger pierced Benedict's mind, and the surface of the dressing-table mirror shivered slightly as if water had trickled down over it. Benedict could see his own reflection, but overlaying it was that indistinct figure with its long dark coat, and the familiar way it had of standing a little way off, only partly facing the light.

‘Why won't you ever face me completely?' he said, and with the words felt his mind start to splinter as it had done that day in Holly Lodge. It was as if dazzling spears of light were slicing deep into his brain, tearing open that strange unreal world where his great-grandfather walked. He's doing it again, thought Benedict in panic. He wants me in his own world and he's pulling me into it.

And for the second time it was London that was opening up in his mind. London in the 1890s, with its crowded, noisy, gas-lit streets. London in the days when, according to those old newspaper articles, a murderer had prowled the streets and had slaughtered five people.

The Mesmer Murderer who had never been brought to justice and who had the face of Benedict's alter ego.

Neither Declan nor Colm really wanted to return to Holly Lodge, but, as Colm pointed out over breakfast in their modest lodgings, it was the only way to find Romilly.

‘And didn't we come to London to do just that?' he demanded.

‘Didn't we come to make our own fortunes as well?' countered Declan.

‘We'll do that afterwards,' said Colm.

Holly Lodge, seen by full daylight, was larger than it had seemed the previous day.

‘And a lot more dissolute, wouldn't you say?' asked Colm.

‘Yes, but that's probably because today we know what kind of a house it is. Actually,' said Declan a bit awkwardly, ‘I've never seen a brothel, have you?'

‘You don't get many brothels in Kilderry,' said Colm noncommittally. ‘Will we knock on the door or are we standing here for the rest of the day, debating the sins of London town?'

‘I've had a word with one of the girls,' said Flossie Totteridge, ushering them into the same over-furnished drawing room. In the afternoon sunlight her hair was more insistently red. ‘And it was definitely Canning Town where your cousin went. I told you I thought it was, didn't I? Sit down – oh, not there, those chairs are wretchedly uncomfortable. Belonged to my husband's family, and they had the ugliest taste . . . Anyway, it was Canning Town, for sure.' Mrs Totteridge came to sit by Colm on the horsehair sofa. ‘You wouldn't know Canning Town, being just off the boat,' she said. ‘And it's a bit rough. But there's nothing wrong with the rough, I always say. In the right place.' Declan saw with a mixture of embarrassment and repulsion that her hand came out to lie with intimate suggestion on Colm's thigh. He'll brush it politely off, thought Declan.

But Colm did not. He put his own hand over it, and leaned closer to Flossie. ‘You said we could talk to any of the girls,' he said, in his silkiest voice. ‘Could we do that now? And afterwards I could take that drink with you – the one you mentioned yesterday. I've been thinking about that ever since.'

Mrs Totteridge hunched a shoulder coyly and said, ‘I'd be agreeable. But get the business about your cousin dealt with first. Second floor back and her name's Cerise.'

‘God, is it really?' said Colm, caught off guard.

‘It's her professional name. She does a bit of acting. I don't ask questions.'