The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (19 page)

When Erin had been a little girl, her outings to the zoo with her father had been some of the happiest times of her childhood. Maybe that was partly why she’d driven straight there today, craving some kind of comforting nostalgia to soothe her after the shock of what had just happened. But it was also a deliberate strategy. The Tulsa Zoo and Living Museum was one of the most public places she could think of. At this time of year, it was milling with crowds all through the day. Nobody would dare attack her here.

Which gave her about forty-five minutes’ space to think before closing time. The late afternoon was still sunny and warm. She stood at the rail of the elephants’ enclosure. She liked elephants, always had. They looked wise and kindly and infinitely patient, like benevolent old uncles shuffling unhurriedly about in baggy grey boiler suits. She felt sorry that they were in captivity, but it was a lot safer for them here than in their own country. Nobody would butcher them and rip out their ivory and leave their ravaged bodies to rot in the sun. They’d escaped all that. They were protected.

Suddenly, she envied them.

She felt a lot less protected right now than the elephants were. Where would
she
be safe from the predators out to get her?

There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the thug she’d shot in her house earlier that day had been sent by Finn McCrory. But how could she ever hope to prove that? Should she have tried to get him to talk? Leaned a knee into his injured leg and stuck her pistol in his face to torture and scare the truth out of him? Or maybe she should have stayed put and dialled 911? All she’d been able to think of was getting away. Maybe that had been a mistake.

But then Erin thought about the man sitting outside the house in the unfamiliar blue Taurus. Maybe getting away hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

The question now was what the hell to do next.

Erin took her new phone from her purse, along with the card with Chief O’Rourke’s number on it. She stabbed the number out quickly.

‘Chief O’Rourke?’ she said when his gravelly voice came on the line. ‘It’s Erin Hayes. You said to call if I had to. Well, I had to. Something happened.’ He listened as she breathlessly explained the incident at her house. She told him about the syringe. About the gunshot. Even about the man outside in the blue Ford. ‘I don’t think he saw me. I don’t know if he was involved too. I just know they’re after me and—’

‘Try to stay calm, Miss Hayes,’ O’Rourke said. ‘Where are you right now?’

‘City zoo. But I can’t stay here long. It closes in a few minutes.’

‘I know. Don’t worry, you’re perfectly safe where you are. A patrol car will be right there, okay? Meet the officers at the main gate, by the parking lot. They’ll escort you here.’

‘Please tell them to hurry.’ She thanked him and ended the call.

Erin had started making her way through the crowds towards the main gate when she got that uneasy sixth-sense feeling that someone was watching her. It was an animal instinct. Almost a physical sensation, making her skin crawl and go cold.

She turned in the direction the feeling seemed to be emanating from. There were only crowds. Some kids were laughing. A little girl had ice cream on her face. A seal was honking and splashing about in the background.

Erin walked on. The announcement came over the outdoor public address system to say the zoo would be closing in fifteen minutes. She looked at her watch and walked faster, praying that the patrol car would be at the main gate waiting for her.

But when she got there, there was no sign of the cops. What was keeping them?

There was that feeling again. Erin spun around, and as she did she thought she saw a figure of a man slipping quickly into the crowd. There’d been something furtive about his movement, as if he was ducking out of her line of sight. She was certain he was following her. How long had he been there, furtive, watching? Since she’d got here? Maybe even before that? Who was he? He’d been too quick for her to get a glimpse of his face, but she’d got a look at what he was wearing: a check shirt loose over a red T-shirt.

Another uncomfortable chill came over her, despite the heat. She looked at her watch again. Peered anxiously through the main gate, up and down the road. No police car.
Come on. Come on.

She walked through the gate towards the parking lot. The visitors were beginning to leave. In a few more minutes the zoo would be empty. And if the cops didn’t show up in time, she’d be left alone with whoever was following her. She wasn’t imagining things. There really was someone trailing her. Maybe the man in the blue Ford had followed her here. Maybe he’d called in another accomplice. The moment she was alone, they’d strike. It would be as if she’d never escaped at all. It would be all for nothing. They’d take her.

Another long minute passed while all those thoughts were spinning around like pinballs inside her head. Erin stood at the mouth of the entrance, not knowing what to do as people filtered by her, heading for their vehicles. Engines were starting, cars pulling out of parking spaces and filing out the road. Still no sign of the police.

She glanced behind her. Thirty yards back, the man in the loose check shirt ducked out of sight around the corner of a wall. She only caught a fleeting glimpse, but there was no mistaking his intention.

Think, Erin.
She was shaking. What was she supposed to do, pull out her pistol and start shooting and cause a mass panic and hope she wasn’t getting it all wrong? Or wait for him to make his move? What if he got the better of her? She’d been lucky first time round, and couldn’t take that chance again. Couldn’t rely on the cops, either. They could still be miles away. There was only one thing for it. Staying here wasn’t an option. She’d have to drive to the police headquarters herself.

Her mind made up, Erin joined the flow of the crowd and walked quickly towards her parked Honda. Glanced back twice, three times and couldn’t see the man but could still feel his eyes on her like a touch. She reached the car. Breathing hard, she locked herself inside, started it up and backed out of her parking space, then turned round and filtered into the procession of traffic leaving the zoo.

She drove past the airport, heading south along the broad highway into the city. After five minutes she checked in her mirror, saw the silver Lincoln behind her and swallowed. She was certain it had followed her from the zoo. She couldn’t take her eyes off the road long enough to get a good look in the mirror, but there seemed to be just a single occupant inside, a man. She could just about make out the red of his T-shirt through the sun’s reflection on his windscreen. Her heart began to thump harder. She turned off at the next junction and took a right towards the Cherokee Expressway, testing to see if he’d stay with her. He did. She took a sudden left turn without signalling, heading due south again down Harvard Avenue. The silver Lincoln was still there in the mirror. If there’d been a shred of doubt in her mind, it was gone now.

She could feel the reassuring hard steel angles of the Springfield in her pocket, pressing into her hip as she drove.
Don’t panic
, she thought.
You have a gun. You’ve made it this far. You’re not defenceless.

So why didn’t she feel so sure?

With one eye on the entrance of the City Hall building across the street and the other on the volume of Elizabeth Stamford’s journal resting on the Patriot’s steering wheel, Ben lit a cigarette, slouched back in his seat and read through a series of entries from the summer of 1847.

He was frustrated and worried about losing sight of what he was even looking for in these journals. He was annoyed that Brennan couldn’t just have told him what was so revealing about them. There’d been no more mention of the mysterious Padraig McCrory. No clues offered as to what Kristen had been hunting for.

And yet, as he kept reading, he couldn’t help but become drawn into the story that had unfolded all those years earlier.

… Having learned from that villain Burrows that a number of the starving tenants on the estate were attempting to feed themselves by shooting one or two rabbit and grouse, my dear husband has forbidden the use or ownership of private arms. I did what I could to impress upon him that by such action he effectively condemns yet more Irish people to the same lingering death that now afflicts every morbid corner of this land. To no avail; his word is final. ‘I will not allow these peasants to roam at will over the countryside with loaded weapons,’ said he. ‘Today it is a rabbit they will shoot. Tomorrow a gentleman, for the pennies in his purse or the meat on his table. We shall not permit anarchy, and there’s an end to it. Nor shall I allow you to meddle in the affairs of the estate.’

Yet meddle I shall, for I cannot simply stand by and do nothing.

… This morning I rode across the blighted fields to the cottages of our three nearest peasant neighbours, the Callaghans, McCormicks and Driscolls. To the Callaghans I gave a share of what little money I have been able to collect and keep hidden, ever fearing that Edgar might find it and discover that I have been secretly selling pieces of the jewellery he gave me. I then crossed the hill to the cottage of the McCormick family, to give them their share of the same in the hope that they might make use of it to provide for themselves. When I entered the cottage, stretched in one corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and the rags that covered them, were the three children huddled together, pale and shrivelled. They turned their sunken eyes upon me as I entered, but were too weak from hunger to rise. In another corner, prostrated on a bed of sodden straw, sat a poor creature, barely human in her squalor and evidently close to death. In a piteous croak, the old woman implored me to give her something to eat, but all I could give was the small sum of money I could spare.

Unable to bear the sight any longer, I hurried onwards towards the Driscolls’ thatched hut beyond the wood, to find there a spectacle even more ghastly: the hut in ruins, reduced to burnt wreckage on the blackened ground. This I knew was the work of the house tumblers, unspeakable rogues employed by my own husband to force eviction upon their very countrymen. The family were gone, dead perhaps, buried in the pits now that the carpenters have no more wood for coffins, or else sent to the workhouse. I reined my horse around and wept for bitter shame as I returned to Glenfell House. I am weeping still.

… Yesterday I was attending to my stable when I came upon little Moira O’Brien, one of the servant girls, sobbing forlornly in the hay barn. ‘What sorrows you, my dear?’ I asked her, giving her a handkerchief. ‘Pray dry your tears and confide in me.’ Barely able to speak at first for her grief, she then related a tale so extremely distressing that I have not been able to shake it from my mind. I did not sleep for a single minute last night and my hand trembles as I force myself to write these words:

It is dreadful. Two of Moira’s cousins, Sean and Liam McGrath, and seven other young men of the county are sentenced to death for the crime of armed robbery after gathering up arms and attempting to raid a convoy of food and livestock bound for Wicklow Port. What manner of desperation could have prompted such a foolhardy course? Everyone has seen the long columns of redcoats marching side by side with the wagons, muskets aloft and gleaming in the sun. Yet in their unthinking folly, Sean and Liam and their friends attacked from the wooded high ground as the convoy passed along a narrow road outside Loughrea. It is said the clamour of gunfire and the great clouds of powder smoke could be discerned for miles. How could nine inexperienced farmers have expected to succeed against English soldiers, to say nothing of escaping alive with enough food to feed their hungry families?

Three of their band were killed outright in the battle, if a battle it can be called. Michael Murphy received a musket ball in his right arm, shattering the bone so horribly that it was caused to be removed at the shoulder. The rest were quickly rounded up and are now in the gaol awaiting execution. Their poor heartbroken families have petitioned for clemency, begging for the sentence to be commuted. Even deportation to the penal colonies of New South Wales must be better than hanging.

‘I shall do no such thing,’ Edgar remonstrated with me when I pleaded,
pleaded
with him this morning to use his influence in the matter. ‘These men deserve no less than the full punishment of the law; they shall have it next Thursday at dawn. I will be there in person to watch them drop, and to the Devil with them.’

Nice guy, Ben thought. He broke away from his reading for a moment to gaze across at the entrance of Tulsa City Hall. There had been no movement in or out of the place for the last several minutes. Mayor Finn McCrory was definitely working late today. This might be a long wait. That was okay with him.

Ben turned his attention back to the journal and scanned through the pages of angry indignation Elizabeth had poured out over the hanging of the Irish raiding party’s six surviving members, including Michael, the amputee, who’d been dying of his infected wound anyway when they’d dragged him from the prison hospital to the gallows. Ben understood Elizabeth’s sense of outrage, and he understood Sean and Liam, too. If he’d been around at the time, he’d probably have joined the raiders himself. They might not have fared any better, but at least they’d have taken a few redcoats with them.

The hanging had come and gone. There had been no surprises, no reprieves. It was sad. It was one of those tragic and unjust things nobody could have prevented.

Ben flipped more pages and went on reading. Then he stopped. Blinked. Looked again. ‘What the …?’ he muttered aloud.

Explosive revelations
, Brennan had said.
The deepest, darkest of secrets, ones that have lain dormant for over a hundred and fifty years.

And suddenly Ben was thinking he’d found one of them.

He read the journal entry through to the end, staring at Elizabeth Stamford’s faded handwriting so hard he could feel the blood rushing in his ears. Then, just to make sure he hadn’t dreamed it, he went back and read the same passage again:

August 19th, 1847

I have made a discovery that shakes me to the core. I am at a complete loss as to what to think, or what to do with such knowledge. Oh, Stephen, where are you when I am in such need of a friend to confide in? I am alone and can do nothing but record upon these pages the turmoil of my mind.

I have often wondered what goes on behind the locked door of my husband’s laboratory in the east wing. He will let no servant enter, nor have I ever been permitted to see inside. He habitually spends many hours shut in that room, refusing to speak afterwards of his work, on the grounds that his botanical and chemical researches lie so far beyond the limits of his wife’s mental powers that to discuss them would be futile.

Inquisitiveness has not seldom driven me to venture to the laboratory door when he is inside, keeping silent as a mouse lest he detect my footstep and wondering at the peculiar odours that emanate from behind it. I have sometimes tried to peek through the keyhole, but could see only the opposite bare wall.

The only human being Edgar will allow into the laboratory is his Royal Society colleague Heneage Fitzwilliam, whose visits to Glenfell have long been a frequent … I shall not say ‘pleasure’, for although the respectable gentleman’s scientific eminence is without question, I have always found his manner somewhat odd. For days on end, many times repeated, have they closeted themselves inside the room, speaking in low tones as if conferring on matters of a highly secretive nature.

Now I come to my discovery. I shall not dwell on how the key fell into my hands today, or how I discovered where my husband keeps it hidden inside the cigar box on his desk. Seizing the opportunity while he is away on some business (whose nature he did not choose to reveal to me), I retrieved the key and ran to the laboratory, all sense of guilt quite overcome by curiosity.

The laboratory is a smaller room than I had expected it to be, yet containing such an amazing variety of instruments and other scientific objects whose names and purposes I cannot guess at, except to say they are connected with Edgar’s botanical investigations. On a long table, covered with papers and books, I came across a heavy ledger filled with entries and notes in my husband’s careful hand. I could make little sense of them, but they appeared to comprise an extensive record of experimental results, dating from the year forty-five to the present. In another book I came upon many drawings of plants similarly dated. Upon a wooden rack sit rows of jars filled with preserved plant specimens, which have been labelled in order and range from those apparently plucked in a state of perfect health, to others bearing signs of disease. The more recent the date, the more withered and ill-looking the plant, as though marking a progression.

Little do I know of botany – but to have lived here in Ireland for any length of time is to know and recognise these specimens as coming from the common potato plant that we see – used to see – growing everywhere around. What can Edgar and his colleague have been doing with them? I asked myself over and over, and could come to no answer until I discovered the box.

It is a plain wooden item, the size of a lady’s sewing box, with a lid that hinges open to reveal the red velvet of its lining. Protected inside, I found a row of small glass tubes – I imagine one could call them phials – each stoppered with a tiny bung and containing some manner of thick brown fluid that resembles … well, I will not say what it resembles. I tentatively uncorked one of them and held its opening to my nose, only to recoil in disgust at its odour before quickly replacing the bung. The phial, like the rest, bears a label in Edgar’s hand with the name ‘Phytophthora infestans’.

Following my discovery, my mind awhirl as to what it could all signify, I replaced the items as I had found them and fled the laboratory, locking the door. Hastening directly to Edgar’s study I returned the key to its hiding place, then perused his bookcase and brought down a Dictionary of Ancient Greek. My knowledge of such things being severely limited by the meagre education reserved for my sex, I spent some time looking up the words I had seen on the labelled phials of noxious fluid. From this investigation I quickly learned that the stem ‘phyto’ refers generally to the plant kingdom, and that ‘phthora’ is the old Greek term meaning destruction, corruption and ruin. ‘Infestans’ I did not need to be told must describe an infestation, an infection or blight.

A blight, intended to destroy plants? Is this what my husband and his scientific colleague have been working on all this time? The foul substance; the potato plant samples in their varying states of corruption; the profuse notes of all their experiments; the conclusions are too unthinkable to contemplate.

Unthinkable, and yet inescapable. I am not a person of any great scientific understanding but it is clear to me that the goal of Edgar’s researches has been the deliberate creation of as severe a withering and devastation of the potato crop as modern science could contrive. God help us. It is more than I can bear. Can my husband truly be responsible for the starvation that afflicts Ireland?

Completely stunned, Ben closed the journal. The enormity of what he’d just read was so overwhelming that he struggled to take it in.

After the initial shock, things that Gray Brennan had said back in Madeira began to fly into his mind. He remembered the historian telling him about the French scientist Edgar Stamford had studied with after leaving Cambridge, and then gone back to visit twice during the mid-1840s. What had been his name? Ben racked his memory for a few moments before he recalled it.
Montagne. French for mountain.

He took out his phone and went online to look the guy up. Montagne had served as a surgeon in the French army before turning to botany. He’d later become one of the first scientists to study and describe the highly infectious plant disease known as
Phytophthora infestans
.

And Stamford had left the comforts of his estate to travel all the way to Paris, not once but twice, just to study with this guy. Working on what? The causes of a lethal blight that could wipe out a whole crop and plunge an entire country into starvation? If these nineteenth-century scientists could figure out how the disease worked, then was it possible they could invert the formula and figure out how to cause it, too?

Gray Brennan’s voice echoed again in Ben’s mind.
It wasn’t a famine. It was a starvation.

But it was one thing to talk about simply taking advantage of a chance natural disaster. One thing to bemoan the cruel neglect the English rulers had inflicted on the starving Irish, taking the food from under their noses as they died in the ditches.

This was different. It went further than Ben could have imagined.

One of the worst acts of genocide you never heard of.

Now Ben understood.

This was it.

This was the journal’s secret.

He put the phone away and stared into space, still reeling from what he’d just read. Forget explosive. It was a hundred-megaton warhead.