The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (9 page)

Ben’s first glimpse of the derelict mansion was the craggy remnants of its east wing that appeared over the brow of the hill as he approached along the lonely country road. The mid-afternoon sun was bright and hot now that the rain had passed over, and he drove fast with the windows open, catching the scent of heather and the distant salt tang of the sea. As the car sped over the top of the hill and began the winding descent towards Glenfell House, the full extent of the place’s ruined state came into view.

He had driven by this lonely spot once or twice before, during the time he’d lived in Ireland. And he’d heard the age-old legends from the leathery, salty grey-bearded old men who hunched over whiskies and pints of the black stuff in the back rooms of pubs, fixing their glittering eye like Coleridge’s ancient mariner on anyone who’d listen, and not leaving much choice to those who wouldn’t.

From one generation to the next, nobody had ever known for sure who’d really started the fire of September 1851 that had gutted the west wing and brought down part of the roof: the most enduring tale was that it had been Lord Edgar Stamford himself, gone mad and intent on burning the place to the ground and himself with it.

If that was true, then the suicidal part of his plan had succeeded, even if Stamford hadn’t been much of an arsonist and the fire had burnt itself out before it could claim the whole house. According to the more colourful legends, all that had remained of the burly six-foot-six hulk of the much-disliked lord was a half-roasted corpse identifiable only by the gold family ring on one blackened, claw-like hand and the engraved pocket watch they’d found in a charred waistcoat pocket. So the story went, the reason that nothing had ever been done to save the gutted mansion from falling into total ruin was the legacy of its association with Stamford’s harsh and despotic rule over the peasant tenants who’d worked his land, and died on it like flies during the Great Famine of ’47. Memories like that would take another five hundred years to die.

Glenfell House itself was dying much faster, as Ben was reminded when he rolled the BMW up outside and got out to wander about the grounds. Over a hundred and sixty years of decay had reduced the place to a melancholy shell. It was common knowledge locally that much of its crumbling stonework and more than a few roofing slates had found their way into the construction of a good many of the county’s farmhouses, cottages and outbuildings during the twentieth century. The endlessly cycling seasons had done the rest. Autumn and spring rains had rotted the timbers to black stumps, winter frosts had driven deep cracks into the stone floors, from which the summer sun had coaxed thick growths of nettles and brambles that encircled the ruins like barbed wire. They hadn’t kept everyone out, though, judging by the empty spirits bottles and beer cans rolling in the dirt and the remnants of a fire. What the roofless mansion lacked in shelter for the vagrants who loitered here, it made up for in privacy. Nobody else ever came near the place any more.

Ben wandered about the desolate site for a few more minutes, kicking a can around in the dust and thinking about Kristen’s notebook in his pocket. Then he walked back to the car, fired up the engine and spun it around in the opposite direction, heading for the small market town of Glenfell, two miles west.

Back in the heyday of Lord Stamford’s little empire, the town had been surrounded by a plethora of even tinier hamlets and primitive rack-rent smallholdings, now mostly swallowed up by its expanding outskirts. To say it had been a poor area back then was no understatement. Among its older greystone buildings was the former workhouse, where during the famine years forty or more orphaned children a week died from malnutrition or disease, the living and the dead often hard to tell apart and lying together in the same beds for days at a time. Ben had heard all the stories, unforgotten scars on the history of this and so many other towns and villages across Ireland.

As if to symbolise happier times, the grim old stone workhouse had long ago been turned into a thriving country store where farmers’ pickup trucks came and went, and its yard was now a car park where Ben left the BMW as he went off in search of St Malachy’s church. On his way there, he passed the town’s famine memorial, a marble slab that had been erected nearly a hundred and twenty years after the tragedy it commemorated. Ben paused to gaze at it, then walked on.

It was just after five as he entered the coolness of the church. It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t especially pretty either, but there was a still, echoey serenity to the place that Ben found familiar and comforting. He tried to remember the last time he’d been inside a church, and realised how long it had been: a painful little reminder of how lapsed a Christian he was. But he could at least console himself, from a glance at the empty pews, that he wasn’t the only one around here who’d been neglecting God.

The sound of his footsteps drifted up to the high ceiling as he paced slowly around, pausing for a moment to look at the plaque on one wall dedicated to the 8,348 men, women and children whose skeletons had been unearthed from the mass famine grave discovered outside Glenfell in 1922.

Walking away from the plaque, he went over to sit in a pew facing the altar, bowed his head and tried to summon up devout thoughts. None in particular came to him, so he just said the words that were in his heart.

‘Here we go again, Lord. It’s been a while, I realise that. I don’t try and talk to you as often as I should. Maybe that’s why you keep putting trouble in my path, when all I ever wanted was a life of peace. I don’t know why else you would. I only know I didn’t ask for this. So please don’t judge me for the things I have to do, and please give me the strength I need to do them well. That’s all I can ask of you now.’

He broke off as he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, and glanced round to see the priest walking in. He was old and stooped, with a kindly smile appearing as he saw Ben sitting there. As if not wanting to disturb one of the faithful at their prayer, he began to turn away.

‘Father Flanagan?’ Ben said, getting up.

The old priest paused in his step and looked at Ben, still smiling. ‘I’m Father Flanagan. I didn’t wish to interrupt you. That sounded like a very heartfelt prayer.’

‘I’ve been saying it a long time,’ Ben said. ‘I sometimes don’t think he listens.’

‘He always listens,’ the priest said, putting his hand on Ben’s arm.

‘In any case, it’s you I came to talk to,’ Ben said. ‘If you have a moment.’

‘Of course. How may I help you?’

Ben couldn’t bring himself to give a false name this time, but his piety didn’t extend to telling the whole truth, or much of it at all. He told the priest that he worked for a research foundation that was doing a project on the history of the Great Famine, and was taking over from his colleague who’d suddenly been taken ill.

‘She was here a few days ago and I’m trying to pick up the pieces. I think you saw her, spoke to her?’

The priest took in Ben’s description of Kristen, and nodded. ‘Yes, she was asking to see the old parish registers. Struck me as a very meticulous young lady. Asked me if the records were accurate. I replied, as far as I know they are. Why shouldn’t they be? But, oh dear, did you say she’d fallen ill? Nothing too serious, I hope.’

‘Pretty serious, I’m afraid,’ Ben said.

‘What a pity. What a terrible pity. Such a sweet child. So what is it I can do for you, Mr … Hope, was it?’

‘If it’s not imposing, father, perhaps if I could view the same records she did, it might help me make sense of her notes. I’d ask her myself, but …’

‘I understand, of course. Dear me, what a shame. Imposition? Not at all, not at all. Come with me, my son.’

Leading him around a crunchy gravel path to the back of the church, Father Flanagan took a large iron key from his pocket, unlocked a peeling old door and showed Ben into an office that was like taking a step back into history. The place looked as if it had been gathering dust since about 1750, and it probably had. A powerful odour of damp hung in the air.

‘This is where all the old records are still kept,’ the priest said with a regretful look, waving an arm at stacks of ancient, yellowed registers on sagging shelves. ‘Births, deaths, marriages, even emigration records dating back to the century before last. Nowadays a lot of parish records are going online, but I’m afraid that’ll be my successor’s job. I’m not one for all this new technology. Don’t even have a television, can you believe that?’ He gave a sad, wizened smile, then seemed to catch his mind wandering and snapped himself back to the present. ‘Now then, the records. I can barely remember the last time anybody wanted to look at them. Now I get two come along in a week. Such are the mysteries of life. What was it you were after?’

‘The information my colleague left me was pretty incomplete,’ Ben said. ‘She was interested in the life history of a particular member of the parish here.’

‘I do remember her saying so,’ Father Flanagan said, scratching his white head. ‘But sure, for the life of me, I can’t recall the details. What was this person’s year of birth?’

‘1809,’ Ben said.

‘Hmm. That
is
a long way back. If it’s here, you may have to dig for it. What was the name?’

‘Padraig someone,’ Ben said.

Father Flanagan looked at him. ‘That’s all you have, Padraig someone who was born in 1809? My son, have you
any
idea how many Padraigs have lived in this parish over the centuries? You’re talking to one of them.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyhow. All yours, and good luck. Take as long as you need, and bring me back the key when you’re done.’

‘Thanks, father.’

‘Oh, just to make life even more interesting for you, you’ll find some of the records were written in Latin. One day someone will organise it all, but it’ll be a nightmare, God help them.’

Left alone in the cramped office, Ben began searching through the old records. If Kristen had been here just two days ago, he shouldn’t have to dig too deep to find what he was looking for. He ran his eye along the disorganised stacks until he spotted it sitting right at the top of one of the piles: parish birth records from January 1805 to December 1809. Lifting it down, he saw the fingermarks that Kristen had made in the dust, and had to fight back another vision of her lying dead, covered in blood.

Laying the register down on the tiny table in the corner of the office, he flipped pages and more dust clouded the air. The entries were all done in the beautifully calligraphed handwriting of a bygone era. The ink was faded with age and scarcely legible in places, and mouse nibbles and mildew had taken their toll on some of the pages. Towards the back of the register, Ben found the birth records starting January 1809. All he knew about that month in history was that the British had defeated the French at the Battle of Corunna during the Peninsular War. Now he could see that while that had been going on, an awful lot of baby boys named Padraig were being born here in Glenfell and the surrounding villages. As he tracked on through the following months, flipping more pages and peering through the dust clouds at the ancient writing, he quickly lost count and realised Father Flanagan had been right. There were hundreds of Padraigs. Without a surname, he might as well give up.

Soon afterwards, he did.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ the priest asked when Ben found him in the church and gave him back the old key.

‘I might have, if I knew what it was.’

‘If it’s the famine period you’re interested in, you should visit the museum.’

‘Museum?’

‘Oh, it’s not exactly on a grand scale. But the impact of the Great Hunger upon this and every other rural community of Ireland cannot be overstated.’

‘I’ll do that. Thanks again for your help.’ Ben shook his hand. He felt real warmth towards the old man.

‘I hope your friend gets better,’ Father Flanagan called after him as he walked away.

‘That’ll take more than a prayer, father,’ Ben replied, but not loudly enough for the priest to hear him.

With no more clues to play with than he’d had when he arrived in Glenfell, Ben stepped inside the Famine Museum. It was as empty as the church, just one room that might have been a village post office or shop at one time. Exhibits and glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls.

Ben walked slowly around the room, pausing now and then to gaze and read. In one display unit, preserved in jars of clear fluid, sat a dismal assortment of rotted, lumpy-looking potatoes: victims of the
Phytophthora infestans
outbreak that had destroyed the food supply of millions of rural Irish and swept death and starvation wholesale across the country. As he walked on, he came to a gallery section featuring contemporary ink drawings and sketches of starving peasants mourning their lost loved ones. The sense of their misery was palpable, and even more so in a collection of early sepia-toned photographs depicting huddled, ragged people, of a level of poverty inconceivable to the modern western mind, sitting outside their tumbledown homes with the blighted fields in the background. Ben looked at their hollow faces and ghastly sunken eyes, and wondered how so many of these folks had ended up stacked like sandbags on the death carts that had routinely patrolled Ireland’s roads during that dark era.

A slightly more recent and less grainy black-and-white photo hung, framed, nearby. It showed the grisly scene of the 1922 unearthing of the huge mass grave that was referred to on the memorial plaque in the church. Work-hardened, wiry men in flat caps and shirtsleeves leaned on their shovels to pose grimly inside the vast hole they’d dug out, while a solemn crowd of spectators clustered around the edge. The sombre picture was accompanied by various smaller close-up photographs of their discovery, the most poignant of which showed a child’s skeleton, pathetically twisted as if it had died in agony.

In a little caption beneath the photographs, Ben read that the Glenfell mass grave had been just one of hundreds discovered across Ireland, together containing as many as 1.9 million bodies of the famine’s victims. One famine grave at Skibbereen in west Cork alone had yielded up some 12,000 heaped corpses. Kristen hadn’t exaggerated the numbers. And for all anybody knew, beneath the lush green land of southern Ireland were many more of the same forlorn caches waiting to be unearthed over the decades and centuries to come.

A display cabinet nearby showed another angle to those miserable years of starvation. In starchy, officious tones, a landlord’s eviction notice informed some poor tenant farmer that he and his family were about to be turfed out into the arctic winter of 1847 for non-payment of rent: effectively a death sentence for poor souls already clinging desperately to what little life was left in them. Ben shook his head and felt angry for their plight.

On another stand were displayed a set of primitive, almost medieval hand tools once belonging to an Irish peasant labourer of the mid-nineteenth century. Ben noticed how the wooden shafts had been worn thin by his hands. Wondering at the thought of the sweat and blood that must have seeped into the wood, he walked on to gaze at a scale model of one of the American sailing ships that had carried the thousands of refugees west from Ireland to the New World during the 1840s and the decades that followed. They’d been the lucky ones.

Less lucky, according to the blurb next to the model vessel, had been the Irish voyagers crammed below decks on board the British ‘coffin ships’, where conditions were brutally squalid, disease was rife and murder and rape were common occurrences. The only consolation for the many who died on the Atlantic crossing was that it was a slightly better death than they’d have faced back home.

As Father Flanagan had said, the museum was hardly on a grand scale, but it was effective at painting a deeply compelling picture of misery. Ben left the place feeling low with an indelible impression of the terrible suffering of all those starving millions of people. At the same time, he was racking his brains to understand what it could have been that Kristen had found in the course of her research, and what she’d been looking for in the records at St Malachy’s church.

He walked as he thought, wandering down the winding main street of the little market town. He didn’t know where he was heading or what he was looking for, other than illumination.

Then he stopped. Turned and did a double take. Retraced his steps a few yards back to the shop window he’d just passed. The sign above the door was old and chipped and said ‘Murphy’s Surplus’. In the window, behind a taped-on cardboard notice that read ‘OPEN LAITE’, was an untidy heap of pre-used army rucksacks and haversacks, everything from modern British army bergens to ancient American and West German issue kit from the fifties and sixties.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Ben muttered aloud. Right in the middle of the window was a bag exactly like the one he’d carried with him for many years on adventures all over the world and finally lost, not so long ago, in a tsunami in Indonesia. It had been nasty and tatty, much repaired with coarse green thread, but he’d been attached to it and missed it.

He walked straight into the shop and smelled that old familiar smell of musty canvas, wax oil and slightly rancid ex-issue high-leg boots. Everything from folding shovels to tent poles to plastic imitation assault rifles dangled from the walls.

‘Closing up,’ grumbled the old guy behind the counter, who Ben presumed was Murphy. The bulldoggish look in his eye vanished as Ben fanned out a couple of twenty-euro notes in front of him.

‘Let me take a look at that bag.’

On closer inspection, the bag had certainly seen a lot of action. And it was going to see some more before Ben was done with it. He let Murphy hang on to his forty euros and walked out of the shop feeling strangely more complete with his new acquisition over his shoulder. It was well after six now, and he was thirsty from the heat. A few doors down from the army store, a pub was gradually filling up with customers.

At the bar, Ben ran his eye along the row of upside-down bottles of Irish whisky, then along the line of beer taps.

‘What’ll it be?’ the barman asked with a welcoming smile.

‘Mineral water,’ Ben said with an effort.

The barman looked disappointed. ‘You want ice or lemon in that?’

‘Just as it comes.’

He carried his drink outside into the beer garden, laid his new green bag on a vacant slatted wooden table and sat on the weathered bench next to it to take in the last of the evening sun and think about what his next move should be. He was running out of options, and it wasn’t a good feeling.

As he sat slowly sipping the water and containing his frustration, an argument brewing at another table across the beer garden kept breaking into his thoughts. He glanced across. It was a typical enough scenario. Two guys in their twenties were sitting with a couple of girls, and judging by the number of empty pint glasses on the table they’d been there for a while. One of the guys, a big steamed-up oaf with the neck and shoulders of an Angus bull, was doing all the loud talking. Whatever he was ranting about at the skinny blonde across the table from him, it was enough to make her shrink timidly away from him.

This was exactly the kind of bully boy Ben most disliked.
Leave it alone
, he thought, and turning back to his own business, he took out Kristen’s phones. From the prepaid Samsung he redialled the London number on which he’d got no reply earlier. This time, after six rings, a man’s voice answered: ‘Chris Ingram.’

Ben turned his back slightly to the other tables, so as not to be overheard. ‘Mr Ingram, I’m calling on behalf of Kristen Hall.’

The voice on the line sounded taken aback and suspicious. ‘Uhhh … okay … what’s it about?’

‘You do know Kristen?’ Ben asked him.

‘Uhhh, yes. Yes, I know Kristen. Excuse me, who’s—?’

‘My name’s Jarrett. Don Jarrett. I was a friend of Kristen’s.’

‘How’d you mean
was
?’

‘She’s dead,’ Ben said, and sensed the man’s shock. ‘Don’t hang up. This is not a prank call. Kristen was murdered yesterday in Galway. You mustn’t have been watching the news, Chris. Go and see for yourself online.’

Ingram’s reaction was enough to convince Ben that he was genuinely horrified by the news. ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe it. I was talking to her just—’

‘Just two days before, I know. What were you talking to her about?’

‘Who did you say you were? Are you the police?’

‘I’m just someone who cares what happened to her, Chris. And I care what happens to you, too, so don’t hang up. You could be in danger, too.’

‘What danger?’ Ingram said, sounding alarmed.

‘You and she talked twice on the phone the same day. She called you at 3.12 p.m., and you phoned back just over two hours later. You spoke for less than a minute, but I need to know what it was about. Talk to me, Chris. It could save your life.’

‘She called me for information,’ Ingram blurted out. His tone of alarm had turned to real fear now. ‘I called her back to pass it on. I do … did … that for her sometimes. When she was researching stuff. That was all it was, I swear.’

‘So you’re in the information business?’ Ben said. ‘What kind of information?’

‘She needed a number, that’s all.’

‘What number?’

‘A mobile number.’

‘In the US?’

‘Yeah. Tulsa, Oklahoma.’

‘You’re doing well, Chris. Keep talking. Whose number?’

‘I can’t really divulge—’

‘It’s an easy question,’ Ben said. ‘Whose number?’

Ingram hesitated, then reluctantly said, ‘Finn McCrory.’

‘Who’s Finn McCrory?’

‘The mayor of Tulsa.’

The mayor of Tulsa again, Ben thought. ‘She paid you to get his number? How much?’

‘A grand,’ Ingram said after another hesitation. ‘I had to pull a couple of strings to get it. That puts the price up.’

‘You’re obviously an expert,’ Ben said. ‘Now tell me, Chris, why someone like Kristen Hall would pay someone like you a thousand quid for the personal mobile number of the mayor of Tulsa. Whatever she wanted with him, it must have been pretty important.’

‘Look, she didn’t say, all right? She never tells … never
told
me her reasons. No questions. That was our business relationship.’ Ingram was breathing nervously. ‘Jesus. Listen, I’ve said far too much already. I’ve got nothing more to say. I’m sorry about Kristen. She was a good client. Goodbye. Please don’t call this number again.’

The moment Ingram hung up, Ben checked the phone’s call history again and looked at the mobile number to which Kristen had made that final thirteen-minute call at 5.22 p.m. two days before her death. Oklahoma time was six hours behind. If Ingram was to be believed – and in Ben’s experience, very frightened and shocked people more often than not told the truth – then Kristen’s conversation that day had been with this McCrory.

Thirteen minutes?

You’re Finn McCrory, the mayor of an important city. A busy man with a lot on his plate. Late one morning out of the blue, this British journalist calls you on your personal number. Why don’t you tell her to take a hike and hang up, like any other high-ranking official would without a second thought? What’ve you got to talk about with this total stranger from another country that would keep you on the line for nearly quarter of an hour?

Wheels ground against wheels in Ben’s mind. Stamford. Ireland. McCrory. Tulsa. He searched for a connection. Found none.

That was when his thoughts were interrupted once more by the dispute at the other table. He sighed. Turned slowly round to look. The big bully with the thick neck was even redder in the face and his voice had risen as he ranted on at his shrinking girlfriend. His beefy fists rested like a couple of pineapples on the table. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he was saying. ‘Stupid useless fucking bitch. Someone needs to slap a bit of sense into you.’ He lifted one balled fist from the table, clumsy from the beer.

Two things happened. First, his girlfriend flinched as if he was going to hit her. Second, with the back of his hand he accidentally swept his half-full pint glass off the table, along with the iPhone that had been lying next to it.

‘Now look what you made me do,’ he said, glaring down at the iPhone in the puddle of spilled beer. ‘Pick that up. It better not be broken.’

‘Pick it up yourself,’ the girl retorted, finally talking back, and Ben thought,
Good for you
.

Bully boy’s face flushed scarlet. He reached a big arm across the table, grabbed a fistful of her hair and twisted it, trying to force her off the bench. ‘I said pick that up!’

The girl was yelping in pain. The other girl at the table started yelling at Bully boy to let her go. Her own boyfriend snapped, ‘Shut your hole.’ Bully boy grinned and twisted the girl’s hair harder.

Ben took a sip of water. Then he quietly put down his glass, stood up and walked over to them.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ he said to Bully boy. He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he raised his right foot and brought it down on the fallen iPhone, dashing it to bits with his heel. Then he twisted his foot from side to side, grinding the remnants of the phone into the spilled beer and broken glass.

‘You can let her go now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to pick up any more.’

Bully boy stared up at Ben, still clutching the girl’s hair. She was whimpering now. ‘What the fuck did you do?’ he growled at Ben.

‘Ended your dispute,’ Ben said, looking steadily back into the big guy’s eyes. ‘So now let her go. You’re hurting her. I’m not going to tell you a third time.’

Other people in the beer garden were beginning to turn and stare. Kristen’s BlackBerry suddenly started ringing on Ben’s table. This wasn’t a good time to take the call.

‘I’ll fucking cripple you, you bastard!’ Bully boy shouted. Enraged, he untangled his beefy fingers from the girl’s hair and hauled himself up to his feet. He was two inches taller than Ben. His friend got up with him. Hostile stares, balled fists. The usual routine. Too much beer, too much confidence.

Bully boy was used to hitting people, Ben could tell. Women, mostly. Then again, Ben had known a few women who could have kicked the guy’s arse so hard he’d be wearing it as a hat. He’d just been lucky this far.