Back in the Touareg, he meandered along empty, winding roads thickly overhung by trees and listened to a jazz station that played a lot of Art Blakey and McCoy Tyner until, at last, the day began to cool and evening started to fall. In the purple-blue haze of twilight, Ben was finally able to home in on his target and drive the last of the way to Brennan’s secluded villa.
The place was four kilometres from the nearest village, encircled by a high white stone wall spilling over with foliage. He drove slowly around the perimeter, searching for the way in, until he came to a tall gateway framed by stone pillars.
The gate was closed. As he got out of the car he could see no latch or handle to open it, but there was an intercom box on one of the pillars. He pressed a button and announced his arrival into the metal grid. There was no reply. He was beginning to wonder if the intercom was working when there was a click and the gates whirred open.
Driving into the courtyard in front of the villa, even in the falling light it was plain to see that the place was well beyond the means of the average retired university professor. Evidently, its owner was not only independently wealthy but highly security-conscious, too. As soon as Ben was inside, the gates whirred and clicked shut behind him.
He stepped back out of the VW. The temperature had fallen sharply with the onset of evening. He grabbed his leather jacket from the back seat and slipped it on. Slung his bag over his shoulder and walked towards the house. Within seconds he’d counted four cameras trained on him from their discreet positions among the foliage. The villa was long and low, surrounded by creeping plants and tumbling flowers. To reach it, Ben had to pass a pair of large dog kennels from which two enormous bull mastiffs emerged at his approach, growling and showing their teeth. Ben didn’t make eye contact and walked coolly by them, but he felt acutely defenceless under their hostile gaze and was grateful to reach the front steps of the house without getting mauled.
There was another intercom box by the door, and from it came the same Irish-tinged voice Ben had heard on the phone. ‘The door’s open,’ it said. ‘Come in.’
Ben pushed through the door and found himself in a large hallway with a mosaic stone floor. Long drapes dimmed out the moonlight from the high windows. Off the hallway, a wide corridor, flanked by huge leafy indoor plants and paintings on the walls that could barely be made out in the shadows, led deeper into the house. He followed the dark corridor until he came to a bend and saw a door hanging half-open.
The faint glow of a light shone from inside.
‘In here,’ said the voice he’d heard first on the phone and then just now on the intercom. ‘Close the door behind you, will you?’
Chapter Twenty
Ben entered and clicked the door softly shut. The room was lit only by a single lamp on a large desk to one side. In its glow he could see the tall bookcases that covered three of the walls and the antique furnishings that gave the impression of a gentlemen’s club of yesteryear. In the shadows on the far side of the room, turned away from the door so that its back was to him, was a huge leather wing chair.
‘I see you found the place all right,’ Brennan said from the chair. ‘Glad you could make it.’
‘Thanks for the invitation,’ Ben said.
Brennan gripped the chair’s arms and hoisted himself slowly to his feet. He was still in shadow and Ben could see no more than a silhouette of him. ‘It’s nice to have some company for a change. You see, Mr Hope, it’s not out of choice that I live like a recluse. And I say that quite without wax.’
It took a second for Ben to understand. ‘Sine cera,’ he said. ‘Sincerely.’
‘Please forgive me. Old classicist’s joke,’ Brennan said with a chuckle. ‘So you speak Latin, I gather?’
‘Theology. Long time ago.’
‘An educated man. Whose unquenchable thirst for knowledge now brings him all the way to my humble home. Welcome to Madeira, Mr Hope.’
Brennan took a step into the light, and for the first time Ben saw his face. He was the same man whose photograph was on Trinity College’s website, but then again he wasn’t the same. Ben had seen a lot of mutilation and disfigurement in the years he’d spent fighting wars all over the world. He’d thought he was used to it. But his eyes narrowed involuntarily and he felt his jaw tighten at the sight of what Professor Gray Brennan had become.
‘Please don’t be too alarmed by my appearance,’ the historian said, catching Ben’s expression. ‘It’s been some time since I could bring myself to look into a mirror.’
His face was livid with glistening sores and patches of raw flesh. The tip of his nose was gone, nothing but bubbling exposed meat where it looked as if an animal had bitten it off. The skin around his eyes and over most of his scalp seemed to have atrophied and was tattered and peeling horribly right down to the bone. Ben saw the hand resting on the back of the wing chair. It looked like a bloody claw.
‘Skin cancer,’ Brennan said. ‘That’s the reason I no longer leave this place. Not fit to be seen in public any more, you see. Call me vain. It’s also the reason it took me so long to reply to Miss Hall’s phone message. I have good weeks and bad; when it’s bad I can’t really do anything at all. Luckily for you, this is a good week, but I can’t stand the sunlight. Hence the lateness of the hour, for which I can only apologise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said. ‘Is it treatable?’
‘Not without irradiating me until my bones glow in my grave,’ Brennan chuckled. ‘Either way, you’re looking at a condemned man. So if you’re here to kill me, you’re welcome. Just make it quick and painless, there’s a good fellow.’
‘Why would I be here to kill you?’
Brennan smiled. ‘It just crossed my mind. I imagine you probably could, though, pretty easily, if you were inclined. I looked you up, you know.’
‘Thought you might,’ Ben said, remembering the way Brennan had probed on the phone to get his name.
‘The Internet is my only window on the world these days. Not many Benedict Hopes in the world.’
‘Just the one,’ Ben said. ‘Not a bad thing.’
‘How is Normandy these days? Le Val? Tactical training? What is that?’
‘The past,’ Ben said.
‘From what little your extremely brief, carefully worded professional profile reveals about you, you seem to have a lot of past, Mr Hope. Or should I say, Major?’
‘I prefer Mr,’ Ben said. ‘I retired from the military a long time ago, as you know if you’ve read my résumé.’
‘Oh, I have, and with great interest. It leaves plenty to the imagination. Crisis response consultant? That would be a neat little euphemism for …?’
‘When people went missing, I tried to find them.’
‘Quite a step from that to a murder investigation, I’d say?’
‘There’s no chance of bringing the victim home again to her loved ones,’ Ben said. ‘Apart from that, it’s pretty much the same thing. But I didn’t come here to talk about me.’
‘Of course. Tell me, have the police made any progress in finding out who did this terrible thing to Miss Hall?’
‘I’m not holding my breath,’ Ben said.
‘What a world we live in,’ Brennan said sadly. He shook his head, sighed. ‘Drink? Help yourself. There’s whisky, brandy, vodka …’
‘No, thanks,’ Ben said.
‘Suit yourself. You won’t mind getting one for me, will you? Scotch. Fill ’er right up.’
Ben laid down his bag and went to the cabinet, found the amber whisky in a cut-crystal decanter and glugged some into a matching glass. He offered the brimming glass out to Brennan, who grasped it between his red-raw fingers, raised it to his lips and drank down a long gulp. ‘That’s better,’ he gasped. ‘I never used to touch the stuff, but now it’s a comfort to me, you know.’
‘The journals?’ Ben said.
‘There on the desk behind you,’ Brennan said. Ben looked, and saw a neatly stacked pile of small books bound in wrinkled, aged grey
leather.
‘Only these four surviving volumes were found in the ruins of Glenfell House,’ Brennan said. ‘Not a diary in the modern sense, more of a serial letter to herself, which she kept going for several years as a way of recording her private thoughts and observations. The earliest dates back to 1841, when the newly married Lady Stamford first went to live on her husband’s estate. From there, they cover the period of her life in Ireland until her departure in ’49. There are two missing from the middle years, but I think you’ll find most of the meat is still on the bone, so to speak. Go ahead, take a look. But treat them kindly, I beg you.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ll let me take these away from here,’ Ben said, picking up the top book from the pile.
‘You’re right about that. You’ll have time to read through them, however. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’
Ben flicked through the pages, scanning quickly left and right.
‘Well? See anything?’ Brennan said with a smile.
‘I can see she had beautiful writing,’ Ben said.
‘She was a great beauty herself, going by the one portrait that was ever done of her. Anything else of interest?’ Brennan had a twinkle in his eye, as though enjoying setting Ben a little test.
Ben was damned if he knew what he was looking for, and he didn’t have much patience for games. He laid the book down, sifted through the pile and snatched up another. ‘I don’t know,’ he said after a few moments of browsing. ‘I’m going to need your help to figure out what could be so important about these diaries.’
‘At first glance, not a great deal, that’s for sure,’ Brennan said, still smiling with that mysterious twinkle in his eye. ‘Despite her remarkable achievements later in her short life, Elizabeth Stamford remains an obscure and minor figure historically. As for her husband Lord Edgar Stamford, aside from having been a bully and a brute who ultimately went insane and burned his own mansion to the ground with himself in it, his only real contribution to history, and what he’s chiefly remembered for, was his scientific work.’
‘He was a botanist, wasn’t he?’ Ben said, remembering what Kristen had told him.
‘Something of a whizz-kid in his day. Distinguished himself in his studies at Cambridge, which he completed a year sooner than his contemporaries despite being a wild and intemperate young man. He was already a lord by then. His father, Colonel Montague Stamford, had been killed in action in the British campaign against the Xhosa on the Eastern Frontier, and his mother Amélie – half French – died of typhoid in 1838. Young Edgar was still in his teens when he travelled to Paris, where he studied for a time under the famous scientist Camille Montagne.’
‘Montagne,’ Ben repeated. ‘French for mountain.’
‘Stamford had come across him from reading his scholarly articles in the Archives de Botanique and Annales des Sciences Naturelles. It seems the two of them hit it off, because Edgar visited him twice more after he was married and living in Ireland, once in 1843 and again in 1845. Montagne’s specialised area of interest, which Stamford shared, was the study of cryptogams.’
Ben looked at him, momentarily confused. ‘Secret symbols?’
Brennan shook his head. ‘Not cryptograms. In botany, cryptogams are things like mosses, algae, lichens and fungi.’
‘I see,’ Ben said, not seeing at all and beginning to wonder what the hell he was doing here. This was a mistake, a voice was screaming at him inside his head.
‘Stamford was also great cronies with another botanist, his old Cambridge pal Heneage Fitzwilliam. But while Fitzwilliam went on to become a professor at Magdalen College, Oxford, Stamford’s career was no great shakes as far as his contribution to modern science goes. He tinkered about in his lab and published the odd paper throughout the 1840s. Very few people today would remember his work. But …’ Brennan seemed about to add more, then went quiet.
‘But what?’
Brennan smiled slyly. ‘As I said, at first glance there seems to be little of interest in the journals, except to nerdish historians seeking insights into the daily lives of the Victorian gentry. But when you look deeper, you’ll come across … shall we say, some most unexpected surprises.’
‘Like what?’ Ben said impatiently. ‘What’s the big secret I’m supposed to find?’
‘I’ve given you a clue already. Surprised you haven’t picked up on it.’
Ben looked hard at Brennan, thinking that if the man hadn’t been so ill and frail-looking, he might have been tempted to haul him out of his armchair and shake the answers out of him.
‘Think about it, Mr Hope,’ Brennan said. ‘What was happening in Ireland in the latter half of the 1840s? What was the primary event taking place all around the author of these journals during that time?’
‘The famine?’
Brennan nodded. ‘Correct. Though I personally wouldn’t use the term “famine”. If you read, you’ll see she didn’t use it either. As she knew, and I know, it’s hardly the appropriate word to describe the black events that overtook Ireland in the harvest of 1846 and created the veritable horror story of 1847 and beyond.’
‘That’s what people call it, isn’t it?’ Ben said. ‘The potato famine?’
‘Only those who don’t know any better. The truth is quite different.’
‘Different from the accounts in a thousand history books?’
Brennan looked grimly pleased at Ben’s ignorance. ‘Now now, I’m surprised that a man of your obvious intelligence, not to mention your background and skills, isn’t more of a realist than to go believing in the tall tales of the majority of my fellow historians. To their shame, they love nothing better than to spout the usual pack of lies that passes for the official version of the story.’
‘Then you’d better tell me the real one,’ Ben said.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘You are familiar with the potato, I presume?’ Brennan asked.
Ben heaved an inward sigh. His idea of travelling all the way out here to the island of Madeira hadn’t been to listen to a discourse on the topic of root vegetables. But he bit back his impatience. ‘As much as the next man,’ he replied.
Brennan leaned back in his chair, settling into lecture mode. ‘The Irish rural population of the 1840 – that is to say some six million out of the country’s overall population of eight million at the time – were very familiar with it indeed. It’s a highly versatile vegetable. It grows prodigiously, keeps well and is easy to cook. Eaten in sufficient quantities it’s a remarkable source of calories, protein and minerals, capable of maintaining health, preventing nutritional deficiencies like scurvy and supplying the energy needed for a hard day’s work in the fields.
‘There had always been plenty to go around in rural Ireland. Children would walk to school with their pockets filled with cold potatoes to eat at lunchtime. Labourers digging the fields would be allowed to roast as many of them as they could eat over an open fire. Fishermen’s wives would weave stocking bags in which their husbands could carry mashed potato to eat at sea. A traveller and observer named Arthur Young described what he found to be a typical scene in the rural Ireland of the time: “Mark the Irishman’s potato bowl placed on the floor, the whole family upon their hams around it, devouring a quantity incredible, the pig taking his share as easily as the wife, the cocks, hens, turkeys, geese, the cur, the cat, and perhaps the cow – all partaking of the same dish. No man can often have been a witness of it without being convinced of the plenty, and I will add the cheerfulness, that attends it.” He estimated that a barrel of around two hundred and fifty to three hundred potatoes could last a family of five, as well as the menagerie of livestock they often shared the same basic dwelling with, for a week. The father of the family would have taken the lion’s share, consuming something in the region of twelve to fourteen pounds a day in order to get the necessary nutrients for the very difficult work that was his livelihood. Not the most varied diet, to be sure, but Young was surprised how very well they appeared to do
on it. He described them as “athletic in their form, as robust and as capable of enduring labour as any upon earth”, adding that “When I see people of a country, in spite of political oppression, with well-formed vigorous bodies, and their cottages swarming with children; when I see their men athletic and their women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on an unwholesome food.”’
‘Just one problem with that,’ Ben said. ‘Dependence on a single food source made them vulnerable, if anything happened to go wrong with it.’
‘Indeed it did,’ Brennan said, nodding. ‘An obvious risk, when you place all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. The potato harvest of 1846 was to have been the biggest ever. All of two million acres of land had been seeded across Ireland, and after the close shave they’d had the previous year with the blight that had narrowly missed devastating the crop, there was widespread optimism that this would be a year of plenty for all. And to begin with, it seemed as if all hopes would be fulfilled. Every planted field was teeming with the dark green leaves and purple blossoms of the thriving young plants.
‘Then in early June, the first signs of the disease began to appear in a few localised spots. Within just a few weeks, it was suddenly everywhere, spreading like gangrene. It was said that farmers who had gone to bed dreaming of their lush potato crop awoke the next morning to the stench of the rotting plants. From one end of the country to the other, a desperate race began to stem the disease by salvaging whatever might remain of the crop. Many believed that by ripping up the stalks, they might be able to prevent the “infection” from reaching the precious vegetables below ground, where the earth would protect them. But when they dug into the ground to check, all they found was the same putrid, liquefying mush of black rot. They had failed to understand that the disease wasn’t spreading downwards from the stalks. It was in the ground itself. A fortunate few who realised this fact in time were able to dig up a few surviving potatoes before the contagion hit them, saving a handful of their crop. But the vegetables that survived were small and soft, virtually inedible. All it did was to delay the inevitable.’
The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) Page 12