The Sin Eater

by Sarah Rayne

  Someone was coming stealthily along the walkway towards him.

  London 1890s

  After Cerise left the bedroom Colm walked round the room twice, and paused at the window, staring down into the gloomy gardens. Then in a completely normal voice, he said, ‘What a bitch. And what a lot of nonsense she talked. I’ve never been in an opium den in my life and neither have you. Let’s ignore her altogether. We’ll go downstairs to see if there’s any food to be had. I don’t know about you, but I’m ravenous.’

  It’s all right, thought Declan, following him down the stairs. Of course he didn’t kill Flossie and of course he isn’t planning to kill Cerise.

  Two of the girls were in the scullery, eating pies which they had brought in from a stall. There was plenty to spare, they said, slicing up the pies with careless generosity. There was bread and cheese in the larder as well.

  They were discussing what they were going to do, because this house would be broken up, that was for sure. The dark-haired girl, who was called Zelda, said Flossie had no family, and the other one, who was fluffily fair and whose name was Ruby, confirmed this. But whatever happened, you could depend on it that Ruby and Zelda and the others would be told to pack their bags.

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked Colm.

  ‘Dunno yet. Me and Zelda had an idea we might set up in rooms off Charing Cross Road. You get a good few toffs wandering down Charing Cross Road of a night.’

  Zelda gave this her endorsement. A girl might do very well in that part of London. They might even end up with a posh flat, all pink satin and plush, very smart it would be.

  Colm entered into the plan with gusto, saying they should have a French maid to answer the door to their gentlemen, and Ruby giggled and said go on with you, French maids, who did he take them for, Lady Muck?

  As St Stephen’s clock chimed two, Colm got up from the table, as casually as if he had all the time in the world, and said he would be off out for a while. ‘Just round and about,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  As he went out, Declan saw with cold fear that his eyes were filling up with the terrible blackness again. He gave it five minutes, then collected his coat and went after Colm. It was not really a surprise to see Colm get on an omnibus with Canning Town written on its front. He’s going out to the old river steps, Declan thought. That’s where he met Harold Bullfinch and he knows it’s deserted and he won’t be interrupted. He must have told Cerise to meet him there. Surely Cerise would not be so foolhardy as to meet a man she believed to be a murderer in such a lonely spot? But Declan remembered those remarks about opium. Cerise thought Colm had acted out of an opium nightmare – that he had not been aware of what he was doing, or even remembered doing it.

  I’ve got to make sure, thought Declan, and waited for another omnibus.

  Bidder Lane was as dismal and dispiriting as he remembered. Grime clung to the fronts of the houses and a dirty yellow fog hung everywhere. Declan went purposefully along the street, pausing at the intersection with Clock Street, and looking wistfully towards the pub. Someone was playing the jangly piano again and a few voices were raised in somewhat beery song. He wished, as he had last time, that he could go inside and become part of a noisy, ordinary group of people, but he had to reach Colm and save Cerise. He went determinedly between the houses, and down the steps to the quay. Someone had sprinkled sand or sawdust on the steps – Declan tried not to think it would be to mop up Harold Bullfinch’s blood.

  But there was no sign of Colm. Then had Colm been going off on some entirely innocent task? Or was he meeting Cerise somewhere else? Declan looked about him. The mist hung over the river, and the lights of the barges were blurred discs of colour. Anyone with half a grain of sense would be indoors on an afternoon like this. No wonder this stretch of the quayside was so deserted . . .

  But it was not deserted after all. At the far end of the walkway shelf, a figure stood, silhouetted against the swirling greyness. It was Cerise – even from here Declan could see the velvet cape which she swore was tipped with mink but the other girls said was rabbit. He could make out the slightly unkempt hair, the tendrils deliberately allowed to escape from their pinnings, giving that tousled, just-got-out-of-bed appearance. Cerise, muffled up against the damp, dank afternoon with her bit of spurious mink, waiting with cat-faced greed for the man she thought she was going to give her money for keeping his secrets.

  Declan was just thinking with relief that there was still time to save her, when a second figure stepped out of the yawning blackness of the old sewer tunnel. Colm. Declan drew breath to call a warning, but it was already too late. Colm had put an arm round Cerise, and was pulling her into the darkness. Declan heard her cry out, in surprise or fear, and he went towards them, not daring to run on the slippery ground, but moving as fast as he dared. Here was the tunnel mouth. It was little more than a circular hole with a brick surround, eight or ten feet across in all, and it looked as if it had been cut into the quay wall. Declan hesitated, then stepped into the sour blackness.

  The sewer had obviously long since been abandoned, and it smelled dreadful. After the dampness of the river fog it felt close and hot. It was not as dark as he had expected; light came in from outside, and he could see the blackened bricks, and the crusted grime of years. Rank weeds thrust out from cracks in the wall and grew up from the ground and the curved ceiling, a couple of feet overhead, gleamed with moisture. There was the sound of water dripping somewhere, echoing eerily. This would be a terrible place to die.

  The tunnel curved round to the right slightly, and ahead, stretching from the floor of the tunnel to its ceiling, was what must be sluice gates. The centre sections were solid, age-blackened wood; the top and bottom were thick spiked iron. At one side was a mechanism, presumably for opening the gates: an immense wheel was set horizontally into its base. If that wheel could be turned, would the old sluice gates creak into life? Declan shuddered and looked about him. It was then he saw a much smaller, narrower tunnel leading off to the left. When he went towards it, he heard a female voice calling for help.

  Nell had not really thought there was any point in calling for help, because she was fairly certain she was inside a particularly horrible dream. And even if this nightmare scenario was somehow real there would not be anyone in earshot. But she called anyway.

  Wherever this was, there was a strong river smell, and there was the eerie sound of water dripping nearby. It was very dark and she was lying on hard ground, half against a wall. Other than this, she was not able to focus very well on what had happened. She sat very still, her eyes closed, and memory unrolled a little, showing her Holly Lodge and the things in the various rooms she had been listing. And then she had fallen part way down the stairs – she remembered that, and she remembered she had been partly knocked out. It was when she came round the nightmare had begun. There had been something odd and frightening – something to do with strange sounds – people in the street calling in voices that did not belong to the present. Nell forced herself to concentrate, and saw in her mind the big hall at Holly Lodge, with the man coming down the stairs towards her, stepping into the lamplight so that for a single nightmare second she had seen his face . . .

  As this memory opened, she sat up abruptly, then gasped as pain twisted through her foot. But the pain forced the remaining fragments to drop into place. She had been running down the stairs to escape and missed her footing on the stairs and fallen, injuring her ankle. He had bent over her, the remarkable vivid blue of his eyes becoming suffused with black . . .

  ‘The eyes are always such a betrayal, Nell . . . There are even some eyes that can eat your soul, did you know that . . . ?’

  The words were not quite spoken, but Nell heard them, and this time she managed to sit up. He was here, standing at what must be the tunnel entrance, just out of the light. Hiding his face, she thought, and then, with helpless sympathy, now I understand why he does that.

  Fear throbbed through her, but she said, ‘Where is t
his? Who are you?’ and heard how her voice bounced off the tunnel walls and roof and came back at her mockingly.

  ‘Benedict Doyle would tell you I’m his alter ego – a figment of a flawed mind . . . Except that I’m a real person – at least, I was once.’

  ‘Declan,’ said Nell, half to herself, and there was a faint ruffle of something that might have been sadness.

  ‘No, I’m not Declan. I’m Colm. Declan was – ah, at the very end, Declan got away from me . . .’ The words whispered into Nell’s mind. This was all a nightmare, of course, or the results of concussion from falling down the stairs. At any minute she would wake up in a hospital bed, with people saying things like, ‘Drink this,’ and, ‘Try to get some rest.’

  She said, ‘Why am I here?’ and thought how absurd this was, because nobody argued with a dream-figure or a phantom conjured up by concussion.

  ‘A little because you saw me that day with Declan’s descendant, Benedict . . .’

  ‘But – does that matter? Anyway, no one needs to know. I won’t tell anyone.’

  She felt his mental pounce. ‘That’s what the others said. “I won’t tell anyone,” they said. Cerise said it on this very spot all those years ago. “No one needs to know what you did,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone if you pay me enough”.’

  ‘Who was Cerise?’ I’ll keep him talking, thought Nell. That’s what they say you should do in this situation. It’ll create a connection between us, and he’ll let me go. Except I’m not sure that we are talking in the normal sense.

  ‘Cerise was a greedy little cat. She thought I had committed a crime and she tried to get money from me to stop her telling people. And I had committed the crime, Nell. So I had to shut her up.’

  ‘You killed her?’

  ‘Oh yes. Just as I killed the villains who ruined the girl I loved and brought about her death. There was a man who butchered her to get rid of a baby she was having – I killed him first. He bungled the task, and the child bled out of her, and her life bled out with it. And all the colour and life and hope went out of my life on that night.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Nell, helplessly.

  ‘Then I killed the man who fathered the baby in the first place. A little plucked fowl in a waistcoat, that’s what he looked like. Strutting around his tiny kingdom in Islington, with his charities and his churches . . . But he had his squalid pleasure with her, with no thought for the consequences, and I couldn’t let him live after that. He had to be punished – you do see that?’

  ‘You killed three people?’ said Nell, in horror.

  ‘More than three. I killed a greedy rapacious female who could have helped Romilly, but threw her out on to the street. And do you know, the creature had left me her house – in a drunken moment she actually wrote out a will and left it to me.’

  ‘Holly Lodge,’ whispered Nell.

  ‘Yes. Me, who had lived in a shack with an earth floor – a ramshackle place in the wilds of Ireland – to be owning a house like that.’ There was a pause. ‘Last of all I killed a man who might have shopped me to the police for that murder. I only knew his Christian name. Arthur, he was called. He had a walrus moustache. I was sorry about that killing, but he had seen too much and Cerise threatened to tell him about the others . . . I couldn’t risk it. When I sent a note, he came to meet me like a lamb. They all came, Nell, just as you did. The newspaper said I mesmerized my victims.’

  ‘Did you?’ In another minute I’ll make a dash for the tunnel entrance, thought Nell. If I could just get outside I could yell for help – someone will hear and come. Only I’m not sure if I can get very far on this ankle.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I had the chess piece, you see. It gave me the power.’

  For an incredible moment Nell forgot about the sinister situation she was in and stared at him. ‘The chess piece? The ebony chess king?’

  ‘Yes. I took it from a man burning to death . . . No, that’s not true, he gave it to me. The other figures burned with him, but the king survived and there was still so much power left in it. You shouldn’t have taken it from the house, Nell. If you had left it there, I might have left you alone. But I had to get it back. I need it to reach Benedict.’

  ‘Why?’ I’m tapping into Benedict’s illness, thought Nell. This is all a weird form of telepathy.

  ‘Because I still carry the sins of the others and I must pass them on. Romilly’s wouldn’t be so much, but God knows what that priest in the watchtower might have done . . . I tried to reach Benedict’s father – and his grandfather – but they got away from me.’

  The whispering broke off for a moment and Nell glanced towards the faint light from the tunnel entrance. Was this the moment to try to escape? She said, ‘I don’t understand all that about passing on sins. And why Benedict?’

  ‘Because it was Declan who pronounced the ritual all those years ago. An old, old ritual it is, Nell – so old you’d think it would long since have frayed to nothing. We didn’t believe in it at the time – it was just meant as comfort for someone facing death.’

  ‘But it did work?’

  ‘Yes. We thought if there was any power in it at all, it would be Declan who’d take the weight of the sins. But I was the one who took them. I felt it happen, Nell. I felt the sins burn down into my soul and that’s a feeling so terrible you’d never recover from it. It’s like having a black stone dropped into your heart – a stone that drinks all the goodness from you and feeds on the evil. I think Declan had his own armour – perhaps simply because he was genuinely good.’ For a moment a faint amusement seemed to ruffle the darkness. ‘Myself, I was never a saint,’ said Colm. ‘Even in the Kilglenn days.’

  ‘Kilglenn?

  ‘Yes. A tiny sliver of a village in Ireland. So beautiful though.’

  Nell said, as firmly as she could, ‘You aren’t real. This is all a dream, and I’m not listening to you. I’m going to wake up – I’ll make myself wake up – and you’ll have vanished.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Colm, with the same deep sadness, ‘it was that simple.’ He stepped forward, and the uncertain light from outside fell cruelly across his face. ‘Forgive me, Nell . . .’

  Nell flinched, and then, even knowing no one would be in earshot, shouted at the top of her voice for help.

  There was a flurry of movement at the opening to the tunnel, and a figure stood silhouetted against the grey wintry light.

  Declan had expected the inside of the sewer tunnel to be dim, but he had not expected it to be so filled with blurred shadows. He certainly had not expected to find his vision clouded so that he felt as if he was looking through a wavy, distorted mirror. But probably the river fog had seeped into the tunnel.

  He did not immediately see Colm or Cerise, but he heard them. Colm was talking to Cerise, his voice soft and low. It was the voice Colm generally used when he was luring one of his females into bed with him. Declan heard Colm say something about Kilglenn, and then something about shutting people up. He’s confessing, thought Declan in horror. He’s admitting to Cerise that he committed those murders – Bullfinch and Flossie – and he’s telling her he’ll do the same to her. He went stealthily forward, hoping not to be heard, praying he could take Colm by surprise and shout to Cerise to make a run for it. As he got closer, he heard Colm say, ‘Arthur, he was called. I couldn’t risk him talking. I sent him a note and he came to meet me . . .’

  Fresh horror broke within Declan. He killed that other man, he thought. The walrus moustache man who was in the house with Cerise that day. Oh God, what do I do? This is Colm, he’s better than a brother to me . . . But I can’t let him kill again.

  No longer caring if he was heard, he ran towards the voices. In a corner of the inner tunnel, Colm was bending over a female who was lying on the ground, half against one wall. There was an extraordinary moment when Declan thought he had got this whole thing wrong, because although the man was wearing the dark great coat Colm had taken from the lodging house, he looked like a stranger.r />
  Cerise was different, as well. Gone was the velvet cape with the dubious fur trimming, and whoever this was, she was wearing the most astonishing clothes Declan had ever seen – some kind of loose top and trousers like a man. Her hair was certainly not Cerise’s scooped-up mane with its tumbling tendrils; it was shorter than Declan had ever seen a female’s hair, and somehow shaped around her head. He blinked, trying to see through the distorting mists, and then saw that of course it was Cerise lying there, it was just the curious light in the tunnel.

  Colm turned at Declan’s appearance, and as he did so, Cerise moved in a half-scrambling way that suggested she might already be injured. As Colm lunged towards her, she went towards the outer tunnel and Declan put out a hand to help her. She seemed not to see it, though; she went past him, still limping heavily, and Declan saw that a completely unknown man was standing there.

  Whoever he was, he had disturbed the river fog, because it came swirling into the tunnels, thick and smelling of oil and grime. Declan blinked, and, when it cleared, he saw with despair that after all Cerise had not got away. She was lying on the ground, her eyes wide and staring. The fur and velvet cape she had been so proud of was soaked in the blood running from her cut throat.

  The present

  Nell clung to Michael, trying not to sob with relief, but unable to prevent tears streaming down her face. When he said, ‘Nell, my dear love, we’ll have the explanations later, but for the moment I’m going to get you into a taxi and head for home.’

  ‘But we need police – the man – he’s still in there.’

  Michael said, ‘What man?’ and Nell, who had been testing her damaged foot to see how well she could walk on it, looked up at him.

  ‘The man who took me in there. He was at Holly Lodge – I think he’s something to do with Benedict’s family . . . Michael, what’s wrong?’

  Michael said, ‘Nell, there was no one in the tunnel.’

  As Nell stared at him, quick light footsteps came towards them along the river walkway. It was Benedict, his face white, his hair beaded with moisture from the river mist.