The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Forty-Six

He was glad the beer was finished, because it hadn’t been as easy for him to refrain as he’d made it look to Erin. ‘Lead me not into temptation, Lord,’ he muttered. ‘I can find my own way there easily enough.’

He turned the lights off and paced quietly about the room for a while, clearing his mind of all the things that had happened that day and working back through what he’d learned from Elizabeth Stamford’s journal earlier. Her revelation that her husband and his scientific crony Heneage Fitzwilliam had apparently been cooking up some kind of plant blight pathogen in their laboratory was still making his head spin. The implications were almost too much to take on board.

Almost.

Ben walked through to the bathroom, closed the door quietly so as not to wake Erin, and clicked on the string-pull light. Taking out his phone, he sat on the edge of the scuzzy old bathtub and went online to run a search on this Fitzwilliam character. With a name like that, there couldn’t be many others.

The web had a few disparate pieces of information to offer. The man had been a reasonably well-known botanist of his day, a professor at Oxford, the author of a few books and some scientific papers which he’d presented to various scholarly institutes during the 1830s and ’40s. All stuff that Gray Brennan had already talked about. So far, Heneage wasn’t exactly setting Ben on fire. Not until a new piece of information popped up from the web search. Something Brennan hadn’t mentioned.

Professor Fitzwilliam had died suddenly while sitting at his desk in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, on September 9th, 1851, aged forty-seven. Not of a heart attack or a stroke, but of a single pistol shot to the back of the head. That, combined with the fact that no weapon had been found at the scene, had led the magistrates to conclude that his demise had been no suicide. Clever, those magistrates. Naturally, it hadn’t been any more usual then than it was now for quiet-living Oxford dons to have their brains blown out in college by some sneak assassin.

September, 1851. A bell began to ring in Ben’s mind. He searched for ‘Lord Edgar Stamford death’ and came up with September 20th of the same year, which was the date Kristen had said. Just eleven days after the murder of his friend and colleague, Stamford had burned himself to death.

Eleven days was probably about the length of time it would have taken in those days for the news to travel between Oxford and the rural west of Ireland. Had the aristocrat killed himself on hearing of Fitzwilliam’s death? That didn’t ring quite true to Ben — but then, maybe it hadn’t been a deliberate act. Maybe he’d got badly drunk and knocked over a candlestick or something, inadvertently setting the fire that had blitzed Glenfell House. That was possible. But maybe there were other possibilities, too.

Ben went back to see what more he could dig up about Heneage Fitzwilliam, and after a few minutes he came across the first photograph he’d seen of the man. It was a typical period photo, very formally posed and taken at some science event in London in 1845. Fitzwilliam was a diminutive individual with half-moon spectacles, bald on top and sporting a ridiculous growth of side whiskers that could probably have been seen from behind on a clear day. A group of his peers stood stiffly clustered around him, all in dark suits and waistcoats. Beside Fitzwilliam, and looming over him by a good fourteen inches, was a large and imposing figure of a man who seemed to sneer disdainfully at the camera. When Ben looked at the list of names in the caption below the picture and counted left to right, he realised the man was Edgar Stamford. It was the first time Ben had seen him, too, and he looked every bit the arrogant tyrannical bastard that his long-suffering wife had made him out to be. He’d been as big as he was proud-looking, probably at least six-four, maybe six-five. When experts said people of the Victorian era were smaller than folks today, they obviously hadn’t been looking at Edgar Stamford.

But it wasn’t just the size of the guy. There was something else. Something that set Ben’s mind churning and his blood quickening.

He keyed ‘Lord Edgar Stamford Ireland’ into the search engine and hit ‘images’. The phone thought about it for a moment or two, then spat out the goods. Just one picture came up, but one was enough.

Ben stared at it for a long time.

The grainy, sepia-tinged photograph showed an assembled group posing in front of Glenfell House in 1844, in that particular self-conscious and solemn, almost funereal way people had acted around cameras at the dawn of the photographic era. Front and centre was Lady Stamford herself. Ben almost felt he knew her by now. Gray Brennan had said she was beautiful, and she was. Less beautiful by far, wearing the same unpleasant sneer and holding his wife’s arm like the piece of property she was, was her tall, broad lord and master Edgar.

In the background were assembled various household members. There were a number of maids in uniform, some of them looking extremely young and nervous. To one side stood a brute-faced bloke in a tweed suit whom Ben could easily imagine to be Lord Stamford’s villainous manservant, Burrows. Perhaps at Lady Stamford’s request, even the horses had been brought out to have their picture taken with the group: a pair of handsome hunters, held still by a big guy clutching a halter in each large hand and staring with unnatural rigidity at the camera, as if he’d never seen one before. He probably hadn’t.

Ben peered closely at the man’s grainy image, thinking that this must be Padraig, Elizabeth’s slow-witted but intensely loyal stableboy. If you could still be called a stableboy in your mid-thirties. He looked as strong as an ox, towering over everyone in the photo apart from Lord Stamford himself.

Ben’s eyes narrowed to slits as his mind worked. So this was the famous Padraig McCrory Kristen had been so interested in, whose name Ben had followed in her wake trying to find in the parish records in Glenfell. There was little doubt that Kristen had seen the same photo Ben was looking at now. Somehow, this was the key to the whole thing.

Ben looked from the hulking stableboy to the lord. From the lord back to the stableboy. And in that moment, something flashed inside his mind and he knew.

He knew everything Kristen had known, and more. He knew why Finn McCrory wanted the journals so badly. Why Kristen had had to die for them.

The knowledge felt like a living thing inside him, pulsing, throbbing, stirring him up with excitement and anger. It was incredible, unbelievable … and yet it made perfect sense. He put away his phone. Stood up and clicked off the light and walked back into the other room.

Erin stirred on the bed, lifted her head from the pillow and looked at him. Her eyes were half-shut and her hair was tousled.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, staring at him standing there.

‘Tell me about the cabin,’ he said.