The Sin Eater by Sarah Rayne Page A

own, and there’s no one within screaming distance . . . What do I do? Can I summon help? Police? What if there’s an innocent explanation, though? But surely an innocent person would have called out to make his presence known. Nell slid a hand into her bag, and her fingers closed reassuringly around the phone in its side pocket. As she did so, there was a soft creak from the landing and the door swung slowly inwards. Nell gasped and backed away to the wall, feeling for the nine on the phone’s keypad, but her hand was shaking so much it slipped from her grasp and when she groped in the bag, her fingers only encountered the chess piece.
    The door opened all the way, and the figure stood on the threshold, the light from the lower landing and the street lamp behind it. Even so Nell recognized him. It was the man she had seen earlier – the man who had been bending over Benedict Doyle. The man with the vivid blue eyes.
    He did not come into the room: he remained on the landing, three-quarters in the shadows. Nell tried to calculate whether she could get past him and down the stairs without getting too close. No. Then the best thing to do was act as if there was nothing wrong.
    She said, ‘Thank goodness it’s you. You’re Declan, aren’t you? Benedict said so. I’m Nell West. I didn’t realize you were still here – I thought you had gone with Benedict in the ambulance.’ She thought she would have to get downstairs, even if she had to push him down two flights.
    â€˜I’m about to leave,’ she said. ‘I haven’t managed to make any notes for the inventory, but I can come back another day. After New Year.’
    â€˜When?’ His voice was soft and muffled.
    â€˜Probably the week after. Say the eighteenth,’ said Nell, more or less at random, but thinking that Hilary Term would have started at Oxford, and life would be more or less back to normal.
    â€˜Yes. Come on the eighteenth.’ The words were as insubstantial as if someone had breathed the letters on to a misted glass, but as they died away, Nell stopped feeling frightened. There was nothing alarming or threatening about the man after all. If he would step a little more into the light he would probably turn out to be rather nice-looking, in fact.
    She said, ‘The eighteenth. Yes, all right.’
    His face was still partly in the shadows, but Nell could see the glint of blue from his eyes. She thought he smiled briefly, then he was gone.
    Nell thought she would not tell Michael about the man or the meeting on January 18th, although she would tell him about Holly Lodge and Benedict. He would want to hear what the house was like and whether the contents had been interesting or valuable. Beth was spending the night with a school friend who was having a Christmas party, so Michael had offered to cook supper for himself and Nell. She was pleased about this; she liked Michael’s rooms at Oriel College – she liked the untidiness of the books he always had strewn around and the way the window of his study overlooked a tiny quadrangle which was sun-drenched in summer and crusted with icing-sugar frost in winter.
    She suspected, though, that they might end up ordering pizzas for their meal, because the last time Michael had tried to cook he had ended in blowing all the fuses on the entire floor, and Wilberforce the cat had decamped in disgust to the buttery where he had disgraced Michael yet again by eating an entire turbot, intended for an Oxford Gaudy lunch.

EIGHT
    â€˜I t was a trick of the light,’ said Michael Flint, seated opposite Nell in his rooms in Oriel College. ‘People’s eyes don’t change from blue to brown in the . . . well, in the blink of an eyelid.’
    â€˜It wasn’t a trick of the light. When I first found him, Benedict Doyle had the most vivid blue eyes I’ve ever seen.’
    Nell was curled up in her favourite chair, sipping wine with