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be a really important day for her.’
    The wife of a third victim described the calendar markings in more detail. ‘Every single calendar and diary in the house was marked,’ she said. ‘It sounds a bit fanciful, but my brother plays chess, and the outline my husband drew on the calendars looked exactly like a chess piece.’
    A chess piece. Benedict stared at the page, his sandwich forgotten. That’s what I saw that day, he thought. That was the outline on the calendar and the desk diary in this house all those years ago. One of my parents – or my grandfather – sketched the outline of a chess piece on that date on the calendar. Only I didn’t recognize it then.
    There was not much point in searching the house for the calendar and the desk diary, but Benedict did not need to. He could still see them clearly. A chess piece – perhaps a pawn – drawn around the date in red ink. And a smaller, similar, sketch around the time of three p.m.
    Just over a hundred years ago, five people had been hell-bent on keeping a mysterious appointment on that date and at that time. They had drawn the outline of a chess piece on their calendars. All five had died. Twelve years ago, Benedict’s parents and his grandfather had done the same thing and they had died as well.
    But the people in the 1890s were murdered, he thought. My parents weren’t murdered.
    â€˜
Weren’t they, Benedict? Can you be sure of that? A driver can be forced to swerve on an icy road because he thinks he’s seen someone standing in the road . . . Someone who never came forward to give evidence and who was never traced
. . .’
    The words came raggedly, as if time had frayed them, but it was Declan’s voice, soft and with that recognizable Irish lilt. Benedict frowned and tried to push it away. This was sheer nerves, nothing more; it was purely because this house had such bad memories for him. Declan no longer existed; he had been dead for more than fifty years.
    But these newspapers existed, and the facts in them were real. He continued reading. The article, having finished reporting on the victims’ families, next seized on the remark about mesmerism, and told its readers that one theory suggested the killer had made use of this contentious practice; that he could have somehow planted in each victim’s mind the command to be at a specific place on a specific date. This did not give a motive, but when did a madman need a motive?
    The police, it appeared, did not exactly support this theory, but had gone so far as to say if anyone noticed relatives or friends becoming preoccupied with an appointment about which there seemed to be unusual or worrying secrecy, police advice should be sought immediately. There followed a slightly schoolmasterly explanation about mesmerism and hypnosis, most of which Benedict skimmed, moving down to the closing paragraph which had the air of wanting to give a dramatic finale. It warned readers that there might still be undiscovered victims and pointed out that if that was so, the tally for the Mesmer Murderer might be higher than that achieved by the notorious Whitechapel murderer dubbed Jack the Ripper.
    Benedict foraged for his notebook and jotted all this information down, including the date of the newspapers. Then he reached for the third, final cutting.
    This was much shorter, and was dated a couple of weeks after the first one. It described how the police had been admirably vigilant and energetic in their endeavours to lay the Mesmer Murderer by the heels. The killer had apparently been arrested and a trial set up. However, he had escaped from police custody while being transferred from Newgate Gaol. Police had refused to release his name, but the paper’s reporter – by dint of ingenuity and one of the brand new Eastman Kodak ‘Brownie’ cameras – had managed to obtain a photograph of the killer.
    Staring from the page of slightly smudgy