23 Benthall Street

23 Benthall Street is the house where Father Gorman makes his final recorded pastoral visit: summoned to the bedside of the dying Mrs Davis, he hears her begin a desperate confession, stays with her for about half an hour, and leaves before she dies. The ordinary, shabby address anchors a private deathbed scene that later becomes part of the inquiry into his own murder.

Setting and Ownership

The house stands in a row of tall, dingy houses near the railway yards. A boy sent by Mrs Coppins gives Father Gorman the address and explains that a woman there is dying, that Mrs Coppins sent him, and that the woman has said the vicar will not do. The request identifies the visit as one requiring a Catholic priest; the narrative does not make the house itself mysterious or exceptional.

Mrs Coppins owns the house and opens its door to Father Gorman with an effusive welcome. As she leads him up the narrow stairs, she complains that Mrs Davis ought to be in hospital and that the ambulance service is slow, recalling how long her sister’s husband had waited after breaking his leg. Her talk of delayed public services places a practical, familiar domestic complaint beside the urgency of a woman believed to be near death.

Father Gorman’s Visit

Father Gorman reaches the house soon after the boy guides him there, carrying a small leather case. Mrs Coppins takes him to the sickroom and introduces him to Mrs Davis with an assurance that the Reverend’s arrival will make things all right. Her cheerfulness is described as spurious, a small tonal contrast to the seriousness of the errand.

The room is clean and neat despite the house’s dingy exterior, and its old-fashioned Victorian furniture gives the bedside scene a settled domestic character. Mrs Davis lies in a bed near the window and turns her head feebly toward the priest. Father Gorman sees at once that she is very ill. She tells him there is little time and struggles to confess what she calls grave sin and wickedness; as her eyes wander and partly close, her speech becomes a rambling monotone.

Death and Later Reconstruction

The later account fixes the visit’s chronology: Father Gorman arrives at 23 Benthall Street at a quarter past seven in the evening and remains with Mrs Davis for about half an hour. She dies just before the ambulance arrives to take her to hospital. The ambulance’s arrival therefore comes too late to alter the outcome, while the earlier complaint about waiting for medical help acquires a direct and painful relevance to the scene.

The address is subsequently established as the place where Father Gorman went after receiving the boy’s message. The narrative first presents it through the urgent errand and the priest’s arrival, then returns to it in the inquiry’s concise reconstruction of the visit. That shift turns a street number into a verifiable link between Mrs Davis’s deathbed confession and the events that follow: the intimate scene at the house is also the last recorded occasion on which the priest is known to have attended her.