The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  Breene bowed his head, as if studying the grain on the polished surface of his immaculate desk. Which Seaton knew he wasn’t. ‘South Downs. Nineteen forty-three. I was the pilot. Five kills in nine missions had made me about as complacent and cocky a twenty-six-year-old as ever flew a fighter aircraft. How old are you, Mr Seaton?’

  ‘Twenty-Five.’

  Breene nodded. ‘Well, then, you know how comfortably in youth the mantle of arrogance fits. Don’t you?’

  Seaton swallowed and nodded. This man was not the fool Mike Whitehall had led him to believe he would be meeting. But then the building wasn’t exactly some squat Dickensian relic, either. Mike found a bit of embellishment amusing. A bit of understatement, evidently, too.

  ‘I didn’t see the chap who shot me down. I was on a homeward course, thinking already about a bath and a beer. When you were cruising, a Hurricane practically flew itself. I’d lost concentration for a moment and I didn’t see him. But he saw me. By God, he did.’

  They all had faces like this. Some pioneer plastic surgeon had worked on them. They had survived, most of them, because they were young and resistant to secondary infection and because most of them were too callow at the age to appreciate the implications of being maimed through the long life to follow. Some had even returned to active service. Seaton found himself liking Young Mr Breene. He took a deep breath and regretted having lied to him over the telephone. Breene deserved better than the crude pretence.

  The coffee arrived. A woman in a liveried blouse and pinafore carried it in on a silver tray. She poured them a cup each and added the cream Seaton requested. The woman withdrew and they both sipped in silence for a while. Then Breene opened a drawer and put on a pair of white cotton gloves and, after doing so, took from the same drawer a small worn leather case fastened by a single press stud. He opened the case and a Leica camera slid into his palm, a stiff card tied by string to one of the rings from where a strap would attach. There was writing on the card, neat script written by the nib of a fountain pen, the ink aged to violet from the original blue or black by oxidisation and the passage of time. Seaton tilted his head and so could read what had been written: ‘Miss Gibson-Hoare. Service and routine overhaul. 28/05/34.’ The spring of 1934. Almost fifty years ago. The date was six or seven years after the composition of her last published photograph. And it was almost three years before the discovery of her body on the bank of the Thames.

  Seaton looked at the camera. The iconic Leica logo was etched on to the body, of course, but the whole small assemblage looked more intricate and old-fashioned than he had seen from Leica adds in the colour supplements and the windows of the better class of camera shop. The lens housing was made of brass and there was a brass viewfinder which raised on a hinge and looked a little like the rear sight of a rifle. The black-painted body was chipped here and there to reveal the metal alloy beneath. The instrument looked more a slightly crude prototype to Seaton than the finished article. But he was guilty of investing it with the expectation of technical embellishments he knew must have come much later.

  ‘We’re in the business of repair and maintenance rather than restoration here,’ Breene said. His Scottish accent sounded much stronger when he spoke now. ‘You’re looking at a Leica One from 1925, Mr Seaton. It may appear a little weathered. But it’s perfectly serviceable.’

  It was what it was, unmistakably, but it looked old, from a remote time, and sat with the mute power of a relic on Young Mr Breene’s wooden desk.

  Breene peeled off the gloves and left them on his desk blotter and went and stood over by one of the windows overlooking the river. His doing so didn’t noticeably diminish the quantity of light in the room. The morning was very bright and Breene made a small dapper figure, his hands clasped behind his back now, against the great Victorian pane.

  Seaton made no attempt to touch the camera. A part of him wanted to pick it up and heft and study it, feel the cold weight and mass of the metal and glass in his palm; sniff it, smell the scent of the thing, scent the ghost of its dead owner. But he knew that to do so would be some kind of gross violation in Breene’s fastidious mind. He thought that the strengthening accent was a sort of clue, that there was a reason the man in the room with him had been taken back in time. In his mind, he did the maths. Breene had been twenty-six in 1943, so twenty at the time of the Gibson-Hoare suicide. And, Seaton would have bet money, studying then at university in Edinburgh. The accent wouldn’t have survived so intact the great English seats of learning. He would have been seventeen years old and undoubtedly at school when the camera had been brought in to Vogel and Breene. But it was worth a try. Something had pulled his mind and emotions back across the decades. It was why he stood now with his back to Seaton. He was hiding the changed expression his feelings had inflicted on the pink ruin of his face.

  ‘You knew her, didn’t you, Mr Breene?’

  Breene’s shoulders stiffened under his suit coat. He cleared his throat, but replied still facing the window.

  ‘You were too modest earlier, Mr Seaton. You do have an instinct for what you do. It’s quite profound. And what you’re doing has nothing to do with a fashion feature in a magazine I’ve never heard of. Does it?’

  Touché, Seaton thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it does not.’

  There was a long silence before Breene said anything more. In the silence a horn wailed from a boat on the river and became faint as it passed underneath them and faded away. ‘My grandfather was one of the founding partners of this business and was followed into it by his son, my own father. And my father would bring me here as a child in the school holidays sometimes to learn something of it. Typically, I would spend the morning at some attraction like the Tower or Tussaud’s. And then I would come here and tinker and absorb information during the afternoon in that easy way children have. Anyway, it was the Christmas holidays. December. I remember it was cold for London, had been snowing, though it didn’t really stick. I was about ten—’

  Which meant 1926 or ’27. The glory years for Pandora Gibson-Hoare. Her golden period.

  ‘She arrived, late one afternoon, in full evening wear. She had on a cloche hat and a fur stole and there hung a rope of pearls around her neck heavy enough to tow a barge. She left a Bugatti, a convertible, with its engine running on the pavement outside. A Bugatti! I believe it was a Number 38. This was at dusk. The lights of the car were left on. No traffic wardens in those times, Mr Seaton. Not for the likes of Miss Gibson-Hoare. She walked in trailing perfume and pink gin and tobacco. I was in the reception area, which was bigger then. Better appointed. It was considered important in those days to maintain a grand entrance and we did, with ornamental pots and much panelled wood. All gone now, of course, in these days of utilising space efficiently. All ripped out after a visit from the time-and-motion people back in the nineteen sixties during the folly of the efficiency drive instigated by myself.’

  Seaton looked at the camera on the desk. He imagined the throaty purr of an Italian roadster on the pavement outside, its headlights yellow orbs fierce with glamour as night descended on the staid city.

  ‘Our vestibule was quite something in those days. And she was quite something in it, shaking the snowflakes from her gray mink stole, glittering, it seemed to me, under our crystal chandeliers. She was quite tall and very slender, the very epitome of the fashion at the time, far more beautiful, my father commented more than once, than any of the celebrated models she photographed. I remember she caught my eye and smiled at me. I was at the desk, practising fair-copy, trying to perfect my copperplate just by duplicating by hand the entries into the service log we kept in those days on the front desk. She was wearing lipstick. It wasn’t red, it was wine-coloured, the stain on her mouth. And she smiled at me, revealing perfect teeth.’

  ‘Why was she here?’

  ‘She had apparently dropped a camera into the sea. She had been getting out of a speedboat or launch at a jetty and dropped her camera. The water wasn’t deep and the came
ra was retrieved. But it had been fully immersed in salt water and needed stripping and the parts cleaning properly to allow everything to dry out.’

  ‘Did she arrive driving the car herself?’

  And Breene’s shoulders stiffened again. ‘What you mean is, was she alone, Mr Seaton. And the answer is that she wasn’t. There wasn’t a chauffeur. But she didn’t arrive alone. There was a chap with her, some flashy fellow in evening wear and a silk scarf and a pair of buttoned spats. Like her, he was tall. I remember he had on an astrakhan coat and carried a cane. He didn’t really look at anything, had this restlessness about him. I think they must have been on their way to a party or reception somewhere, the way they were attired.’

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  And now, finally, Young Mr Breene turned around. And Seaton really could see him as the alert and curious child he’d been.

  ‘She really was very beautiful. She had pale skin and dark eyes and auburn hair with the gloss of silk about it when it shook and caught the light. She was a remarkable creature, even to a child such as I was. But you’re right, it’s something else I remember most vividly. As they left, the fellow winked at me. It was a wink full of lasciviousness, a look almost entirely lost on a little boy. And he stuck out his tongue. And his tongue convulsed and cavorted between his teeth like some chopped pink eel, unaware of its death. And then he walked out with her across the parquet. Except that he more glided than walked. It was a curious affect, or trick, he possessed. As though his feet didn’t actually touch the floor. To this day, I don’t honestly think they did.’ He laughed. ‘And to this day, Mr Seaton, spats give me the shivers.’

  ‘We’re largely spared spats, these days.’

  ‘Thank the Lord.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  Breene indulged in one of his silences, before answering. ‘I asked my father. And my father told me he was thought by some to be the wickedest man in the world. And I didn’t ask anymore. I left it at that.’

  Seaton said nothing.

  ‘We don’t all share your curiosity, you see.’

  ‘Why weren’t you more curious? Why aren’t you?’

  Breene looked across to the camera reposing on his desk. ‘Because curiosity killed the cat. And the cat had nine lives. And that’s eight more than I’ve ever been able to boast.’

  Seaton nodded. He remembered then what Young Mr Breene had said about the mantle of arrogance. About how comfortably, on the young, the mantle of arrogance could fit.

  ‘Come. Since it was what you came here for, I’ll give you that address.’

  Fourteen

  He went there straightaway. He looked it up in his heavily thumbed and dog-eared A to Z in the bright sunlight on the street outside Vogel and Breene and then jogged towards London Bridge tube with only a glance at his watch. It was eleven fifteen. He’d been with the old man over an hour. It had seemed less at the time, but he was in a hurry now to recover the vestiges of an enigmatic and elusive life. And he could not wait to do so.

  It was just after midday when he crossed Fulham Broadway at the junction to the right of the station exit and walked up Harwood Road, the Town Hall building on his left a high jumble of stained ornamentation in the unforgiving light and still-rising heat of the day. Left again into Moore Park Road and the traffic sounds from the junction he’d crossed seconds earlier retreated into something like a rumour. He didn’t know this part of London at all. He was relieved to see that Moore Park Road comprised two facing terraces of three-storey Victorian houses. The angle of the sun cast the road between the terraces into shadow. It was suddenly cool, as well as quiet. There were odd parked cars. But there was no road traffic moving. At the end of the block, at the first intersecting road, he saw there was some kind of shop. There was a pub next to it, the sign obscured by hanging baskets of flowers and plants that, even from here, he could see the dry summer had defeated. But the road itself had been spared bomb damage, redevelopment and other urban catastrophes. It was intact. He started to study the numbers over the knockers on the doors.

  Ten minutes later, his knuckles tender from rapping on solid oak, he walked into the shop a block down the road. The knocker on the door he wanted had been too stiff with clumsily applied paint to make much noise on impact. It suggested whoever lived there didn’t get many visitors. But his hammering fist hadn’t aroused anyone either. And there was no bell to ring. The curtains had been drawn and when he’d stooped and tried to look through the narrow letterbox, the interior had been dark, with a dank odour somehow discouraging to the notion of life, let alone domesticity. The smell had reminded him of the smell of the high-rise slums he sometimes had to go to with Mike Whitehall, doing conditions stories on damp or cockroach infestation on Hackney’s neglected estates. It was the smell of squalor. It seemed odd to encounter it now, here. This wasn’t the opulent riverside Chelsea of Cheyne Walk; that was obvious. The parked cars had some mileage on them and there were patches of graffiti celebrating the Second Division heroes of Stamford Bridge here and there on walls. But most of the addresses looked well-maintained, smart in the discreet way prosperity usually manifests itself among people used to being prosperous.

  ‘How’s it going,’ he said absently, walking into the newsagent’s shop, fishing for change, his mind on his summer thirst and the Diet Coke that would quench it.

  ‘You’d be a Dublin man, I’m thinking.’

  Seaton looked at the figure behind the counter. He’d expected an Asian proprietor, because in London that was what you almost always got. The man behind the counter was flanked by Chelsea FC pennants on one side and a giant colour poster of the centre forward Kerry Dixon rising for a header on the other. His shop was like a small shrine to the Blues. Except for one sly little shield tacked to the rear wall, visible above his left shoulder and bearing the three-castle crest of the Dublin gaelic football team. You’d have to know what it signified even for it to register, so discreetly placed was it. But Seaton knew it all right. The proprietor himself was blue-eyed, long from the girlish lower lip to the tip of the chin, dark curly hair tumbling down his forehead as far as his eyebrows. And his waistline was winning the battle to force his tucked-in shirt out over his trousers. He looked like all of Paul Seaton’s uncles rolled into one and the thought made Seaton smile.

  ‘You’d be a Dublin man?’ he repeated.

  There was a way to play this. ‘I wouldn’t be after coming from anywhere else, now. Yourself?’

  ‘Ah,’ the newsagent said. ‘There’s not a town to touch it. Not at all. Nowhere.’

  ‘Not even London?’

  ‘Oh, London’s a grand place, right enough. Sure it’s grand. There’s only the one thing London’s lacking.’

  ‘It’ll never be home,’ Seaton said.

  ‘As long as I live and breathe,’ the newsagent said, ‘it’ll never be home.’ He sighed. There was a silence.

  ‘And the Guinness,’ Seaton said.

  ‘Right enough,’ the newsagent said, nodding his head. ‘And the Guinness, too.’

  He spread his hands across the newspapers and magazines on his countertop. The ritual greeting was complete. Dublin had been duly honoured. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘What is it you’ll be wanting?’

  He sounds to me, Seaton thought, like I must sound to Lucinda.

  ‘You don’t happen to know the people live at number eighteen?’

  The Dubliner stared at him. ‘Ah, man. You wouldn’t be a copper, now. Would you?’

  Seaton pulled out his NUJ card. ‘It’s a routine thing.’ He nodded to a wall rack hung with papers folded to show their mastheads and the first line of their front-page banner headlines. ‘We’ve got to fill ’em. For you to sell ’em.’

  ‘You’re looking for a scruffy old guy. Lives there alone. Tall, wears a beard. We deliver him the Telegraph daily. He also takes the Racing Post and Punch.’

  ‘Deliver? The man doesn’t live more than a minute away.’

  ‘He’s a reclu
se, so he is.’

  ‘What time does he get home?’

  ‘Sure, he’s home now.’

  Seaton looked at his tender knuckles. He didn’t think anyone was that reclusive.

  ‘You’d be better knowing what time he comes round,’ the newsagent said, grinning. ‘It’s fair to say the feller takes a drink. I’d say he drinks well into the small hours. I’ve never seen him surface before five in the afternoon, when he’ll sometimes brave the light for a pint of milk. But you’re better catching him around six. The later you leave it, the better the humour he’s apt to be in.’

  Seaton looked at his watch. It was only twelve thirty. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

  ‘Semi-skimmed,’ the Dubliner said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The milk.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ Seaton said. He was at the door, had the door held open, when the obvious occurred to him. ‘Would you happen to know the feller’s name?’

  ‘Gibson-Hoare,’ the Dubliner said.

  But he pronounced the latter part of it, whore.

  There was nothing else for it but to go back home to Lambeth. He couldn’t entertain himself window-shopping in the King’s Road for five and a half hours. He had to stay out of North London altogether unless he was spotted, fit and mobile, when he was supposed to be bedridden with a stomach bug. He’d get a district line train to Embankment and walk over Hungerford Bridge. Then he’d walk along the South Bank, under Waterloo Bridge, under Westminster Bridge, up the steps at Lambeth Bridge, across the road and home. He’d take a glorious stroll along the summer river, trying to calm himself, trying to contain his swelling sense of excitement and anticipation before returning to Moore Park Road by later simply reversing the route.

  Early on a Tuesday afternoon, Lucinda wouldn’t be home. She would be at college, still frantically putting together the finishing touches to her degree show. It seemed to Seaton a superhuman amount of work for one student to accomplish on the timetable and the grant. But it was the same for everyone on the degree course. The standards set were the reason St Martin’s had such an exalted reputation. And he was taking care of her dissertation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that any longer.