by F. G. Cottam
What I have found should be sufficient to prompt an investigation, even after all this time. There may even be concrete proof, at the Fischer house, of their murderous offence. I believe it now lies abandoned. Regardless of that, I think I have uncovered sufficiently compelling circumstantial evidence to build a case against them. But the past few days have taught me that I cannot continue with this alone. I need to confide in someone trustworthy and wise. I need cool and detached advice on how best to pursue the matter. Should I go to a lawyer now? Would I be more sensible making a statement to a detective at Scotland Yard?
I am tempted, of course, to tell the Monsignor everything. He is so clever, with that fastidious cleverness that comes of being a Jesuit and a Frenchman. I no longer care that I should disappoint or disillusion him. The need for justice overrides my foolish vanity.
But the Monsignor is a Catholic and a foreigner. Neither characteristic is seen as entirely respectable. This is especially true now the country is so fraught with thoughts of war.
There is my cousin, Edwin Poole. He is younger than me, and I see precious little of him. But his career at Lloyds thrives. He is a member of all the best clubs. He takes a box each season at Covent Garden and gives lavishly, if a little too conspicuously, to good causes. The idea of a family scandal might appal him. And I know he knows Wheatley slightly. But I need to speak to someone. And a blood relative, who makes a successful living calculating risk, who depends upon discretion for his very livelihood, might not be the worst choice of confidant.
I need to go to bed. I am desperately weary. But I cannot get the smell of camphor and cigar ash out of my nostrils, or the topper gleam of beaver skin through fog, out of my mind. I hear their jeering laughter, the venom and contempt of it. I can see the tobacco stains on their teeth, the black gold of Fischer’s capped incisor. There is the sheen of patent leather in the flat light on their shoes. Crowley wore spats, too, I remember. They were wet and dirty at the skirt with scum trailed from the tideline. Poor Peter, insulated in mist and horror from the love and safety of his orphaned life.
God forgive me.
Peter, forgive me.
I must take back the car in the morning. I shall speak to my cousin first thing tomorrow.
Twenty-Six
Seaton had read her account out loud so that Mason might hear it, too. And it was Mason who spoke first when Seaton had finished and slowly brought the covers of the little volume back together in his hands.
‘She was in love with you, Father.’
The priest spoke with his back to them. ‘She was very beautiful. And she was abundant with intelligence and life. And I was a little in love with her, I think.’
Seaton said, ‘Where did you get the notebook?’
‘She gave it to me herself. She presented it to me bound in brown paper and string secured by sealing wax. She said I was to read it only in the event of her death. Otherwise, she said, she would be back to collect it from me within a fortnight or so. The occasion upon which she gave me the journal was the last on which I ever saw Pandora.’
‘It was her last confession,’ Mason said.
‘She never got to make her first confession,’ Seaton said. ‘She never finished her instruction, was never accepted into the faith. Edwin Poole saw to that.’
‘Nevertheless, Paul. I think that in every important particular, Nicholas is right.’
‘Did she have a premonition of her own death?’ This from Mason.
Lascalles hesitated. ‘The last time I saw her, she was serene. She handed me the package containing her journal with a smile. But the precaution speaks for itself, I think. She was reconciled to her course of action. Perhaps she was even confident of the outcome. But she was never in doubt about how malign and formidable were the forces she was challenging.’
‘She called you Monsignor,’ Seaton said. ‘So did the Franciscan who brought the food in here earlier. It suggests a Vatican rank.’
‘I am a priest.’
‘One who could summon an instant favour from a cardinal.’
‘I had a telephone. A cardinal is a priest before he is a prince of the Church.’
There was silence in the library.
‘It wasn’t malnutrition, when they found her body in the river,’ Seaton said. ‘She wasn’t starving, she was fasting. It was penance.’
Lascalles took out his rosary and kissed its crucifix. Mason thought that there were tears in his eyes. But in the unsure light of the dying fire, it could have been age. Or fatigue.
‘I’m going to find Peter,’ Seaton said. ‘Pandora found him with a purloined library pass. I was a reporter once and good at it. I’m going to find him, find out who he was.’
Seaton’s tone of voice here was new to Mason. There was a certainty to it. So Mason spoke tactfully, ‘It was nearly seventy years ago, Paul. And it won’t bring the boy back to life. Or her.’
‘We need to know why he was singled out and taken.’
‘They chose shrewdly,’ Mason said, quoting Pandora. ‘He was probably a workhouse foundling, some poor infant soul no one cared about.’
Seaton shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think that was what she meant. I think there was more to it. And I think that when I’ve found Peter, we’ll be ready for the Fischer house.’
Mason looked to the priest. ‘Father?’
Lascalles was looking at Seaton. ‘I pray that God is with you,’ he said. ‘I pray that He is with both of you.’
Seaton was at the British Museum by the following afternoon. Mason got off the train at Ashford, where they had parked the Saab on their outward journey. He would drive it back to Whitstable.
‘How long is this going to take?’
‘As long as it takes,’ Seaton said. There was no point discussing it. Mason thought he was wasting his time. Seaton thought it might actually be worse than that. He was following hunches again, felt the old familiar compulsion that had lured him before into catastrophe.
‘I’ll contact the families of the other girls,’ Mason said. ‘Maybe visit them.’
‘You can offer them some of your stolen morphine,’ Seaton said.
Mason looked at him.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nick. That was uncalled for. But this should only take a couple of days. Sit tight. Wait for me.’
Mason shook his head. ‘Sarah’s in good hands. I have to do something.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s Tuesday. Be back by Friday. That’s as long as I’m prepared to wait. With or without you, that’s when I’m planning to go to the Fischer house.’
‘And do what?’
‘You’re Irish, Seaton. So I’m sure you’ve heard of Semtex. I’ll wire the place, blow it to fucking kingdom come.’
Seaton walked from the terminus at Waterloo over Waterloo Bridge to Aldwych and along Southampton Row towards Bloomsbury. They’d slept a couple of hours on truckle beds in the Jesuit keep and then been driven down the mountain by the Franciscan, chuckling at the wheel of a VW van as it slalomed on narrow tyres through the hairpins, racing to get them on the first available train. Now it was mid-afternoon, and he was in London, walking autumnal streets to a familiar destination. Old copies of the Western Mail would have been transferred to microfiche back in the 1980s. He could think of no reason why the library’s run of copies would be incomplete. He would comb every page of every edition from the beginning of September 1927. The certainty had set in him that he would find something. It burned like a small fire in his belly as light from the sky along Southampton Row retreated and deepened and the shadows softened and he turned, almost by rote, into Museum Street, under the threat of advancing rain.
A Welsh accent spoken by a child, seventy years ago, meant Wales. Britain was a kingdom then, without mobility or flux. The working classes only travelled when they marched or climbed into cattle cars as conscripts to fight in imperial wars. Most people lived and died in close proximity to where they were born. Only the privileged few, like the public schoolboy Young Mr Bree
ne had been, were afforded the luxury of casual travel about the country. Peter’s disappearance had provoked no widespread response. To merit that, back then, you had needed wealth or status or the notoriety of the poor kidnapped Lindbergh baby. Peter had been of the common herd. His Welsh voice had distinguished him for the first time outside the land of his birth, only after his abduction from it. Seaton felt curiously certain of that.
And so he found him almost straightaway.
The first story was a filler, filed by a court stringer and offering no names. Carried in the edition printed on 4 October, it merely said that an eight-year-old orphan had gone missing from the fishing village of Aberdyfi in Gwynedd. It didn’t even determine gender. But Seaton knew who it was. As Pandora had observed in her journal, child-stealing was in those days a rare crime.
The second story appeared on 20 October and was well-fleshed-out. It appeared under the byline of Philip Beal, credited as the Mail’s Senior Crime Reporter. A portrait was constructed of the boy, using quotes provided by his parish priest and the headmistress of the church school he attended. According to Miss Marjory Pegg, Peter Morgan was honest, obedient and blessed with a sunny disposition. He was an enthusiastic football player. He was also, she maintained, an immensely gifted student. Miss Pegg was adamant that Peter would not have gone off willingly with a stranger. She was not specific about the nature of his academic gifts. Or if she was, her further comments had not survived the subs, busily cutting stories to length in the Mail’s Cardiff newsroom.
Seaton didn’t put much store in the description of the boy. It was an old trick. Reporters had always colluded with the police in doing this. The more vivid and attractive the portrait of the victim, the more emotionally embroiled in the story the reader became. It was a tried and tested ploy in nudging unknowing witnesses into remembering something important they might have seen.
More significant was the status of the writer. Three weeks after the boy vanished, the Mail had known it was dealing with a crime. A child abduction; then as now, it was among the very gravest offences anyone could commit. Nobody nursed the illusion that they were dealing here with an accidental tragedy; a small boy dying of exposure lost in the wind-scoured hills that rose behind the village. Peter Morgan had been stolen. Then he had been murdered. And no one had ever been called to account for these awful, planned, sequential crimes.
Seaton rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and read the story a second time. He switched off the microfiche projector. The hot whirr of its fan faded as the light went out and the inked columns on their yellowed page from a newspaper printed a generation ago were lost again to darkness and history. He pulled back from the viewfinder and looked up at the walls of the Reading Room and blinked. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to five. He straightened a leg and patted his trouser pocket to reassure himself he had the change he required for the calls he needed to make from one of the payphones in the library vestibule. And he looked around him.
Pandora Gibson-Hoare had sat here, in this very room, and read the same words he just had and then walked to Charing Cross Road to get her maps to plot the journey made in her forlorn quest for retribution. And she would have needed maps. There had been no motorways to shrink the country then. The roads linking the cities of Britain were tenuous in those days, potholed and narrow and, when the sun went down, entirely dark. In Seaton’s imagination it seemed an awful, alien place; coal-fired, gas-lit, empty-skied, monochromatic and unmoving in its polarities of slum squalor and brittle high-born privilege. How Britain and the world with it had changed in those seventy years, in that human span, that single lifetime of which Peter Morgan had been robbed. Anger stirred in him. And Seaton knew he was sharing the same indignant rage Pandora had so vibrantly felt.
Like her, too, he had the strong sense of being followed when he left the museum. He walked back to Waterloo and bought tickets with some of Malcolm Covey’s money for the train journey to Aberdyfi. The Saab was in Whitstable. It would be quicker to go by rail. You took a northbound express from Euston and changed at Birmingham for West Wales. The Aberystwyth train stopped at Aberdyfi between stops at Machynlleth and Barmouth in its slow and scenic journey along the Welsh coast. If he set off early enough in the morning, he would be there by tomorrow lunchtime.
He was followed stealthily and felt the pursuit cease only when he left Waterloo Station after buying his train tickets and turned from Waterloo Road into Lower Marsh on the route back to his flat. He paused on Lower Marsh. The shops were closing. Their shutters were coming down. A large weak part of him wanted to spend more of Covey’s cash on a room for the night at the Novotel on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. It was a new and anonymous place, too glossy and recent for ghosts. But with the same certainty that told him he was no longer being followed, he knew now that it was safe to return to his home. There would be no more games tonight; no clangour of cathedral bells, no disembodied songs leaking from the guts of broken players. The real business was almost upon him. The trickery would begin again, the chilling mischief, only when he reached the Fischer house.
Light diminished along Lower Marsh with the lowering shutters and detritus stirred in the gutters, tissue paper shivering around pieces of bruised fruit dropped from the morning market stalls. He thought about Mason with his Semtex bluster on the train, and the pain over his lost sister which provoked it. He wondered what would Mason be doing at that moment and felt a feeling like a wrench in him of pity and foreboding for the man. Wind gusted and the gutters flapped. The street was dark. He sniffed and caught the faint dissipating whiff of cigar smoke on November air.
Twenty-Seven
Aberdyfi was a shallow rank of terraces rising with the steep incline of the land and facing the mouth of the Dyfi estuary. Penhelig, where Peter had actually come from, was a cluster of dwellings tacked on to the southern end of the village. Everything was of a type, of a period, as though the place had drowned in sepia or become cursed and frozen in time. It occurred to Seaton that this was because the village was in Snowdonia. Since the establishment of the National Park, it would have been impossible to build anything new. It would have been illegal to demolish anything not completely derelict. It was a fact he thought might help him in his search for secrets from the past. Aberdyfi quite deliberately celebrated the past. It was where the village lived and, when the tourists came in the summer months, thrived. The place seemed, more than anything, a monument to itself. The present was circum-scribed, here, tolerated only if it did not necessitate physical change.
Peter had been baptised and raised in the Anglican Communion, in what was, in his childhood, the newly established Anglican Province of the Church in Wales. His school had been a church school. His birth had been registered in the Parish of St Luke’s. And Seaton had spoken to the vicar from a British Museum payphone to arrange a face-to-face talk and to seek permission to take a look around his church. He’d lied about the reason. A cold call did not invite discussion about an infant tragedy. He’d relied on his rusted talent for invention to find a pretext.
He walked along the seafront to Penhelig under the drum of insistent rain. Cloud in a grey mantle concealed the peaks of the hills to his left. To his right, he passed a cluster of small fishing boats and yachts in Aberdyfi harbour. Craft sat still at anchor. It was very quiet under the rain. There was not enough breeze even for their rigging lines to slap the masts of the boats dragged up above the tideline on the sand. Within a few minutes of disembarking at the station, Seaton was completely soaked. He had not been so drenched since the evening he had got off a London bus, shivering with presentiment, on Lambeth Bridge. That was the night he’d met Malcolm Covey in Zanzibar. In the rain on the Aberdyfi seafront, it seemed an awfully long time ago. In calendar time, it was still less than a week.
He dumped his overnight bag on the bed in the room he’d reserved by phone at the Penhelig Arms. It was a nice room. It was more of Covey’s cash. The inn was sited on the coast road and his small window
faced the grey rain-stippled estuary.
St Luke’s was an ascent up a steep tree-lined lane that yellowed to a wash of gravel and gurgled in the ditches flanking the lane as he climbed. The church was high above Penhelig and lost from sight in a fold of hills until he saw the slate spire, almost upon it. The door to the church was open and lit from its porch in the general gloom of trees and sky. There was no priest, though. The Reverend Madden had been called away to see a sick parishioner. Seaton was met instead by a Mrs Reeve, who explained this to him. He had long ago, as part of his training in his old profession, disciplined himself against writing off people as types. But he had Mrs Reeve down straightaway as the sort of spinster who fusses around church flowers, spraying beeswax on pews, cleaning the font.
