The House of Lost Souls (10 page)

Through the window, in the car park, Mike was adjusting the knot of his tie and patting down his hair in the wing mirror of the editor’s Granada. Mike, tall and slim and dapper in his black suit from Robot in Covent Garden and his crêpe-soled Robot shoes.

‘So it was suicide?’

‘It certainly looks that way.’

‘Anything else unusual?’

‘Malnutrition. She had starved herself.’

Through the window, Mike had taken the pager from his belt and was playing with it.

‘She was destitute,’ Seaton said.

‘No, she wasn’t. We still have her effects here. I’ve got them in front of me. She was wearing diamond earrings, was madam. She was wearing a ring set with emeralds and rubies and a Cartier watch strapped to her wrist. Stuff like that was easy to pawn back then. Still would be. She wasn’t a candidate for the soup kitchen, if you want my professional view. She was starving herself out of choice.’

‘How come you’ve still got her effects?’

‘According to the accompanying note, her cousin was supposed to collect them.’

‘But he never did?’

Halliwell laughed. ‘Hasn’t so far. They’re still waiting.’

‘And she cut her own throat?’

‘That’s what the surgeon said.’

‘I owe you one, Bob,’ Seaton said.

‘Chivas Regal,’ Halliwell said. ‘No half-bottles, mind.’ He hung up.

In Arthur’s café Seaton sat opposite Mike, while the proprietor strolled between the crowded tables telling his customers what it was they were going to eat. There were menus in Arthur’s, printed in brown italics on heavy yellow paper in transparent plastic sleeves. But once you’d been there often enough, Arthur, dapper in his white waiting-on coat and short-back-and-sides, would dictate your order to you. In the beige décor and stifling heat of the café, Mike worked through the mixed grill Arthur had ordered on his behalf while Seaton neglected a plate piled high with meat lasagne. He sipped from his glass of Coke. The café, from the door in, occupied a long narrow rectangular space. Bench seats were arranged to either side of a central aisle that ran the length of it, so you were either facing the door to the kitchen or you were facing the entrance and, beyond it, Kingsland Road. Seaton looked at the traffic through the windows rising from waist height to either side of the door. It wasn’t moving. Palls of diesel hung about above the pavement in the heat and brightness from buses and lorries gridlocked out there. He could feel his thighs sticking through the light wool of his suit trousers to the plastic-covered padding of his seat. He drained his glass.

Arthur passed their table, tapping its Formica surface twice with a forefinger, taking Seaton’s empty Coke glass and wiping away the circle of condensation from underneath it with a cloth before winking and moving on. He always referred to them to their faces as his Gentlemen of the Press. He liked them enough to extend them credit at the end of the calendar month when funds were apt to run a little low. He’d offered to do so out of the blue, months earlier, without their asking. Seaton was from Dublin and Mike came from a town in Merseyside called Formby. They’d been surprised by the offer. But London was a collection of villages, when you got to know your way around them a bit. And in this part of London, they were mostly made to feel at home.

Arthur would have made a good subject for Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s camera, Seaton thought. He had a face carved from mahogany, an urban metropolitan face that was somehow ageless. You could see him astride a bicycle, sweep’s brushes balanced over one shoulder, dark-skinned with soot on a cobbled street a century distant. You could see him wearing a billboard in a lost newsreel, advertising to a stunned world that the
Titanic
had foundered, many lives believed lost. But there was more to his features than their timelessness. His face had the deadpan inscrutability required for convincing magic. So you could see him as a hypnotist, say, levitating some pretty, rigid volunteer in petticoats and buttoned boots. That was more Pandora’s line, wasn’t it? Something unsettling and improbable; an image begging more questions than it was capable of answering. In the prints in the monograph he’d seen, she seemed to specialise in precisely the opposite of what the revelatory art of photography was supposed to do.

‘Aren’t you going to touch that lasagne?’

Seaton picked up his fork and put sauce-covered pasta into his mouth and began to chew. He just couldn’t stop thinking about Pandora. He had this image in his mind of her pale body, naked and bejewelled, her fine skin wrinkled and stained from its time in a river still poisonous in those days with its cocktail of industrial filth. Jesus, you’d have to hate yourself, then, to jump into the Thames. The Cartier watch would have stopped at the precise moment her body entered the water, an entirely redundant clue since the killer had been herself. The time of death was immaterial. He was half-tempted to take Bob Halliwell over that bottle of Scotch, see if he could have the detective take from their strongroom the drawer of artifacts claimed from Pandora’s corpse. Touch them and, in doing so, touch her. But what would be the point of that, beyond a sort of ghoulish perversion?

‘You know, it’s one of those clichés vindicated every time I sit down with you,’ Mike said, from miles away, on the other side of their table.

‘What is?’ He saw that Mike had cleared his plate of everything but a small puddle of egg yolk. He heard the sound of the transistor radio from the café kitchen, loudly tuned as always to Capital, a song by ABC playing, Martin Fry singing their histrionic hit ‘The Look Of Love’.

‘The stereotypical Irishman,’ Mike said. ‘The silver-tongued Celtic charmer. I mean, you lay it on a bit heavy sometimes, the way you weave in all those spellbinding aphorisms. But, personally, I have to say I’m a willing audience. I suppose I’m just a sucker for a monologue from the bog.’

Seaton smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Stand me another Coke. Tell me what’s on your mind,’ Mike said. He looked at his watch.

The thing was, for a moment, he’d been there. He’d been on the strew of pebbles by Shadwell Stair, the body under a tarpaulin at the edge of a grey tide of lapping scum, barges passing in low procession pulled by squat long-funnelled tugs billowing smoke into a low November sky. He’d smelled the river, the damp gabardine of policemen’s raincoats, the sour pickled odour of waterlogged flesh, breathed the air, heavy with its burden of sulphur and soot. It had been raining. It had been raining in London on the morning the fact of Pandora’s death revealed itself.

With effort, he dragged himself back. Back to Arthur’s. Back to the heat, to the here and now. ‘Got much on this afternoon?’

Mike grimaced. ‘I’m actually thinking of calling it a day, after the furry felon. Bringing the curtain down on a brilliant career. I might as well go out on a high. A man at the top of his game should know when he’s peaked. I mean, the mad monkey. Come on, professionally speaking, it just doesn’t get much better than that.’

‘It could be worse. It could be a pile of charity pennies toppled in a pub.’

‘Depends who’s doing the toppling,’ Mike said. ‘Last Tuesday night in the Anchor and Hope it was a woman who used to be in Pan’s People.’

They were both silent for a moment. Seaton picked up his fork and then put it down on his plate and pushed away his plate of uneaten food.

‘So what are you doing this afternoon?’

‘The most boring sodding job on the planet,’ Mike said. ‘I’m taking the camera bodies in for a service. It means I’ve got to drive to sodding London Bridge.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘In this bastard traffic. In this bastard heat.’

‘Isn’t there somewhere more local?’

‘Undoubtedly. But Eddie insists on using the same place the company has used since about the turn of the century.’

‘Tradition,’ Seaton said. He was half-rising, fishing in his pockets for coins to pay for the lunch.

‘More than that,’ Mike said. ‘It’s always been renowned as the best place, with the best technicians, used by the best photographers. Which is great if you’re handling Hasselblads and Leicas and your work is featuring in
National Geographic
, but a bit wasted when you’re generally pointing the lens of a 35-mil Pentax at a grinning Syd James opening a garden fête. Or taking a mug shot of a delinquent primate.’

Seaton sat down. He took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table and offered Mike his pen. ‘Write down the name of this place, would you?’ he said.

Mike took the pen. ‘You’ll have trouble finding it. The entrance is an unprepossessing little green door with no number in a ramshackle brick building dwarfed by the brutalist monstrosities erected in the sixties to either side. It’s staffed entirely by gnomic Swiss lens-grinders and ancient tinkering Scots. The average age there must be about ninety. They make Eddie look boyish and carefree, the staff at Vogel and Breene.’ He laughed. ‘What do you run to anyway, Paul? A Kodak Instamatic?’

‘It’s not for me. It’s for my girlfriend. It’s for Lucinda.’ Lucinda owned a good camera. Mike knew she did.

‘She should have kept the guarantee,’ he said, writing down an address. ‘These people might be old-fashioned, but they’re far from cheap. They’ll charge her a term’s grant just to take the lens cap off.’

Seaton nodded. He took back his notebook and pen. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had used Leica cameras. She hadn’t been destitute and so may have owned them still at the end of her life. She had stopped working professionally. She had stopped having her pictures published. But what if she had continued to use her cameras? Or merely to have owned them? Wouldn’t she have had them serviced, if only out of force of habit? And wouldn’t the company that serviced them have had an up-to-date address for her?

‘Thanks,’ he said to Mike, in Arthur’s café, the June heat sending a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. He looked at their plates. ‘I’ll get this one. This one’s on me.’

He phoned as soon as he got back to his desk, asking, as Mike had advised him to ask, for Young Mr Breene.

‘Young Mr Breene is about a hundred and seventy years old, but he’s reasonably cordial. He doesn’t have a first name, obviously. No one there does. But if you’re deferential enough and try not to sound too young, he might condescend to book Lucinda’s camera in before this time next year.’

He had the newsroom to himself. The other reporters generally went to the pub around the corner for lunch and had a pint and played pool and listened to The Clash on the jukebox while the bread hardened around the ham and cheese in their sandwiches and rolls.

At London Bridge, Young Mr Breene was summoned to the telephone. There was a cough and then an elderly voice with a hint of Aberdeenshire.

‘How can I be of assistance?’

‘I am putting together a story about the pioneer photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare.’

There was a pause. ‘Are you indeed.’

‘It’s for a magazine called
The Face
.’

But Young Mr Breene was unfamiliar with
The Face
.

‘I wonder, did Miss Gibson-Hoare ever have her equipment serviced by Vogel and Breene?’

There was another, long pause. ‘Why would you wonder that?’

‘There’s a peculiar quality to her work.’

Young Mr Breene chuckled. ‘That was her eye, Mr Seaton. Her talent. It had nothing whatever to do with her choice of camera or of film.’

Seaton swallowed.

‘You sound very certain of that.’

‘The prototype of the 35-millimetre Leica was created in 1913. The Great War prevented it from going into production. It was 1924 before the camera was ready for mass production and the following year before it became widely available throughout the world. Miss Gibson-Hoare bought two of them. And you are right to suppose that we serviced them for her. In fact, I believe we still have one of them here.’

Seaton’s heart was audible to him against his chest wall. ‘Am I right to think she lived in Cheyne Walk?’

‘In Chelsea, yes,’ Breene said, and Seaton’s heart descended to his stomach. ‘But not in Cheyne Walk. That wasn’t the address we had for her towards the end of her life.’

‘Could you tell me where she did live?’ He could hear the boys from the pub clattering up the stairwell, could smell the beer-and-tobacco-smoke pub smell that would cling to their clothes and hair and breath for the rest of the afternoon.

Young Mr Breene had paused again. ‘You want to know where it was that Pandora Gibson-Hoare resided. Now why on earth would you want to know that?’

‘I just want to paint the fullest possible picture, Mr Breene. To do that, I need to be in possession of all the detail I can accrue.’

‘I see. Well, I don’t profess to see the use of the information, but I don’t see it can do any harm to tell it to you. That said, I won’t give you the detail you seek over the telephone. Come here personally. Ask for me. Present your press credentials. Do that, and I will furnish the address.’

The following morning, Seaton did something he had never done before and rang into the office sick. He’d spent the small hours lying awake next to a sleeping Lucinda as light gathered in the sky and filled the room with a milky luminescence that gradually grew into dawn. At five thirty, he’d had to steal carefully out of bed and make himself a cup of tea. He drank it, looking out of their sitting-room window down at Lambeth High Street and the chink of Embankment, visible to the right where the edifice of the old government office building opposite ended and Lambeth High Street intersected with Lambeth Bridge Road. He’d never known himself feel remotely so excited by any professional pursuit.

What did he honestly hope to find?

If the flat had been provided by a friend or lover, there might be some legacy of Pandora’s left behind. There might be a cache of letters shedding first-hand light on her work and the reason it so abruptly ceased. There might be half a dozen little cylinders of yet-to-be-developed film containing pictures no one had ever seen. He thought this unlikely, 35-millimetre stock probably having perished to nothing after better than four decades of neglect. But there might be prints. And that was his greatest hope. She might have shot whole stories that she edited out of what the world thought of as the Gibson-Hoare cannon. And commenting on the rediscovered work would give Lucinda’s dissertation real distinction.

Two small worries nagged at Seaton as he sipped tea and looked out over the deserted dawn intersection of streets. The first was that, in all likelihood, he would find nothing at the new address. The building could have been bombed in the Blitz or bulldozed during the wholesale redevelopment of London in the 1960s. How likely was it that, even if they survived, a set of furnished rooms would still harbour such fragile and reclusive keepsakes? It would be unlikely he’d find anything at all other than a suspicious and hostile landlord or a clueless tenant occupying impersonal space on a short let. Or a company let; because Chelsea wasn’t any longer the bohemian haven it had been before the war. It was a succession of coveted postcodes and record-breaking property prices. If he found nothing, he would have to rely on the sparse facts and thin conclusions of Edwin Poole as the basis for work that would inevitably be undermined by the insubstantiality of its spun-out speculations.

And this brought him to the second, honestly more troubling, of his two concerns. Because he knew that this pursuit was about more now than helping Lucinda, however important that had been to him when he’d originally had the idea. As soon as he’d looked at the Gibson-Hoare pictures in the Poole monograph, he’d been hooked, hadn’t he? Or perhaps it was the plea for help in her frightened eyes in the picture taken of her at the Café Royal. He wanted to know what troubled vision of the world informed her disquieting work. He wanted to know what it was had made her stop working with such abruptness, when her reputation was at its apparent height. He wanted to know the reason she had hidden subsequently from her former life. And she had been hiding, hadn’t she, if poverty could not be blamed for forcing her into obscurity? And finally, Seaton wanted to know the reason for that ghastly suicide. He knew now that he would ask Bob Halliwell if he could see the artifacts taken from her corpse at the Whitechapel mortuary. It couldn’t remotely help with the framing of Lucinda’s fraudulent dissertation. He could think of no reason for doing it beyond his own prurient curiosity. But if it took a big bribe, a litre of Chivas, he’d do it now, he knew.

From their bedroom next door, he heard Lucinda sigh in her sleep. And then he thought he caught sight of a shape, dark in space and light, through that chink in the buildings that gave a glimpse to the far right through their window of the Embankment. From where he looked, to his right, at the intersection with Lambeth High Street there was Lambeth Bridge Road, which at this hour was still empty of traffic. On the other side of it was the ornamental garden fronting the church of St Mary’s at Lambeth. And beyond that was the Embankment itself.

Embankment was where now he saw a tall figure in what he could have sworn was a black top hat, staring directly back at him. He saw with surprise that the still figure was dressed formally in a black morning suit. And then, with a movement so spasmodic and sudden it made Seaton clatter the lip of his tea mug hard against his teeth, the man raised his top hat and Seaton saw that its brim trailed crêpe tails of mourning ribbon, before it was put back on his head and he turned and started to walk eastward, out of sight. But he was followed. Horses, a team of four black-plumed horses followed him into view, pulling a glass carriage hearse at the solemn funereal pace the figure had set. It progressed silently, the clop of hooves and trundle over the road of iron-bound wheels sounds that would not carry over the three or four hundred yards of distance that separated Seaton from what he saw. The whole weird procession passed out of his limited view of it through the window in no more than a fraction of time, a couple of seconds. It was twenty-eight minutes past six. It was no time for a funeral procession of such stately flamboyance. It was no time for any kind of funeral procession at all.

He’d dismiss it, he decided, as one of London’s passing enigmas. There was much about the complexity and ritual of the city he did not understand. But for a junior reporter on a local London newspaper, he felt he was doing okay with his latest story. True, it was about as far off-diary as a story could get. And, as Bob Halliwell had said, he was pursuing it forty-six years after the fact. But he was making significant progress. Lucinda sighed again, dreaming he supposed, stirred from deep sleep into listlessness by the encroaching light, her warming skin and dormant senses roused by the rising heat of another day. He felt a stir of excitement grip his belly as he made the decision, then, to call in sick and call in at the premises of Vogel and Breene at London Bridge. He stroked his chin. He would shave and iron his crispest shirt. He wanted to make the best impression he could on Young Mr Breene and suspected that manners and appearance would be important in accomplishing that. Lucinda moaned and uttered a word he couldn’t make out in her sleep. She didn’t waken, but the one lonely word sounded anxious, he thought, afraid. He went and opened the bedroom door a chink and looked at her lying there in the diffuse light of a summer morning gathering strength and intensity through her home-made muslin drapes.

He loved her. He wanted her. What was new in him, he knew, was that he felt for her. He thought it was a shame the way that taking a degree tested people at such a tender age. He was only three years past the ordeal himself. But he didn’t think Trinity College had provided quite the pressure with modern literature that St Martin’s did with its fashion course. He could understand the stress she must be suffering and he sympathised with a depth of emotion and a tenderness so real and novel to him that he knew it must be love.

This glorious summer was going by as Lucinda, lovely, toiled and fretted over her little electric sewing machine in the flat. But it would be over soon. And Stuart Lockyear had called her degree collection brilliant. And Stuart wasn’t one for pointless flattery. She’d done it all in shades of yellow and cream and taupe; pleated flowing dresses and bias-cut, calf-length skirts worn under waisted jackets. Already, Whistles had ordered three keynote garments from the collection for their flagship store in Marylebone. And the buyer from Harvey Nichols was said to be interested, too. The auguries were good. Seaton closed the bedroom door softly on Lucinda and stroked his chin again and went into their small bathroom to shave so that he would look the part when he rang in sick and went to London Bridge for his audience with Young Mr Breene.

At some stage of his life, Breene had been badly burned. The skin of his neck above his tie knot was pink and smooth in rivulets like spoiled wax. His eyelids were lashless and had an almost oriental cast to them. Seaton guessed that his own eyelids had been burned off, lost to the fire that had consumed most of his facial features and replaced by skin prised and shaped from painful grafts. His nose was short, almost comically arbitrary, the nostrils crude, and he had no lips at all. He didn’t blink. Under his shock of still thick and unruly hair, his face looked at first glance like that of a badly put-together child. A wood counter separated them. He lifted a section of it and beckoned Seaton through. Seaton held out his hand and Breene shook it and the gash under his nose stretched across his teeth in what Seaton supposed was a smile. His grip was strong. If his hands had been burned, they had recovered their strength and aptitude. They must have done, for the man to be able to handle the intricate task of camera repairs.

‘Tea or coffee,’ he asked when they got to his office. His office made it plain to Seaton that Young Mr Breene did not concern himself with the day-to-day mechanics of calibrating shutter speeds and repairing light apertures. It was too big, too well-appointed. There were some good Scottish landscapes on the walls. There were pictures of Breene with various civic dignitaries at events Seaton supposed had been organised by the London Chamber of Commerce or the Lord Mayor’s office. There were signed prints of photographs taken by Beaton and Bill Brandt and even Cartier-Bresson. There were half a dozen golfing trophies in a glass display cabinet. And there was a view from two high broad windows cut into the side of the building out over the river, London Bridge a resplendent curve of stone and painted iron to the left in the light of the ascending sun.

‘Coffee would be very welcome.’

‘But first, your credentials,’ Breene said. He sat down behind the mahogany splendour of his desk in a swivel chair. Seaton, still standing, took out his NUJ and IOJ cards and the laminated pass with his picture on it the Met Police Press Bureau insisted you carry. Breene leaned over and looked. ‘A very nice likeness. But you’re not English, are you?’

‘Dublin.’

‘A wonderful city, Mr Seaton. Sit, please.’

Seaton sat in one of the two straight-backed chairs facing Breene’s desk. He put his press credentials back into his wallet. Breene pressed an intercom switch and leaned into the machine. ‘A pot of coffee, Mary, when you have a moment. Two cups. Thank you.’

He smiled his ragged smile again. ‘You don’t mind staring, Seaton, which is to your credit. How do you think I got to look such a sight for sore eyes as I do?’

‘I’d say you were in the cockpit or fuselage of an aero-plane when it came under enemy attack and caught fire. You baled out, which is why you can still smile and appreciate coffee. You baled out, or your pilot got you down. But you were badly burned.’

‘Very good. You’ve an instinct for what you do.’

‘Not really. I live near the Imperial War Museum. I’ve spent a couple of idle Saturdays in there.’ Seaton regretted the use of the word ‘Idle’ the moment it came out of his mouth. But Breene didn’t look offended. ‘May I ask about the specifics?’

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.