The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [0]
The House of Lost Souls
F. G. Cottam
For my girls and for my boy, with love and pride.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
The House of Lost Souls
One
Hull, October 1995
Nick Mason thought it ironic that he had always been so skilled at the covert aspect of the craft. Not so much skilled, really, as talented. He had a natural aptitude, an instinct for concealment. He watched his sister, pale at the graveside, from his hide a hundred feet away and it never even occurred to him that he might be discovered and compromised there. He knew how good he was at doing this. The proof lay in the fact that he’d done it so often and was still alive.
It was ironic because he had never thought to employ these skills in carrying out surveillance on his own flesh and blood. But there it was. There he was. Here he was, spying on his little sister. His instinct told him there was every reason for doing so. He was doing it for her own good. And ironic or not, it was bloody convenient to possess the sly and patient cunning necessary to do it so successfully.
He’d gained the expertise in the 1980s in Northern Ireland. They loved a burial, the Paddies did. They loved a martyr properly honoured and, to Mason’s mind, were melancholy by nature, always hankering after a proper excuse to mourn. All the major players attended the big ones. And you learned a lot from the body language, watching them pay their respects to one another. You watched them greet one another and offer their condolences and you learned about their hierarchy. And so he’d seen a lot of IRA heroes go to their final resting places, hidden in hides just like this one, sometimes feet away from the boyos posted as sentries, sometimes close enough to smell the breath on them from the steadiers they’d sunk in the pub on the way to the church.
He had to admit that this particular funeral was different from any of those, though. There was his sister, for a start, a pale, broken little presence in her black coat, with her clasped hands and the grief running in raw streams of redness down her face. She’d wanted to come on her own. He’d had to respect her wish to do so. It was why he was smeared in cam cream and wearing enough webbing to conceal a sniper in a combat zone. It was why he was dressed in jungle fatigues and had remained entirely still for two hours now in a narrow depression behind a thick cluster of twigs and thorn bushes adorned by an orange and russet litter of October leaves.
It wasn’t just his sister that made it different, though. Watching the funeral procession walking to the graveside had been for Mason like watching a film with several of the frames missing. The light was odd and there was a jumpy quality to the way the mourners moved that made it hard to keep track of what was going on. Funerals usually had their own morbid choreography. Even when they buried one of the boyos in Belfast, the event had always possessed the same slow, deliberate decorum.
Here, one of the pallbearers had staggered from under the burden of the coffin and vomited with his head twisted away from the procession and his hands on his knees as soon as they exited the church. The other bearers had looked as sallow and nauseous as their colleague had, lurching and struggling on. The parents had not appeared to notice. Mason, mindful of the manner in which the girl had taken her life, tried not to look at the parents. But the priest followed the coffin like a man striding towards his own death, stiff-legged and sweating, gasping out