The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [103]
Twenty-Three
Seaton finished his story and then listened for a while to the silence that followed it. The night had passed peaceably enough for the patient sleeping her narcotic sleep above their heads. She had not stirred. Mason had smoked steadily as he listened, the occasional frown his only reaction to what he was being told. They were in the room with the expensive hi-fi equipment and the pretty landscapes painted by the St Ives School of colourists on its walls. The pictures had just been dark oblongs in the night. Now their detail was accruing cautiously, as November light leaked through the wooden shutters over the ground-floor windows. But the storm of the night before, which had threatened the Wavecrest panes with bursts of pounded shingle, had blown itself out. And mercifully, they’d been free of music since leaving the car. All through his story, Seaton had expected the sardonic accompaniment of uninvited song from Mason’s speakers. But none had come.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Mason looked at his watch. He looked up towards the ceiling, as though looking through the floors to where his sister lay. He lowered his head and levelled his eyes on Seaton.
‘I’ve got a Land Rover garaged in Tankerton. It would take me twenty minutes to get some gear together, maybe another thirty-five to load it so it’s concealed. The ferry crossing could be risky, because ammo is heavy and sometimes they’ll weigh a vehicle. But it’s unlikely, unless we’re very unlucky. And we’ve both had more than our share of bad luck already. My instinct is to try to do what I did to that thing in Africa. But my intuition is that I don’t know everything I need to. There’s stuff I feel I’ve not been told. Know your enemy, they say. Fucking right, I say, if you want to survive. If you want to have a chance of coming out on top.’
‘I’ve told you everything,’ Seaton said.
‘Malcolm Covey,’ Mason said. ‘Even his name sounds like a fucking anagram.’
‘Oh, he’s real enough.’
‘And he sent you to me, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘We need to talk to the priest,’ Seaton said. ‘We need to go and talk to your Jesuit. Covey told me we’d be wise to do that, before attempting to do anything else.’
Mason pondered. ‘Ever think that Covey wasn’t coming entirely clean with you?’
‘Always,’ Seaton said.
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know. As God is my judge, I don’t know. But I spent an hour with him the other night in a bar adjacent to St George’s Cathedral in Lambeth. And he was most insistent that we need to talk to the priest if we’re to have any chance of saving the lives of the girls.’
‘Why does he say you have to go back there, Paul? Out of the goodness of your heart?’
‘He always said it. He always insisted that one day, I would have to go back.’
‘Why?’
The air in the room was yellowish and bitter with smoke grown stale. The light drifting now through the shutters suggested one of those autumnal days that never brightens noticeably beyond its enfeebled dawn. Even the rhythmic slap of the water on the shingle below sounded tired. Seaton sighed with fatigue and the spent effort of all his recent reminiscing.
‘Malcolm Covey said I would have to go back, because the dead don’t bury themselves.’
Mason snorted. He said, ‘What’s that, some sort of psychiatric riddle?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was just stating a sad and unfortunate fact.’
Mason was still for a moment. Seaton knew this was a man who was very seldom entirely still. Then he shifted and blinked. He looked up again; up through the layers of his inherited house, towards where he no doubt hoped his sister still slept her dreamless sleep.