The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [104]
‘He’s at a retreat in the French Alps,’ Seaton said. ‘A former monastery, above the town of Chamonix. Covey told me. Covey told me that’s where we’ll find him.’
‘Somewhere secluded he’s gone, reconciled, to die,’ Mason said. ‘Who is Covey?’
‘I told you. I don’t know. I’ve never really known.’
Mason nodded. ‘Get some kip,’ he said. ‘We’ll sleep for a couple of hours and then we’re going for a run to help clear our minds before the trip.’
‘A run?’
‘You were fit once, weren’t you?’
‘Don’t you want to leave immediately?’
‘I don’t want to leave at all. My instinct is to stay with Sarah. But my being here doesn’t seem to be helping my sister very much. That said, I don’t think important things are very often, if ever, achieved in haste. And to be really honest, if I don’t sleep first and then burn off some of this tension, I’m likely to hit something. And you are the clear and present target.’
‘I haven’t got any kit.’
‘I’ll lend you some,’ Mason said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m running on my own. And running kit, mate, is the very least of your problems.’
They took the train to France from Ashford and caught a connecting TGV, mostly full of skiers. On the journey, Mason told Seaton about the condition of the other surviving girls from the ethics seminar. He’d established contact with the families of the English girls in the aftermath of the funeral he’d clandestinely witnessed. Both were in hospitals, sedated and on suicide watch. The American student, older, apparently tougher, had been restrained by air stewards trying to open an emergency door on a flight home, six miles above the Atlantic. She was wearing restraints in Bellevue, now, her distraught parents swapping vigilant shifts outside her room.
The TGV was quick. But Chamonix was the Alps. It was forty-five chilly and discouraging minutes before they were able to find a taxi prepared to take them to the address above the village provided by Malcolm Covey.
‘How do we know he’ll see us?’
‘Covey said he’ll be expecting us.’
It was cold inside the taxi. Colder outside, as they climbed higher and the air got thinner. Seaton rubbed his glove against the condensation on his window. It was a borrowed glove, one of a pair of Mason’s skiing gloves he’d been lent for the journey. Splashes of snow looked luminous between the trees in the pond of view the knuckles of his hand had rubbed against the glass. He shifted against the car’s upholstery. He felt his leg and back muscles, stiff and tender after their run of the morning. The run had been long and hard. Mason was as well-conditioned as he looked. But the unaccustomed exercise had left him feeling better than he could have imagined. The car started to climb a steep gradient that pushed him back in his seat. He watched condensation encroach on his diminishing pond of view. It bleared to a puddle. They were rising through the tree line, the boughs coniferous and dense. Through the windscreen, in yellow headlamp glare, snow twirled downward in slow thickening flakes. Music crackled into life on the cab radio, the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris, the gypsy virtuoso Django Reinhardt nimble on the frets of his guitar.
‘Merde!’ their driver said, stabbing buttons on the dash. Behind him, in the light from the glowing radio, his passengers swapped a glance.
They were left on the cobbles of the monastery courtyard by the cleric sentry who answered Mason’s pull on the door-bell. It was snowing more heavily now, wet flakes that clumped on to their shoulders and bare heads as they waited. Seaton’s impression, looking at the dark arches and the walls above them, was of stone chilled to indifference by centuries of winters like the one on the way. It was a bleak and ancient building. Yellow patches against the brooding mass of the place, sparse and without warmth, suggested candlelight burning through the windows of odd cells and cloisters. Seaton shivered. But only with