The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [11]
After Perdoni’s, he packed a few things into an overnight bag and then walked the short distance to the lock-up under the arches in Hercules Road. There was a key to the padlock on the door in Covey’s padded envelope. The car key the envelope contained had already told him that he would be driving a Saab. The car was fairly new, black, its exterior spotless and its carpets and upholstery freshly vacuumed. The tank was full and Seaton had studied the route using a road atlas in the morning at his table outside the café.
He had not driven for a while but had barely drunk anything the evening before with Covey and driving was a skill he considered rudimentary enough. Nevertheless, he had one bad moment on the journey. It occurred on the A3, the bulk of Guildford cathedral looming monolithic to his left, when the Saab’s radio switched itself on. He looked down at the green lights of the display, so shocked that the wheel seemed to convulse in his hand, veering the car violently to the left. A furious horn blatted from behind and he saw the lorry he’d almost hit shuddering under the force of its air brakes in his rear-view mirror. He corrected his steering with sweaty hands and could feel his heart, light in his chest, as he waited for Sandy Denny’s cold and ragged delivery of the posthumous ‘Tam Lin’ through the speakers behind the door panels. But when he made sense of the sound, it was a white soul song he didn’t know, the station innocent, the presenter talking inanely about the weather or his wife or something over the melody as it faded in and out of coherence with the strength of the signal. Some piece of software built into the Saab’s dashboard had elected to turn the radio on, that was all. The last person to use the car must have preprogrammed it. He pushed the radio’s ‘mute’ button and the music and talking stopped as his pulse began to slow reluctantly to its normal rate.
The university was new, half-timbered buildings with thick panes of tinted glass, set amid gravel paths and thickets and avenues of mature trees on one side of a slope that grew less gentle the higher and more exposed to the weather it became. A chapel and an administration building topped the rise. The chapel surprised Seaton. He thought that perhaps it meant American or Catholic funding. The blue sky of the London morning had become a mournful November grey en route to Surrey in the afternoon. Now, when Seaton looked up, the cloud was blank and low and bruised heavily with its burden of impending rain. Gravel, in larger fragments than he thought usual for paths, crunched or was squirted stubbornly out from under his feet. He could feel the sharpness of individual stones through the soles of his shoes. Halogen lamps had been wired high at intervals in some of the trees and he was glad of the light. He had been obliged to park at the very bottom of the hill. The humanities building was closer to the top. His breathing became more laboured as the incline steepened. The path seemed to narrow and the trees grew denser, limiting the daylight through their crisp brown and orange autumn foliage. So he was glad of the halogen lamps. And particularly grateful for their flat, white glare when he thought he heard the approach of something large and stealthy through the ferns and branches, over the dead leaves and damp grass behind the wall of trees rising along his left, parallel to the narrowing path along which he walked. He stopped