The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [120]
‘I’ll contact the families of the other girls,’ Mason said. ‘Maybe visit them.’
‘You can offer them some of your stolen morphine,’ Seaton said.
Mason looked at him.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nick. That was uncalled for. But this should only take a couple of days. Sit tight. Wait for me.’
Mason shook his head. ‘Sarah’s in good hands. I have to do something.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s Tuesday. Be back by Friday. That’s as long as I’m prepared to wait. With or without you, that’s when I’m planning to go to the Fischer house.’
‘And do what?’
‘You’re Irish, Seaton. So I’m sure you’ve heard of Semtex. I’ll wire the place, blow it to fucking kingdom come.’
Seaton walked from the terminus at Waterloo over Waterloo Bridge to Aldwych and along Southampton Row towards Bloomsbury. They’d slept a couple of hours on truckle beds in the Jesuit keep and then been driven down the mountain by the Franciscan, chuckling at the wheel of a VW van as it slalomed on narrow tyres through the hairpins, racing to get them on the first available train. Now it was mid-afternoon, and he was in London, walking autumnal streets to a familiar destination. Old copies of the Western Mail would have been transferred to microfiche back in the 1980s. He could think of no reason why the library’s run of copies would be incomplete. He would comb every page of every edition from the beginning of September 1927. The certainty had set in him that he would find something. It burned like a small fire in his belly as light from the sky along Southampton Row retreated and deepened and the shadows softened and he turned, almost by rote, into Museum Street, under the threat of advancing rain.
A Welsh accent spoken by a child, seventy years ago, meant Wales. Britain was a kingdom then, without mobility or flux. The working classes only travelled when they marched or climbed into cattle cars as conscripts to fight in imperial wars. Most people lived and died in close proximity to where they were born. Only the privileged few, like the public schoolboy Young Mr Breene had been, were afforded the luxury of casual travel about the country. Peter’s disappearance had provoked no widespread response. To merit that, back then, you had needed wealth or status or the notoriety of the poor kidnapped Lindbergh baby. Peter had been of the common herd. His Welsh voice had distinguished him for the first time outside the land of his birth, only after his abduction from it. Seaton felt curiously certain of that.
And so he found him almost straightaway.
The first story was a filler, filed by a court stringer and offering no names. Carried in the edition printed on 4 October, it merely said that an eight-year-old orphan had gone missing from the fishing village of Aberdyfi in Gwynedd. It didn’t even determine gender. But Seaton knew who it was. As Pandora had observed in her journal, child-stealing was in those days a rare crime.
The second story appeared on 20 October and was well-fleshed-out. It appeared under the byline of Philip Beal, credited as the Mail’s Senior Crime Reporter. A portrait was constructed of the boy, using quotes provided by his parish priest and the headmistress of the church school he attended. According to Miss Marjory Pegg, Peter Morgan was honest, obedient and blessed with a sunny disposition. He was an enthusiastic football player. He was also, she maintained, an immensely gifted student. Miss Pegg was adamant that Peter would not have gone off willingly with a stranger. She was not specific about the nature of his academic gifts. Or if she was, her further comments had not survived the subs, busily cutting stories to length in the Mail’s Cardiff newsroom.
Seaton didn’t put much store in the description of the boy. It was an old trick. Reporters had always colluded with the police in doing this. The more vivid and attractive the portrait of the victim, the more emotionally embroiled in the story the reader became. It was a tried and tested ploy in nudging unknowing witnesses into remembering something important they might have