The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [121]
More significant was the status of the writer. Three weeks after the boy vanished, the Mail had known it was dealing with a crime. A child abduction; then as now, it was among the very gravest offences anyone could commit. Nobody nursed the illusion that they were dealing here with an accidental tragedy; a small boy dying of exposure lost in the wind-scoured hills that rose behind the village. Peter Morgan had been stolen. Then he had been murdered. And no one had ever been called to account for these awful, planned, sequential crimes.
Seaton rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and read the story a second time. He switched off the microfiche projector. The hot whirr of its fan faded as the light went out and the inked columns on their yellowed page from a newspaper printed a generation ago were lost again to darkness and history. He pulled back from the viewfinder and looked up at the walls of the Reading Room and blinked. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to five. He straightened a leg and patted his trouser pocket to reassure himself he had the change he required for the calls he needed to make from one of the payphones in the library vestibule. And he looked around him.
Pandora Gibson-Hoare had sat here, in this very room, and read the same words he just had and then walked to Charing Cross Road to get her maps to plot the journey made in her forlorn quest for retribution. And she would have needed maps. There had been no motorways to shrink the country then. The roads linking the cities of Britain were tenuous in those days, potholed and narrow and, when the sun went down, entirely dark. In Seaton’s imagination it seemed an awful, alien place; coal-fired, gas-lit, empty-skied, monochromatic and unmoving in its polarities of slum squalor and brittle high-born privilege. How Britain and the world with it had changed in those seventy years, in that human span, that single lifetime of which Peter Morgan had been robbed. Anger stirred in him. And Seaton knew he was sharing the same indignant rage Pandora had so vibrantly felt.
Like her, too, he had the strong sense of being followed when he left the museum. He walked back to Waterloo and bought tickets with some of Malcolm Covey’s money for the train journey to Aberdyfi. The Saab was in Whitstable. It would be quicker to go by rail. You took a northbound express from Euston and changed at Birmingham for West Wales. The Aberystwyth train stopped at Aberdyfi between stops at Machynlleth and Barmouth in its slow and scenic journey along the Welsh coast. If he set off early enough in the morning, he would be there by tomorrow lunchtime.
He was followed stealthily and felt the pursuit cease only when he left Waterloo Station after buying his train tickets and turned from Waterloo Road into Lower Marsh on the route back to his flat. He paused on Lower Marsh. The shops were closing. Their shutters were coming down. A large weak part of him wanted to spend more of Covey’s cash on a room for the night at the Novotel on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. It was a new and anonymous place, too glossy and recent for ghosts. But with the same certainty that told him he was no longer being followed, he knew now that it was safe to return to his home. There would be no more games tonight; no clangour of cathedral bells, no disembodied songs leaking from the guts of broken players. The real business was almost upon him. The trickery would begin again, the chilling mischief, only when he reached the Fischer house.
Light diminished along Lower Marsh with the lowering shutters and detritus stirred in the gutters, tissue paper shivering around pieces of bruised fruit dropped from the morning market stalls. He thought about Mason with his Semtex bluster on the train, and the pain over his lost sister which provoked it. He wondered what would Mason be doing at that moment and felt a feeling like a wrench in him of pity and foreboding for the man. Wind gusted and the gutters flapped. The street was dark. He sniffed and caught the faint dissipating whiff of cigar smoke on