The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [123]
Seaton squeezed the raindrops from his eyebrows with his thumbs. ‘Coffee would be grand,’ he said.
By all accounts. So the two women had never met. But that would have been a bit much to ask for. Marjory Pegg had been forty-three at the time of the disappearance, according to the crime reporter Philip Beal. And Beal had struck Seaton as a pro. Such facts as he had been able to establish, he would have been far too methodical to write up imprecisely.
They drank their coffee in a tiny room off to the left of the church altar. The room smelled of cut flowers and was lit by a naked bulb against the gloom allowed by one small stained-glass window. Rain gurgled and spilled over swamped guttering on to the ground outside. Mrs Reeve produced a framed picture. It showed eight pale children standing to attention in front of a stone building in a schoolyard. Seaton knew it was a schoolyard because the lines and numbers of a hopscotch game were still etched faintly on the flagstones in front of the class. The children were flanked by a neatly dressed woman and a thin elderly man in a clerical collar. Seaton assumed the man was one of the Reverend Madden’s predecessors. He studied the woman.
Marjory Pegg was tall and bareheaded in the picture. Her thick silvery hair was combed back into a bun. She wore a plain pinafore dress over a striped shirt buttoned to the wrists and collar. Pinned to her breast was the sort of watch worn on a ribbon or chain by a nurse. Seaton could clearly see where the schoolteacher’s stockings had been darned under the knee. And her shoes, plain and immaculately polished, were thick with the resoles of careful repair. She was smiling in the photograph, into the sunlight that gave the picture its vivid sharpness and detail. Her eyes were squinting against the brightness. But this did nothing to harden her expression. She looked kind and cheerful. And she looked immensely proud of her charges, with their tousled short-back-and-sides haircuts and their short-trousered uniforms.
The brilliant clarity of the shot gave the photograph between Seaton’s hands an impression of immediacy, of modernness, as though it could have been recently posed and taken. But this illusion was swiftly dispelled. The boys had the young-old faces of children who had endured the hardship common to their class and time. These boys did not look strangers to cold or occasional hunger or the visitation of grief. Their eyes had a tough, wary innocence. Seaton studied expressions possessing complexities he reckoned altogether lost to modern youth. These were children of their age; at once buoyant and carefree, cautious and bruised. None of the group could have been more than about eight years of age. But there was nothing in the picture to distinguish Peter, if he was among them, from the rest.
Seaton was reminded of Fischer’s crooned platitudes about polio and rickets. But there were no calipers bolted to the legs of any of the boys. And none leaned on a crutch. He was reminded of Mason’s bleak dismissal of Peter the workhouse foundling. But Miss Pegg’s brood were of a muchness. This was a jaunty band of brothers, a healthy hardy litter without a runt.
‘You’re frowning, Mr Seaton.’
‘I’m just wondering, is one of these boys Peter Morgan?’
The picture was taken from his hands. On Mrs Reeve’s face, the sun went into eclipse.
‘I’m sorry.’
She stood. ‘You’re here under false pretences. You lied to the Reverend. I’d be obliged if you’d leave.’
‘Please, Mrs Reeve. My interest is far from merely prurient.’
‘I’m sure. And I’m sure your time is precious. And since I know nothing about any boy called Peter Morgan, you are wasting it here.’
She still had the framed picture in her hands. They were shaking slightly. The smell of flowers in the small room was underlaid by water, stagnant in a vase or backing up from a drain somewhere, brackish, choked by leaf-fall. The sound of rain spewing from the gutter outside was incredibly loud. Seaton thought he heard a chord of organ music stir from somewhere outside the