The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [125]
It had been the wrong approach. The crime had taken place so long ago, almost no one could be left alive to remember it. It was a remote enough event to qualify as history. Confronting it head-on, asking his questions openly, was not now likely to provoke pain, or resentment at unwarranted intrusion. He had made a crass mistake. But would put it right in the morning.
He took another, welcome sip of beer. Through the window, distant across the estuary, he could see the twinkling lights of a town, remote before the black hills massing in the night behind it. He didn’t know the name of the town. He didn’t know anything. And he was unlikely to find anything out. The old St Luke’s school building was a ceramics studio now. It looked the same from the outside, but was filled with bags of clay and potter’s wheels and kilns creating souvenirs for Welsh resorts whose visitors had a taste for indigenous crafts. The school records had long been destroyed. And Madden would not speak to him. Not now. Why on earth should he?
Seaton picked the menu up from his table. There was a dining room at the pub, a kitchen with a good reputation. More of Covey’s money. Lamb featured heavily among the signature dishes. He would order a hearty casserole for which he could find in himself no appetite whatsoever.
The pub door opened and a woman walked in. He had to look twice before recognising Mrs Reeve. Her hair had been combed out and she was wearing lipstick. She had on a tailored coat and a scarf, finely woven out of wool. Seaton thought the scarf probably cashmere. She sat down opposite him and began to pull off a pair of leather gloves.
‘Are you a policeman?’
‘They don’t investigate seventy-year-old crimes.’
She nodded. ‘What is your interest?’
Seaton sighed and gripped his glass in his fist. Where to begin.
‘Just tell me this. Is your interest likely to result in exposure? In retribution? In what is fashionably termed closure?’
He’d had the woman in front of him buttoned into a floral overall, mopping imaginary spillages from the St Luke’s font in a spinsterly attempt at attaining God’s grace. Sometimes luck confounded judgment.
‘Exposure is unlikely, Mrs Reeve. But I would hope with all my heart to make the guilty pay and bring a sad business to an overdue conclusion.’
She looked at the table, where her gloves rested now like clasped hands. ‘That will have to do,’ she said. She sighed. ‘You’ve something of the priest about you. Catholic and defrocked, in case you mistake that for flattery. It could just be the Dublin brogue. But you’ve a basic goodness about you, I think.’
He said nothing. He sipped Banks’s beer.
‘I’ll have a large whisky, Mr Seaton. No ice. I take my whisky with a dash of soda water. We’ll have a drink. And then I’ll ask you to accompany me to my home where I’ll tell you what little I know about the sorry matter of the stolen boy.’
Mary Reeve lived in a house on the Aberdyfi seafront, left to her by her uncle. She had always lived in the village. She owned and ran a shop there selling antiques and curios. She had lived in a flat overlooking the shop. Most of the summer visitors were repeat trade and the shop did well, looked out for sentimentally by customers whose trinkets casually bought there had become, with time, cherished mementoes. For the last five years, she had lived in the house where Seaton sat with her now. Her uncle had been the golf professional at the links course just to the south of the village. Seaton had seen the flags marking a couple of its holes from the window of his train coming in. Her uncle, William Reeve, had been at school with Peter Morgan.
‘Where did Peter live? Was there an orphanage?’
They were in her kitchen. Seaton suspected it had seen some changes since the death of William Reeve. They were seated at a hardwood table with a deep reddish grain. Her cooking range was shiny and German and new, and the steel utensils in her kitchen hung from butcher’s hooks. Mary Reeve didn’t bring her bric-a-brac home.
She smiled. ‘There were no Social Services