The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [129]
I have every faith that you will find a way.
Except that Seaton didn’t for a moment share that faith. He tossed the old missal back into his bag, knowing it was the Jesuit centurian’s dying bequest to him, certain it was going to be nowhere near what was required.
He called Mason.
‘They’re the same,’ Mason said, in answer to the unasked question. ‘The Americans let their girl come round. She chattered volubly enough, at first. But in the persona of a cigarette girl from a Chicago speakeasy. She seemed to think she worked for Al Capone. Her poor parents were encouraged. Then she began to scream about some guy called Harry Greb. And the Bellevue medics doped her up again and got a clamp into her mouth to stop her biting through her tongue in terror.’
Seaton gripped the receiver tight. His hand was shaking. He felt the phone tremble against his cheek.
‘Useful trip?’
‘We’ll know tomorrow,’ Seaton said. ‘We’ll find out then, so we will.’
Mason grunted and hung up and Seaton remembered that the Franciscan’s fallen angel had never greatly cared for the Irish.
They took Covey’s Saab, with its canvas roof and jittery, sometimes disobedient, radio. It was an act of defiance and a signal to their adversary. Mason checked briefly on his sedated sister and filled the car boot with various ominous-looking canvas bags. The Saab would be far less suspicious a vehicle to transport Mason’s ordnance on the Wight ferry in, than his own Land Rover. That was the soldier’s logic.
‘I don’t think you can kill it with a gun,’ Seaton said, watching Mason load up the boot.
‘The thing that came after you splintered the stairs with its tread, for Christ’s sake,’ Mason said. ‘It had weight and mass. It’s corporeal, at least some of the time. And it’s a fucking big target, by the sound of it. Trust me, Irishman, it’ll take a round.’
The sun had come out. It was just after four in the afternoon and below them, beyond the shingle, sunbeams glittered through broken cloud on the shifting green surface of the sea. The air was suddenly fresh with salt. A breeze ruffled Seaton’s hair. He got into the car and looked at the backs of his trembling white-knuckled hands. It wasn’t terror that made him shake. It was anger. And it was almost surprising. He could not believe the fury he felt over a sixty-year-old murder. But he did. He kept thinking of the empty journal pages and her body on the strew of pebbles at the river’s edge, cold, daubed under a tarpaulin with river filth. She had been exquisite. And passionate. And on her own humble path to redemption. And she had been slain with brutal degradation and derided for decades following as a suicide, shambolic and dispossessed. He railed at the waste and furious injustice of it.
He wanted to trap the slippery emissary, Covey, corner him in a place he couldn’t bolt from and kill him with his hands. He had educated hands, had Paul Seaton. And though much of his conditioning had slipped away through self-neglect, his hands had never forgotten the painstaking lesson they had learned in his tender youth. He wanted to corner Malcolm Covey and beat him until he squealed and whimpered and then continue beating him until he stopped breathing altogether. He clenched his hands into fists, unaware of doing so, the nails so tightly pressed into the palms that the skin broke and blood oozed on to the pads of his curled fingers. He was oblivious to it. He was eager to meet Malcolm Covey again. Of course, he was still afraid. But he thought that he felt altogether more anger, now, than dread.
About the boy, he could allow himself to think barely at all.
Nick Mason closed the boot lid on the Saab’s lethal cargo and looked at his wristwatch.
He was uncertain about the Irishman. He had not thought it possible for cowardice and courage to coexist as they seemed to do in Paul Seaton’s troubled nature. Soldiering,