The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [14]
Whitstable offered Seaton the false promise of conviviality. The girl who had tried to kill herself was a nineteen-year-old called Sarah Mason. Both of her parents were dead. Her surviving next of kin was her brother, Nicholas, who was something in the military and had taken compassionate leave to help his sister recover. She was at the family home, Nicholas’s property now, one among a parade of Victorian houses built above the beach, called Wavecrest. Nick Mason was quite happy to see the trauma specialist from London. But not at home. The plan was that he would sound out Seaton while a qualified nurse monitored the condition of the girl. And the sounding out was to be done at the Pearson’s Arms, a gastropub famous for its seafood in a town famous for its seafood. Mason had hired three nurses, providing twenty-four-hour professional help for his sister.
‘What does he do in the military?’ Seaton had asked Covey.
‘I couldn’t find out,’ Covey said. ‘Which rather answers the question, I think.’
But Seaton’s mind, on the route to Whitstable, was not on crab or lobster, or even the cloak-and-dagger world of covert military operations. It was on the story professor Clarke had recounted in his sad little refuge from mildew and failing light. As he drove, he went over and over the professor’s story in his mind.
Peter Antrobus was a mature student of thirty-four who had applied to do a PhD in moral philosophy. He possessed a good first degree and the academic lubricant of independent wealth. Granting Antrobus his place required no bursaries or messy haggling over grants. By contrast, there was optimistic talk of an endowment from rich parents with money old enough to enable them to see the pursuit of abstract thought as more than just an expensive waste of their son’s time and career potential. The only problem was Peter’s absolute refusal to live in student quarters on the campus. Clarke openly admitted to Seaton that the main reason for this stipulation was financial. The university charged its students considerably more to live in than it cost to keep them. The policy was rigid and extremely profitable. Once Antrobus became aware of this, he offered a gift sum equal to a year’s accommodation charge to settle the matter. And settle the matter it did. He and his girlfriend moved into an old coach house at a crossroads about two miles north of the university.
Peter and his companion were both thin and pale and shared the same dark-blond hair. They both favoured a black wardrobe and, to the professor’s inexpert eye, their clothes seemed stylish and expensive. He only ever saw Marthe with Peter, which was natural enough. Once, only once, he was invited to spend an evening in their company at the coach house. The couple chain-smoked and drank absinthe and ate almost nothing of the cold cuts that comprised the meal they had prepared. It was February and the coach house was uncomfortably cold. What made the evening even more of an ordeal, Clarke said, was their very public lasciviousness. They may have looked like brother and sister, but they could not keep their hands or their mouths off one another. They’d put music on, he said, and these fitful little dances would develop into the sort of necking sessions more commonly associated with adolescents in a darkened cinema.
‘Their behaviour that evening was inappropriate, to say the least.’
‘What kind of music?’
The professor looked thoughtful. ‘Anachronistic, given their ages.’
‘Be specific,’ Seaton said.
‘Piano music. Rags.’
‘Was the coach house sited close to water?’
The professor thought about this. ‘No rivers or streams, no.’
‘No water, then.’
‘No running water,’ he said. ‘There was a pond.’
Seaton nodded.
‘What relevance has this?’
‘Please go on, professor. I’m sorry I interrupted.