The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [17]
‘So you don’t believe personally that a place can be malevolent?’
The professor’s smile was brave and ghastly in the cold flare of light from the Coleman lantern. ‘I didn’t, Mr Seaton. I didn’t. But, to be frank with you? My opinion changed during my visit to the Fischer house.’
That visit had finally taken place early in October, at the end of the long vacation, at the very beginning of Michaelmas term. Clarke’s quartet of students still wore their summer tans from travel jobs and holidays abroad. A couple of the girls, God help them, wore sunglasses perched by habit in the sun-bleached highlights of their summer hair. They gathered in the college car park carrying overnight bags and borrowed camcorders and an air of anticipation close to excitement. Clarke had found the keys to the house, along with a map and other instructions, in an envelope in his pigeonhole.
Antrobus had not yet returned to the university. He was in Germany studying transcripts of the trial of Peter Kürten, the madman and cannibal more luridly known to history as the Vampire of Düsseldorf. There was a cell under a Düsseldorf police station were Kürten had been briefly incarcerated. The cell had survived Nazism, survived intact the firestorm of the Allied bombing raids towards the end of the war. And Antrobus had apparently arranged to visit it. Kürten had first murdered at the age of five, drowning two school friends in a deliberate act comprehensible at the time only as a tragic accident. Antrobus claimed to be intrigued by the man who had begun his long killing career as an infant. But he had done everything he could, despite his absence, to facilitate the visit to the Fischer house. His instructions were detailed, thoughtful.
‘Solicitous,’ Clarke said, as rain spattered, like fistfuls of vindictive grit, thrown against his office windows. And Seaton shivered at the tone the professor’s voice had taken on.
Professor Clarke’s ethics seminar group comprised three English second-year undergraduates. There was Sarah Mason from Whitstable. Rebecca Mortimer came from Southport, on the Lancashire coast. And the dead girl, the girl who had died, was Rachel Beal. Rachel had been born and buried in Hull, in the bleak and wind-blasted northeast of England, where her body lay now in one of the plots of the cemetery surrounding the church she had worshipped in as a child.
The fourth member of the student group was an American woman called Ellen Paulus. At twenty-six, Ellen, like Antrobus, was a mature student. She was also an exchange student. She had gone on the visit to the Fischer house at the very outset of her planned year of study at the university in Surrey. She was studying psychology and parapsychology on a four-year course conducted by the well-respected college she had enrolled at in Vermont. For some vague reason he couldn’t readily identify, Paulus struck Seaton as a familiar name. Then he had it. Paulus was the name of the Werhmacht field marshal who surrendered at the siege of Stalingrad. Hitler had been mystified, outraged, at his failure to kill himself. ‘What’s a death?’ the baffled Führer had asked himself out loud. What’s a death indeed, Seaton thought, who considered the question far more contingent, much more complicated. Whatever, Ellen Paulus could not be held responsible for her surname. Lots of Americans had Germanic surnames. And he had a feeling the woman would need all the sympathy she could get.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, professor.’
Clarke opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle of Polish vodka. It was the overproof stuff and it was two-thirds empty. He unscrewed the cap and took a brazen swig. Light from the Coleman lantern flashed on the lenses of his glasses as he tilted back his head to open his throat. He coughed.
Back in the period of the Ripper trial, Seaton had smuggled a bottle of the same stuff into the Screen on the