The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [30]
‘Cigarette?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Me neither,’ Mason said, lighting one. ‘Gave up five years ago. Read the Allen Carr book, but it didn’t work. Not for me. Hypnotherapy did the trick, though. Clinic in London, not far from Regent’s Park.’
‘You must have really wanted to stop.’
‘Oh, I did,’ Mason said, inhaling deeply. ‘Cost me an arm and a leg. But it was worth it.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Cheers.’ He exhaled. ‘Thanks for waiting.’
‘Just deciding where to go.’
Mason nodded, trying to keep his voice calm, the welling desperation out of it. If necessary he would drag Seaton out of the car, subdue him with the sap he’d put in his jacket pocket on leaving and carry him back to the house on Wavecrest over his shoulder. The fucker was going nowhere, not with Sarah in this condition, not if he had anything at all to offer them. ‘Right,’ Mason said. He kept on nodding. He pushed a hand deep into a pocket and fingered the raised stitching on the leather grip of the sap. ‘Right.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Sedated. Our nurse is a stoic.’
‘I just lost it, briefly,’ Seaton said. ‘I’ll be okay in a minute.’
Mason studied the glowing tip of his cigarette. Wind rocked the car on its springs.
‘The music—’
‘All suicides,’ Mason said. ‘Ian Curtis hanged himself. With Nick Drake it was painkillers. And that singer with Fairport Convention threw herself down a flight of concrete steps.’
‘You know your music.’
Mason nodded towards the car radio. ‘I don’t recognise this.’
‘Frank Rosolino. Trombonist. Big on the West Coast, once. Well, big by bebop standards. Which means he was a virtuoso who just about scraped a living. Pretty much any jazz player’s lot, in the era of James Taylor and the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers.’
Fear took some people like this, Mason knew. Made them loquacious, verbose. Sometimes it was all you could do to shut them up. ‘You a jazz fan, Paul?’
Seaton nodded. ‘Radio turned itself on a second after I got into the car.’
‘Frank Rosolino kill himself?’
‘Late one evening. Shortly after he put a bullet into the head of each of his sleeping infant sons.’
Seaton reached for the switch to turn on the windscreen wipers but his hand gave up before touching it, as though he lacked the will. The trombone died in the speakers and Mason, a pause after, straightaway recognised the mournful Roy Buchanan blues that followed it. He thought that the volume might jump, suddenly. He thought that he might scream if it did.
‘Walking after you in the rain, I wondered about the odds against that kind of thematic coincidence with the songs on the bedroom radio.’
Seaton turned to face him. ‘Outlandish,’ he said. ‘The odds, I mean. I’m not an actuary. And I’m not a betting man. But I would think those odds incalculable.’
Mason nodded.
Roy Buchanan sounded other-worldly, the chords enfeebled now, the strings of his old Telecaster guitar distorted and loose.
Mason had cajoled and caressed and bribed the nurse back into his sister’s charge. She had slumped into unconsciousness again by the time they got back to her room, thin against her pillows, her breath shallow and her face wearing the dead sheen of pewter. The nurse had taken the radio from her sleeping grip and then wrenched the plug that powered the thing from its socket on the wall. She dumped it in Mason’s hands with an expression on her face that was a complex stew of fear and understanding and resolution. She was a Celt, he remembered, the nurse. She was a girl from County Meath and acquainted, perhaps, with talk of magic and certainly with folklore. And the nursing was a vocation in her and so her conscience would resolve her now to stay. With no point in speculative talk he merely nodded his thanks and relief to her and went to find Paul Seaton.
He knew Seaton wouldn’t have got very far. He had cut the Saab’s fuel line while the Irishman was in the Pearson