The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [41]
‘We’ll lead on the furry felon,’ the editor said at ten forty-five, putting his head around the newsroom door in one of his whimsical moods. He wouldn’t have done it for the Friday edition. But he must have thought he could get away with it midweek. It certainly made a change from blues-party stabbings and arson attacks and tower-block suicides. And Seaton wasn’t on it, so he climbed the stairs to photographic to pick brains on how he might discover more about Pandora Gibson-Hoare.
There were two staffers up there on the fourth floor. Mike Whitehall was the junior of the two and had been dispatched to record the furry felon’s carnage in glorious black and white. It had occurred to Seaton that monkeys were actually covered in hair, but their readers were unlikely to argue the distinction and their editor was notoriously partial to alliteration in headlines. Anyway, he was glad Mike had gone. Mike possessed a born reporter’s curiosity and would want chapter and verse about why he was asking his questions. Eddie Harrington, an indifferent veteran close to retirement, would not. And he was the more likely of the two to know the answers.
The darkroom light was off when Seaton got to the open door of their set of offices at the top of the stairs. That was good. It meant Eddie wasn’t developing. He walked along a narrow corridor and found their chief photographer polishing lenses on a stool in a walk-in cupboard full of camera equipment and stoppered glass bottles of chemicals. Eddie nodded at him over his spectacles but didn’t stop polishing. Dust rose in tiny particles and danced around the yellow dusting cloth in his fingers in what light crept there from the corridor.
Seaton knew Eddie liked him. He wore a suit for work. He was polite, respectful still to his elders, because it was how he had been brought up to be. There was still a punk hangover among the young reporters in the newsroom that manifested itself in mohair jumpers and a sort of sneering generic insolence. They thought of themselves as pioneers of new-wave journalism as they tapped out wedding and funeral captions on the newsroom’s ancient typewriters. And they kept threatening lightning strikes, mumbling darkly about pay parity and demarcation. None of them was well-paid. Not compared to the printers in the building’s basement, anyway. But that wasn’t the fault of old staffers like Eddie. So Seaton made sure he was smart and respectful. And he knew that Eddie liked him for it.
‘You say she died in obscurity?’
‘In poverty. Which, I suppose, pretty much amounts to the same thing. It was odd, because she had plenty of wealthy relatives who would have helped her. But she was penniless when she took her life. And she didn’t do that wherever she was living. So I don’t have an address.’
Eddie pondered this. ‘Why is that address so important?’
‘It’s a long shot, to be honest with you. I need to find any papers she might have left. Her final address might give me a clue as to their location, if they still exist.’
The expression on Eddie’s face suggested he thought this shot particularly long. It occurred to Seaton that Eddie was probably by now fondling the best-polished lens in the history of his department.
‘I’ll give you a list,’ Eddie said. ‘Professional guilds, associations, organisations to which photographers generally belong.’ He finally put down his polishing cloth and began to pat his waistcoat pockets for a pen.
‘Did she use a printer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Portrait photographers often do. Printing is an art in itself, beyond a particular point in the photographic craft. And printers mean invoices and invoices mean addresses. She very likely would have had an account with a printer. If she did, that printer would have to have had her address.’
‘I’ll phone my girlfriend and ask