The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [44]
Arthur passed their table, tapping its Formica surface twice with a forefinger, taking Seaton’s empty Coke glass and wiping away the circle of condensation from underneath it with a cloth before winking and moving on. He always referred to them to their faces as his Gentlemen of the Press. He liked them enough to extend them credit at the end of the calendar month when funds were apt to run a little low. He’d offered to do so out of the blue, months earlier, without their asking. Seaton was from Dublin and Mike came from a town in Merseyside called Formby. They’d been surprised by the offer. But London was a collection of villages, when you got to know your way around them a bit. And in this part of London, they were mostly made to feel at home.
Arthur would have made a good subject for Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s camera, Seaton thought. He had a face carved from mahogany, an urban metropolitan face that was somehow ageless. You could see him astride a bicycle, sweep’s brushes balanced over one shoulder, dark-skinned with soot on a cobbled street a century distant. You could see him wearing a billboard in a lost newsreel, advertising to a stunned world that the Titanic had foundered, many lives believed lost. But there was more to his features than their timelessness. His face had the deadpan inscrutability required for convincing magic. So you could see him as a hypnotist, say, levitating some pretty, rigid volunteer in petticoats and buttoned boots. That was more Pandora’s line, wasn’t it? Something unsettling and improbable; an image begging more questions than it was capable of answering. In the prints in the monograph he’d seen, she seemed to specialise in precisely the opposite of what the revelatory art of photography was supposed to do.
‘Aren’t you going to touch that lasagne?’
Seaton picked up his fork and put sauce-covered pasta into his mouth and began to chew. He just couldn’t stop thinking about Pandora. He had this image in his mind of her pale body, naked and bejewelled, her fine skin wrinkled and stained from its time in a river still poisonous in those days with its cocktail of industrial filth. Jesus, you’d have to hate yourself, then, to jump into the Thames. The Cartier watch would have stopped at the precise moment her body entered the water, an entirely redundant clue since the killer had been herself. The time of death was immaterial. He was half-tempted to take Bob Halliwell over that bottle of Scotch, see if he could have the detective take from their strongroom the drawer of artifacts claimed from Pandora’s corpse. Touch them and, in doing so, touch her. But what would be the point of that, beyond a sort of ghoulish perversion?
‘You know, it’s one of those clichés vindicated every time I sit down with you,’ Mike said, from miles away, on the other side of their table.
‘What is?’ He saw that Mike had cleared his plate of everything but a small puddle of egg yolk. He heard the sound of the transistor radio from the café kitchen, loudly tuned as always to Capital, a song by ABC playing, Martin Fry singing their histrionic hit ‘The Look Of Love’.
‘The stereotypical Irishman,’ Mike said. ‘The silver-tongued Celtic charmer. I mean, you lay it on a bit heavy sometimes, the