The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [45]
Seaton smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Stand me another Coke. Tell me what’s on your mind,’ Mike said. He looked at his watch.
The thing was, for a moment, he’d been there. He’d been on the strew of pebbles by Shadwell Stair, the body under a tarpaulin at the edge of a grey tide of lapping scum, barges passing in low procession pulled by squat long-funnelled tugs billowing smoke into a low November sky. He’d smelled the river, the damp gabardine of policemen’s raincoats, the sour pickled odour of waterlogged flesh, breathed the air, heavy with its burden of sulphur and soot. It had been raining. It had been raining in London on the morning the fact of Pandora’s death revealed itself.
With effort, he dragged himself back. Back to Arthur’s. Back to the heat, to the here and now. ‘Got much on this afternoon?’
Mike grimaced. ‘I’m actually thinking of calling it a day, after the furry felon. Bringing the curtain down on a brilliant career. I might as well go out on a high. A man at the top of his game should know when he’s peaked. I mean, the mad monkey. Come on, professionally speaking, it just doesn’t get much better than that.’
‘It could be worse. It could be a pile of charity pennies toppled in a pub.’
‘Depends who’s doing the toppling,’ Mike said. ‘Last Tuesday night in the Anchor and Hope it was a woman who used to be in Pan’s People.’
They were both silent for a moment. Seaton picked up his fork and then put it down on his plate and pushed away his plate of uneaten food.
‘So what are you doing this afternoon?’
‘The most boring sodding job on the planet,’ Mike said. ‘I’m taking the camera bodies in for a service. It means I’ve got to drive to sodding London Bridge.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘In this bastard traffic. In this bastard heat.’
‘Isn’t there somewhere more local?’
‘Undoubtedly. But Eddie insists on using the same place the company has used since about the turn of the century.’
‘Tradition,’ Seaton said. He was half-rising, fishing in his pockets for coins to pay for the lunch.
‘More than that,’ Mike said. ‘It’s always been renowned as the best place, with the best technicians, used by the best photographers. Which is great if you’re handling Hasselblads and Leicas and your work is featuring in National Geographic, but a bit wasted when you’re generally pointing the lens of a 35-mil Pentax at a grinning Syd James opening a garden fête. Or taking a mug shot of a delinquent primate.’
Seaton sat down. He took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table and offered Mike his pen. ‘Write down the name of this place, would you?’ he said.
Mike took the pen. ‘You’ll have trouble finding it. The entrance is an unprepossessing little green door with no number in a ramshackle brick building dwarfed by the brutalist monstrosities erected in the sixties to either side. It’s staffed entirely by gnomic Swiss lens-grinders and ancient tinkering Scots. The average age there must be about ninety. They make Eddie look boyish and carefree, the staff at Vogel and Breene.’ He laughed. ‘What do you run to anyway, Paul? A Kodak Instamatic?’
‘It’s not for me. It’s for my girlfriend. It’s for Lucinda.’ Lucinda owned a good camera. Mike knew she did.
‘She should have kept the guarantee,’ he said, writing down an address. ‘These people might be old-fashioned, but they’re far from cheap. They’ll charge her a term’s grant just to take the lens cap off.’
Seaton nodded. He took back his notebook and pen. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had used Leica cameras. She hadn’t been destitute and so may have owned them still at the end of her life. She had stopped working professionally. She had stopped having her pictures published. But what if she had continued to use her cameras? Or merely to have owned them? Wouldn’t she have had them serviced, if only out of force of habit? And wouldn’t the company that serviced them have had an up-to-date address for her?
‘Thanks,