The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [46]
He phoned as soon as he got back to his desk, asking, as Mike had advised him to ask, for Young Mr Breene.
‘Young Mr Breene is about a hundred and seventy years old, but he’s reasonably cordial. He doesn’t have a first name, obviously. No one there does. But if you’re deferential enough and try not to sound too young, he might condescend to book Lucinda’s camera in before this time next year.’
He had the newsroom to himself. The other reporters generally went to the pub around the corner for lunch and had a pint and played pool and listened to The Clash on the jukebox while the bread hardened around the ham and cheese in their sandwiches and rolls.
At London Bridge, Young Mr Breene was summoned to the telephone. There was a cough and then an elderly voice with a hint of Aberdeenshire.
‘How can I be of assistance?’
‘I am putting together a story about the pioneer photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare.’
There was a pause. ‘Are you indeed.’
‘It’s for a magazine called The Face.’
But Young Mr Breene was unfamiliar with The Face.
‘I wonder, did Miss Gibson-Hoare ever have her equipment serviced by Vogel and Breene?’
There was another, long pause. ‘Why would you wonder that?’
‘There’s a peculiar quality to her work.’
Young Mr Breene chuckled. ‘That was her eye, Mr Seaton. Her talent. It had nothing whatever to do with her choice of camera or of film.’
Seaton swallowed.
‘You sound very certain of that.’
‘The prototype of the 35-millimetre Leica was created in 1913. The Great War prevented it from going into production. It was 1924 before the camera was ready for mass production and the following year before it became widely available throughout the world. Miss Gibson-Hoare bought two of them. And you are right to suppose that we serviced them for her. In fact, I believe we still have one of them here.’
Seaton’s heart was audible to him against his chest wall. ‘Am I right to think she lived in Cheyne Walk?’
‘In Chelsea, yes,’ Breene said, and Seaton’s heart descended to his stomach. ‘But not in Cheyne Walk. That wasn’t the address we had for her towards the end of her life.’
‘Could you tell me where she did live?’ He could hear the boys from the pub clattering up the stairwell, could smell the beer-and-tobacco-smoke pub smell that would cling to their clothes and hair and breath for the rest of the afternoon.
Young Mr Breene had paused again. ‘You want to know where it was that Pandora Gibson-Hoare resided. Now why on earth would you want to know that?’
‘I just want to paint the fullest possible picture, Mr Breene. To do that, I need to be in possession of all the detail I can accrue.’
‘I see. Well, I don’t profess to see the use of the information, but I don’t see it can do any harm to tell it to you. That said, I won’t give you the detail you seek over the telephone. Come here personally. Ask for me. Present your press credentials. Do that, and I will furnish the address.’
Thirteen
The following morning, Seaton did something he had never done before and rang into the office sick. He’d spent the small hours lying awake next to a sleeping Lucinda as light gathered in the sky and filled the room with a milky luminescence that gradually grew into dawn. At five thirty, he’d had to steal carefully out of bed and make himself a cup of tea. He drank it, looking out of their sitting-room window down at Lambeth High Street and the chink of Embankment, visible to the right where the edifice of the old government office building opposite ended and Lambeth High Street intersected with Lambeth Bridge Road. He’d never known himself feel remotely so excited by any professional pursuit.
What did he honestly hope to find?
If the flat had been provided by a friend or lover, there might be some legacy of Pandora’s left behind. There might be a cache of letters shedding first-hand light on her work and the reason it so abruptly ceased. There might be