The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [47]
Two small worries nagged at Seaton as he sipped tea and looked out over the deserted dawn intersection of streets. The first was that, in all likelihood, he would find nothing at the new address. The building could have been bombed in the Blitz or bulldozed during the wholesale redevelopment of London in the 1960s. How likely was it that, even if they survived, a set of furnished rooms would still harbour such fragile and reclusive keepsakes? It would be unlikely he’d find anything at all other than a suspicious and hostile landlord or a clueless tenant occupying impersonal space on a short let. Or a company let; because Chelsea wasn’t any longer the bohemian haven it had been before the war. It was a succession of coveted postcodes and record-breaking property prices. If he found nothing, he would have to rely on the sparse facts and thin conclusions of Edwin Poole as the basis for work that would inevitably be undermined by the insubstantiality of its spun-out speculations.
And this brought him to the second, honestly more troubling, of his two concerns. Because he knew that this pursuit was about more now than helping Lucinda, however important that had been to him when he’d originally had the idea. As soon as he’d looked at the Gibson-Hoare pictures in the Poole monograph, he’d been hooked, hadn’t he? Or perhaps it was the plea for help in her frightened eyes in the picture taken of her at the Café Royal. He wanted to know what troubled vision of the world informed her disquieting work. He wanted to know what it was had made her stop working with such abruptness, when her reputation was at its apparent height. He wanted to know the reason she had hidden subsequently from her former life. And she had been hiding, hadn’t she, if poverty could not be blamed for forcing her into obscurity? And finally, Seaton wanted to know the reason for that ghastly suicide. He knew now that he would ask Bob Halliwell if he could see the artifacts taken from her corpse at the Whitechapel mortuary. It couldn’t remotely help with the framing of Lucinda’s fraudulent dissertation. He could think of no reason for doing it beyond his own prurient curiosity. But if it took a big bribe, a litre of Chivas, he’d do it now, he knew.
From their bedroom next door, he heard Lucinda sigh in her sleep. And then he thought he caught sight of a shape, dark in space and light, through that chink in the buildings that gave a glimpse to the far right through their window of the Embankment. From where he looked, to his right, at the intersection with Lambeth High Street there was Lambeth Bridge Road, which at this hour was still empty of traffic. On the other side of it was the ornamental garden fronting the church of St Mary’s at Lambeth. And beyond that was the Embankment itself.
Embankment was where now he saw a tall figure in what he could have sworn was a black top hat, staring directly back at him. He saw with surprise that the still figure was dressed formally in a black morning suit. And then, with a movement so spasmodic and sudden it made Seaton clatter the lip of his tea mug hard against his teeth, the man raised his top hat and Seaton saw that its brim trailed crêpe tails of mourning ribbon, before it was put back on his head and he turned and started to walk eastward, out of sight. But he was followed. Horses, a team of four black-plumed horses followed him into view, pulling a glass carriage hearse at the solemn funereal pace the figure had set. It progressed silently, the clop of hooves and trundle over the road of iron-bound wheels sounds that would not carry