The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [50]
Seaton looked at the camera. The iconic Leica logo was etched on to the body, of course, but the whole small assemblage looked more intricate and old-fashioned than he had seen from Leica adds in the colour supplements and the windows of the better class of camera shop. The lens housing was made of brass and there was a brass viewfinder which raised on a hinge and looked a little like the rear sight of a rifle. The black-painted body was chipped here and there to reveal the metal alloy beneath. The instrument looked more a slightly crude prototype to Seaton than the finished article. But he was guilty of investing it with the expectation of technical embellishments he knew must have come much later.
‘We’re in the business of repair and maintenance rather than restoration here,’ Breene said. His Scottish accent sounded much stronger when he spoke now. ‘You’re looking at a Leica One from 1925, Mr Seaton. It may appear a little weathered. But it’s perfectly serviceable.’
It was what it was, unmistakably, but it looked old, from a remote time, and sat with the mute power of a relic on Young Mr Breene’s wooden desk.
Breene peeled off the gloves and left them on his desk blotter and went and stood over by one of the windows overlooking the river. His doing so didn’t noticeably diminish the quantity of light in the room. The morning was very bright and Breene made a small dapper figure, his hands clasped behind his back now, against the great Victorian pane.
Seaton made no attempt to touch the camera. A part of him wanted to pick it up and heft and study it, feel the cold weight and mass of the metal and glass in his palm; sniff it, smell the scent of the thing, scent the ghost of its dead owner. But he knew that to do so would be some kind of gross violation in Breene’s fastidious mind. He thought that the strengthening accent was a sort of clue, that there was a reason the man in the room with him had been taken back in time. In his mind, he did the maths. Breene had been twenty-six in 1943, so twenty at the time of the Gibson-Hoare suicide. And, Seaton would have bet money, studying then at university in Edinburgh. The accent wouldn’t have survived so intact the great English seats of learning. He would have been seventeen years old and undoubtedly at school when the camera had been brought in to Vogel and Breene. But it was worth a try. Something had pulled his mind and emotions back across the decades. It was why he stood now with his back to Seaton. He was hiding the changed expression his feelings had inflicted on the pink ruin of his face.
‘You knew her, didn’t you, Mr Breene?’
Breene’s shoulders stiffened under his suit coat. He cleared his throat, but replied still facing the window.
‘You were too modest earlier, Mr Seaton. You do have an instinct for what you do. It’s quite profound. And what you’re doing has nothing to do with a fashion feature in a magazine I’ve never heard of. Does it?’
Touché, Seaton thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it does not.’
There was a long silence before Breene said anything more. In the silence a horn wailed from a boat on the river and became faint as it passed underneath them and faded away. ‘My grandfather was one of the founding partners of this business and was followed into it by his son, my own