The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [52]
‘We’re largely spared spats, these days.’
‘Thank the Lord.’
‘Who was he?’
Breene indulged in one of his silences, before answering. ‘I asked my father. And my father told me he was thought by some to be the wickedest man in the world. And I didn’t ask anymore. I left it at that.’
Seaton said nothing.
‘We don’t all share your curiosity, you see.’
‘Why weren’t you more curious? Why aren’t you?’
Breene looked across to the camera reposing on his desk. ‘Because curiosity killed the cat. And the cat had nine lives. And that’s eight more than I’ve ever been able to boast.’
Seaton nodded. He remembered then what Young Mr Breene had said about the mantle of arrogance. About how comfortably, on the young, the mantle of arrogance could fit.
‘Come. Since it was what you came here for, I’ll give you that address.’
Fourteen
He went there straightaway. He looked it up in his heavily thumbed and dog-eared A to Z in the bright sunlight on the street outside Vogel and Breene and then jogged towards London Bridge tube with only a glance at his watch. It was eleven fifteen. He’d been with the old man over an hour. It had seemed less at the time, but he was in a hurry now to recover the vestiges of an enigmatic and elusive life. And he could not wait to do so.
It was just after midday when he crossed Fulham Broadway at the junction to the right of the station exit and walked up Harwood Road, the Town Hall building on his left a high jumble of stained ornamentation in the unforgiving light and still-rising heat of the day. Left again into Moore Park Road and the traffic sounds from the junction he’d crossed seconds earlier retreated into something like a rumour. He didn’t know this part of London at all. He was relieved to see that Moore Park Road comprised two facing terraces of three-storey Victorian houses. The angle of the sun cast the road between the terraces into shadow. It was suddenly cool, as well as quiet. There were odd parked cars. But there was no road traffic moving. At the end of the block, at the first intersecting road, he saw there was some kind of shop. There was a pub next to it, the sign obscured by hanging baskets of flowers and plants that, even from here, he could see the dry summer had defeated. But the road itself had been spared bomb damage, redevelopment and other urban catastrophes. It was intact. He started to study the numbers over the knockers on the doors.
Ten minutes later, his knuckles tender from rapping on solid oak, he walked into the shop a block down the road. The knocker on the door he wanted had been too stiff with clumsily applied paint to make much noise on impact. It suggested whoever lived there didn’t get many visitors. But his hammering fist hadn’t aroused anyone either. And there was no bell to ring. The curtains had been drawn and when he’d stooped and tried to look through the narrow letterbox, the interior had been dark, with a dank odour somehow discouraging to the notion of life, let alone domesticity. The smell had reminded him of the smell of the high-rise slums he sometimes had to go to with Mike Whitehall, doing conditions stories on damp or cockroach infestation on Hackney’s neglected estates. It was the smell of squalor. It seemed odd to encounter it now, here. This wasn’t the opulent riverside Chelsea of Cheyne Walk; that was obvious. The parked cars had some mileage on them and there were patches of graffiti celebrating the Second Division heroes of Stamford Bridge here and there on walls. But most of the addresses looked well-maintained, smart in the discreet way prosperity usually manifests itself among people used to being prosperous.
‘How’s it going,’ he said absently, walking into the newsagent’s shop, fishing for change, his mind on his summer thirst and the Diet Coke that would quench it.
‘You’d be a Dublin man,