The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [53]
Seaton looked at the figure behind the counter. He’d expected an Asian proprietor, because in London that was what you almost always got. The man behind the counter was flanked by Chelsea FC pennants on one side and a giant colour poster of the centre forward Kerry Dixon rising for a header on the other. His shop was like a small shrine to the Blues. Except for one sly little shield tacked to the rear wall, visible above his left shoulder and bearing the three-castle crest of the Dublin gaelic football team. You’d have to know what it signified even for it to register, so discreetly placed was it. But Seaton knew it all right. The proprietor himself was blue-eyed, long from the girlish lower lip to the tip of the chin, dark curly hair tumbling down his forehead as far as his eyebrows. And his waistline was winning the battle to force his tucked-in shirt out over his trousers. He looked like all of Paul Seaton’s uncles rolled into one and the thought made Seaton smile.
‘You’d be a Dublin man?’ he repeated.
There was a way to play this. ‘I wouldn’t be after coming from anywhere else, now. Yourself?’
‘Ah,’ the newsagent said. ‘There’s not a town to touch it. Not at all. Nowhere.’
‘Not even London?’
‘Oh, London’s a grand place, right enough. Sure it’s grand. There’s only the one thing London’s lacking.’
‘It’ll never be home,’ Seaton said.
‘As long as I live and breathe,’ the newsagent said, ‘it’ll never be home.’ He sighed. There was a silence.
‘And the Guinness,’ Seaton said.
‘Right enough,’ the newsagent said, nodding his head. ‘And the Guinness, too.’
He spread his hands across the newspapers and magazines on his countertop. The ritual greeting was complete. Dublin had been duly honoured. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘What is it you’ll be wanting?’
He sounds to me, Seaton thought, like I must sound to Lucinda.
‘You don’t happen to know the people live at number eighteen?’
The Dubliner stared at him. ‘Ah, man. You wouldn’t be a copper, now. Would you?’
Seaton pulled out his NUJ card. ‘It’s a routine thing.’ He nodded to a wall rack hung with papers folded to show their mastheads and the first line of their front-page banner headlines. ‘We’ve got to fill ’em. For you to sell ’em.’
‘You’re looking for a scruffy old guy. Lives there alone. Tall, wears a beard. We deliver him the Telegraph daily. He also takes the Racing Post and Punch.’
‘Deliver? The man doesn’t live more than a minute away.’
‘He’s a recluse, so he is.’
‘What time does he get home?’
‘Sure, he’s home now.’
Seaton looked at his tender knuckles. He didn’t think anyone was that reclusive.
‘You’d be better knowing what time he comes round,’ the newsagent said, grinning. ‘It’s fair to say the feller takes a drink. I’d say he drinks well into the small hours. I’ve never seen him surface before five in the afternoon, when he’ll sometimes brave the light for a pint of milk. But you’re better catching him around six. The later you leave it, the better the humour he’s apt to be in.’
Seaton looked at his watch. It was only twelve thirty. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’
‘Semi-skimmed,’ the Dubliner said.
‘What?’
‘The milk.’
‘That’s grand,’ Seaton said. He was at the door, had the door held open, when the obvious occurred to him. ‘Would you happen to know the feller’s name?’
‘Gibson-Hoare,’ the Dubliner said.
But he pronounced the latter part of it, whore.
There was nothing else for it but to go back home to Lambeth. He couldn’t entertain himself window-shopping in the King’s Road for five and a half hours. He had to stay out of North London altogether unless he was spotted, fit and mobile, when he was supposed to be bedridden with a stomach bug. He’d get a district line train to Embankment and walk over Hungerford Bridge. Then he’d walk along the South Bank, under Waterloo Bridge, under Westminster Bridge, up the steps at Lambeth Bridge, across the road and home. He’d take a glorious stroll along the summer river, trying to calm himself, trying to contain his swelling sense of excitement and anticipation before returning to Moore Park Road