The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [56]
‘And I’m an unrepentant bankrupt, too,’ Gibson-Hoare said.
Seaton said nothing. He’d had a speech prepared, of course. But it didn’t now seem to suit either the man or the circumstances. He lifted his hand to reach into his pocket for his wallet and his press card but then let it drop again. Officiousness did not seem the right route, to his instinct, to this man’s real whereabouts, or confidentiality.
Gibson-Hoare sniffed. And he introduced himself. And the two of them, on the threshold of his house, shook hands. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘You’d better come in and tell me why I’ve so mysterious a visitor.’
His sitting room was at the top of the stairs. Before they ascended, Seaton took in what detail he could of the gloomy entrance hall as his eyes tried to adjust after the brightness of the day outside. At the far end was a kitchen, one side of a beaded curtain in the doorway pulled back to reveal the chipped enamel of an old stove. To the right was a doorway, curtained off by a heavy brown drape. That led to the cellar, Seaton supposed, going on the faint smell of damp clinging to the velvet curtain fabric. He could smell mouse droppings, too, the overall atmosphere of decay, of squalor, he’d sensed peering through the letterbox depressing now he was inside the place.
But there was nothing squalid about Gibson-Hoare’s sitting room. It was large and light through two handsome windows and richly coloured with original art and the scattered plush of rugs and cushions. His furniture was clearly antique and very substantial. The room was spacious enough not to be cramped by the presence of a Steinway piano. The lid was lifted over the keys and from the patina of wear on their ivory, it was obvious that the piano was frequently played. Gibson-Hoare seemed to like antique weaponry. A pair of duelling pistols had been mounted in a glass-fronted case on one wall above a row of swords. He owned a claymore and a cutlass, but the rapier appeared to be his weapon of choice where cold steel was concerned. His booze occupied cut-glass decanters in the bottom half of a large globe of the world, the upper hemisphere pulled back on a hinge in readiness. Each decanter wore a silver necklace with an engraved plate telling you what it contained. Seaton knew next to nothing about antiques, but it was obvious there was a lot of valuable stuff here. Either its owner was lying about being a bankrupt, or the bailiffs assigned to his case were criminally negligent.
‘Tea? Or something stronger?’
‘Tea would be grand.’
Seaton thought he was probably about sixty years old. If he was, then almost everything he owned here pre-dated him. When he served the tea, the sleeve of his dressing gown rode up to reveal the rectangular case of a Rolex wristwatch with an age-mottled face, hanging from a gold bracelet with too many links for the thinness of his wrist. What else had he inherited, Seaton wondered. A cache of pictures? Personal memories shedding light on the life of the enigmatic relative he may well have known as a child and adolescent?
He sipped tea. Sunlight warmed the room through the windows. Dust motes rose in Vetiver-scented air. He wondered how to begin. ‘You’re very trusting, Mr Gibson-Hoare. This being London and all.’
‘No I’m not, my young friend. I’m not trusting at all. You’re very presentable. You’ve a charming brogue and honest Irish eyes, but you wouldn’t have got through the door without what Young Mr Breene told me about you when he was considerate enough to call.’
‘He called you after my visit this morning?’
‘He called me after you telephoned him yesterday. Without my permission, he wouldn’t have given you this address. A firm doesn’t thrive like Vogel and Breene has over the years without manifesting some measure of professional integrity.’
Or discretion, Seaton thought, wondering what the man in front of him would have made of Breene’s description of his one childhood sighting of Pandora. And more to the point, of her date, on that winter evening long ago.
‘There’s no cache of pictures