The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [58]
Seaton thought of the smell that had permeated the thick velvet drapes concealing the cellar steps, contaminating the hallway even in the current heatwave with the clammy languor of damp. He wondered how much of a stomach he would have for rummaging through mildewed coats and mould-spotched dresses; the rotting gladrags of a suicide. Her camera had been a relic, sterile, pristine between Mr Breene’s white cotton hands. And he had coveted its touch. Her decaying ephemera, folded into closets at the bottom of the basement steps, seemed altogether less beguiling.
In his mind, Seaton visited again the stretch of river where the tide had abandoned Pandora. He could smell the sodden wooden supports of the landing stages behind where the group of them stood in the still, chilly absence of breeze. Small stones slithered in the mud and puddles of oil slick dumped by river vessels, under their leather-shod feet. In the mist on the water a foghorn sounded blindly and the police doctor opened his bag between his feet with a click of its lock and a waft of surgical spirit from the small bottles and wound rolls of lint and shiny instruments within. The doctor plucked his fob watch by its chain from his waistcoat pocket and made a verbal note to a plainclothes man of the time. The man nodded under his trilby and looked briefly at the body, uncovered now. He took off his hat in a gesture of respect for the dead. And he looked at the wound, bloodless and wide after its time in the water, dividing the flesh of her throat.
Out towards the centre of the river, there was a sudden commotion like the rumble of a storm and the surge of a cascading unseen torrent. It was a fire boat, the water pulled up through its pumps and pushed through the brass tips of its hoses, the noise the scream and impact of the deluge steepling down and crashing against the surface of the Thames. They were practising out there, rehearsing. They were preparing for the conflagration that would come with the looming war. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had elected to miss the performance. She was missing even this sombre rehearsal for it.
‘Cold feet, Mr Seaton?’
‘What?’ He blinked. He sipped at his tea, which had grown cold. His host had lit a fresh cigarette and was at the centre again of his blue aura of French tobacco smoke in the light bathing his sitting room. ‘Not at all,’ Seaton heard himself say.
‘It’s all in the attic. One floor up. There’s a ladder. I won’t go up there myself, it’s a few years since I’ve had the required agility. So you’ll be climbing solo, as it were. But you’re welcome to take a look if you so wish.’
Her stuff was in a trunk. It wasn’t damp up here. Light entered through a single pane of glass. The skylight looked welded to its frame and was spotched on its exterior with rain stains and years of pigeon shit. But the illumination it allowed was a help as well as a relief. The attic wasn’t as crowded as Seaton had expected. The house had a flat roof and it was a relatively large and regular space. He’d expected a jumble of Gibson-Hoare’s antiques, a rejected arsenal of rusting weaponry and old keyboard instruments, perhaps. But there wasn’t much and it all looked personal. A few pictures were propped against one wall. There was an oriental frieze on articulated lacquered panels showing a stork in a rocky stream. There were some elderly 78s in faded paper sleeves in a gilt rack that had tarnished badly. Her trunk stood in the furthest corner from the light, hide-bound