The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [7]
‘A naïve question, Paul.’
‘Seriously. Why me?’
‘Because you beat it, once. Because you have the power in you to beat it once again.’
‘I won’t do it,’ Seaton said. ‘I’m not qualified.’ He dropped the envelope back on to their table. ‘I won’t do it.’
‘You’ve no choice,’ Covey said, reclining magisterially in his seat amid the loudness and the crush of Zanzibar. His voice was flat, devoid of inflection. He extended his arm and flicked ash from his cigar on to the floor. With his free hand, he pushed the envelope of cash and bogus credentials back towards Seaton. ‘Now listen very carefully to what I have to say,’ he said. He held Seaton with his eyes. ‘Listen to my every word.’
Three
They parted thirty minutes later on the street, Covey folding his bulk into the cosy refuge of a black cab. Seaton leaned into the open doorway to say goodbye in the rain and Covey blinked in the glow of the cab’s interior light and gestured at the cathedral building looming over where they stood, a few feet of pavement away from the yellow pub. He nodded. ‘Insurance?’
Seaton shook his head. Rain, hard in a dancing thrum on the roof of the cab, made him blink. ‘It would only make things worse. They’d see it as provocation,’ he said.
‘You really think they’re that…informed?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I do.’
Now, Covey blinked. He looked more sad than shocked.
‘I’ll think about what you’ve said, Malcolm.’
‘No time,’ Covey said. ‘No time for thought.’ He tugged hard at the door handle, Seaton let go of its frame and the door slammed shut and the cab was away in a spray of water from its rear tyres. Seaton straightened up. For the second time over the course of a single evening, he was soaked to the skin.
He’d been in bed half an hour when he heard the music playing softly from his sitting room next door. He’d bought a duvet cover and sheets, offering the enveloping childhood comfort of cotton fleece, on taking the tenancy of the flat. He’d bought them expensively from the Army & Navy department store in Victoria along with soft pillows and a plump goosedown duvet. The plan had been to bury his solitary nights in cosy oblivion. And it had worked. Until now. Now, the music from his sitting room made stiff shrouds of his sheets against his rigid body. He listened to the same, faintly relentless song. He counted seven minutes off the luminous dial of his wristwatch. He started to sweat and to grow cold in his bed. He recognised the song. Or he thought he did. And it continued. It wavered through the wall and door-frame in strained, distended chords and choruses, swelling and fading, ragged and persistent. The door was to his right. On the wall to his left, behind the heavy drape of his curtains, he could get out of bed and look out at the night view spread below. At the busy thoroughfare and, beyond it, the War Museum dome, floodlit beyond the drip in its tended grounds of sodden, autumnal trees. The older locals still called the place Bedlam. The building that housed the museum had once been a lunatic asylum.
But the madness now was coming from the right. So Seaton pulled back the duvet and got out of bed and walked through the door into his sitting room.
Where the music was louder.
He had no curtains there. The room was lit in whitish monochrome from the sodium lights on the intersection down below. Shadows jumped and scattered on his walls and ceiling as traffic slid by. And the music persisted, repetitious, frightening him.
It was the Fairport Convention song ‘Tam Lin’. Poor, dead Sandy Denny was singing it. It was her slightly disembodied voice, or a voice at least sharing the perfect pitch and cut-crystal enunciation of the late Sandy Denny. Seaton could hear the whoops and whistles of the band, the Fairports – or their facsimile – in full cry, with their virtuoso fiddle-playing and frenetic picking of guitars and mandolins and drum rhythms. And something under that, unruly and discordant. An occasional noise like the close snagging of cloth and what sounded like the odd snicker of vindictive laughter.
Seaton sank into