The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [76]
Before leaving the office for the Town Hall, he called Bob Halliwell.
‘Micky Boy! How’s the land of the leprechauns? Where’s my bottle of Scotch?’
‘There’s a case of Chivas with your name on it, Bob, if you can answer in the affirmative to the following request.’
Halliwell was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had dropped an octave. He said, ‘You want to see Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s effects.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Because I’m a copper, Mick. And not the clueless arse-hole you sometimes seem to think you’re dealing with. That’s probably how I know you’d like to see the autopsy report, as well.’
‘Is there any chance?’
‘Because you’ve tickled my curiosity about this, I rooted it out and read it myself, yesterday. It’s pretty routine stuff. Pretty dull.’
‘Was there nothing that struck you as unusual?’ Seaton held the phone against his ear, waiting for the policeman to decide what to tell him.
‘The body had one unusual feature. It concerned her hands. She was missing her right thumb from the second knuckle. It had been amputated. Crudely.’
* * *
He didn’t pick up the journal again until the Thursday evening. Lucinda was at a degree-show rehearsal, staged in the early evening at college. Patrick and Greg and the boys were using it as an excuse for a drink. As though they ever needed an excuse. They planned to attend the rehearsal and then go with Lucinda and a couple of her fashion course friends to a new bar opening in Soho. David Haliday had painted friezes on the walls and had been given a handful of invitations for them guaranteeing free drinks.
‘I’m happy to go with Patrick,’ Lucinda said to him. ‘But I’d rather you came.’ She liked Patrick. She never, or rarely ever, these days called him the Fat Rockabilly any more.
‘I need to get on with that stuff I’m writing,’ Seaton said.
‘Martyr.’
‘It won’t write itself.’
‘Give her my love.’
He got home from work on Thursday and went and trained at Fitzroy Lodge in the early evening heat for an hour. He trained under the grim ferocious gazes of Hagler and Duran, looking down from the walls. Then he took the journal to the Windmill.
8 October, 1927
I’m going to describe how Dennis and I met. It was at a ball not long after my father’s death. Among the many things of my father’s I inherited, but had no use for, was my father’s wine cellar. Someone at the ball winced at tasting a bad vintage and I remarked that I had several hundred better bottles sitting neglected under Mayfair, to any of which they would be welcome. It was a stupid shallow witticism made to Edwin Poole, a young distant cousin of mine who is something in the banking or insurance world. He said he knew a man, a name at Lloyds and a wine dealer, who could help me dispose of the cellar profitably and, of course, with discretion. Then he took me over to meet Dennis, who was holding forth about the singer Bessie Smith and the devil’s music generally at a table on the other side of the room. He was slightly drunk and very cheerful, not handsome, but attractive enough in the bland open-faced sort of way common to chaps from his background. He wore campaign ribbons from the war and a monocle. He seemed too young for the monocle, screwed into his eye socket with the phoniness of a stage prop. He was after a sort of dignity, or gravitas, I thought. But in the terminology becoming fashionable then, I saw the monocle, and the ostentation of the war ribbons, as signs of insecurity. In that company, his insecurity seemed attractive rather than a weakness. He was a young man making his way in the world. And he seemed impressively knowledgeable about the devil’s music called jazz.
When he met me at my father’s house, I was surprised to learn that he had actually known my father. He had sold him wine. Extraordinarily, they had been on first-name terms. He kept referring to my father as ‘Mr Gibson-Hoare’ out of politeness and deference to me. But twice he slipped in conversation and referred to him rather fondly as ‘Sebastian.’
We were in my father’s cellar, when I noticed