The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [82]
She really had taken those pictures for Fischer. The slighted professionalism was unmistakable in her tone in the journal, even with everything else on her mind. She had even name-checked the equipment, Fischer’s Rollei rather than one of her own beloved Leica cameras. Rollei, the Swiss engineer who created Rolleiflex a year or two after the autumn in which Pandora had written. Those pictures, that commission, as she called it, had been professionally executed. She’d even found space in the journal to complain about the short time she’d been given with each sitter, like a factory production line. The shoot had really taken place. And the film had really been switched and hidden. And, whatever her other grumbles, the pictures had been taken with film stock she described as excellent. She’d been a woman in extremis, falling back on where her instinctive craft and talent lay, when she took that set of portraits she chose to deride as snapshots. Among all the illusion during her apparent breakdown at the Fischer house, they had been real.
Seaton’s eyes were drawn reluctantly back to the top of the road. And he waited for a carriage hearse to turn the corner, pulled by velvet-flanked stallions wearing black plumes on snorting heads, followed by a procession of mourners, whey-faced under their top hats because they walked in death to a long-forgotten destination.
And he shook his head and tried to slow his accelerating heart. Where had that come from? There was nothing there, at the end of the road, but night gloom. George had completed his locking-up routine behind him in the pub. The only sound was the ambient drift of night traffic along the road. He turned left and looked along Lambeth High Street to the bulk of the block where he lived, listening for their loud neighbour, for the drift of ‘Red, Red Wine’. But even their neighbour was subdued tonight. Yet he did not want to tempt sight by looking again to his right. It was ridiculous. He was spooked by his own imagination, stirred by the clandestine reading matter carried in his hand. But why that? Why the funeral cortège?
He took a step towards home and cleared his thoughts.
And suddenly he had it.
The solution to his conundrum dropped neatly into his mind.
He would go to the Fischer House himself. The chances were remote that a place so large would still be in private hands. Odds were it would be a guesthouse by now, its great rooms divided; its occupants tourists, walkers, island nature lovers looking for a bit of seclusion off the beaten. It would be no bother to book a room for a couple of nights. He could leave tomorrow afternoon, come back Sunday, be back in time to make the swim on Sunday afternoon at Hampstead Ponds with the boys, and the beer after. Unless the place was full, of course. But it was still early in the season. The schools weren’t off. And the Isle of Wight in June was hardly Devon or Cornwall in August. Of course they’d have a room. He’d look for the lost film and he might even find it. And if he did, what a coup for Lucinda. What he would certainly find there, though, would be the journal. He’d find that secreted under floorboards in its rightful place. Because that was where it ought to be found, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a compelling logic for finding the thing in the very place where its last entry had been completed?
He lifted his head, resolute for home, no longer concerned about the beat and panoply of deadly grief rounding the corner behind him. And he stopped.
A couple of hundred feet distant, coming from Lambeth Bridge Road ahead of him, he saw the figure of a woman, turned wraithlike by the streetlamps, pale and gliding over the pavement towards him as though her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her bobbed hair framed her face and her smile was a dark, night crimson shaping her mouth. Where else would you see such a sight, Seaton thought. It was Lucinda, coming home. He slipped