The House of Lost Souls

by Cottam, F. G.

  He heard a sound in the quiet of his reverie and turned towards where it came from, to where Lambeth High Street ended in the dark T-junction of Black Prince Road. It had sounded like the snort and whinny of a horse. And he heard the metal clop of a hoof and wondered, idly now, why the mounted police were patrolling at all in so quiet a backstreet at night. They should be galloping through Trafalgar Square, providing a show to compensate the tourists forced to leave the pubs at eleven o’clock.

  There had to be a convincing way for him to pretend he had stumbled innocently upon the journal. The solution to this problem was half-formed already somewhere in his mind. But befuddled by beer, it would not come into clear focus for him. He’d only had a couple. But his brace of beers had followed a workout in the unrelenting heat. And he hadn’t eaten any dinner, to speak of. It had been foolish of him.

  Bridle leather strained against muscle and sinew and iron-shod wheels rolled along the macadam as they approached under some thunderous burden, and Seaton’s head snapped back towards Black Prince Road and he gripped the journal in its oilskin sleeve in a hand loose and sweaty now with fear thinking, What in God’s name was that?

  But all was innocent again. He heard behind him George, the Windmill landlord, whistling as he shuttered and locked and bolted for the night. River noise. It was river noise. The proximity of the river distorted and carried sound sometimes, in a way for which the senses possessed no ready explanation. Seaton sighed and relaxed.

  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 the journal sly into his pocket, thanking fate for his having the habit of always needing somewhere to put his wallet when he went out.

  * * *

  He got into the office early the following morning, determined to book his accommodation at the heart of Brightstone Forest for the weekend without a curious audience. He was in at nine, confident that none of the other lads would get there until ten. Mike Whitehall tended to arrive at nine thirty or so, but his doing so was thought by the rest of the editorial staff a northern eccentricity. The lax hours the NUJ had negotiated on their behalf was the jealously held revenge, after all, for what the printers were being paid in comparison with them.

  It was nine thirty before he was able to reach some clueless typist from the Isle of Wight Tourist Board who told him that there was no accommodation whatsoever in Brightstone Forest and no, she wasn’t mistaken.

  A brief study of the AA map of Britain told him the forest was National Trust land now. He really needed the close detail of an Ordnance Survey map, but they didn’t have one in the Gazette office, where there wasn’t much call for them and certainly not for one of Wight. When he called them, the National Trust couldn’t help. As far as they knew, there was nobody domiciled in Brightstone Forest. There were visits made to it by forest wardens. And the wardens would have built a shelter. But the shelter would be rudimentary, nothing more elaborate than a hut. And Forestry only manned their phones from eleven until three, and then only on Mondays through Wednesdays.

  Thoroughly frustrated, at ten to ten he went to make himself a mug of tea. Mike was in the kitchen, doing the same for himself and Eddie Harrington. ‘Give me your mug,’ he said. ‘I’ll be mother.’

  Seaton handed over his mug.

  ‘How did you find Young Mr Breene?’

  ‘Picturesque.’

  Mike laughed.

  ‘You could have warned me.’

  ‘I’m warning you now. You should leave it, Paul. Whatever it is. No good will come of it.’

  This was unlike Mike, who was characteristically as inquisitive as they come.

  ‘You don’t want to know what it’s about?’

  Mike stirred sugar into his tea. He raised his cup to his lips and took an exploratory sip. ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ he said. Which was a phrase Seaton had heard before. Mike didn’t look himself this morning. There were these sullen unfamiliar shadows under his eyes.

  ‘The boys are going to Hampstead on Sunday afternoon,’ Seaton said. ‘Swimming in the men’s pond. We’re all going. Patrick been in touch?’

  ‘No,’ Mike said. ‘I mean, yes. What I mean is, I said no. I’m not exactly Mark Spitz in the water. I’m not even Esther Williams.’

  ‘It’ll be a laugh.’

  Mike looked doubtful. ‘Isn’t it a bit homo, though? And a bit deep?’

  ‘It’s deeply homo. It’s far mor
e Judy Garland than Esther Williams, to be fair. But it’s a lovely place for a swim in the weather. And your virtue will be safe enough among a crowd.’

  ‘I’ll bring my water wings, then,’ Mike said. He sipped his tea.

  Back in the newsroom, on no more than a reporter’s hunch, Seaton rang a number for the County of Hampshire Civic Authority and asked for Social Services. This time, for the first time, he referred specifically to the Fischer house.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said a clerk.

  Seaton didn’t know if he had a minute. He looked at his watch. It was five past ten. But the stairwell outside the office door was still silent. And a spy couldn’t climb through its cold acoustics without making a clatter. A ghost couldn’t do it.

  He heard the phone picked up and fumbled. He heard a match struck, tobacco inhaled. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s London Tonight. We’re doing a piece about Home Counties provision for the elderly. And the infirm.’

  ‘We’re not the Home Counties, mate,’ the voice said. ‘And the Fischer house was an insane asylum.’

  Seaton’s heart thumped. The stairwell was still blessedly absent of feet. ‘Was?’

  The voice broke into laughter. ‘If it was still going, I’d call it a place for the mentally challenged, wouldn’t I? I’m fluent enough in the euphemistic new lingo. But it was an insane asylum when it closed. That was what they still called them back in the bad old nineteen fifties.’

  ‘Is the building still there?’

  There was a pause. ‘Why? Is London Tonight doing a piece on Isle of Wight architecture, now? Building conservation? Who exactly are you, mate?’

  ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘So far as I know, it is. Derelict. Boarded-up and forgotten. It’s a madhouse full of rats. Now fuck off, mate, whoever you are. You’re a fucking timewaster and I’ve got more important things to do.’

  He made a booking at a guest house in Ventnor. It wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t have time to shop around. Terry Messenger or Tim Cooper or someone was coming up the stairs as they told him his name and work phone number were enough to secure the booking and he dropped the receiver on to the cradle.

  The afternoon was his. He was owed an afternoon or morning in lieu, for covering full council.

  He’d told Lucinda he was going, the previous night, as she undressed, tipsy after the Soho bar launch. She’d nodded, immediately accepting of his story of how he’d learned that the Klaus Fischer in the Café Royal photograph had owned a house on the Isle of Wight where he was famed for his hospitality. There might be pictures of their gatherings on its walls, he’d told her, amazed at his own accelerating capacity for voicing the convincing lie. There might be something there to flesh Pandora out. Sober, she might have asked how he expected to be given access to the place. Sober, she might have asked how he could be confident that there would be anything of Pandora there, forty-odd years after her suicide, for him to find. But she wasn’t sober. She just nodded and smiled with the slight diminishing of focus with which drink softened her eyes. And she didn’t ask.

  He knew his absence would be no loss to Lucinda. It was the last weekend she would have to prepare for her show. She would be working throughout all of it. She was probably relieved he was going to be out of her way for most of it. She didn’t look relieved when he told her. But she seemed relieved when the moment came for him to go in the morning. It was concrete proof that he was working on the still-unwritten project. He was a fast writer who researched and wrote for a living. He was a professional carrying out what was, in essence, an amateur assignment. But there was only a week to go until the essay’s submission.

  Now, he had his overnight things in a canvas grip underneath his newsroom desk. And folded snugly among them was the journal. He didn’t really need to take it. But he hadn’t dared leave it behind, where Lucinda was sure to stumble on it in their tiny flat. And he couldn’t leave it in the Gazette office, which until a few moments earlier had been his original plan. There were far too many curious eyes and probing fingers on an idle Friday afternoon in the newsroom for that to be a sensible thing to do. He occupied the couple of remaining work hours making desultory routine calls and meandering rounds of tea. At one o’clock, he made the formal note of his absence in the big diary on its tilted lectern with the Biro chained to the lectern for the purpose. And he closed the diary on his entry and nodded and waved his goodbyes to the rest of the office.

  His crossing could not have contrasted more greatly with that described in her journal by Pandora. He took a train from Victoria to Portsmouth and a ferry from Portsmouth Harbour to Fishbourne. Portsmouth itself would have been unrecognisable to her, bombed into dereliction by a war she had chosen not to live to have to endure. It had been rebuilt cheaply in concrete and glass with scant regard for its history, the hulking imperial fleet she had described long towed away and broken up for scrap. Seaton’s passage, enjoyed on the promenade deck in the open air, was a blue playground of smudged sails and trailing wakes out of a Dufy painting. Only the Solent forts, austere and monumental, marred the bobbing, Enid Blyton mood of the sea.

  He walked the mile from the dock at Fishbourne to Wootton Creek and rented a mountain bike from an adventure shop. He used the shop’s changing room to get out of his suit and into the shorts and trainers and track top he’d brought with him in his grip. He crammed his work clothes into the grip and the grip into a cheap rucksack the more easily to carry it, pedalling, on his back. And he bought the detailed island map he needed and, after riding a mile to get used to the bike, sat at the side of the road in the shade of a hedge in the heat and plotted his route. And when he’d done that, he paused. It was now just after five o’clock. There were scalloped clouds remote in the sky and the earth was warm under him. The island sky was enormous after the limited vistas of London. He could smell wildflowers entwined in the hedgerow allowing his shade. In the time he’d sat there, two cars had passed him. A 2CV had rocked by on thin tyres, its rear compartment kaleidoscopic with buckets and spades and balls and rolled beach towels, Joni Mitchell shrill on its radio through the open driver’s window, singing something tremulous and folky from the album Blue. And a Morris Traveller, resplendent in its timber trim, had happened by towing a caravan. Island life was a lot different from Hackney, he thought, smiling as he climbed on to the saddle of the bike.

  It occurred to him that it was a week to the day since he had first heard the name Pandora Gibson-Hoare. He’d been on the roof at St Martin’s with the boys, Stuart Lockyear dressed like Franchot Tone in Five Graves To Cairo, sipping cheap Lambrusco in the indolent London heat. Every silver lining has a cloud, Stuart had said. The scene on the roof had been played out to a soundtrack, the broken-backed songs of Hank Williams on Foyle’s paint-spattered beatbox. Over the course of just seven days he had become obsessed by Pandora, by her short life and disquieting work and tantalising mysteries. It was odd, really. He didn’t feel he knew or understood her very well. Yet something in his heart and brain and even in his memory suggested that he had known something of this woman always.

  Direct, he judged the distance southwest across the island to the forest to be about nine miles. But he chose to skirt around Newport, rather than navigate his way through the island’s busiest town. His route was narrow and hilly and he missed a couple of crucial signposts, forcing him to double back twice. He’d been pedalling hard for over an hour when the ferns and saplings and second growth of the forest outskirts told him he had arrived there. He stopped and took a long drink from the bike’s water bottle, glad the fellow in the adventure shop had thought to fill it for him.

  Because he’d skirted Newport, he was approaching the forest from the north, across what the map told him was Newbarn Down. He could see the forest proper rising in front of him to a horizon where dense trees capped a high slope. He reckoned the Fischer house had to be at the bottom of the downward slope on the south side of the hill. The house was on land near a stream or river and Pandor
a had made no mention of a gorge, so he was assuming the house had been built on the same elevation as the stream, close to sea level. And the other side of the wooded crest in front of him would be more accessible by car from where she and Fischer had landed in the boat piloted by Wheatley. So he knew roughly where he was going. The only problem was that he couldn’t get the bike over the hill. The adventure-shop man had proudly demonstrated the fact that the bike had fifteen gears. It had a tough grippy tread on its thick tyres. But so dense was the wood already that Seaton was wheeling it now rather than riding it. There were not sufficient gaps between trees to steer the thing through.

  He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He could double back and find a road and go around the perimeter of the forest and approach it from the seaward side. But he had doubled back enough. He could cut his losses, ride off to the guest house in Ventnor, dump his bag and find a nice seafront bar. The guest-house owner had told him a free house called the Spyglass Inn overlooked the bay and stocked an impressive range of guest ales and lagers. If he came back in the morning, he would have a whole day of sunlight in which to try to discover more than he knew. Maybe he’d find a single bullet casing on the ground by the door to the scullery. Maybe he’d find the spot where Göring and the lithe American had fought their duel as Crowley prowled like a fugitive beyond them in the trees. Perhaps he would discover a roll of undeveloped pictures taken by Pandora Gibson-Hoare of her fellow coven members gathered to practise black magic in secrecy together.

  The pictures, if they were there, had waited for fifty-six years to be exposed. Surely they could wait a few hours longer? What were the odds of the Fischer house accidentally catching fire tonight, out of all the thousands of nights it had stood abandoned, and burning to the ground? What possible harm could a small, entirely practical delay do now?