by F. G. Cottam
There was a sound then outside the door. It sounded like something slithering against the wood. It was followed by what sounded like a giggle, suppressed, further along the corridor. There was a key in the lock on the door. Seaton got up and turned it and sat back down again.
‘Bother,’ drawled a voice from beyond the door. Neither man in the room reacted to it.
Seaton swallowed. ‘What do you remember of the Fischer House?’
‘Nothing,’ Clarke said. ‘Nothing at all. I’ve searched my memory and continue to search it. But I honestly don’t remember a thing.’
Six
Seaton had left the professor, drunk, convinced that he really did remember nothing. He didn’t remember it when he was awake, anyway. The booze suggested that his memory improved when he was asleep, though. He was drinking because he remembered the dreams the Polish vodka was intended to obliterate. Seaton had tried the same remedy. It didn’t work, but it didn’t seem worth telling the professor that. He had the moss growing on his building to contend with. He had the lurker in the woods. There was the mildew problem and the failing electrical circuitry. There was the visitor in the spats. Seaton left thinking that the professor had his work cut out with the visitor in the spats. Drunk or sober, Clarke had unwittingly given himself a great deal to contend with.
‘Antrobus?’ It had been Seaton’s parting shot. Unnecessary, really, he thought, as the professor recoiled at the mention of the name. ‘I couldn’t help noticing you refer to him in the past tense.’
‘He’s disappeared,’ the professor said. ‘I sometimes wonder.’
‘What?’
‘Whether he was ever here, Mr Seaton. I passed the coach house the other day. Drove past it deliberately and stopped. And it’s derelict, you know. It doesn’t look as though anyone has lived in it for years.’
Seaton, who thought the descriptions of Antrobus and Marthe uncomfortably close to those of two people he’d seen looking back at him that morning through the glass frontage of Perdoni’s, thought it best to refrain from comment.
He looked again around the professor’s office. At the books he’d written and the framed citations. At a triptych of family photographs taken at a barbecue, with a playful Labrador dog in their foreground. Nothing, really, remained to be said. He stood and shook hands over the Coleman lantern and he left.
He was tired when he got to Whitstable. And it was later than it should have been. He got there shortly after seven, unable to explain to himself quite why the journey had taken so long. He came down the hill on to the high street and in the persistence of rain and a strong gust of wind off the sea the town looked shuttered and dismal. The wind rocked the car on its springs in blasts of exposure where high-street buildings were breached by the narrow lanes to his left leading to the water. If there were lights lit on Whitstable’s high street, Seaton did not see them. The buildings were mostly shops, all closed, a dank, dumb procession of two-storey facades. The windsurfers and dinghy sailors who gave the place its summer life had long departed. Through the condensation and rain on his nearside window, he thought he saw the wood portal and battening sign of a pub. But he knew it wasn’t the Pearson’s Arms. He had precise instructions on how to get to the Pearson’s Arms. Just then the radio began to play, making him jump, as John Lennon launched into the plodding piano introduction to ‘Imagine’. Seaton scrabbled for the controls and found the ‘mute’ button, wishing he owned the Saab, because if he owned it he’d tear the fucking radio right out of the dashboard. Maybe he’d get lucky and some desperate Whitstable fucker would steal it. He hadn’t seen a single pedestrian so far. Much less a skulking thief. With the ‘mute’ button pressed, the ghost of Lennon singing was a just-audible nasal whisper as he pulled up and parked. Then he switched the engine off and there was silence until he opened the car door and heard the rain thrum on rooftops and the ground, and the sound of waves smacking on the granite buttress of the sea wall in the freezing darkness a few feet away. And he smelled it, too. He smelled the sea, inhaled the foam-flecked swell.
Mason was seated at a corner table in the basement area of the pub where people came to eat from the menu proper. Even in the basement’s artfully limited light, Seaton knew him immediately. There were only seven or eight people in the basement. Four of those formed couples. He had studied the picture of Sarah Mason in the file given him the night before by Malcolm Covey. Nicholas Mason shared his sister’s high cheekbones and brown, deep-set eyes. His clothing and hair were nondescript enough. But he couldn’t do much to disguise the bone structure. He was slim, slight even, but he had taken off his coat and had his sleeves rolled to the elbow. His forearms were sinewy and strong, rising to the curve of solid biceps under his shirt. There was a packet of Rothmans on the table, Seaton saw, as he sat opposite Mason. Mason had one of them, unlit, between his fingers.
‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘Does it make the blindest bit of difference if I do?’
Mason smiled and lit his cigarette. ‘Jesus. A Paddy. I wasn’t told you’d be a Paddy.’
‘You’ve no liking for the Irish, then.’
‘Not much, no.’
Seaton sighed. He made to get up.
Mason blinked. ‘Sit down, mate. Please? I’m having a rough time of it right now. The manners aren’t what they should be. But I’m very grateful you’re here. I will be, anyway, if you can help my sister.’
Seaton sat down. He hadn’t meant to go. He was here to help if he could. Right now, he was resolved to help. He just didn’t have time for the sort of macho bollocks he thought a man with Mason’s background would probably consider a necessary preamble. The man had Belfast written all over him. Two, three tours of duty. But Seaton didn’t have the time or the inclination to listen to or tolerate that crap just now.
‘Does she remember anything about the visit?’
Mason shook his head. ‘She’s pretty heavily sedated.’
‘Before?’
‘She was extremely subdued. But I don’t think so. She wouldn’t be drawn, awake. And there were no nightmares I could discern when she slept. Then she went to the Beal funeral and thought she saw Rachel Beal at the graveside.’
‘They all did.’
‘After that, she seemed almost catatonic. And then she tried to take her own life.’ Mason pulled on his cigarette. ‘She walked into the sea, Mr Seaton.’
The two men were quiet for a moment. Outside, all around them, wind gathered and whooped and there was the heave of waves breaking on obdurate stone.
‘A night not dissimilar to this one, a week ago. I was playing patience by the bay window overlooking the shore. I saw her because she’d wrapped—’
Mason’s voice broke.
‘—she’d wrapped her modesty in a bed sheet.’
Her modesty. Seaton was pretty sure as soon as he’d sat down with him that Nicholas Mason had killed men. He was equally sure now that he would help this family, if he possessed the strength to do it.
‘Some of what I’m going to ask you to do, Mr Mason, you’re going to have to take on trust.’
Mason looked at him.
‘Faith, might be a better word.’
Mason said, ‘Might as well call me Nick.’
‘Paul,’ Seaton said. They shook hands over the table.
‘I know there’s something very odd going on, Paul. Something inexplicable in any terms I’m familiar with. And it’s frightening. I witnessed the Beal funeral. Against Sarah’s wishes and without her knowing. But I’m glad I did. I was there when she collapsed. But before she collapsed, I saw some very strange things.’
‘Anything since then? Anything here? This is important.’
Mason considered. ‘There were two occurences last night, actually. In the early hours. I’d checked on Sarah just before midnight. One of the nurses I’ve hired was watching her, of course. I reckoned on nicking two hours’ kip. But I was woken by the radio playing in the kitchen and I had to go and turn it off.’
; ‘What was odd about that?’
‘Apart from the radio switching itself on?’
Seaton shrugged.
‘Before Hereford and the regiment, I was in the paras. Anyway this particular night three of us were manning a road checkpoint in a wood at Crossmaglen. We had no specific intel concerning Provo activity. It was just routine. I’d just finished my watch, was listening to my Walkman, drinking a brew, when they hit us with a mortar shell. Both my men were killed, blown right out of their kit and pasted in bits in the trees. I wasn’t even scratched. I’ve never been able to listen to that song since. And it was the one playing when the radio decided to come alive.’
‘What was it?’ But Seaton knew.
‘John Lennon. “Imagine”.’ Mason stood and pushed a hand into his pocket. ‘I haven’t even offered you a drink, Paul. You’ll drink something?’
‘You said there were two things. You said two strange things happened last night.’
‘They did. I’d switched the radio off and was climbing the stairs and I thought I heard a bell toll. It tolled only once. But it tolled louder than any bell has a right to in Whitstable.’
‘I’ll take a whisky off you,’ Seaton said. Mason went to the bar and he put his head in his hands. It was his belief that whatever lurked in the Fischer house waxed and waned in its power. They must have gone there at a time when it was very powerful, the ethics professor and his hapless band of undergraduates.
Mason returned, carrying a double. Seaton sipped it. It was Bushmills whisky, and it tasted like the twelve-year-old.
‘Who’s Covey?’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘Told me some bollocks about an institute for psychic research.’
‘It isn’t bollocks.’
‘Maybe not. For all I know, he qualifies for lottery funding. But you’re not who you say you are.’
‘No,’ Seaton said. He sipped whisky. It tasted good, seductive. It tasted of home.
‘There’s something else I should tell you,’ Mason said. ‘I said I heard “Imagine” on the radio. And I did. Or I thought I did. Because it didn’t really sound like Lennon. But it didn’t really sound like a cover version, either. What it actually sounded like, was a pastiche.’ He shrugged. It was an easy song, after all, to mock. ‘This is probably nothing.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
Rain howled in the wind around the pub and the sea in its waves was a ragged chorus. The overhead lamps, deliberately dim, flickered. Seaton thought he could smell tar from the timber planking lining the walls. He thought, Jesus. This close to the sea. And there was a tremor in his hand he could not conceal when he raised his whisky glass to his lips.
‘It didn’t sound like Lennon playing the piano,’ Mason said. He drew on his cigarette. ‘When I was a boy, my dad had a real thing for primitive jazz. He liked the classic, early-twentieth-century stuff. King Oliver. Louis Armstrong. He was crazy about Fats Waller. He drove us mad, playing all these rags and romps from New Orleans. That’s what Lennon’s playing sounded like, last night. Black, barrelhouse music. Stride piano. It had the lilt and echo of the whorehouse.’
Seaton downed the remainder of his drink. This time the tremor left him alone. The Bushmills had accomplished its task. He endured the heartfelt fantasy then of reaching into his pocket for Covey’s money and buying the bottle from the landlord. The remainder of the bottle. Or a fresh bottle. Ah, Christ, why not the balance of the bottle opened and a fresh one, too? Why not a grand night over a full case of Bushmills? He had plenty of cash now. Twelve burnished amber bottles, filled to their necks with peaty oblivion. It was a powerfully seductive thought, as filled with foreboding and self-pity as he’d allowed himself to become, as thirsty for escape as he was, and solace. Instead, he got to his feet and said to Mason, ‘I’d like to see your sister now. If I may.’
A fire of pine logs burned in the grate in the girl’s room. The room was on the top of the three floors of the house. The resin from the burning logs gave the room a sweet scent. Out of the window, the havoc of the sea below was black and white, flecked under a turbulent sky. Now and then the old panes rattled in their frames, in the two windows, made fretful by the wind. The house was wooden and it groaned at the weather, and wind whistled and sighed through the attic space above them. There were fresh flowers in two vases in the room and it was cheerfully lit by bright little lamps with cloth shades in primary colours. The nurse was a plump-cheeked girl in a starched agency uniform who looked tranquil, untroubled by the one, apparently undemanding patient under her charge. Seaton felt uncomfortable in the room. He could smell cigarette smoke on his clothes from the pub and smoke and beer on Nick Mason’s breath as the two men stood at the foot of Sarah Mason’s bed and studied her. They were wet from the rain on the walk back along the sea wall and it was so quiet in the room that Seaton could hear rain drip from the hem of his waterproof on to the lilac painted floorboards. It was still a little girl’s bedroom, this.
Its occupant was asleep. It was only looking at Sarah that Seaton realised quite what a good-looking man her brother was. Nature had blessed them both. Sarah’s sleep looked deep and untroubled. But there were hollows under her eyes and her cheeks wore gaunt shadows. And the one arm visible, thrown across her body above the duvet covering her, showed the slack skin of muscle wastage where it met her shoulder. Her skin was pale. Her lips were the colour of a bruise. Her hair looked freshly washed and brushed. Her breathing was regular. But it seemed a degree or two colder in the room to Seaton than it had on the stairs, in spite of the fire. The nurse, despite being plump, wore a cardigan over her pristine tunic. You could see the temperature in the room as sinister, Seaton thought, or you could argue that you were in a room exposed to the sea on the top floor of a drafty Victorian house on the English coast at the end of October. You could cripple yourself with needless caution. Or you could die of complacency.
‘We’re dealing here with ghosts, aren’t we?’ Mason said.
They were now in his sitting room. One entire wall of the room was decorated with neat shelves lined with books. Seaton thought Mason owned a surprising number of books for a soldier. Maybe they were his father’s books and he had inherited them, as he had the house. He had a shelf full of video tapes and a large-screen television, which was more predictable. And he had a very expensive stereo system, the speakers, with their black lacquered finish, angled into a listening point near the centre of the room on expensive-looking, dedicated metal stands. He liked pictures, too. And they looked like original pictures. Of all things, he had a taste for the St Ives School of English colourists. Unless, of course, it was his father’s taste. They were both drinking Mason’s whisky, though. And that definitely wasn’t off the peg. It was Glenmorangie.
Seaton nodded at the shelves. ‘Your books?’
Mason was silent, looking at him. ‘I asked you a question, Paul.’
‘Bear with me. Your books?’
‘Mostly. A few were my dad’s. I like reading.’
‘Ever come across a writer called Dennis Wheatley?’
Mason chuckled. ‘I’ve read one of his. One was enough. Supernatural thrillers, right?’
‘I’m surprised you’ve heard of him. They’re no longer in print.’
‘Picked it up at a boot sale, I think. Don’t think I ever finished it.’
‘He was a terrible writer,’ Seaton said. ‘But he was very successful in his time. His peak years were between the wars. But he believed in Aryan supremacy and was quite a fan of Hitler and Mussolini and wasn’t shy of saying so in his fiction, where he also argued the racial inferiority of blacks. And he was an anti-Semite. Even in the late forties, he was still trying to salvage Hermann Göring’s reputation.’
‘So he’s not due a revival any time soon, then.’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Seaton said. He stopped. He was struggling with a way to continue. ‘From his late youth, Wheatley manifested some sort of character defect.’
‘Get away,�
� Mason said.
‘His prejudices were pretty widely shared among his class, in the period. I’m talking about something more subtle than proto-fascism. Wheatley’s father was well-off, a Mayfair wine merchant. He took his son out of school and made him serve a year aboard a Napoleonic-era naval vessel to try to put some backbone into him. An ambitious father had to be pretty desperate even in those days to do that to his son and heir. Then the Great War started and the boy served as a young artillery officer at Mons and Ypres.’
‘That should have done the trick,’ Mason said. ‘Backbone-wise.’
‘It should have. But apparently it didn’t. Not long after the armistice, his father died and Dennis inherited the wine business. This in the early nineteen twenties. He ran with a very louche crowd. At a very louche time. Do you know much about the twenties and thirties in England?’
‘Educate me,’ Mason said.
‘There was a great deal of social unrest.’
‘I know about the Jarrow March. The General Strike.’
‘Wheatley drove a London bus during that. And wore a pistol on his belt to combat the Bolshevik menace.’
‘He sounds like a wanker.’
‘He was a toff,’ Seaton said. ‘If you’ve read your Orwell, and I’m guessing you have, you’ll know that the judiciary and the police had their hands full in those days suppressing a very large and sometimes very militant working class. The government was unnerved by what was going on in Russia in the years after the Bolsheviks murdered the Tsar and his family. They were frightened by the pithead shop stewards in Wales and the north, tough men pissed off after four years of combat in the trenches, only to come home and discover none of the promises concerning social injustice were going to be kept. These were the years when a peacetime army confronted striking dockers in Liverpool and Tilbury and Chatham with their bayonets fixed. If you were a toff, in the years between the wars, the law didn’t really touch you. The law had its hands full. You were outside it, irrelevant to it, really. And this state of affairs led to some very decadent behaviour.’