The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Who is Wheatley?’

  ‘A thriller writer. His books are all out of print.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Fischer?’

  ‘Some sort of industrialist. An arms dealer, I think. Made a fortune in the aftermath of the Great War out of weapons patents. I’ve no idea about the fifth guy. But she ran with a pretty louche crowd, did Pandora.’

  Seaton nodded. He had shifted from the sofa to a chair under the window to see the picture in better light. The eyes of the men in it all seemed to share the same lazy malevolence the eyes of big cats have when they doze, half-awake, between kills. It was a look that gave the lie to ever relaxing in the truest sense. There was a lethal indolence there, a sort of predatory alertness only lightly disguised. Except for Crowley. To Seaton, Crowley in the Café Royal picture simply looked deranged.

  There was no sincerity in any of the smiles. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had that in common, at least, with the people with whom she shared her table. But when Seaton looked closely, he didn’t think she looked truly one of them, not really. Under the jewellery and elaboration, he thought she manifested two characteristics unique to her in the group. She looked very beautiful. And she looked afraid.

  He started first thing on Monday morning, just as soon as he had opened what post he had at his desk and phoned the press bureau at Scotland Yard to learn of any crimes committed over the weekend on Hackney’s ground. There were several, of course, but none that merited following up. They got an edition out twice-weekly and Monday was a press day. But the paper was pretty full, looking only for a front-page lead. There was a gruesome court report about a revenge killing already on the stocks, and one of the boys was working on a human interest based around a toddler rescue from a canal. At ten thirty, the owner of a pet shop at Hackney Downs called in with a story about how a monkey had escaped its cage and run amok, trashing the pet-shop interior and liberating most of the stock, the previous day.

  ‘We’ll lead on the furry felon,’ the editor said at ten forty-five, putting his head around the newsroom door in one of his whimsical moods. He wouldn’t have done it for the Friday edition. But he must have thought he could get away with it midweek. It certainly made a change from blues-party stabbings and arson attacks and tower-block suicides. And Seaton wasn’t on it, so he climbed the stairs to photographic to pick brains on how he might discover more about Pandora Gibson-Hoare.

  There were two staffers up there on the fourth floor. Mike Whitehall was the junior of the two and had been dispatched to record the furry felon’s carnage in glorious black and white. It had occurred to Seaton that monkeys were actually covered in hair, but their readers were unlikely to argue the distinction and their editor was notoriously partial to alliteration in headlines. Anyway, he was glad Mike had gone. Mike possessed a born reporter’s curiosity and would want chapter and verse about why he was asking his questions. Eddie Harrington, an indifferent veteran close to retirement, would not. And he was the more likely of the two to know the answers.

  The darkroom light was off when Seaton got to the open door of their set of offices at the top of the stairs. That was good. It meant Eddie wasn’t developing. He walked along a narrow corridor and found their chief photographer polishing lenses on a stool in a walk-in cupboard full of camera equipment and stoppered glass bottles of chemicals. Eddie nodded at him over his spectacles but didn’t stop polishing. Dust rose in tiny particles and danced around the yellow dusting cloth in his fingers in what light crept there from the corridor.

  Seaton knew Eddie liked him. He wore a suit for work. He was polite, respectful still to his elders, because it was how he had been brought up to be. There was still a punk hangover among the young reporters in the newsroom that manifested itself in mohair jumpers and a sort of sneering generic insolence. They thought of themselves as pioneers of new-wave journalism as they tapped out wedding and funeral captions on the newsroom’s ancient typewriters. And they kept threatening lightning strikes, mumbling darkly about pay parity and demarcation. None of them was well-paid. Not compared to the printers in the building’s basement, anyway. But that wasn’t the fault of old staffers like Eddie. So Seaton made sure he was smart and respectful. And he knew that Eddie liked him for it.

  ‘You say she died in obscurity?’

  ‘In poverty. Which, I suppose, pretty much amounts to the same thing. It was odd, because she had plenty of wealthy relatives who would have helped her. But she was penniless when she took her life. And she didn’t do that wherever she was living. So I don’t have an address.’

  Eddie pondered this. ‘Why is that address so important?’

  ‘It’s a long shot, to be honest with you. I need to find any papers she might have left. Her final address might give me a clue as to their location, if they still exist.’

  The expression on Eddie’s face suggested he thought this shot particularly long. It occurred to Seaton that Eddie was probably by now fondling the best-polished lens in the history of his department.

  ‘I’ll give you a list,’ Eddie said. ‘Professional guilds, associations, organisations to which photographers generally belong.’ He finally put down his polishing cloth and began to pat his waistcoat pockets for a pen.

  ‘Did she use a printer?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Portrait photographers often do. Printing is an art in itself, beyond a particular point in the photographic craft. And printers mean invoices and invoices mean addresses. She very likely would have had an account with a printer. If she did, that printer would have to have had her address.’

  ‘I’ll phone my girlfriend and ask if she knows.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘I’ll have your contacts list by the time you get back.’

  Lucinda was at home, sewing frantically for her degree show. Outside their flat, the relentless sun of that relentless summer had turned the grass a brittle yellow. But she was inside, toiling over her patterns, her fabrics, her little electric machine. He pictured her in the light through the muslin drapes she had run up for their windows. And Seaton felt a surge of love for her as she answered the phone with her slight, northern formality. She was living for this bloody show of hers. He loved her. He did. And he would help her all he could. He spoke in a hushed voice in the presence of the other newsroom reporters as they clattered fingers on their typewriter keys and smoked and pretended not to listen to anything worth listening to.

  ‘No printer,’ Lucinda said.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘She printed all her pictures herself. Many of them were private commissions and the fact that she printed them, that they were never in the hands of a third party, was apparently a prerequisite of the commission itself.’

  ‘How do you know that, Lucinda?’

  In Lambeth, there was a silence. In Hackney, the newsroom clattered and scraped with busy chairs.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s anecdotal. Some of her work was very risqué by the standards of the time, apparently. And some of the subjects rather well-known. Why?’

  ‘How can you know so much about this woman? And so little?’ Lambeth was silent again. So was the newsroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ Seaton said. He replaced the receiver on its cradle and looked at the pinboard on the wall next to his desk for inspiration. It was covered in clippings and flyers. There was a signed print of Henry Cooper pushing over a pile of pennies on behalf of some charity next to a grinning pearly queen in a Shoreditch pub. There was a leaflet for the Save Wapping campaign. There was Princess Di in puffball sleeves at a bedside in Homerton Hospital. Children face-painting; fund-raising fire fighters, a headline claiming pharaoh ants were terrorising a Clapton estate. No inspiration there.

  He went and got Eddie’s completed list and did a ring around. And he discovered that Pandora Gibson-Hoare had been a member of several photographic bodies and associations. But all of them, when the people he spoke to obligingly went to look, had her last address as the house in Cheyn
e Walk where she had lived in the period when the Café Royal picture had been taken. Seaton located and rang the number for the Chelsea Arts Club.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the elderly female voice on the end of the line. ‘We don’t keep records that far back. But I do remember her, vaguely. And I remember that she lived in Chelsea. She had a rather grand address, in Cheyne Walk.’

  He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He’d been on this only two hours, which was no time at all. But he had a bad feeling about it, a feeling of discouragement. When her body had been found, according to the one obituary, she had been officially described as being of no fixed abode. It meant she had been destitute. London in the 1930s was a grim place to be homeless, a cruel place to try to find refuge in without the money to pay a regular rent. So many of the population were poor. Not genteel poverty but the relentless, widespread, worsening desperation of the Great Depression. Compassion was scarce and charity almost totally arbitrary. It had required the welfare state to provide a proper safety net. But, more importantly, it had required the welfare state to provide individuals with a paper trail it was possible to access and research and follow. And that had not been established until 1948, eleven years after the death of the woman whose trail was looking colder to Seaton by the minute.

  He got up and offered to make a round of teas. He ran into Mike from photography in the staff kitchen.

  ‘How was the furry felon?’

  ‘Hirsute. Felonious.’

  Seaton nodded, washing cups. Mike had a superior vocabulary to anyone on the writing side of the staff. But tabloid writing was all about the words you rejected. And he was a snapper, so the talent was doubly redundant.

  ‘Arthur’s café for lunch in an hour?’

  ‘Why not?’ Seaton said. Arthur’s was just before the pie-and-mash shop on Kingsland Road as you headed towards Dalston Junction. After the Favourite, next to Camden Town Underground station, Seaton thought it the best café outside of Dublin. One of Arthur’s mixed grills might just provide the necessary inspiration.

  She was found in the river, low tide leaving her corpse stranded on the pebbles near Shadwell Stair, not far from the Prospect of Whitby pub. And that was probably as close to a common public house as someone from her background had ever come. How could she have descended so far as to die destitute? Did none of her eminent friends try to help her? Had she gone mad? The stigma of insanity was the only explanation Seaton could think of for the blanket neglect of her former circle. He looked at the obituary again, which stated with genteel disdain that she had died from a self-inflicted wound. That was an odd way even for the Times in 1937 to describe a drowning.

  He called Bob Halliwell, the desk sergeant at Bethnal Green nick and one of his better-cultivated contacts. Though cultivated was not a word you would associate with Halliwell generally. Halliwell had told him once he spent his spare time fly-fishing. Seaton thought Halliwell probably the sort of angler who dynamited for trout.

  Bob Halliwell listened patiently. Then he said, ‘Forty-six years. Mick, even by your standards, this is a pretty stale lead.’

  Halliwell called him Mick because he came from Dublin. Worse, the policeman thought this was genuinely funny. ‘It would have been Whitechapel’s ground back then, that stretch of the river.’

  ‘But you’d have the paperwork since the consolidation. And the file would have been transferred and archived and put on to your computer records.’

  Halliwell sniffed. ‘In theory,’ he said.

  ‘Go on, Bob,’ Seaton said. ‘It’s worth a drink.’

  ‘It’s worth more than one,’ Halliwell said. And then, reluctantly, ‘Give me the name again. I’ll call you back if I can find anything.’

  He was looking out of the window, to where Mike Whitehall waited for him for the walk down to Arthur’s when Bob Halliwell returned his call fifty minutes later.

  ‘She didn’t drown, Mick. She cut her throat before jumping and bled to death in the water.’

  Through the window, in the car park, Mike was adjusting the knot of his tie and patting down his hair in the wing mirror of the editor’s Granada. Mike, tall and slim and dapper in his black suit from Robot in Covent Garden and his crêpe-soled Robot shoes.

  ‘So it was suicide?’

  ‘It certainly looks that way.’

  ‘Anything else unusual?’

  ‘Malnutrition. She had starved herself.’

  Through the window, Mike had taken the pager from his belt and was playing with it.

  ‘She was destitute,’ Seaton said.

  ‘No, she wasn’t. We still have her effects here. I’ve got them in front of me. She was wearing diamond earrings, was madam. She was wearing a ring set with emeralds and rubies and a Cartier watch strapped to her wrist. Stuff like that was easy to pawn back then. Still would be. She wasn’t a candidate for the soup kitchen, if you want my professional view. She was starving herself out of choice.’

  ‘How come you’ve still got her effects?’

  ‘According to the accompanying note, her cousin was supposed to collect them.’

  ‘But he never did?’

  Halliwell laughed. ‘Hasn’t so far. They’re still waiting.’

  ‘And she cut her own throat?’

  ‘That’s what the surgeon said.’

  ‘I owe you one, Bob,’ Seaton said.

  ‘Chivas Regal,’ Halliwell said. ‘No half-bottles, mind.’ He hung up.

  Twelve

  In Arthur’s café Seaton sat opposite Mike, while the proprietor strolled between the crowded tables telling his customers what it was they were going to eat. There were menus in Arthur’s, printed in brown italics on heavy yellow paper in transparent plastic sleeves. But once you’d been there often enough, Arthur, dapper in his white waiting-on coat and short-back-and-sides, would dictate your order to you. In the beige décor and stifling heat of the café, Mike worked through the mixed grill Arthur had ordered on his behalf while Seaton neglected a plate piled high with meat lasagne. He sipped from his glass of Coke. The café, from the door in, occupied a long narrow rectangular space. Bench seats were arranged to either side of a central aisle that ran the length of it, so you were either facing the door to the kitchen or you were facing the entrance and, beyond it, Kingsland Road. Seaton looked at the traffic through the windows rising from waist height to either side of the door. It wasn’t moving. Palls of diesel hung about above the pavement in the heat and brightness from buses and lorries gridlocked out there. He could feel his thighs sticking through the light wool of his suit trousers to the plastic-covered padding of his seat. He drained his glass.

  Arthur passed their table, tapping its Formica surface twice with a forefinger, taking Seaton’s empty Coke glass and wiping away the circle of condensation from underneath it with a cloth before winking and moving on. He always referred to them to their faces as his Gentlemen of the Press. He liked them enough to extend them credit at the end of the calendar month when funds were apt to run a little low. He’d offered to do so out of the blue, months earlier, without their asking. Seaton was from Dublin and Mike came from a town in Merseyside called Formby. They’d been surprised by the offer. But London was a collection of villages, when you got to know your way around them a bit. And in this part of London, they were mostly made to feel at home.

  Arthur would have made a good subject for Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s camera, Seaton thought. He had a face carved from mahogany, an urban metropolitan face that was somehow ageless. You could see him astride a bicycle, sweep’s brushes balanced over one shoulder, dark-skinned with soot on a cobbled street a century distant. You could see him wearing a billboard in a lost newsreel, advertising to a stunned world that the Titanic had foundered, many lives believed lost. But there was more to his features than their timelessness. His face had the deadpan inscrutability required for convincing magic. So you could see him as a hypnotist, say, levitating some pretty, rigid volunteer in petticoats and buttoned boots. That was more Pandora�
��s line, wasn’t it? Something unsettling and improbable; an image begging more questions than it was capable of answering. In the prints in the monograph he’d seen, she seemed to specialise in precisely the opposite of what the revelatory art of photography was supposed to do.

  ‘Aren’t you going to touch that lasagne?’

  Seaton picked up his fork and put sauce-covered pasta into his mouth and began to chew. He just couldn’t stop thinking about Pandora. He had this image in his mind of her pale body, naked and bejewelled, her fine skin wrinkled and stained from its time in a river still poisonous in those days with its cocktail of industrial filth. Jesus, you’d have to hate yourself, then, to jump into the Thames. The Cartier watch would have stopped at the precise moment her body entered the water, an entirely redundant clue since the killer had been herself. The time of death was immaterial. He was half-tempted to take Bob Halliwell over that bottle of Scotch, see if he could have the detective take from their strongroom the drawer of artifacts claimed from Pandora’s corpse. Touch them and, in doing so, touch her. But what would be the point of that, beyond a sort of ghoulish perversion?

  ‘You know, it’s one of those clichés vindicated every time I sit down with you,’ Mike said, from miles away, on the other side of their table.

  ‘What is?’ He saw that Mike had cleared his plate of everything but a small puddle of egg yolk. He heard the sound of the transistor radio from the café kitchen, loudly tuned as always to Capital, a song by ABC playing, Martin Fry singing their histrionic hit ‘The Look Of Love’.

  ‘The stereotypical Irishman,’ Mike said. ‘The silver-tongued Celtic charmer. I mean, you lay it on a bit heavy sometimes, the way you weave in all those spellbinding aphorisms. But, personally, I have to say I’m a willing audience. I suppose I’m just a sucker for a monologue from the bog.’