The House of Lost Souls (25 page)

Aberdyfi was a shallow rank of terraces rising with the steep incline of the land and facing the mouth of the Dyfi estuary. Penhelig, where Peter had actually come from, was a cluster of dwellings tacked on to the southern end of the village. Everything was of a type, of a period, as though the place had drowned in sepia or become cursed and frozen in time. It occurred to Seaton that this was because the village was in Snowdonia. Since the establishment of the National Park, it would have been impossible to build anything new. It would have been illegal to demolish anything not completely derelict. It was a fact he thought might help him in his search for secrets from the past. Aberdyfi quite deliberately celebrated the past. It was where the village lived and, when the tourists came in the summer months, thrived. The place seemed, more than anything, a monument to itself. The present was circum-scribed, here, tolerated only if it did not necessitate physical change.

Peter had been baptised and raised in the Anglican Communion, in what was, in his childhood, the newly established Anglican Province of the Church in Wales. His school had been a church school. His birth had been registered in the Parish of St Luke’s. And Seaton had spoken to the vicar from a British Museum payphone to arrange a face-to-face talk and to seek permission to take a look around his church. He’d lied about the reason. A cold call did not invite discussion about an infant tragedy. He’d relied on his rusted talent for invention to find a pretext.

He walked along the seafront to Penhelig under the drum of insistent rain. Cloud in a grey mantle concealed the peaks of the hills to his left. To his right, he passed a cluster of small fishing boats and yachts in Aberdyfi harbour. Craft sat still at anchor. It was very quiet under the rain. There was not enough breeze even for their rigging lines to slap the masts of the boats dragged up above the tideline on the sand. Within a few minutes of disembarking at the station, Seaton was completely soaked. He had not been so drenched since the evening he had got off a London bus, shivering with presentiment, on Lambeth Bridge. That was the night he’d met Malcolm Covey in Zanzibar. In the rain on the Aberdyfi seafront, it seemed an awfully long time ago. In calendar time, it was still less than a week.

He dumped his overnight bag on the bed in the room he’d reserved by phone at the Penhelig Arms. It was a nice room. It was more of Covey’s cash. The inn was sited on the coast road and his small window faced the grey rain-stippled estuary.

St Luke’s was an ascent up a steep tree-lined lane that yellowed to a wash of gravel and gurgled in the ditches flanking the lane as he climbed. The church was high above Penhelig and lost from sight in a fold of hills until he saw the slate spire, almost upon it. The door to the church was open and lit from its porch in the general gloom of trees and sky. There was no priest, though. The Reverend Madden had been called away to see a sick parishioner. Seaton was met instead by a Mrs Reeve, who explained this to him. He had long ago, as part of his training in his old profession, disciplined himself against writing off people as types. But he had Mrs Reeve down straightaway as the sort of spinster who fusses around church flowers, spraying beeswax on pews, cleaning the font.

‘You’ll be the writer, Mr Seaton,’ she said.

He had Covey’s fake accreditation dampening in his coat pocket. But it had no useful application here. And writers didn’t need qualifications. They just needed subjects to claim to be writing about.

Mrs Reeve had a cloth between her hands and her hair pulled back in pins away from her face. She was middle-aged, all spectacles and bland parochial disapproval. And then she smiled, and it seemed to him as though the summer sun came out.

‘Writing a book about Marjory Pegg, are you?’

‘Researching one.’

‘By all accounts the woman was a saint, the work she accomplished at the school. Can I get you a cup of tea, Mr Seaton? Or there’s coffee, freshly brewed.’

Seaton squeezed the raindrops from his eyebrows with his thumbs. ‘Coffee would be grand,’ he said.

By all accounts. So the two women had never met. But that would have been a bit much to ask for. Marjory Pegg had been forty-three at the time of the disappearance, according to the crime reporter Philip Beal. And Beal had struck Seaton as a pro. Such facts as he had been able to establish, he would have been far too methodical to write up imprecisely.

They drank their coffee in a tiny room off to the left of the church altar. The room smelled of cut flowers and was lit by a naked bulb against the gloom allowed by one small stained-glass window. Rain gurgled and spilled over swamped guttering on to the ground outside. Mrs Reeve produced a framed picture. It showed eight pale children standing to attention in front of a stone building in a schoolyard. Seaton knew it was a schoolyard because the lines and numbers of a hopscotch game were still etched faintly on the flagstones in front of the class. The children were flanked by a neatly dressed woman and a thin elderly man in a clerical collar. Seaton assumed the man was one of the Reverend Madden’s predecessors. He studied the woman.

Marjory Pegg was tall and bareheaded in the picture. Her thick silvery hair was combed back into a bun. She wore a plain pinafore dress over a striped shirt buttoned to the wrists and collar. Pinned to her breast was the sort of watch worn on a ribbon or chain by a nurse. Seaton could clearly see where the schoolteacher’s stockings had been darned under the knee. And her shoes, plain and immaculately polished, were thick with the resoles of careful repair. She was smiling in the photograph, into the sunlight that gave the picture its vivid sharpness and detail. Her eyes were squinting against the brightness. But this did nothing to harden her expression. She looked kind and cheerful. And she looked immensely proud of her charges, with their tousled short-back-and-sides haircuts and their short-trousered uniforms.

The brilliant clarity of the shot gave the photograph between Seaton’s hands an impression of immediacy, of modernness, as though it could have been recently posed and taken. But this illusion was swiftly dispelled. The boys had the young-old faces of children who had endured the hardship common to their class and time. These boys did not look strangers to cold or occasional hunger or the visitation of grief. Their eyes had a tough, wary innocence. Seaton studied expressions possessing complexities he reckoned altogether lost to modern youth. These were children of their age; at once buoyant and carefree, cautious and bruised. None of the group could have been more than about eight years of age. But there was nothing in the picture to distinguish Peter, if he was among them, from the rest.

Seaton was reminded of Fischer’s crooned platitudes about polio and rickets. But there were no calipers bolted to the legs of any of the boys. And none leaned on a crutch. He was reminded of Mason’s bleak dismissal of Peter the workhouse foundling. But Miss Pegg’s brood were of a muchness. This was a jaunty band of brothers, a healthy hardy litter without a runt.

‘You’re frowning, Mr Seaton.’

‘I’m just wondering, is one of these boys Peter Morgan?’

The picture was taken from his hands. On Mrs Reeve’s face, the sun went into eclipse.

‘I’m sorry.’

She stood. ‘You’re here under false pretences. You lied to the Reverend. I’d be obliged if you’d leave.’

‘Please, Mrs Reeve. My interest is far from merely prurient.’

‘I’m sure. And I’m sure your time is precious. And since I know nothing about any boy called Peter Morgan, you are wasting it here.’

She still had the framed picture in her hands. They were shaking slightly. The smell of flowers in the small room was underlaid by water, stagnant in a vase or backing up from a drain somewhere, brackish, choked by leaf-fall. The sound of rain spewing from the gutter outside was incredibly loud. Seaton thought he heard a chord of organ music stir from somewhere outside the door separating them from the aisle of the church and he shivered and goosebumps pricked and raised themselves on his flesh. He steeled himself for the clump of a team of horses, for the snorts and gasps against the bit, under their black mourning plumes.

‘Leave,’ she said. She had the picture held in one hand, her pride in the saintly Miss Pegg forgotten, redundant.

And there was no organ music. It had been his imagination. The time for games was past. He was the only one still playing them, and he was ashamed of his little deception here. Ashamed. He bowed his head and reached for the door handle and walked before the altar and along the silent aisle and past the font, out of the church porch.

He found himself among graves. It was still light, though the evening darkness was fast enough descending. He had blundered to the right instead of the left and the route down the hill to Penhelig in his haste to get away. When he looked around, he was on a small plateau to the rear of St Luke’s. The headstones were modest, rain-stained sandstone and dull granite rather than marble. The grass was recently cut. The shadows of the graves stretched over the grass in low sunlight. It was still raining from above him, but over to the west, out over the sea, the cloud had thinned in a fiery horizon. Seaton looked at the headstones. After a moment, he found the grave belonging to Peter Morgan’s father. By Public Subscription, it said on the granite, chiselled and still somehow free of moss after seventy years. His name was etched into the stone below a handsome carved relief. It was a small stone. But Seaton thought the people of his village had done the memory of Robert Morgan proud.

Seaton knew from the account written up by Philip Beal that Peter’s father had been the cox of the Aberdyfi lifeboat. He had perished in a storm after the lifeboat capsized, attempting to reach a foundering cargo vessel in Cardigan Bay. That had been in 1925. He had been thirty-seven years old. It had been the sort of small tragedy familiar to seafaring communities. It had deprived Peter Morgan of his father at the age of five. It had inspired the piece of commemorative art carved and rubbed into granite that Seaton looked at now, flushed with low November sun, the sound to the rear of him of rain dribbling through church gutters, the tended grass wet under his knees as he ran respectful fingers over the relief.

It showed a lighthouse mounted on a rock. Its single beam spread to the right across the stone. The dead man’s name had been written in the beam. And under it, the lines:

A
BRINGER OF HOPE

L
OST BUT REDEEMED

I
N GRATITUDE

Well. The Aberdyfi boat would have saved a lot of lives. It was why they were built. It was the reason their crews went out.

Seaton got to his feet. His legs ached. Dusk was creeping now among the graves. Most of the headstones were crowded with names. Morgan’s ancestors had been buried elsewhere. He had come to Aberdyfi from Barmouth, where he had himself put to rest the bride who died bearing him his son. He had come to Aberdyfi to escape grief. But they had done him proud, his adopted people, with their tribute, with this refuge on the plateau in the quiet and the late light tucked to the rear of the old church. It seemed to Seaton as good a place as any to be buried. It was a place of peace and sanctity where a noble soul could sleep untroubled.

The barman at the Penhelig Arms was disappointingly young. Seaton would find no enlightenment there. He took his pint of Banks’s bitter over to a table by the window. In the morning he would try to talk to the Reverend Madden. He had lied, but the clergy were generally forgiving. Tomorrow he would tell the truth, if not the whole truth, admit his interest lay solely in the abducted boy. He had lied because closed communities were apt to conceal their crimes and the disappearance was exactly the sort of appalling event to provoke collusive, clannish secrecy. He had hoped to stumble upon the subject of her vanished pupil as though inadvertently, discussing the unsung qualities of the admirable Marjory Pegg.

It had been the wrong approach. The crime had taken place so long ago, almost no one could be left alive to remember it. It was a remote enough event to qualify as history. Confronting it head-on, asking his questions openly, was not now likely to provoke pain, or resentment at unwarranted intrusion. He had made a crass mistake. But would put it right in the morning.

He took another, welcome sip of beer. Through the window, distant across the estuary, he could see the twinkling lights of a town, remote before the black hills massing in the night behind it. He didn’t know the name of the town. He didn’t know anything. And he was unlikely to find anything out. The old St Luke’s school building was a ceramics studio now. It looked the same from the outside, but was filled with bags of clay and potter’s wheels and kilns creating souvenirs for Welsh resorts whose visitors had a taste for indigenous crafts. The school records had long been destroyed. And Madden would not speak to him. Not now. Why on earth should he?

Seaton picked the menu up from his table. There was a dining room at the pub, a kitchen with a good reputation. More of Covey’s money. Lamb featured heavily among the signature dishes. He would order a hearty casserole for which he could find in himself no appetite whatsoever.

The pub door opened and a woman walked in. He had to look twice before recognising Mrs Reeve. Her hair had been combed out and she was wearing lipstick. She had on a tailored coat and a scarf, finely woven out of wool. Seaton thought the scarf probably cashmere. She sat down opposite him and began to pull off a pair of leather gloves.

‘Are you a policeman?’

‘They don’t investigate seventy-year-old crimes.’

She nodded. ‘What is your interest?’

Seaton sighed and gripped his glass in his fist. Where to begin.

‘Just tell me this. Is your interest likely to result in exposure? In retribution? In what is fashionably termed closure?’

He’d had the woman in front of him buttoned into a floral overall, mopping imaginary spillages from the St Luke’s font in a spinsterly attempt at attaining God’s grace. Sometimes luck confounded judgment.