Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Eventually, he was promoted to major and asked to lead a hand-picked team of fellow assault fighters,’ my father said. ‘In many ways, this outfit was the precursor of what today we call Special Forces. Rank was not an issue among these men. Class was not an issue. Spalding’s own background was immensely privileged. He was the favoured son of one of the wealthiest families in American banking. But he was chosen on merit for his role in the field. All of them were. He led them.’

  ‘Did they have a name? Did this unit have a designation?’

  My father sipped champagne. ‘They were called the Jericho Crew.’ He reached inside his suit coat, brought out his wallet and took from it a picture he put on the white linen of the table between us. I picked it up and studied it in the subdued lighting of the Kundan interior. There was a candelabra on our table and I pulled it closer. The print was new but the picture, I knew, was ninety years old. The men in it were posed like a football team, half standing in a line behind those kneeling in front of them. All wore their hair brutally shorn. All were white and young. They were a hollow-eyed, savage-looking bunch, armed to the teeth with knives and knuckledusters and revolvers and short-snouted, heavy calibre assault rifles. You could judge the weight of shot by the thickness of the rounds wedged into bandoliers wound across their bodies from the shoulder. They all wore the same weird, infected grin. They looked like men drunk on killing. But I did not think this a verdict on the men in the photograph it would be wise to share with my father. I nodded in what I hoped would pass as a gesture of appreciation. But to me the men assembled in the picture looked like the sort of soldiers who sawed battlefield trophies from the extremities of the dead.

  ‘Which one is Spalding?’

  My father’s forefinger extended over the print and he tapped a figure.

  I should have guessed. Spalding, the well-born hero, was half a head taller than the rest. In those days, prosperity almost always translated into physical height. He was very slender. He was loose-limbed, with long thighs and supple fingers. His grin showed a jaw full of white, perfectly even teeth. He was a startlingly handsome man, when you really scrutinised his features. In conventional terms, his facial appearance was almost flawless. But there was nothing attractive about him at all. He seemed dangerous. You wouldn’t want to meet him and, if you did, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him. I rubbed my eyes. Perhaps it was just the wine, drunk after a swift beer, itself swallowed after a long day and a tense, fog-hampered drive. I looked again at Spalding. But the effect was the same. The one word his photograph brought to mind, more than any other, was feral.

  ‘Why the Jericho Crew?’

  A shrug. ‘Haven’t been able to source an explanation for the name. Not a convincing one, at any rate. And the men in the picture have all been dead for far too long to provide it.’

  Thank God, I thought.

  ‘Wondered if Suzanne might be able to find that out for me.’

  ‘If she can’t, nobody can,’ I said. ‘She’s in Dublin at the moment, digging up fresh revelations for a documentary film about Michael Collins.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ my father said, taking back his picture. ‘It’s hardly important.’

  I studied the wine in my glass.

  ‘She’s wasting her time, of course.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Irish are a loquacious people. There is nothing about Michael Collins that we don’t already know.’

  Over our aromatic lamb and drily spiced chicken, he took me through the rest of Spalding’s short and energetic life. The first significant thing he did in the peace was to survive the Spanish flu epidemic that killed something over half of his comrades on the steamer returning them home from France. In the years after the armistice, he took two six-month-long sabbaticals from the bank to sail his bright new toy. In the autumn of 1922, he could stomach the bank no longer and, to his father’s apparent dismay, quit the commercial world altogether. Curiously, far from being cut off in the classic retaliatory manner, his already generous living allowance was increased to the point where he could afford to squander a literal fortune every month. He sailed his boat to Europe, a girlfriend crewing for him until she tired of life on the ocean and jumped ship, apparently jilting him for good, on the quay at Rimini. He gambled at the tables in Monaco, where he won. He berthed the boat for the winter and travelled to Paris, where he played tennis with Ezra Pound, and boxed a few inevitable rounds with Hemingway, and bought on a whim a polo pony he never rode and attended a séance conducted by the English black magician, Aleister Crowley. In the manner of all men quietly traumatised by the carnage of the trenches, he drank too much and spoke too recklessly and could discover no great hope or value or salvation in human life.

  And how would he, I wondered on hearing this, inured to the practicalities of life by such fabulous wealth?

  Spalding spent a period in the middle 1920s in England. He had put out on a jaunt from Dublin Bay and was forced for refuge to Liverpool by a storm that almost destroyed the Dark Echo. He found the climate, and perhaps the northern coolness of the people and their detachment, more congenial to his soul than continental Europe. This was the time of his winning things at Cowes and in other places, the great lines of his boat forming a familiar, celebrated shape against the dappled waters of the Solent.

  In Cowes, his exploits on the water were still an awed folk memory among old salts whose grandfathers had piloted or crewed in races for Harry Spalding. They still talked about the way you had to watch out for his evil bull mastiff, Toby, should a chart be required and the aft cabin therefore need to be risked. And they still talked about tips aboard a winning boat so lavish that a man could spend the next six months idle, arse parked on the beach in a Ventnor deckchair.

  There was amazement at the memory of the yachtsman Harry Spalding, but there was no fondness. And he had possessed no love for himself, it seemed. For in the cold December of 1929, he had lain down in a Manhattan hotel with his boat berthed in the thickening ice of New York Harbour a mile and a half away and had put a bullet from his own gun into his right temple. He was thirty-three years old and made a beautiful corpse. Even the NYPD detective called to the scene to investigate said as much, seeing Harry in deathly repose. He looked serene in death. The only mark on him was the small hole left by the bullet and a dark, delicate halo of powder burn around the hole. There was no exit wound. The bullet had apparently lodged in his skull.

  Having drunk too much to drive, I left the Saab on its meter and saw my father safely into a Mayfair-bound cab before walking across Lambeth Bridge to the home I shared with Suzanne on the other side of the river. When I got in and had taken off my coat, I looked into her tiny study and switched on the light. The air in her workspace retained the subtlest hint of her scent and I inhaled what there was of it gratefully. There were reference books in a line on the window sill with yellow slips of paper marking crucial passages. The award she had won for her work on a three-part documentary series on the elusive Rudolph Hess sat, a little silver-mounted perspex trophy, on top of her computer monitor. She had Blu-tacked it there, incredibly proud. The sight of it now made me smile. The wall she faced when she worked was a gallery of the gifted and the infamous whose mysteries she had worked hard to unravel. There was Auden and the Kray Brothers, and a pencil sketch of Christopher Marlowe and a sepia studio shot of Dan Leno in costume. Among the collage of pictures on the wall was the famous shot of Michael Collins, thin-lipped and preening in his leather gloves and army uniform as Chief of the Irish Free State, a Parabellum pistol swinging on his hip. I studied him. And the man who did for the Cairo gang in one bloody night of assassination looked a cosy sort of fellow altogether, when I recalled the picture I had seen earlier that evening of the Jericho Crew and their leader, Harry Spalding.

  I noticed that the flowers in a vase sharing the sill with her books were dying. I would buy a fresh bunch to greet her return. I switched off the light, shaking my head. The flat felt very quiet
and empty in Suzanne’s absence from it. I closed the study door softly and went to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. The spiced food and the beer and wine drunk with it would have made me seek water anyway, so close to bed. But it was my father’s request, over dinner, that made me really thirsty now. I felt the dry-mouthed affliction of nervousness, even of fear. And it was my father’s proposition at our table in the Kundan that had triggered it. That, and the walk back to the flat. The river had been low under Lambeth Bridge, lapping softly and invisible, what little noise it made distorted by the fog. The fog, almost impenetrable in Portsmouth, had extended its tendrils as far as the capital. There was almost no traffic and curiously no pedestrian traffic at all, though it was not remotely late by London standards. But from the moment my father’s taxi drew away, I endured the strange suspicion of being trailed though dissipating mist, all the way over the bridge and to the safe refuge of home.

  That night I dreamed that Harry Spalding and Michael Collins met, the encounter in some dim and monochromatic no-man’s-land. They were uniformed and they took off their caps and their Sam Browne belts and came together to wrestle. And Collins, the broth of a boy from his father’s farm in County Cork, naturally the bigger and stronger man and much the more skilled at grappling, gained the upper hand. And then Spalding’s limbs seemed to lengthen and burnish and they blackened like those of some great, bony insect and he crushed and then greedily devoured his opponent, his arms and legs segmented now and chittering foully as he scrabbled away into the darkness from the scene. I awoke, sweating. It had been a horrible dream, all the worse, as nightmares so often are, for being so nonsensical and meaningless.

  I got out of bed, went back into Suzanne’s study and took the cashmere sweater she had left draped across the back of the chair at her desk. It had been the source of the earlier scent, a mingling of her skin and hair and the perfume she habitually wore. I folded it on to my pillow for comfort but still felt spooked. I sat up and took my mobile from the bedside table and texted Suzanne to call me if she was still awake. I was grateful she was only in Dublin, in the same time zone. Her research work could take her anywhere in the world. In Dublin and London it was only just after midnight.

  She called me back straight away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Have you heard of a man called Harry Spalding?’

  There was a silence as I’m sure she flicked through the mental Rolodex in her clever, beautiful head. ‘Yes. In Paris in the 1920s he once offered Bricktop a hundred thousand dollars if she would sleep with him.’

  I had no idea who or what Bricktop was. A courtesan? An entertainer? ‘Bricktop’s response?’

  Suzanne laughed. ‘Something fairly unprintable, I should think.’

  ‘Have you heard of the Jericho Crew?’

  There was another silence. This one was less productive. ‘No, I haven’t. It doesn’t sound very salubrious, though, whatever it is. Or was. What’s this about, Martin?’

  ‘My father bought the wreck of Spalding’s boat today. His yacht. The Dark Echo?’

  At the other end of the line, I heard Suzanne swallow. ‘Well. Your father has never been one for superstition.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you, Martin. I’ll tell you all about Bricktop, too.’

  ‘My father intends to have the boat restored, made seaworthy once again. He intends to sail her. He wants to sail her around the world. And he told me tonight he wants me to accompany him.’

  She laughed. There was no mirth in the sound. ‘I thought your father liked me.’

  ‘He does like you.’

  ‘But he wants to take you away,’ she said.

  ‘Which means that he must like me as well.’

  I could hear her thinking. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ she said. It was Wednesday. She was due back on the Saturday. ‘Take care, Martin.’

  She never said that. I thought it was an odd thing for her to say. Take care of what?

  I lay on the bed for a while with her sweater a soft, sweet-smelling pillow under my head, but I still could not discover sleep. So I went back to her study and switched on Suzanne’s computer. Then, almost without thinking, I reached across and switched on Suzanne’s little radio. She had taken her laptop with her and our home computer was old and slow. It was nice to have a diversion while it groaned slowly into life. The radio was tuned to one of the digital stations, bebop and modern jazz and fusion, tunes segueing into one another without the hindrance of some insomnia jockey’s coffee-and-ego-fuelled patter to spoil the music.

  I tapped my fingers on the desk surface and smiled, remembering the unlikely way in which Suzanne and I had first met. It was far below the streets of Wapping, on an East London Line train. She had simply been a strikingly attractive girl sharing the same carriage until three hoodies burst in and began steaming the most vulnerable-looking passengers. What happened next was down to Father O’Hanlon, who had passed on the necessary skills, and my father, who had secured for me the tutelage of O’Hanlon.

  No one, in that modern London way, was doing anything about the gang. Those not being singled out as victims were just pretending that nothing untoward was going on. There were no screams, no threats, no jarring assaults or violation. It was just a normal London commute, wasn’t it? It was just routine as those not being robbed stared at the black glass of the tunnelling train windows and the gang approached the pale, pretty woman clutching a laptop case protectively under her arm. Everything was normal. Or, at least, it was until I got off my seat and approached the gang, hauled them round and knocked the three of them cold.

  Suzanne later called it my KOWK (knight on white charger) moment. For her, the moment had been DID (damsel in distress). The acronyms amused her. The roles were amusing, too, so absurdly far removed were they from the balance of our relationship once it properly began.

  I was arrested and taken to Wapping police station and charged with assault and bailed in person by my beaming father. Suzanne attended voluntarily, as a witness. Six weeks later, I was summoned back to be told that no charges were going to be pressed.

  ‘The scum you encountered used to be known as the Shadwell Posse,’ the detective sergeant I saw there told me in the seclusion of an interview room. ‘Ever since your brush with them, we’ve been calling them the Shadwell Pussies. And I’m delighted to say that the name has caught on.’

  Suzanne had dinner with me to celebrate my reprieve. A week later, we were living together.

  The computer finally came to life. I did a search for Bricktop. I searched images first, and found only old pictures of a venerable black woman and then shots from the same woman’s rather lavish and showy funeral. Then I did another search and, of course, discovered who she was – the legend she had been, the picaresque life she had led and the glittering array of talent she had showcased at her nightclub in Paris in that febrile decade after the Great War. I read about Bricktop and her long legs and lengthy list of admirers. Gangsters and painters and hucksters and writers vied for her favours, and some of the names on the list were legendary. Spalding’s wealth couldn’t get him to the front of the queue, where the likes of Jack Johnson and Pablo Picasso and Duke Ellington jostled and preened.

  How long the song had been playing I don’t know, but when my attention to the words on the screen faltered sufficiently for me to become aware of it a shiver of cold spread up my spine as I listened to something old and sonorous and crackling with the vintage speed at which I could hear it revolving on the plinth. I looked at the radio. Suzanne had bought it only recently. It was a very modern little item and the sound leaking out of it seemed horribly incongruous. For a dreadful moment I was listening to Bricktop, her dead voice creaking forth seventy-odd years after the death of her failed suitor, on the very day my father had purchased the possession that suitor prized most greatly. The song ended. For once, I craved a spoken voice. And it came, the presenter crediting the performance
I had just heard to Josephine Baker. I felt a surge of relief. Baker had been a Bricktop protégé, of course, even a Bricktop discovery. I’d just learned as much. But the long arm of coincidence was allowed to stretch that far. At least, to my tired mind it was. But it could stretch no further, so I switched off the radio before giving it the chance to.

  Back in bed, sleep still proved elusive. I breathed in the warm comfort of Suzanne’s improvised cashmere pillow and smiled at the irony of how I was behaving now, compared to my behaviour in the circumstances in which the two of us had met. Was I afraid of the dark? Suzanne believed I was afraid of nothing. I’d given her reason, I suppose, to think it. It was an awfully long way from being the truth. But was I? Afraid of the dark?

  I don’t honestly think that I was. But I was afraid, I know, even then, of the malignant memory of the American called Harry Spalding.

  Two

  There was at least some method in my father’s madness. Before buying Spalding’s boat, he had commissioned a precise estimate of what the craft would cost to restore, refit and make seaworthy. The estimate had been carried out by a boatyard on the Hamble with the best reputation for this kind of work in what was an exact, esoteric and quite exclusive business. The original specification of the boat was very high. Craftsmanship to equal it did still exist. But it was uncommon. And it was bought in the modern age only at great expense. Computer simulation could and had made the design of a modern boat a much cheaper proposition altogether. But restoration was a matter of painstaking artistry done with arcane tools and precious raw materials.

  Frank Hadley said his yard could do the job. But he told my father honestly that it would take six months if it were to be done properly and not botched. The timescale suited my dad. Six months would enable him to learn the necessary seamanship to sail the Dark Echo competently. The boat would be ready by the beginning of July. It was a benign time on the marine calendar to put out across the Atlantic. Benign and Atlantic were not words I thought sat easily in the same sentence. But everything was relative. July was going to be better than March and a damn sight gentler than October.