Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  She went and knocked on the door of the building that looked most like a dwelling. It was old and brick-built with a porch, and there was smoke raising a thin stain into the rainy sky from a chimney. But there was no response. She walked round the side of the building and peered into a window. The interior was dark, dank even, ancient enamel appliances yellowing in its shadows. It was a kitchen, but it seemed cold and abandoned.

  None of the other buildings were occupied either. Perhaps the farmer was just doing what farmers did, out in his fields. Suzanne looked around the farmyard once more, trying to persuade herself that there was something picturesque in the buildings with their half-timbered walls, their rust-coloured brickwork and sagging roof tiles. But in the rain, among the puddles, the place looked squalid. Rustic charm was absent from it. There was a damp and elderly smell of cow shit. Birds flapped in a ragged flock towards the poplars lining the ditch that led to the barn. Suzanne looked at her watch and decided to follow them. She wanted to be well on the way back to Calais and the bright ferry terminal lights by the time darkness descended here.

  She walked for ten minutes before the barn started to look any closer. It was a trick of perspective, she decided. The building was both bigger and further away than she had first assumed. The aerial photograph had given an accurate impression of its rectangular outline, but not of its scale. As she got closer, she realised that the barn was of a really substantial size. And it was sturdily constructed, more than just solid, somehow formidable. It did not reflect the humble domestic architecture of the clustered farm buildings she had just left. They were simpler and more recent – built, she guessed, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The barn might be a barn now, in terms of its function. But despite its remote location, it surely must have been something grander at some stage in its past. It was a sombre building. Even in the flat, rainy absence of light, it seemed to cast a shadow bigger than itself.

  It had originally possessed windows in what had once been an upper storey. They had been flat rectangles rather than arched. And they had been bricked in a great many years ago with blocks made of the same stone as the rest of the construction. They had weathered over time to the same grey as the walls. But the mortar between them had blackened and rotted and gave the old work away. Suzanne found herself wishing she had at least some working knowledge of architecture. But she possessed very little and what she did know she had learned incidentally. Because she had researched him for a documentary special, she knew quite a lot about the work and working methods of the Nazi architect, Albert Speer. But with a shiver, she realised that the building in front of her was calling to mind something far removed from Speer’s grandiose classical plagiarism. It made her think, of all things, of the Whitechapel killer, Jack the Ripper.

  She stopped dead in her own muddy footprints. It was an absurd subject to be entering her head, wasn’t it, by a ditch at the edge of a muddy field in sheeting rain in France on an April afternoon? What did a Victorian serial killer have to do with Harry Spalding and the happy bloodlust of the Jericho Crew?

  And then she had it. She had thought the barn looked a little like a Norman church deprived of its tower or its spire. But what it actually resembled, with those square windows it had once possessed, was a Masonic temple. There were tricks and puns and cul-de-sacs of architectural detail about the barn that she did not have the expertise to recognise. But the closer she got to it the more she could see they were there, just as they were perhaps the defining characteristic in Masonic temples. Some people had speculated that the Ripper was a Mason. There had never been any hard evidence to support this belief, because the Ripper had never been identified and convicted. But that had been the link in Suzanne’s mind. And it gave her an even greater sense of uneasiness approaching the barn, thinking it perhaps a place that harboured more than just the chill inherent in buildings that were old and semi-derelict and standing in unhappy isolation.

  Her feet were wet as well as muddy, now. The soil, black and clinging, had risen above her leather ankle boots and smeared her tights to the calf. She thought the boots probably ruined. They were from Russell and Bromley and not Millets and they had cost her a penny short of two hundred quid – and the credit card had done the buying, so they weren’t even paid for yet. It was her own fault, of course. But who would think to pack wellingtons to take on a ferry? She looked around. The landscape was wet and desolate. She had thought the farmer would warm to her smile and politeness. She had thought rough-spoken but gallant Pierre Duval would give her a lift across the mire aboard something with a close gear ratio and chunky tyres. But she had got that part of the proceedings badly wrong.

  Then, suddenly, she was there. The ground rose and hardened towards the building’s walls. The incline was slight but the drainage effective and her feet approached the last few yards of distance on firm earth. She looked for the bedraggled squadron of birds that had led the way. She had thought they were starlings. But they had veered off on some other course. There were no birds. There were no rabbits or squirrels and the barking dog of the farmyard had long faded into silence. There was nothing living in proximity to Harry Spalding’s old Jericho Crew hideaway. Even the poplars hereabouts seemed stunted and reluctant. But that was just her imagination, Suzanne knew. She looked at the walls, at rain-stained masonry, at the filled-in windows, like blind and baleful eyes looking darkly outwards at the featureless world of Pierre Duval’s domain. She looked at the large oak double door, which did not appear locked. And she felt afraid and awfully alone and vulnerable wildly beyond what she had felt earlier, on the road, when she had stopped for the comfort of a smoke.

  She forced her feet forward. What was the matter with her? She was a grown woman. She was here in broad daylight, for Christ’s sake. She had wanted to come. She pulled one of the big doors open a fraction and slipped inside. And her first impression was of an almost sepulchral darkness and cathedral calm. She looked up, looking for the chinks in the building’s fabric that would allow some meagre light for her eyes eventually to adjust to. The first thing that came into focus were the wooden beams from which she assumed Derry Conway had taken the last leap of his life. They were very thick and substantial and she could see no structural reason for them unless they had once supported a floor. That would make sense, too, of the height of the bricked-in windows.

  Slowly, reluctantly, she brought her eyes down to the level of where she stood. And she saw that the barn did not stand empty. Crates of produce had been piled almost to the height of the ceiling along the entire length of the wall to her left. And there was, at the centre of the barn on the ground in front of her, a rough, high pyramid of beets. It reached almost to the beams. It was so big and high that it did not really look stable. She almost smiled. The prospect of being crushed by an avalanche of beets was an ignominious one. It would not be at all a dignified death.

  The quiet in there was unnerving. And there was nothing very reassuring about the produce in the place. It should have given the building a workaday feel of farming domesticity. But it did not. Suzanne wondered precisely why. The quiet was one reason. Another was the fact that she could smell nothing in there, neither the earth from which the pyramid of root vegetables had been taken, nor whatever was stored in the crates. Perhaps it was not fruit or vegetables, but a hoard of wine, she thought. She would approach and recognise the musty, distinctive smell of corks stoppering old bottles.

  She walked across to the crates. Her eyes were adjusted now to the lack of light. The crates were wooden and venerable. Some had dates in faded ink on the pale wood of their sides. Others had the year branded into them. They should have had bottles of wine in them, old and valuable vintages, she thought. None of the dates was more recent than 1915. But the crates were full of apples and plums and damsons and pears. The fruit was fresh, the burnish of red and russet and gold on firm flesh in the gloom. It was odd that nothing smelled. There was not the hint, not the ghost of the ripe and woody scent of an orchard from the
fruit.

  On the wall opposite the one against which the crates were piled, Suzanne saw something that almost caused her composure to abandon her. She was very frightened in the refuge of the Jericho Crew. Everything here was mundane. Nothing here had threatened her. And yet she was sure she had never been in a place that harboured so much pure and absolute menace. Before the far wall, she saw a uniform line of men standing perfectly still against the shadowy stone. They did not approach. They just waited and watched, motionless and poised. She almost screamed, before her mind was able to rationalise the sight as a line of coats on hooks, hanging there.

  She could feel the muscles jump in her legs as she approached the coats. The weight of her body felt light in her ruined boots. They would be musty and rotten, the coats, and there would be thirteen of them. But there were only nine. And when she reached out and touched one, the nap of the fabric, where it was not mud-splashed, was firm and heavy and still soft. She turned the collar of the garment on its hook and could just make out the name, the letters forming it, Waltrow S, machine-stitched on to the pale name tag in red thread. Suzanne recoiled from the greatcoat as light and noise drifted into the building, and she cried out aloud and put her hands to her face.

  ‘Madame?’

  There was a figure at the door in a rain cape and a hat.

  ‘Madame?’

  The farmer Pierre Duval had a shotgun broken over his arm. He was tall in the bath of light at the door and wore a hat with a dripping brim and a heavy moustache and the rain cape was black and slick with moisture. He might keep his earlier promise and not shoot her, but he had brought the gun as a precaution. He frowned at her. In better English than he had displayed over the phone, he said, ‘Have you discovered what you came for?’

  She gestured vaguely at the crates, at the pyramid of beets. ‘You use the place for storage?’

  He looked around. He had not crossed the threshold. She sensed that he was reluctant to do so. She remembered what Martin had said about Frank Hadley’s refusal ever to call Harry Spalding’s boat by its name. He shifted on his heels and the twin barrels of his shotgun rose and descended again over the crook of his arm. ‘I never come here,’ he said. ‘Nothing of this is work of mine.’

  It was very quiet. Suzanne could hear rain splash on the step at the entrance as it dripped from the hem of Duval’s rain cape. She did not understand. And then she thought that perhaps she did.

  ‘Nothing rots in here?’

  He just looked at her. The double shotgun barrel was thick and heavy-seeming, and it gleamed in the matt light from the sky as it rested over his forearm.

  ‘Nothing perishes?’

  ‘Not in my lifetime, madame. Nor in my father’s. And nor in his. It is nature’s joke.’ The expression in his eyes told her plainly that Duval knew it was a joke played not by, but against nature.

  She turned and looked back behind her at the still pyramid of beets rising from the floor at the building’s centre. She tried to imagine song and camaraderie and the warmth of a campfire with a coffee pot or a bacon skillet rigged over the flames. But the image defeated her. She looked again to the ghostly company of coats in their line against the wall. Stillness and darkness were the only discoveries here. As it was a place where nothing perished, so it was a place where nothing lived. Derry Conway had managed to die here in the autumn of 1917. But Suzanne, having seen the place, having felt its raw malevolence, was pretty sure that Derry Conway had been assisted in achieving his death. She shivered again. What manner of man could ever have found comfort here?

  ‘There is coffee inside,’ said Pierre Duval, who had seen her shiver, gesturing in the direction of the farm. ‘You were unwise to walk here. Come.’

  He had parked his battered Land Rover behind the line of poplars. She thought it odd that she had not heard the approach of its labouring engine, because the engine did labour, when he started it. It chugged and then when he depressed the accelerator pedal, it roared and the vehicle vibrated on its high springs. But too much else was odd about the barn for the failure of sound to carry there to worry Suzanne unduly. She was grateful for the lift. With Duval’s shotgun resting across the back seats, she was grateful also for the company.

  He progressed beyond the farmyard, to another structure that the farmyard buildings themselves had obscured during her brief earlier exploration. And he parked outside it. This was a modern dwelling made of wood and designed to blend in with the earth and trees surrounding it. It looked more Scandinavian than typically French. She could see how she had missed it in her aerial search, looking for old stone and sagging clay tiles. Its steep roof was earth-coloured and made of some modern material. Its windows were tinted on the outside so that the building did not reflect light.

  The impression that farming was a profitable business after all for Pierre Duval was strengthened when he unlocked the door and she was invited inside his home. He did not like clutter. But his furniture looked expensive. The kitchen was a hard, shining array of steel and granite. A large plasma television screen was mounted on one wall of his sitting room. There were logs in the open iron grate but the fire was unlit. He had a laptop on a small desk and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system in one corner with three immaculate rows of CDs stored on shelves above it. No one else lived here, she was certain. Pierre Duval did not share his life. She smiled inwardly at the thought that he had once lived amid the fading enamel and linoleum squalor apparently abandoned a few hundred metres behind them.

  He took her coat and removed his and went to hang them where he said they would dry, and then he gestured for her to sit while he made the coffee. She had wiped her feet vigorously on the doormat outside. Now she saw that her muddy boots had trailed a few crumbs of wet earth across Duval’s wooden floor. He would notice; the place was otherwise immaculate. But she did not think he would mind. She had picked a careful path between his scattered and expensive-looking rugs. And she sensed he had invited her in for a reason beyond her wish for something hot and sustaining to drink. She was here because he wanted to tell her something. He would tolerate a bit of mud to hear it told.

  ‘In 1917 my grandfather was a boy,’ he said, seated in the chair opposite hers when they both had their coffee. ‘He was fourteen and he was very innocent. He liked the Americans. He liked the doughboys. They were generous with their chocolate and their chewing gum. They were cheerful. Many of them, whole battalions of their infantry, were coloured soldiers. Were you aware of that fact?’

  ‘None of the Jericho Crew was black,’ Suzanne said.

  Duval did not answer her. He looked down at the contents of his cup. ‘My grandfather was Pierre Duval also. And he was still a child. And the war was a great adventure. When the soldiers marched, they sang. Most of them sang. The Scots marched to the pipes, to their tunes of glory in their fighting kilts, with their battle standards raised. At night, in their camps, the coloured doughboys sang their slavish songs of devotion to God.’

  ‘Spirituals,’ Suzanne said.

  Duval smiled, as though he himself were remembering. ‘Their spirituals, yes, of course. They sang their spirituals in this land so far from home, in their canvas settlements, and their strong and ardent voices carried through the night. How marvellous and strange that must have sounded, here.’

  He stopped. Suzanne felt no compulsion to interrupt the silence. He sipped coffee. ‘It was all a great adventure to the boy who would become my grandfather. It must have seemed to him as an epic film in the cinema would. And then the Jericho Crew came here,’ he said. ‘And they did not sing, madame. They did not sing at all.’

  Pierre Duval, who was fourteen and for whom the war was a great adventure, had seen none of the crew. They moved by night. And they moved with the stealth of ghosts. But he had seen the night glow sometimes of their fires. And knowing the friendliness of the Allied troops generally, and overcome with curiosity, he had approached the barn.

  He had done so very quietly and carefully. He did not wish to be mistake
n for an approaching enemy, nor to be mistaken for game and shot. His plan, such as it was, was simply to reveal himself in plain sight when the light of their encampment could illuminate him as a harmless, unarmed boy. Later, he was thankful for this cautious instinct because he was sure it saved his life. At the time, as he approached along the forgiving autumn earth between the poplars and the drainage ditch, he felt only a boy’s excitement.

  They were clustered in a group outside the rear of the barn. He saw the scene from a hundred feet away, from behind the screen of trees. And at first he could make no sense of it at all. This was because he knew that his father’s land was flat. Every inch of it was flat. Yet they were sitting grouped around their fires on a hill. And then he saw its purpose, what it was they had constructed on their hill.

  There were three wooden crosses. A uniformed man hung from each. The oldest and most senior-looking of the prisoners was at the centre. To his right and left, Pierre thought, perhaps the men flanking him were his aide-decamp and his driver. Was the man at the centre a general? It did not matter. Other details imposed themselves with far greater and more shocking clarity on his young mind. They had been nailed to the crosses using bayonets. They were still, the pinioned men. Pierre thought that they were probably dead. And they had each of them been crucified upside down.

  As he watched, rigid with the dread overwhelming him, one of the Americans, a man with a pale swatch of hair, rose from the ground and idled across to the victim at the centre of the tableau. He took a knife and sawed at the torso and Pierre was certain now that the German general suffering this mutilation was dead. The man tugged at the corpse and his free hand came away with something wet that glistened in the flames of their fires, and he lifted and dropped this human morsel into his mouth and started to chew.

  And Pierre heard laughter and clapping. And then at the edge of the group, he saw a seated man lean over and vomit on the earth. This man was dressed in the same uniform as the other Americans, he saw. But his hands appeared to be bound at his back. And there was the glimmer of a clerical collar in the firelight around his neck.