Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  The following morning, because it was all she knew to do, Suzanne went back to the library. Her Birkdale hotel room had been comfortable enough. She had thought over breakfast about exploring the locality. It looked encouragingly unchanged. She had Jane’s old address. But she knew that she would not knock on the door and discover Jane’s daughter there, cogent at eighty and happy to reminisce. Jane Boyte had died in 1971. There had been no descendents. The internet and the fashion for the subject on television made genealogy a very easy subject to research. She had researched the descendants of a northern comic from this very region for just such a programme herself two years earlier. She was familiar from that study with the old Southport surnames. The salient facts had taken Suzanne fifteen minutes to discover. Jane’s life ended in a cul-de-sac. She had encountered in her life a great man in Michael Collins and a bad one by the name of Harry Spalding. How well she had known either of them remained to be established. But her own life seemed to have ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Such was the lot of most people. Glamour was not a quality that sustained itself, unless you were Marlene Dietrich. Unless you were Pablo Picasso.

  Again, she came up with nothing at the library in Southport. After two hours of musty, futile digging she went and got her cup of coffee and sat in the shade of an umbrella at a pavement table on sun-drenched Lord Street and pondered on what to do next. Maybe she ought to go to Liverpool and examine the maritime archive at the library there. What if, as she supposed, Dark Echo had been as accident-prone in Patrick Boyte’s boatyard as it had in that owned by poor Frank Hadley? There might be something.

  She sighed. She sipped cappuccino. She watched traffic for a bit, the cars predominantly that silver metallic they were everywhere nowadays, and she toyed with her Marlboro packet without opening it and lighting one. What would an accident-prone boatyard in the Liverpool of eighty years ago prove? She knew that Martin and his father were in danger. She did not need a catalogue of old accidents to prove that to her. She knew it already. What she needed was the something indefinable that her instinct had impelled her to Southport in search of. It was not a coincidence in all of this that she did what she did for a living. It was her duty and her solitary hope. And sipping coffee, and resisting the craving for nicotine, she had to do what she could now to prevent a deep and powerful hopelessness from engulfing her like the tide.

  ‘Mind if I sit here, love?’

  Suzanne smiled into the light against which the voice was silhouetted. The honest answer was that she did, of course. In the proximity of old people, you risked conversation. And this was particularly true in the north, where she knew that complete strangers often inflicted chat on you in the way that only care in the community victims ever did back in London. Age wasn’t even a consideration. Young people here did it, too. It was an indiscriminate vice.

  Martin had warned her about it, years ago. But he had not done so deliberately. Magnus Stannard did it. Magnus was from Manchester. He talked to strangers all the time. He actually engaged people he did not know and had never met in conversation. Suzanne was there on a couple of occasions when he was blatantly guilty of it.

  ‘What is it with your dad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The compulsive attention seeking.’

  ‘He’s an attention seeker. But it’s not compulsive.’

  ‘He’ll talk to anyone.’

  And Martin had laughed. ‘He’s from Manchester, Suzanne. And he might be a terrible show-off. Christ knows he’s got his faults. But my dad’s never had any side.’

  ‘Any what?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Eventually, she had understood. It was why she smiled in a manner she hoped might be warm and welcoming to the old lady who had invited herself to share her table outside Costa on Lord Street in Southport in the north of England where people spoke habitually to strangers and had no side. She swivelled her eyes, surreptitiously, to right and left.

  ‘All taken, love.’

  Which they were. Every other table was occupied by families, by shop girls on their break, by fat men sweating in suits and dragging furiously on their outlawed choice of smoke.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ Suzanne said. And she was. She stood slightly and held out her hand. ‘My name is Suzanne. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  The old woman smiled. A waiter from somewhere in Eastern Europe delivered her iced coffee. So she was a regular. Of course she was. Suzanne had felt surprised at the choice of beverage and now cursed herself for her snobbery. It was a kind of bigotry. What it was, was parochial.

  Harry Spalding had not been parochial.

  ‘You look a bit lost, love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

  Her hair had been blonde a lifetime ago. Now it was grey and tied back above the patina of tiny creases on her forehead. It was fine and thick and still abundant on her head. She wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, which she took off and put on the table. They had those old-fashioned green lenses. They had tortoiseshell frames. She put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands together and Suzanne saw that she wore a Cartier Tank wristwatch and a huge ruby eternity ring. So much for care in the community.

  ‘My name is Alice Daunt. I’m tempted to ask why someone so beautiful looks so crestfallen. And you are beautiful, you know, dear. You are exquisitely beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I won’t ask.’

  Suzanne nodded.

  Alice Daunt winked. ‘I’ll just let you tell me. If, and only if, you choose to do so.’

  Suzanne sighed. ‘I’m researching a woman from Southport. Specifically, she was from Birkdale. Her name was Jane Boyte.’

  ‘I knew her.’ Alice Daunt raised and sipped her drink. There was condensation beading on the glass. Her hand was steady as she brought it to her lips. ‘Well, I say I knew her. I didn’t really. But my mother did.’

  ‘I’m trying to research her life.’

  ‘Oh? How?’

  ‘Over at the library there.’ Suzanne gestured.

  Alice Daunt snorted into her drink. ‘Jane Boyte was a Birkdale girl.’

  ‘I know. I know that was where she lived.’

  ‘There was a Birkdale library, love. Gone now, like everything that was great about this town. Destroyed, the land sold on, by Sefton. Flats. Offices. Desecration.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Alice Daunt smiled. The smile was sly, concealing. ‘She looked uncannily like you do, Suzanne. It might be why I stopped. I was walking along Lord Street and I was transposed these eighty years. I thought for a moment I’d seen a ghost.’

  Suzanne smiled back, or tried to. ‘Aren’t you afraid of ghosts, Alice?’

  Alice Daunt sipped from her glass. ‘Of course I am. But a man whose opinion I respected very much told me a long time ago that we should confront our fears.’

  The use of the past tense was not lost on Suzanne. ‘Your husband?’

  ‘My son,’ Alice Daunt said.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And you’re very nice.’ She put down her iced coffee and picked up her sunglasses from the tabletop. ‘I could have only been seven or eight. But if you would like to meet me here at the same time tomorrow, Suzanne, I’ll tell you what I remember about the rather unfortunate person you so resemble.’

  Suzanne sat for a while after Alice Daunt’s departure and watched the ice slip and subside in the June warmth at the bottom of her coffee glass. Southport had a lot of elderly residents and they had lived here all their lives. It was a demographic oddity. But it was a fact. There was a sprinkling of nonagenarians and even centurians among their frail number. But how many of them had known Jane Boyte? Had her meeting with Alice Daunt just now been a matter of coincidence or fate? Suddenly, she missed Monsignor Delaunay. His strength and certainty had been a reassuring comfort to her. She felt very alone and isolated, doing this. She shivered in the warmth and decided she would spend the afternoon exploring parts of the town relevant
to her stalled investigation.

  She walked south towards Birkdale and Weld Road. The shops petered out and eventually the road became lined instead with huge gardens and enormous, grand houses. Many of the houses had been turned into rest homes or dental clinics or bases for genteel professionals like chartered accountants, architects, solicitors and surveyors. She saw the signs on the grass and the brass plates on the gateposts saying so. Some had been divided into flats, their expansive lawns pulled up and paved over to accommodate residents’ cars. But many more of these grand houses were still still exactly that. Merchants made wealthy by businesses in Lancashire and Merseyside had come to live here in their opulent droves. That had been the Southport of Harry Spalding’s golden summer here.

  Eventually she reached Birkdale and turned right on to Weld Road. The road rose into a gentle hill at its conclusion half a mile away, beyond which she knew the beach lay. To right and left, if anything the houses were even grander here. No two were exactly alike. But they shared characteristics beyond their enormity. Many had turrets and towers and crenellations. She smiled, reminded of her preconceptions concerning the women’s guest quarters at the seminary in Northumberland. Here, there was a great deal of Victorian Gothic. It was easy to imagine dark drawing rooms filled with William Morris furniture beyond those high front doors of studded oak and stained-glass panelling. The theme had been continued and exaggerated at the Palace Hotel, which had sprawled across the area approaching now to her left as she neared the rise that would take her to the sea. What a self-styled modernist like Harry Spalding had made of it was anyone’s guess. The Palace had been much more Tennyson than T.S. Eliot. Then again, it had been haunted. And that might have amused and even delighted its sardonic American guest.

  There was only one place left in the locality of the Palace now to serve as a public amenity, and that was the Weld Road pub called the Fisherman’s Rest. It had originally been built as a coach house for the hotel and was later converted into a non-residents’ bar. It was here that the fourteen lifeboatmen who drowned attempting to reach the Mexico had been brought on a December night in 1886. The bar became a makeshift mortuary as the corpses were laid out for identification.

  It was at the neighbouring hotel that a coroner’s enquiry was hastily convened. Suzanne ordered her half of Guinness and fingered one of the fourteen small brass mermaids holding the handrail of the bar in place. They were cast and fitted as a tribute to the lost lifeboatmen. She shuddered, thinking of death at sea, of brine-filled lungs and being washed up drowned, the tide lapping at grey, indifferent flesh. And she took her drink outside to sip in the sunshine at one of the bench seats attached to the tables there.

  The Palace was opened in November of 1866, built by the Manchester-based architects Cuffley, Horton and Bridgeford. At its peak it boasted 1,000 rooms and had its own railway station on the Cheshire Lines to link it directly, for the convenience of guests, to the racecourse at Aintree. But there never were enough guests. And in 1881 a health hydro was added to the building to enhance its appeal to the ailing victims of northern industry. By Spalding’s time, the hotel was even equipped with its own runway. Famous guests in its latter years included Clark Gable and Frank Sinatra. But rumours of paranormal activity plagued the hotel almost from its opening. Two sisters died there in a suicide pact. The last and saddest event in its grisly history occurred when the body of an abducted child was found under a bed there in 1961. She had been taken and assaulted by a kitchen porter later hanged for the crime. The hotel never really recovered from this damaging scandal. In 1969 it was demolished. And the demolition men were unnerved and eventually terrified by lifts that groaned into life without power and wouldn’t stop the steady, clanking habit of their work.

  But there was nothing of Harry Spalding for her to find there on the spot where the Palace Hotel had been. Suzanne finished her drink and decided to recross Weld Road and walk north along Rotten Row back into the centre of the town. Spalding had left the hotel and rented a house on Rotten Row. You could not see the houses here, though. They lay at the top of a steep grassy slope above a drystone wall to her right as she walked, with the flower beds and high hedgerows of Victoria Park on the other side of the road to her left.

  ‘Sod it,’ Suzanne said. There were summer pedestrians on Rotten Row. There were gardeners tending the flower beds beyond the park boundary and there were cars in a bright procession on the road itself. But she had to see. She had to have a look. She scaled the wall and climbed the embankment to the fences protecting the mansions of Rotten Row from prying eyes. The slope was steep, the ground too hard for purchase and the manicured grass covering it dry and glassy under her feet. Once again, she was wearing shoes inappropriate to the task. But she had not planned this. This was spontaneous. She had lost a pair of boots to bad planning in France. Here, all she might lose was her balance and her dignity if she slithered on her leather soles on to her backside and tumbled down the hill.

  She knew which of them had been Harry Spalding’s house as soon as she saw it. She knew because as she saw its clusters of ivy and black, sightless windows staring back, a chill gathered in her chest and gripped her heart. There was a stillness about the long lawn and the grouping of stunted ornamental trees providing shade by the path that wound from the front porch to the summer house. Thirty feet along the rise from where she stood, steps had been cut into the earth to give the owner access through a latched gate. She looked at the old brick and terracotta and knew that Harry Spalding had ascended those steps with his lupine stride and his cane gripped in his fist on his grinning journey home. She started, her eyes reclaimed by the house itself as she sensed a shape, just for a sly instant, at one of the upper-floor windows. A cleaner, she thought. Even in Southport, the Poles and the Filipinos would come to polish and scour. An address as prestigious as this had not sat empty for eighty years awaiting a spectre’s return. He had rented it for a summer only. He was here for a solitary season. He was not here now. But by God, Suzanne thought, shuddering with cold in the high June heat, he had left his baleful mark on the place.

  Because she did not know what else to do, Suzanne went back to Lord Street and Southport Library. And then in the late afternoon, because she was facing a dead end, she left the library and walked up Nevill Street and found the promenade and the pier. Nevill Street embodied everything that was wrong with Southport as a modern tourist destination. Fat clouds of fish batter and beefburger grease scented the pavement. There was rock in stripy midget walking sticks, and toffee apples and pink candyfloss swollen in the breeze in bags of cellophane pinned and flapping against wooden racks. Men peered over pints with long-suffering wives from inside the picture windows of sad, modernised bars.

  She walked the length of the pier, over the Marine Lake, over the start of the flat wastes of Southport beach and finally over the water as the sluggish wavelets of the Irish Sea began their shallow approach. The tram passed her on its path to the pier head. It was full of smiling day trippers. She waved back at a toddler waving at her though the rear window. She squinted over the railing to her right. She could see Blackpool Tower faintly through the heat shimmer over the salt marsh, rising on the peninsula thirty miles away.

  At the end of the pier, she went into a modern and, to her mind, absurdly incongruous glass and steel visitors’ centre with a big display devoted to the wild birdlife of the Fylde Coast. To her left there was a café area with views out over the featureless wilderness of sea and sand. To her right, there was a cluster of antique machines she assumed had been salvaged from old amusement arcades in the resort. You could change modern pounds into old-fashioned copper pennies to use them. You got ten old pennies to the pound, which Suzanne knew was more robbery than exchange rate. But she thought she might have fun here, or at least lighten her prevailing mood. So she changed a couple of pounds.

  After spending about half of them, she shuffled through her remaining pennies, looking at the dates. She got to the last one, King George V’
s bearded profile stoical and aristocratic and resembling rather the slaughtered Romanov tsar to whom, of course, he’d been related, on one side. She flipped the coin. And the date underneath Britannia, sitting with her spear and shield on the reverse face of the penny, read 1927.

  As she had known it would. She jumped. A child had put a penny in the slot for the laughing sailor and, inside his glass case, this sinister relic was swaying and wheezing in a show of mirth in his fusty, mottled blues. Next to him, there was a fortune-telling machine. You fed it money and your character and fate emerged neatly printed in tiny letters on a little rectangle of board. Suzanne fingered the flat, worn-smooth edges of her penny. She raised it to her nose and smelled its acrid, copper smell. Had Spalding handled it? Had he flung it bright and new among others across the Palace bar as a careless tip? She slipped the penny into her pocket. She did not want to know her fortune. She thought her fate predetermined. She knew who it involved, even if she was unsure of the what and precisely of the when.

  Further to her right, beyond the old machines, a film about the history of Southport was showing on a projection screen mounted up on the wall. Images, grey and sunny at the same time, showed the great days of the outdoor pool and the flower show and the bandstand next to the town’s large cenotaph of dignified Portland stone. Water shimmered and roses bloomed in this monochrome world of long ago. She stiffened as she saw a scene from the 1920s. Black sedans prowled the length of Lord Street, sleek as panthers. Women in furs and cloche hats walked arm in arm and discussed the intrusion of the camera, smiling at it. She did not see Harry Spalding. She did not recognise any of the women as Jane Boyte. Fingering the old penny in her pocket, unaware that she was doing so, Suzanne sat down on the chairs before the screen and waited for the film to reach its conclusion and loop back again to its beginning.

  Aboard Dark Echo

  Night had fallen again by the time I awoke. I looked at my watch. The date wheel told me I had been asleep for a full twenty-four hours. I dressed in an incredulous rush and climbed to the deck. A fog had descended and under it the sea wore the still torpor of a lily pond. I had been forced to reduce to nothing the amount of sail we were carrying in the squall of the previous evening. Everything had been hauled in. Now I saw to my irritation and disappointment that nothing had been done to raise sail since. There was no wind. Every inch we carried should have been up in a bid to keep us moving, however sluggishly, on our course. Then I became aware that we were moving. The engine was not being used. But we were in motion, the Dark Echo travelling as though being tugged through the water, at a speed sufficient to leave a wake churning under the fog at our stern. We felt to be doing about ten knots. I walked to the wheel. The auto-steer was on, of course. I took a bearing from the binnacle compass next to the wheel. It was impossible. With no wind and no power and under no sail, we were doing about ten knots on a south-easterly course. We seemed to be in the grip of a current. And still more than a thousand miles off the coast of America, we were coursing swiftly back in the direction we had come.