Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Thought I’d tell you about the Jericho Crew, Magnus. But make yourself comfortable, sport. Take a seat. Occupy a pew, why don’t you. Please don’t worry about the machine. It will continue to function quite capably.’ My father nodded. He took his hand off the handle. He went and sat down and reached absently for his whisky glass. His face was rapt. I had lost him.

  ‘Took me weeks to find twelve apostles with just the right combination of qualities, Magnus. I needed the sly and the insubordinate, the savage and the self-interested. It helped enormously to have men who were both cunning and stupid at the same time. And that’s an unusual blend of attributes. A dash of cowardice was an advantage, too. I needed men prepared to do pretty much anything to guarantee their own survival in the fray. They had to be willing to submit to the necessary ceremonies, you see. There were, too, what might be termed certain contractual obligations. It helped if, above all else, they valued their own skins. It smoothed things along.

  ‘It was terrible at first, Magnus. They lined up the brave and the noble for me. There was lots of bravery and nobility among the American forces in France in the fall of 1917.’ On the cylinder, he laughed. ‘Those qualities were as common in the line as chocolate and chewing gum. And they were all very fine in their way. But they were no good to me in the way I intended to fight the war. Bravery and nobility would have been . . . how shall I put it? Help me out here, Magnus. You’ve been a leader of men.’

  ‘They would have been impractical,’ my father said.

  ‘Precisely,’ Spalding said. ‘Knew you’d understand, sport. Took me weeks to select my band of faithful acolytes. One of them was plucked from the cell of a makeshift military prison. Always a mistake to rape a civilian from the side you’re supposed to be fighting for. Positively dumb when they’re under age. Another two were deserters, snatched from in front of firing squads with the blindfolds already tied. And, of course, I was only starting out myself. I was pretty green, Magnus, a raw tenderfoot in the business of killing. But I had leadership quality, I think, as history proved. And I had an appetite for the work.’

  My father nodded. He was no more enjoying this than he could escape it.

  ‘Still do, Magnus. Still possess that appetite, don’t you know. And, if anything, I’d say it’s grown.’

  My father had his head in his hands.

  ‘We’ll enjoy being shipmates,’ Spalding said. ‘You’ll have to accept a subordinate role, of course. But you’ll be keeping the boy in line, so you won’t be on the bottom of the heap.’ The voice turned to steel. ‘And I will want the boy kept in line, Magnus. I run a tight ship. I will not tolerate insubordination. The Waltrow brothers discovered that, to their cost. So have other crewmen over the years. There is no escape on the high seas from the need for discipline.’

  The voice had risen to a high, angry screech.

  ‘Why the Jericho Crew?’ I said.

  There was a pause. ‘You’ll refer to me as captain, boy.’

  ‘Why the Jericho Crew, Captain?’

  ‘The name derives from the Jericho Society, into which I initiated my men. We completed an important mission in the cathedral city of Rouen. We arrived aboard a barge, berthing in the port there in the fog. We became a crew aboard that barge. It was a joke made by Corporal Tench. But the name stuck. We became the Jericho Crew.’

  ‘Rouen was always in Allied hands.’

  Laughter snickered. ‘Student of conflict, are you, boy? I’ll teach you about war. I’m looking forward to you, Martin.’

  The voice had subsided, become lower and more intimate again. ‘Let me tell you about our base in France, Magnus. Indulge the reminiscences of a proud old soldier. Let me tell you about how we came to build our own Calvary by a barn on a farm near the town of Béthune.’

  But I knew already about their Calvary. I knew from Suzanne, who knew from Pierre Duval. And I had no wish to listen to the voice of Harry Spalding any longer as it smirked and bragged. I turned and walked out of my father’s cabin and closed the door behind me and went back to my own. I had my writing to conclude.

  Passing through the galley I saw a rat. It saw me first and tried to slither into a cupboard it had prised partially open. But my hands were fast when I boxed and I have retained that speed of reflex and I was too quick for it. I grabbed it by the tail and raised and smashed it with a vicious downward swing against the sink edge. Blood flecked the metal. I unscrewed the butterfly nuts locking a porthole, opened it and dropped the dead rodent out of it into the sea. It had been a large rat. Its tail was as thick and coarse in my fist as an abseil rope. It was large enough for me to hear the splash as it hit the water. I cleaned the stain off the sink with some wadded kitchen roll and dropped that out of the porthole, too.

  And now, a momentary change of tenses, as I sit for the last time and tap out the letters forming each painstaking word of this account, in what will be my last contribution to it.

  All this has happened before. I knew it in my heart back as long ago as the winter, when clever Suzanne found that news page from the archive of the Liverpool Daily Post. I was distracted by the resemblance then between Jane Boyte, the beautiful criminal suspect in the picture, and Suzanne herself. Who wouldn’t have been? The likeness was uncanny. But it wasn’t the point. The point was the worry and fatigue worn on the face of her father, Patrick Boyte. I had seen it in life on the face of Frank Hadley with the Dark Echo lashed to his dock and tragedy afflicting the men in his boatyard. Spalding just now, his disembodied voice, had referred to contractual obligations. It seems to me that sacrifices were required, also. And I think that thought occurred both to Patrick Boyte and Frank Hadley in the period when their men were the ones being sacrificed. Suzanne said as much at the time. It has all happened before, she said. Jesus, I wish I had listened. In a moment, I will write to her. It may be the last opportunity I will get and she may never get the message. But I will do it anyway. She is owed that.

  Earlier I called this part diary, part chronicle and part confession. And one of those words has given me my clue as to whom I shall send it to. It is likely to be the last of me, I think. And as such I value it. In doing so, do I commit the sin of pride? I suppose I do. But it is a small sin to be guilty of in the scheme of things. And I want this story to be a warning. Because I really do believe all this has happened before. And I do not want what is happening to my father and me now ever to happen to anyone again.

  Are you reading, Monsignor Delaunay? I very much hope that you are. And I’m equally very sorry to have burdened you with this. But you are almost at the end of the account, now. I must break off to write my goodbye to Suzanne. I hope, with all my heart, this reaches you. You will know what to do. You called the Dark Echo benign. You called her a beautiful toy. In that judgement you were woefully wrong. But Spalding has been at this game of his a long time. The boat has gone under different guises and its master many aliases, I am sure. But it has always been essentially the same vessel, the same game, the same nightmarish voyage.

  I can hear the crying of an infant child again. It is no gull. It is coming from outside my cabin door and is my lost sister, Catherine Ann, I fear. Spalding has brought the torment of her back to us.

  God bless you, Monsignor Delaunay.

  And God help us all.

  Martin.

  Ten

  She was hungover the following morning, waiting for Alice Daunt at a pavement table outside the coffee shop. She had drunk too much wine the previous evening, seeking the numbness of drink because she felt lonely and frustrated with her lack of progress and fearful for Martin. She had a reasonable head for alcohol. But she was slightly built. There was only so much of her. And this morning, most of that felt full of last night’s Merlot. The furled umbrellas of Costa’s lurid purple livery made her wince. In the hard sunlight, they were as bright and poisonous as pirate sails. Everything on the street shared the same vivid, sinister cast. The shadows were black on the pavement and capered when people innocently passed. />
  Alice Daunt sat down, punctual to the minute. Suzanne looked up at her and tried to conceal a yawn she could not stifle. Alice smiled over her at the waiter from Poland. She took off her Ray-Bans and put her handbag on the table. It was crocodile skin and very glossy with a clasp that wore the dull sheen of gold. ‘One over the eight, dear?’

  Suzanne smiled. The smile was rueful. ‘I don’t know, Alice. I lost count at six.’ And most of a pack of Marlboro. She could have done with Jane Boyte’s Dublin ashtray. She could have filled it.

  ‘The woman you’re researching was a very rebellious creature,’ Alice Daunt said. ‘She was a supporter of the suffragettes from the age when she began to be able to read. She didn’t understand the politics, but she could appreciate the gestures. Flinging bricks through windows. Hunger strikes. Sitting down in Whitehall to stop the traffic. That sort of thing excited her.’

  Suzanne nodded.

  ‘This isn’t my opinion, by the way. It’s received opinion. But I received it from my mother, who was a good woman and an impartial judge.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Jane Boyte became disillusioned with the suffragette movement when Christabel Pankhurst started making patriotic speeches at the outbreak of the Great War.’

  ‘She could only have been an adolescent.’

  ‘A disillusioned adolescent. But her next big cause wasn’t far away. In 1916, the Easter Rising destroyed a large section of the centre of Dublin. I might add that it did so much to the disgust of the vast majority of the Dublin public. But Miss Boyte had another banner to brandish.’

  ‘She became a Fenian,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Indeed she did. When she was nineteen or twenty, she met Michael Collins. I believe she worked for him. There was talk of an affair, but there always was with that fellow where any woman in his proximity was concerned.’

  Suzanne nodded.

  ‘Overcompensating in my view,’ Alice Daunt said. ‘He was probably trying to cover up his incipient attraction to men.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Only received opinion, Alice. But received from an impeccable source. He really did prefer girls.’

  ‘Well. Jane Boyte was certainly one of those. I’ll give you no argument in that department.’

  ‘Was this allegiance embarrassing for her family?’

  ‘Not really. Certainly not after the conclusion of the war, when it became public knowledge. The Fenian cause would always have had support in and around Liverpool once it gained ground in Dublin. Lot of Catholics of Irish extraction in Liverpool in those days. Even more than now. And Patrick Boyte, Jane’s father, was one of those. And Collins always enjoyed personal popularity in England. When his train pulled into London for the treaty negotiations with Churchill, he was practically mobbed.’

  Suzanne knew about that. ‘What else can you tell me about her, Alice?’

  Alice Daunt toyed with her coffee glass. ‘Nothing. After Collins’ death, after the fratricidal bloodbath of the Irish Civil War, she became disillusioned with all that, too.’

  ‘You hinted yesterday that there was more.’

  The old lady shifted in her seat. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  For a moment, Suzanne did not think that she was going to add to her account. Then she said, almost imperceptibly, ‘Don’t imagine it can hurt, can it? Not after eighty years, it can’t.’

  She was talking to herself. It was herself she was trying to convince. She looked at Suzanne and Suzanne knew that her internal effort had succeeded. ‘There was some trouble with the police. Jane Boyte made a very serious allegation against a prominent and wealthy foreigner.’

  ‘Harry Spalding.’

  Did Alice Daunt shudder at the mention of the name?

  ‘Him. Yes. She made the allegation against him.’

  ‘Do you know the nature of the allegation?’

  ‘I do not. I was a little girl at the time. I was never told. You will have to find that out for yourself.’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ Suzanne said. She gestured back in the direction of the library. ‘I’ve discovered nothing. It all went under the bulldozer, as you said yourself yesterday, when Birkdale library was demolished.’

  Alice Daunt drained the last of her coffee. Ice slipped and clacked against her dentures. She lowered the glass. ‘There is one other place you might try. There is a museum in Southport, at the Botanic Gardens in Churchtown. If Jane Boyte had things to say, and I’m sure she did, she might have deposited the relevant papers there. It would be worth a try.’

  ‘What happened to her, Alice?’

  ‘She was broken,’ Alice said, simply. ‘The business with the American broke her completely.’

  ‘You won’t say his name, will you?’

  And Alice Daunt smiled, tightly. She put on her sunglasses and she picked up her bag. ‘I never have, dear. And I shan’t as long as I live.’

  ‘We should confront our fears,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘My son’s name was David. He was a wonderful boy and a wonderful man. And he was wise, despite the effects of the tumour, almost to the very last. But when he said that, my dear, I believe he was referring to our earthly fears.’

  Alice smiled a final time and turned and walked away through the flitting sunlight and the shadows of the trees and the shop awnings lining either side of the street. Suzanne watched her stiff, stately progress until her pale coat disappeared in the throng of shoppers and trippers indistinct in the distance. Then she got up and crossed the road and asked about the opening hours of the Botanic Gardens Museum in the tourist office. The tourist office looked like someone’s giant conservatory plonked on an empty patch of pavement. But they were very helpful. The girl behind the counter did not know the museum opening hours without having to look, which suggested to Suzanne that it was possibly one of the resort’s more obscure attractions. She thought that a good thing. She thought the new, interactive, user-friendly breed of museum both terrible and virtually useless. A repository of the past should be just that, was her opinion. She was provided with a map. The route was north along Lord Street and then east along a lengthy road called Roe Lane. She asked if it was walking distance. The girl screwed her face up, debating this with herself. It was three or four miles. Suzanne decided that she would walk. The exercise would punish her for drinking too much and might cure her hangover at the same time.

  Walking to Churchtown, she did not think about Jane Boyte and what she might discover there. She did not think much either about Harry Spalding, or not consciously. She thought about Martin and his love and tenderness and the courage that he had displayed before she had even known him. His bravery she thought remarkable and deeply impressive. She did not think it was a quality of which his father was aware at all.

  She had been on an East London Line underground train. She had been to see Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames. She had been researching the great engineer for a series about Victorian technologies. She had her laptop with her. Three hoodies burst into the carriage. One of them had been brandishing a knife. It was a large, open-bladed weapon, somewhere between a bowie knife and a machete. It was meant to terrify. It was also meant to hurt. When the thug with the knife made a grab for her laptop, she had stupidly tried to hang on to it. And he had brought the knife down to slash her face.

  Martin took the blow. He came out of nowhere and held out his arm to protect her from disfigurement, and the blade was embedded with the force of the blow deep in his forearm. And the thug lost his grip on the weapon as Martin wrenched his arm away and jerked the knife out of the meat of him and sent it skittering along the carriage floor. And then he grinned and inflicted a few blows of his own. He delivered a series of savage punches with incredible accuracy and speed. He just beat the three of them senseless while the rest of the carriage looked away and pretended that none of this was actually going on.

  He saved her from disfigurement. He did it purely on instinct, obliv
ious to the pain it would cause him or the further physical consequences. When he was released from arrest afterwards and treated, it was discovered that he had severed a tendon. Fighting with a severed tendon in his arm had made the damage worse. It took an operation and four months of physiotherapy to enable full recovery. The scars, from the knife blow and the op, he would always carry.

  When she tried to thank him, it was obvious from his reaction that he thought he had done nothing at all remarkable. He thought that everyone, in those circumstances, would behave exactly as he had done. There was a right way and a wrong way to do things and he had done the right thing because, well, that was what you did. It was one of the things she loved about him. It was not the thing about him she loved most, but courage nobly used was a very attractive quality. She had made a joke about it, they both had, knights in armour, damsels in distress and so on. But it was an attractive quality for a man to possess. And she also thought it rare.

  Churchtown announced itself in a cluster of tiny cottages, some of them thatched. They were plain as well as small and Suzanne knew that they dated from the early nineteenth century. This was the oldest part of the whole settlement of Southport. Neighbouring places like the hamlet of Hundred End and the village of Ormskirk were much older. They dated back to the first Viking invasion. But Churchtown was as old as anywhere in Southport and so a fitting location for the town’s museum. Some of the cottages had been turned into shops of an artsy-craftsy variety. They sold hand-painted children’s toys and embroidery kits and watercolours and antiques. The roads were very narrow and the shops were very quaint. But the effect was somewhat spoiled by the huge lorries trundling through in a procession of stinking diesel in the heat. Churchtown seemed to be a traffic rat run.