Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

The Botanic Gardens themselves were quiet and secluded, well away from the sound and smell of traffic. But they did not look spry. Everything seemed mossy and mildewed. There was a lake, green with silt and clogged with floating lily pads, a few ducks besieged on its surface. A wooden bridge arched over the lake. Its paint was peeling and its planks sodden and Suzanne would barely have trusted it to take her weight. The museum was off to the left, occupying a building with a classical portico next to an old conservatory that had been converted into a souvenir gift shop and café. She took in the scene, thinking that nothing she was looking at would have been incongruous fifty years ago or, for that matter, eighty years ago, in 1927. She climbed the steps to the entrance and walked inside.

  Most of the ground floor was occupied by a shrimper’s cart with its nets extended and a full-sized figure of a shrimper in oilskins staring through sightless glass eyes at a point where the sea and his catch under it would have scurried. There was a Victorian fire appliance and a vintage motorcycle. There was a faithfully reproduced High Victorian parlour. It was all very picturesque and interesting. But there were no books. Suzanne was not encouraged. And there were no staff, either. She could hear a transistor radio very faintly somewhere. But there seemed to be no one about.

  She climbed the stairs. The first-floor display comprised two large rooms. One of them was pretty much dedicated to the Mexico disaster and its aftermath. The other was full of stuffed wildlife from the Fylde Coast. The taxidermist had done an excellent job. The animals were as lifelike as any dead beast was ever going to be. But Suzanne was starting to feel that Alice Daunt had surely misdirected her to this haphazard assemblage of local relics and curios. She wanted books. Or she wanted microfiche or an easily accessed computer database. She wanted facts and revelations, not dust and elderly pictures.

  She followed the tinny sound of the radio. It was playing ‘When Love Breaks Down’. Suzanne thought that she had never disliked a song more. But she listened carefully, trying to track its source. It was coming from down below her, from the ground floor. She descended the stairs. The music barely increased in volume. It was being listened to surreptitiously, in a sly near-silence. Gaining the ground floor, she looked around. There was something in the gloom to the right of the Victorian parlour. It was darkness on darkness, an added dimension, the suggestion of a shadow or opening. She walked towards it. The song grew louder without gaining body. It was shrill, exactly the sort of sound reproduced by a pocket radio from the 1960s or 1970s. Suzanne thought that no pleasure could be gained from listening to this starved melody. With a song you liked, it would be even worse.

  It was a sort of cupboard without a door. Her eyes adjusted and she saw a figure sitting there. He looked up at her and jumped. He was wearing a liveried sweater, uniform trousers. He was the museum staff. And if he wasn’t on his break, he was skiving. He switched off the radio.

  ‘Can I help you?’ He stood, finger-combing his hair, clearly caught out and embarrassed.

  ‘I’m researching a Southport resident called Jayne Boyte.’ Suzanne took out her BBC accreditation and showed it to the man.

  ‘People generally make an appointment. I mean, they email us or telephone ahead, unless they’re just casual visitors.’

  ‘I’m not a casual visitor, as you can see. But I’m not from Southport, obviously. I wasn’t previously aware of the existence of this museum, of this resource.’

  The man had recovered from her ambush. He seemed to like the flattery implicit in his place of work being termed a resource by someone with a laminated pass. Work avoidance, Suzanne thought, looking down at the radio where it sat on his bench. It was silver and rectangular and held together in one corner by adhesive tape.

  ‘Essentially, we have two separate archives,’ the man said. ‘The photographic archive is catalogued both by date and by subject matter. The written archive is not catalogued at all. We did have an archivist scheduled to put it all in some kind of order about three and a half years ago. But budget cuts put paid to that.’

  Suzanne nodded. It was a familiar complaint.

  ‘You’re more than welcome to have a look. It’s all on shelves, roughly alphabetically listed by author, in a room in our basement.’ He began to search for a key from a bunch attached to a key ring on his belt. ‘You have to come with me around to the back of the building to gain access to it. It’s through a door at the rear and down a set of steps. Do you have a mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then put my number in it. I will have to lock the door behind you. It’s nothing personal, but we have to do it as a security measure. It’s one of our rules.’

  ‘Fine,’ Suzanne said.

  He shuffled past her and began to lead the way. ‘I hope you don’t have any allergies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Specifically, I hope you’re not allergic to dust.’

  Suzanne expected mildew. She expected splotched pages and books with gummy spines. But there was a dehumidifier purring away in the corner when the museum worker switched on the overhead lights in the subterranean room. Everything looked dry and comparatively clean and well ordered. The shelves were neatly stacked. The lights cast a brilliant flare of white brightness. They revealed her guide’s glasses as bifocals and gave his eyes an avaricious gleam. She realised that the remark about dust had been his little joke.

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We close at five. Appreciate it if you could summon me to come and get you by a quarter to, at the latest.’

  Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just approaching one. She had not eaten breakfast, but this was one day when lunch could wait. The walk along Roe Lane to Churchtown had been just the thing, she realised now, for her hangover. All trace of it was gone. She felt alert and fresh. And she was excited at the nature of the archive that clearly resided here, well maintained but scarcely ever used. There might be secrets here, committed to paper by Jane Boyte before her rebel instinct was destroyed. As she heard the key turning to lock the basement door, Suzanne had Jane pictured in her mind on the sand in the sunshine, wearing her flying leathers, feline and gorgeous with her bobbed hair raven black and her smile full of life and mischief between the brothers Giroud.

  She found what she was looking for within fifteen minutes. The Dáil delegation press picture had led her to expect something typed rather than handwritten. And it was typed, double-spaced across eighty pages which had then been professionally bound. The binding was blue canvas-backed board and it had faded with the years from what Suzanne had imagined was cobalt to something much paler. There was nothing on the cover to tell you what you were reading. But on the volume’s slim spine were printed the words: Jane Elizabeth Boyte. My Deposition. August 12, 1927.

  There was a desk in the corner of the museum basement. Suzanne went over to it and pulled up its chair and sat. She had no protective gloves with her to shield the pages of the deposition from damaging secretions. But she had the strong instinct that she was the first person in eighty years to open what she held between her hands. And she thought that it would survive the experience. She opened the volume and flicked through the leaves with her thumb. They were thicker than flimsy, thicker than foolscap. They were somewhere between foolscap and cartridge paper and would have been stiff in the roller of Jane’s Royal or Remington machine. The letters forming the words were even in their depth of ink and the impression left by the individual keys on the page. Jane Boyte had been an expert typist, fast and confident and clean. There were no mistakes at all. Her deposition was, Suzanne could see from the dates at the top of each entry, strictly speaking, a diary. At least, it was a chronological account. It ran from May 10 to August 8. And it concerned itself only with the days and weeks and months in between those two dates during the single year of 1927.

  Jane’s entire deposition had been written during Harry Spalding’s Southport summer.

  There was an introduction. Jane had signed it with a fountain pen,
writing her full name. There was a curious, sombre formality about the whole vintage exercise. There were secrets here, Suzanne was sure. She lifted the document and held it to her nose. It smelled very faintly of ancient tobacco and expensive scent. Suzanne was pretty sure the perfume Jane had worn at that time was Shalimar. She had been a proto-feminist, a privileged revolutionary who flew an aeroplane and smoked cigarettes in public. She had been bright. She had been a celebrated beauty. When she was nineteen or twenty, she might have shared Michael Collins’ bed.

  Suzanne read the introduction.

  Every word of what is written here was written in sincerity. You, reader, can draw your own conclusions as to its veracity. But there was no revision, no tinkering or retrospective editing of the account. I have described events as they occurred. My conclusions have been based on compelling evidence. That evidence is circumstantial, but when you have read what is contained here, you might agree that this unfortunate fact was not for the want of me trying to effect its reversal. And I really did try. But wealth is a more compelling imperative than truth, even in our modern times. And the weight of a woman’s opinion and justified suspicions are still not accorded that of a man’s. I am given to wonder if they ever will be.

  When you have read this, you might justifiably wonder about the writer. What can I honestly tell you? I am impressionable and impulsive. My morals might not sit very easily with you. I am comfortably off. I possess independence of spirit and was, until recently, generally a stranger to fear. I have known real and thrilling greatness in a human being. And I knew that human intimately and the knowledge did not impair or diminish in any way the impression of that greatness.

  But, reader, I have also known the Devil himself. And it is with this encounter that the following account is concerned.

  Suzanne rang the number given her by the skiving museum staff member. She did not want to read Jane’s deposition in that barren, white-lit, book-infested room. She had followed her intuition to Southport in the absence of hard information about Harry Spalding and his blighted boat. She felt vindicated now. But she wanted to read what she had discovered in the space and at the time of her choosing. There was urgency here. But she felt she would glean more from the deposition away from where she had discovered it. She would take it, if she was permitted to, and read it at one of the tables outside the Fisherman’s Rest. There was no doubt in her mind about the identity of the devil to whom Jane referred. The Fisherman’s Rest had been an adjunct to the long-demolished Palace Hotel. And it was only a few hundred yards from the mansion hidden on Rotten Row where Jane’s devil had lived. She would read her deposition there, as afternoon turned to evening, as close to the memory and spoor of Harry Spalding as she was able to get.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’ve found what I came here for.’

  His radio was on again. Coldplay were feeble, almost anorexic in the background. He was hiding in his cupboard. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Could I take it away with me?’

  There was a pause. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Intrinsic value.’ The Southport accent had a flat quality. It wasn’t nasal, like Mancunian. And it was slower and more deliberate than Liverpudlian. Words delivered in it had a finality about them. But Suzanne was not intimidated. ‘This isn’t Magna Carta we’re talking about here.’

  ‘Then photocopy it.’

  ‘Not the same. Twenty-four hours?’

  But the museum skiver was entrenched. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll leave you a deposit. Fifty quid. Non-returnable. Twenty-four hours.’

  There was a pause. ‘More than my job’s worth.’

  Suzanne thought the pause significant. ‘A hundred?’

  ‘Done.’

  She left the Botanic Gardens museum with Jane Boyte’s deposition in her bag. On her way back to Roe Lane through Churchtown she stopped at a picturesque pub with tables outside called the Hesketh Arms. She did not read. She ate. It was after two thirty now and she was very hungry. The sun was warm on the weathered surface of the table she sat at. Ivy grew green and verdant on the white walls of the pub. Flowers in window boxes filled with freshly watered soil smelled sweet and fragrant. She ordered a cheese salad and it was very good: fresh, crusty bread and crumbly Lancashire cheese and plump tomatoes freshly picked from the greenhouses outside the town at one of the farms on the South Lancashire plain. The scene would have been idyllic, were it not for the lorries trundling by, their emissions rippling in the summer light, distorting the view.

  Suzanne walked back the way she had come. They did not have taxis you could hail in Southport. They had minicabs. And there were plenty of those, but none stopped for her when Suzanne had tried in the preceding days to hail them. They stopped at designated ranks to pick up fares, she supposed. But she did not know where any of the ranks were located. Or you could ring them. But she did not know the numbers. They would have put her right on that score in the Hesketh Arms, of course. But the weather was lovely and the unfamiliar streets were picturesque and totally different from what she was used to. Southport was largely Victorian and very largely, in terms of its domestic architecture, still intact. She was enjoying the exercise. She was enjoying the anticipation. And so she walked.

  It was almost four when she reached the point on Rotten Row where she knew Spalding’s mansion lurked above the rise. She looked at her bag. Jane’s deposition wore the protection of a large padded envelope. The fellow in the museum had provided it, to keep the covers of the volume from the sun. It was his overdue bid at professionalism and conscientiousness, his tardy attempt to be seen as competent. Suzanne was very keen to examine the contents of the envelope. But the lure of the house over the steep grass slope was inexplicably strong. She wanted another look. She wanted just a peek at the place. She did not see how, in the bright sunshine, with schoolgirls passing on the way to the cement courts in Victoria Park with their tennis rackets swinging from their hands, it could hurt just to sneak another look.

  This time she was more brazen about it. She climbed the stone steps with their smooth inlay of terracotta tiles. She unlatched the wooden gate at the top, took a breath and walked through into the garden. And it hit her immediately. It hit her like an arctic shift in the weather or a solid punch to the gut. Everything was different here and none of it was right. She began to shiver and sweat at the same time, chilled but clammy at the forehead and temples. The feeling got worse with every footstep she extended towards the house. She was surrounded by a silence that her deep foreboding insisted would be torn asunder any moment by a scream she knew she would share. And she recognised this feeling. She remembered it. It was the selfsame instinct of terror she had felt in Duval’s barn, before she reached the barn door and Duval himself confronted her, comforting in his surly rudeness, safe wielding his shotgun, after the other-worldly hazards of the barn interior.

  What had he done here? She turned round. She had to. She could not will herself to take another step. The ground felt corrupt under her feet. The taint of death hung like a pallor above the earth. She ran for the gate and escape, and descended the brick steps back to sanity, back to smiling pedestrians, a clopping bunch of riders, back to cars in the sunshine driving slowly along Rotten Row, giving the horses a wide berth as they edged past them in the safe and pleasant hope and colour of a lovely June afternoon.

  Aboard Dark Echo

  It seems that the writing habit is a hard one to lose. Though I am writing this in longhand in one of the handsome morocco-bound volumes my father intended to have serve aboard the vessel as his log. My laptop battery has failed. Since we have no electrical power aboard any more, I write by the light of a paraffin lamp. And the instrument in my hand is my father’s fountain pen. The master of the Andromeda himself could not better me at this moment for simplicity or tradition. But Captain Straub would not be proud of me. He passed on a warning that I should have heeded but chose to ignore. I was no longer strictly under his command whe
n he delivered the warning. But I should have listened to him. He would be disappointed to know my predicament now. And he would be right in thinking that I have only myself to blame for it.

  I am in my cabin, writing this seated at my desk behind the locked cabin door. My father lies unconscious on my bunk. Occasionally, things slither past along the gangway outside. Or at least, they sound as if they do. There is the growl of a dog or the whimper of a child. More rarely, and the more shocking for it, there is the sudden loud scream of a woman hysterical with terror. That sound comes from my father’s cabin, which is really Spalding’s cabin, of course. There is often laughter, but it is dark. There is whispered pleading, which is met by silence. And there are scents. These are more varied than the noises. Sometimes they are pungent and sometimes subtle. Sometimes it is a hint of perfume, Arpège or Mitsouko, florid and heavy. Sometimes it is the whiff of strong tobacco. Sometimes the treacle aroma of rum is in the air. On occasion I’ve smelled cordite, sharp and strong as though from the barrel or firing chamber of a gun just discharged in close proximity. There is often the coppery odour of blood, freshly spilled. There is the sour secretion of fear. Worst of all, there is now and then the overwhelming stench of mortal decay that radiates from the self-murdered corpse of Gubby Tench as his remains stew in the heat of Havana Bay.

  They are the boat’s memories, these various and randomly occurring sounds and smells. And they are growing in strength and vividness as we approach our meeting with its one true master. Harry Spalding haunts the boat. But he does this in a paradoxical way. For I believe Spalding haunts the Dark Echo without really being a ghost at all.

  Suzanne encountered a ghost, I remember, in Dublin back in January. Her ghost was benign. I suspect she encountered him again and never let on to me about the fact. Her ghost, in life, had an eye for the ladies. She was looking pretty hard at him, back then. He probably considered he had the justification to take a look right back at her. Whether she sensed him again or not, he meant no harm. And being dead, he could do no harm, either. I don’t believe a dead man can physically hurt the living.