Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  Nothing about Spalding was ever benign. I had pondered on this after my efforts to send my account of events to Monsignor Delaunay, as my father got steadily drunker and the boat shifted under me as it continues to do now on its own relentless course. He had used his occult knowledge to keep death at bay in the war. He had practised barbaric and blasphemous rituals to guarantee his survival. He had sacrificed and kept on sacrificing. I suspected that the woman who supposedly dumped him on the quay at Rimini had been the first of his peacetime offerings. But Tench and the Waltrow brothers had been sacrifices, too, hadn’t they? Another had been made only recently, in the man who bled to death following that impossible accident in Frank Hadley’s yard. Between Gubby Tench and Hadley’s man, I suspected that the lost log of the Dark Echo would have documented a lot more deaths down the years and decades. But Spalding had ended his own life in 1929. Why did a man, long since deceased, need to go on paying the Devil the price of immortality? There was no reason. He did not need to do so. So what was the obvious conclusion? My own logic impelled me to believe that Spalding had never died at all.

  The ‘Send’ light was still flashing feebly on my computer screen. Providence would determine whether Delaunay ever got my emailed testament. It was beyond my fingertips now, in cyberspace, out of my hands. I got up and went to confront my father. I wanted to ask him about the log. He once said he had read it. I’d thought the claim blithely made and untrue, just something said to shut me up when, at Hadley’s yard, the Dark Echo really had seemed cursed. But it was possible he had actually read it. He was a voracious reader and an intellectually curious man and the boat had been his coveted prize.

  But when I got to him he was beyond interrogation. He was stretched unconscious on the floor. At first, I feared he had suffered a stroke. But his features wore their familiar symmetry and there was nothing rigid in his posture, lying there. His breathing was ponderous but steady. I bent to listen to his heart and it was regular and strong. The sounds aboard of infant crying had tormented him, as perhaps they were supposed to do. I knew with dull certainty in my own heart it was not my sister but some infant victim of the boat’s bloody history. My father, though, had believed it was Catherine Ann, come back to chastise him for some sin he had never committed.

  My father had now taken to the refuge aboard the Dark Echo of deep shock. I was on my own. I gathered him in my arms and carried him to my cabin and put him in my bunk. I kissed him on the cheek and brought the blanket snugly to his chin. I smoothed down his dishevelled hair to restore some dignity to my dad. I said a prayer for him. Locking the door behind me, I returned to the master cabin. The machine that played the wax cylinders looked like it had when I’d brought it out of its rotting box. It looked like it would never play again. I took the cylinder we had listened to from the cradle bevelled for it and put another in. It stank and slipped between my fingers with greasy decay.

  ‘Why did you fake your suicide?’

  The needle dropped on to the cylinder and the cylinder began to turn.

  ‘You’ll call me captain,’ Spalding’s voice commanded, ‘or you’ll call me sir. I will not suffer insubordination, sport. You will learn this to your cost.’

  ‘Why, sir, did you fake your suicide?’

  There was a long silence. I could hear the sludgy moan of the needle on the wax. What I was hearing defied the laws of physics. But Harry Spalding had engineered his own bleak path through the rational world. He had harnessed magic to do it.

  ‘My parents followed a faith frowned upon by the land of the brave and the home of the free. Our faith was persecuted, outlawed. A Federal Bureau man called Grey oversaw the destruction of our place of worship. My parents prayed for revenge.’

  To whom, I wondered. But I knew the answer.

  ‘Grey had a daughter. She had aspirations to be a dancer. I courted her. I wooed her, Martin, old chum. I took her to Europe cherishing dreams of the stage and ovations and garlands. And I butchered her with a boning knife and dropped her corpse in weighted pieces in the harbour at Rimini.’

  ‘And her father found out.’

  ‘Her father was dead by then. But he had buddied up for years with a loyal and dogged partner in the Bureau by the name of Gianfranco Genelli. Genelli’s entire family were Sicilian hoods. He was the white sheep of the flock. But he kept on good terms with people on both sides of the law. Things became a little hot for old Harry Spalding in the years after Rimini. Harry moved around, but Genelli’s people were only ever a step behind. It rather cramped my style. Eventually and somewhat flamboyantly, Harry was obliged to say adieu.’

  Which was not a hard thing to accomplish, I supposed, in the New York of 1929. Not for a man as stupendously wealthy as Spalding had been. Not after the Crash, when it must have seemed as though the Great Depression would just go on deepening for ever.

  ‘So you got away with it.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With her murder.’

  ‘I get away with everything.’

  ‘Where are you now, Spalding?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough, sport. And you will call me captain or you will call me sir. I sparred with Hemingway, you know. And I bested Hem. I drank Scott Fitzgerald under the table.’

  ‘And you offered Bricktop a hundred grand to sleep with you and she turned you down, you fucking creep.’

  There was a groaning, smudgy silence. Then, ‘I’ll see you soon, shipmate. I’m looking forward to it.’

  My bravado was exactly that. I retreated to the dim, troubled refuge of my cabin and my ailing dad. Nothing will happen aboard the boat. Nothing will happen until we reach land. We are in no real danger until then. When we reach land, we will be in the proximity of Harry Spalding, who has never died. He will come aboard and take command. We will embark upon our real voyage. The Dark Echo will begin to fulfil its real purpose. And what will happen then does not bear further speculation.

  Eleven

  Southport, May 10th, 1927

  I am to meet him after all. The Rimmers are holding a garden party and I accepted my invitation ages ago, and this morning I discovered that the man everyone refers to as Jane’s obnoxious American is also on the list of invited guests. Tommy Rimmer, who was very apologetic on the telephone this morning about it all, does not think that he will attend. He has, apparently, a reputation for not turning up to things. It’s something he probably cultivates, a kind of unpredictability designed to make him appear interesting rather than merely uncouth. But I think he will turn up. I have thought a meeting with him inevitable ever since his battered racing schooner limped into Liverpool Harbour and my father’s yard. He does not know about me. It was a ghastly coincidence, the fact that his boat fetched up for repair where it did. My father has had no reason, I’m sure, to mention me to him and I have every reason for never mentioning him to my father.

  I will have to go to the Rimmers. It would be rude, now, not to go. And I will not have my life dictated to me by any man. This one in particular I will not allow to force me to act out of fear. Do I fear him? I suppose I do. Even after eight years of added experience and maturity and the resilience those elements bring to a person’s character, I still do fear Harry Spalding. But it would be absurd for me to miss the Rimmers’ party on his account.

  Perhaps he will not remember me. I will not remind him if my face and name have slipped from his memory. I have always confronted my terrors, but this one is different. Where he is concerned, if he has forgotten me, I will be pragmatic. In the words of a saying expressing a sentiment I would ordinarily loathe, I will, just this once, let discretion be the better part of valour.

  But he won’t have forgotten me. What would be the point of us meeting if he had? I’ve already said I believe this confrontation has the inevitability of fate about it. Of course he will remember me. I just hope he has matured enough to feel the shame and remorse that seemed to elude him in the aftermath back then.

  Harry Spalding tried to rape me. He forced the
door of my room at the Shelbourne Hotel and attempted to take me by force. I fought back, but he was enormously strong for so slightly built a man. He seemed inconceivably strong. Perhaps it was the strength of a madman. I was changing for dinner when he burst in. He tore my dress off and flung me across the bed and pinned my arms. I bit him hard enough to draw blood. But he seemed encouraged by that. I must have been screaming. Boland came into the room with a pistol. He put the point of the pistol under Spalding’s chin and told him very calmly that he would blow his head off if he did not release me. I swear the grin never left Spalding’s face. It was a rictus, death’s head grin that stretched his features grotesquely. He moved back from the bed, but Boland kept the gun on him. He did not look safe. As I have said already, he did not look sane.

  Mick Collins came in. He must have heard the commotion. He took off his coat and put it over me and asked me was I alright. He asked Boland to take me to his room and to book me another. You can’t stay in this one, he said. I heard the first blows land as Boland closed the door on the room. Mick Collins was a powerful figure in the peak of condition then and every ounce of his reputation as a fighting man had been earned. I thought he would beat Spalding to a pulp. I hoped he would. But he did not. After I had been brought brandy in Mick’s room by Boland, Mick himself came in. He went into the bathroom and ran the tap until the water could only have been scalding and I heard him wash scrupulously. When he emerged, his hands were bruised, the knuckles visibly swelling. And one of his eyes was marked.

  I caught a glimpse of Spalding later, leaving the hotel between two of Mick’s men. And his lip was cut and his face was swollen and carried contusions. But they were healing already. A half-smile played under the congealing gash on his upper lip.

  I’d easier have beaten Lucifer himself, Mick said, helping himself to a brandy from the bottle Boland had fetched. Maybe I should just have him shot, he said.

  You’ll shoot no one on my account, I said.

  Cause a stink with the rest of the Yanks, Boland said.

  The rest of them are decent men, Mick said.

  You will shoot no one on my account, I repeated.

  Then we’ll have that scum on the first boat out of Dublin. Boland here will make the call. Mick put down his glass and came over to me. I still wore his coat, the smell of him on the collar a comfort as I tried to stop trembling. He smiled and stroked my cheek. The touch of his sore hand was infinitely tender.

  And that was the end of it. And I did not really think about Harry Spalding again. I did not think about him until his boat struggled listing up the Mersey and I read the story of the storm in the newspapers.

  May 12th, 1927

  The Rimmers host their party tonight. Their house is one of the grandest on Westbourne Road. It overlooks the golf links, which is where Tommy and my obnoxious American met. I am slightly surprised that the party is going ahead as planned. But this is nothing to do with Spalding. A chambermaid has vanished from the Palace Hotel. The same girl worked for the Rimmers for a while, helping Nora Rimmer look after their youngest daughter until Bonnie started school. She left because she wanted the variety, she said, of hotel work. And her departure was cordial enough. But she worked for the Rimmers for almost a year. And the police say in the papers that they suspect foul play. And Bonnie was really very fond of her. It seems slightly callous to hold the party until there’s word of the girl turning up safe. But maybe that’s just me and what Tommy Rimmer would call my Fabian pretensions. Fabian or Socialist. I don’t think men like Tommy are aware of any distinction. When a man lives only to see his handicap get down to scratch, his mind can’t help but suffer from the consequent neglect.

  May 13th, 1927

  The party passed without incident. At least, it did so far as the obnoxious American was concerned. Spalding had greatly changed. He is no longer the scrawny fellow in pinstripes of Dublin in 1919. He is the international playboy and yacht-racing sportsman now. He is very tanned and has filled out physically. There is no fat on him. But he is muscular, I suppose from all that raising of sail and hauling of anchor. His blond hair has been so bleached by exposure to the sun and salt water it is almost white. He was dressed impeccably, with pearl studs embellishing his collar and cuffs. I do not think I have ever been in the proximity of a more deeply unattractive man.

  He did not recognise me. Or if he did, he did not successfully place me in his mind. No one is that accomplished an actor and his manner was relaxed and expansive throughout the evening. He held forth about the Paris scene before an audience of Southport’s self-styled bohemians. I could hear enough on its periphery. He has this harsh tone to his voice and New England vowels that carry on the summer air through the hubbub, whether in a room or outside. He knows Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. He knows Braque and Picasso and Delaunay. Anyway, he says he does. His world when on dry land seems to be the world of Bricktop’s nightclub and the racetrack at Auteuil and ringside seats at Montparnasse for the boxing matches fought by Georges Carpentier. It all begs the question, what is he doing here? But of course, he is here more by accident than design. And with the aero club and the golf at Birkdale and racing at Aintree there is enough to keep him temporarily entertained while my father’s men toil to fix his boat by that rash deadline Father gave the press.

  He likes Dublin, too. He speaks fondly of Ireland. I would have thought his treatment at the hands of Mick Collins and Harry Boland at the Shelbourne Hotel would have ended any nascent love affair with the ould sod, as he calls it. But Mick and Boland are long dead now, distinguished footnotes both in the bloody saga of Irish political history. But only footnotes, when you subtract the sentiment. So perhaps Spalding has had the last laugh and can afford a bit of magnanimity where Ireland generally and Dublin in particular are concerned.

  I don’t think my estimation of Spalding as repulsive is widely shared. He is rich and strange and athletic and worldly. And that is enough of a cocktail of attractions for many women. It was not only the bohemian crowd surrounding him in the hope of titbits of gossip from the table of the artistic greats. Several of the unattached women drifted into his orbit during the course of the party. But despite his presence, it was generally all very pleasant. The weather was glorious, the food wonderful and Tommy Rimmer on outrageous form. Spalding was only one among over a hundred guests at the Rimmers’ place. There was a jazz band. Orchid and rose petals had been strewn like a glorious carpet over the surface of the swimming pool. Iced bowls were piled on the tables with gleaming mounds of caviar, and two professionals from London played an exhibition game on the tennis court and then coached any of the more competitive guests on how to improve their strokes. Though there was one unfortunate incident I shall recount that spoiled things slightly for myself, at least.

  Tommy Rimmer has a happy knack for making money. He discovered this during the war, in which he served as a lowly second-lieutenant. They put him in supplies, because he has a flair for detail and a slight congenital weakness of the heart. He was invalided out, after a German bombardment that must have gone astray. Instead of hitting front-line troop positions, the shells detonated in Tommy’s supply dump. He recovered. But in his time in the field hospital and then the proper French hospital to which they sent him for convelescence, he worked out in his mind a more efficient approach to the logistics of war supply than the chaotic model he had been obliged to follow.

  He was not so stupid as to try to apply this to the conflict that had almost cost him his life. But, decommissioned after the armistice, he was able to persuade a War Ministry panel to listen to his conclusions. They were impressed enough to take him on as an adviser on the procurement of war material. Tommy’s reward was to be a shilling for every pound he was proved to have saved. The contract signed, he set about making himself a very wealthy man.

  Tommy Rimmer’s politics are a mystery to me. I think they are to him. And I’m sure they are to Nora, the wife whom he adores. But the one area in which he has been very liberal is the ra
ising of his children. They have the run of the house. The doctrine of children being seen but not heard seems anathema to the Rimmers.

  Or it did until today.

  It was a garden party. So, of course, the children were there. But darkness comes late to Southport in May. It was still light at nine o’clock, when the three Rimmer children were all ushered up to their various cots and cribs and beds. By then they were exhausted, I think. Parents, mindful of their own children, make a sentimental fuss of the children of their friends. It’s a cherished instinct. It is one of the things that makes us human. In my guise of Auntie Jane, I gave each of them a kiss myself before they trooped off, tired and obedient, to the land of nod.

  Except that Bonnie came back. I heard rather than saw her return at first, as the conversation subsided with her unsteady progress through the Rimmers’ garden. Then I saw her. Everybody did. The entire gathering turned with their drinks and cigarettes and cigars in hand and, much less than sober, saw this small child sway on unsteady feet through the throng. All was silent. Bonnie raised an arm and turned. Except that she did not so much turn, as swivel. And she pointed. And she let out a scream that would have curdled sleeping blood.

  She swooned afterwards. And her father scooped her into his loving arms and took her off to bed. And such was the momentum of the party that it continued on, despite the poor child’s sleepwalking fit. But my appetite for revelling, poor already because of Spalding’s presence, was killed entirely by the moment. I tried to talk to one of the brothers Giroud, excited about the great oval lido about to open on the Southport foreshore. Having overflown the last of the workings, the placement of the plunge slide and the high diving boards, he described it as magnifique. But my enthusiasm for gossip and sensation was entirely gone. I said my goodbyes and gained the happy refuge of the car Father had provided for my journey home. I was not drunk. I could have driven my own car. I could have walked, the Rimmers’ house being only a mile or so from my flat. But it would have been foolhardy to plan to walk home from the party without first knowing how Harry Spalding would react to my presence.