Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  When Bonnie screamed, I looked at Spalding. And I saw that he was looking back at me. His expression was impossible to read. There was nothing obvious, no salaciousness or overt curiosity about the look. But it was as though he were blind and deaf to the odd distress of the little girl. And then a woman in a brightly feathered stole approached him and he was all smiles and solicitous charm with her and seemed to forget entirely about me.

  It was very foolish of me to mention to anyone that I had ever met this man. I did so casually, after reading of the storm and his survival in the newspaper. I did not explain the circumstances, merely saying that we had shared an unpleasant encounter in Dublin. But I should have kept the matter a secret to myself. Under the urbane talk of Hemingway and Picasso, I think Harry Spalding is a cold and dangerous man. Polishing enhances the facets of the stone, brings a bright glitter to its surface. It does not reduce its hardness or change its fundamental nature. What I wish is that I had let Mick Collins have him shot. What I really wish is that I had taken Boland’s pistol and blown his brains out myself.

  Suzanne looked up from the pages she was reading and blinked at the sky. The light was fading. The evening would be long, but the heat and intensity had gone out of the day. It was six o’clock. Already, she liked Jane Boyte very much. And she felt very sorry for her. She had not even had the consolation of seeing Michael Collins’ reputation restored, his achievement recognised. They had been relatively recent developments. Self-serving Irish politicians resentful of their place in his shadow had undermined Collins’ character and deeds for decades after his death. In 1971, when Jane Boyte had died, he had still been the footnote in Irish history she had described him as in 1927. There had been no consolation in her grief.

  Suzanne slid the deposition across the table, opened her bag and took out her Marlboro pack and lit a cigarette. She was too fastidious to breathe smoke over the precious pages. She would wait to read on until she had finished. She sipped her drink. She was the only customer outside the haunted pub. There were but three or four inside. Off across the tarmac to her right, there was a concrete barbecue pit veined by rust stains. Clearly it rained here sometimes. But she had been very lucky with the weather. She looked out over the area where the Palace Hotel had been, vast and imperious in its high gables and princely turrets. There was nothing of it now, no sense that it had ever been there at all, with its ghostly lifts and glittering guests and sad little litany of deaths still awaiting proper explanation.

  To her rear, a hundred yards or so away on the other side of Weld Road, Rotten Row began. And the sense of Spalding’s house and lurking presence there was contrastingly strong, a cold prickle of the flesh between her shoulder blades, an itch she could not scratch. She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and exhaled at the sky, slightly dismayed at how wonderful the tobacco had tasted.

  May 26th, 1927

  A group of us went to the open-air bathing pool for the first time today. The queue for the twin turnstiles stretched and wound in a gaudy, excited procession. I thought it would take ages to clear, but it did not and we were in after a wait of only ten minutes or so. The pool really is immense, a great oval lake of seawater surrounded by landscaped rocks and seats rising as they would in an ampitheatre. On the side to seaward there is a huge domed cafeteria with a great glass globe of the world at its summit. I saw it from the air, overflying it a week ago. But the whole place is much grander and more spectacular from the ground. The changing suites, at either end, are pillared and gabled like temples. It made me proud of the town. Civic pride is a novelty to me, something I would have dismissed as a bourgeois conceit a decade ago. But I have grown up somewhat since then. And this magnificent amenity is open to anyone who can pay the modest entry fee. With its high diving boards and steepling metal slide, it is a wonderful place. People deserve it.

  Even seeing Harry Spalding there could not much diminish my enthusiasm. I saw him on his haunches in his bathing costume, rubbing oil into the back of a companion I recognised as the woman in the feather stole from the Rimmers’ party. He was wearing sunglasses and his tan has deepened even further. He is extraordinarily muscular and, in the harsh sunshine, his dark body reminded me with a shudder of the carapace of some large and deadly creature. There is something of the crab or the praying mantis about him.

  I went to the pool with Helen Sykes and Vera Chadwick. Helen vaguely knows the Ormskirk girl who went missing a week ago. Vera is courting a police inspector who works with the murder squad in Liverpool. As if having a romantic liaison with a police officer isn’t bad enough in itself, Vera is full of the phraseology of crime and investigation. She told Helen, with me a reluctant audience, that the police are linking this latest disappearance with that of the Palace Hotel girl. I suppose it was fair enough for them to discuss this subject, since Helen has an interest and Vera seems to have the inside line. But it did seem grim stuff in the circumstances, surrounded by languid sunbathers and with the squeal of delighted children splashing down the water slide shrill in our ears.

  I smoked a cigarette and tried not to listen. I watched the divers in their acrobatic grace, gathering for a leap and then launching from the springboard, showing off to their sweethearts. Then I saw Spalding in the line in a blue rubber cap the same sudden colour as his eyes. He executed a perfect jackknife and entered the water so cleanly he left barely a ripple on the surface. And I thought that the man should by rights be dead at the bottom of a Dublin dock and not sullying our bright little town with his dark presence.

  The town doesn’t mind him, of course. The town has welcomed him and his style and extravagance with open arms. It is only my spirits that his presence here darkens.

  You can bet there are more than two, Vera was telling Helen. That is what her detective has told her. If two disappearances have been reported, there will be others that people have tried to explain away without raising public alarm.

  What does he think the motive is, Helen asked her.

  Sexual, Vera said, flatly. But she had lowered her voice.

  I was contemplating a swim. Instead, I lit another cigarette. The girl who worked for the Rimmers was far from beautiful. And the picture in the paper of the Ormskirk girl showed her to be bland-looking and overweight. They did not seem to me the sort of women a sexual predator would obviously seek out. I looked around me. My immediate conclusion was that attractive and shapely would-be abduction victims are plentiful in this part of the country. It wasn’t a charitable thought and there would have been a time when I would have regarded even thinking it as a betrayal of the sisterhood. But contemplation of lethal acts of crime requires clear thinking, not blind loyalty to one’s gender. There are many more tempting targets than those two would have been. Perhaps the Palace chambermaid simply upped sticks and spent her savings on a ticket aboard a steamer to America. Women are capable of independent thought. She was a somewhat restless girl with an impulse for action and change.

  That still leaves the Ormskirk girl, of course.

  I went for a swim. The depths of the pool were deliciously cold in the heat of the day. I swam five lengths. It is only yet spring, but we are in the grip of a heatwave. After my lengths I floated with my eyes closed against the sun and my hair floating in fronds like seaweed as the water lapped about my head. I hope that the missing girls are safe. I hope that Vera’s detective is given to lurid exaggeration in the cause only of impressing her. But I doubt it.

  Afterwards we walked back and along the promenade to the end of the pier. I am always amazed at the number of crippled men and amputees one sees out when the weather is warm. Almost ten years after its conclusion, the casualties of the war are still very much among us, living their diminished lives in pain and poverty in the land they were promised would be fit for heroes on their return. I stopped to give a man with a begging bowl half a crown. Blinded by gas, the sign around his neck said, and he wore a ragged, filthy blindfold to hide the disfigurement of his eyes. He was genuine, too. Some scoundrels
beg, but I heard the wheeze and rattle of his liquefied lungs when I bent to put the money in his bowl. My half-crown joined a tarnished threepenny bit. I paused and took a guinea from my purse and pressed it into his grateful palm and he blessed me for the gift and then raised a salute.

  He’ll spend it on drink, Vera Chadwick said. Her courtship with the murder detective has made her hard, I think, bled out of her the compassion that originally made her so attractive to me as a friend.

  I hope he does, I said.

  And Helen Sykes laughed.

  I hope he finds happy oblivion for a night at my expense, I said. We should be humbled at the bravery and sacrifice of men like him.

  I thought you were a Fenian, Vera said. But I did not reply to that. Perhaps she has discussed her Fenian friend with her policeman sweetheart. I want no trouble to embarrass my father. My heart went out of rebel politics when Mick Collins was killed. Before that, to tell the truth, with the senseless killing of the civil war even before it claimed his life.

  At the end of the pier, there was a Punch and Judy show. It is the one seaside and fairground entertainment I detest. The violence of a man against a woman, even caricatured, is not to my mind a fit subject for humour. Nothing is funny about Punch cudgelling his shrew of a wife. It is comedy from a more robust time, I suppose. But it is crude and cruel. Punch beats Judy because she is ugly. I watched him do so, feeling a pang of guilt about my own thoughts earlier regarding the looks of the missing women.

  There was a Pierrot show. And there was a brass band sweltering in their thick serge uniforms as they blew through the mouthpieces of their burnished instruments. Some of the players were very young, a couple no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. At the interval, Vera Chadwick bought ices for the band’s child players and congratulated them on their musical prowess. And I liked her again, recognising my friend happily returned in her pretty smile and thoughtfulness.

  Afterwards we went for cocktails at the Prince of Wales Hotel. We were not really dressed for the restaurant, but took a balcony table in the cocktail bar and had sandwiches and fruit served there. We were all three of us famished after the swim and long exposure to the sun. I have a strong head for drink but was quite light-headed after two pink gins.

  Ballast is what you need, girl, Helen Sykes said, ordering a bowl of pistachio nuts and some salted crackers.

  Mention of ballast made me uneasy. And then I realised why. Her image of things nautical brought thoughts of my father’s boatyard and his race to have Spalding’s schooner repaired by his own impossible deadline. That deadline seems more than ever impossible now. Two men were seriously injured aboard the Dark Echo yesterday. They were proofing a section of the keel with some sort of varnish or protective paint that should not be used in confined spaces. They were doing so under an open hatch that slammed shut and somehow jammed. The heat apparently made the toxic effects of the stuff they were using worse. Father said it was sweltering on the dock, ninety degrees in the open air and more in the vessel’s hold. The more fortunate of the two has badly blistered skin. He is burned and scarred. The other man is unconscious in a bed in Liverpool infirmary and is not expected to recover.

  Helen and Vera tried to tease me about the money I gave my war hero, asking had the impulse cleaned me out, speculating on whether I would honour my share when the bill was presented, asking was I prepared for washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. But the sombre mood had descended and would not lift.

  Tommy Rimmer told me the other day that his new golf friend Harry Spalding is a war hero on his own account. Apparently he led a special unit called the Jericho Crew. They were charged with particularly dangerous missions carried out behind enemy lines. They were very successful and greatly feared by the enemy. And I was not greatly surprised to hear this. Courage comes in many forms. It can be noble and reckless, as Mick’s brand of it certainly was. And it can be a function of savagery. Who can say a snake lacks a certain primeval courage, locked in a battle to the death against a mongoose? Spalding is a killer. I’ve known it in my heart since the night it took Boland’s gun to discourage him from raping me. He would not have stopped with the violation. The evening would have ended in my death. How he must have loved the war and the killing spree to which it would have treated him.

  June 10th, 1927

  A farm girl from Burscough has gone. Vera Chadwick telephoned and told me this morning. Tonight there is a grand ball at the Palace Hotel. I do not feel like going, with the intimation of death about the region. Vera says her detective beau has told her confidentially that no woman in the area is safe. Three makes five, he said. He is an experienced catcher of killers, so I suppose his opinion has to be respected. Three makes five. His theory is that if the police know about three, there are likely to be at least two other victims whose disappearance has gone unreported.

  Vera asked him why. And I asked Vera.

  Shame, he said, is the reason. Families think their little girl has absconded. They do not want the attentions of the police. Even less do they want the attentions of the press. What would their neighbours think? How would the dismaying news be received by the congregation at their church? Perhaps they had given their daughter just cause to bolt the family home. The police would press them on this and the police were expert and relentless in their questioning.

  Three makes five, Vera’s detective says. And I am apt to think him right. And I am impressed with his psychological insight. But there is no suspect yet identified for the crimes he believes he is investigating. And he has told Vera that the best thing she and her friends can do is to be escorted or stay off the streets altogether and double-lock our doors. I am less impressed with that. We pay for the police through our taxes. We are entitled to their protection. The notion of being confined to my home is an unattractive one. My home is a spacious and comfortable Birkdale Village flat. I have good furniture and a marble bathroom and a painting by Bonnard on the wall. But I do not want the place I live in to be my prison.

  And it won’t be. The one advantage I possess that those poor girls did not, is a gun. I have a Mauser pistol given me as a keepsake years ago by Mick Collins. It has existed more as a treasured memento than as a weapon all this time. But I have had it serviced regularly if only out of respect for its proper function. I like mechanical things. I like them to work, whether at the joystick of a Tiger Moth or the wheel of a Morgan roadster. And, of course, the Mauser is, before it is anything else, a functioning tool. It is a potent weapon. Mick, also, was of a practical turn of mind. The Mauser was a keepsake. But it was intended to protect me should the need for it to do so ever arise.

  My gun is oiled and loaded with eight soft-point nine millimetre bullets. I was never the best shot on the range at Parbold when I taught myself how to use it, but I was far from being the worst. My marksmanship was good enough to make some of the men embarrassed. And I remember well the advice given me by Boland on firing a pistol. Aim for the centre of the target, he said. And keep on squeezing the trigger until the gun is empty. Never trust to accuracy. Trust to the percentages. Blow the life out of what you wish to kill. Never stop until you’re out of ammunition.

  I liked Harry Boland. He was a good and spirited man. I liked him even before his intervention saved my life. Mick was wrong over their falling out and the breach depressed Mick afterwards, I knew. Anyway, Boland taught me something that might save my life. If it does, I’ll walk to Saint Theresa’s Church in Birkdale and light a candle and say a prayer for the safe delivery of his soul. Do I need to? I imagine both their souls were safely delivered. They were good men. They were the best of men, says she, having re-encountered the worst.

  I feel weary and defeated after Vera’s call. I have never felt less like a party in my life. But I will go. It’s what we do. It’s the modern way. In a sense, I suspect that in this modern age, it’s what we’re all of us for. There is a painting in one of the rooms at the Atkinson Gallery. It portrays this mad whirligig. The passengers aboard are frenzi
ed, their grins crazed and their knuckles white with the insane strain of hanging on to the ride. I cannot remember the name of the painter. It is someone from the Modernist school. But it is us he has portrayed in this painted metaphor. It is us, in our hysteria and hurtle and addiction to novelty and the future.

  Suzanne groaned. She was in the gloaming, now, outside the Fisherman’s Rest. She was amid the creeping shadows of the night. And she had in her hands a document that had told her in an evening more about the character of Michael Collins than she had learned from the known sources in a year. And Collins wasn’t even the point of what she’d been reading. Her glass was empty. She wanted another drink. She had about a third of Jane Boyte’s deposition to go.

  ‘God, you were wonderful,’ she surprised herself by saying out loud. ‘You were really something, Jane.’ Suzanne wiped at a tear she could not suppress or contain. ‘You were brave and true.’ She sniffed. She bent over the typed pages and continued to read.

  June 15th, 1927

  The ball was a spectacular success. The ballroom at the Palace was decked out in balloons and taffeta and silk ribbon of every shade and two bands shared a swivel stage. There was a full orchestra for half of the evening. And that alternated with a jazz band playing the wild and frenzied music of New Orleans. It was sweltering in the heatwave. Someone at the hotel had come up with the clever idea of ice sculptures to cool the dancing throng. They decorated the ballroom on two opposing sides, depicting a four-funnelled ocean liner running almost the full length of one and a great, streamlined steam locomotive on the other. Someone told me that the steam engine fashioned from ice was modelled on the prototype of one being built at York to break the world rail speed record. By the end of the evening, there were puddles on the parquet from these perishable masterpieces adorning the room. But they were very finely wrought and kept the air cool and breathable for the crowd in the cigar smoke under the bright, burning electric globes of the ballroom’s giant chandeliers.