Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  I went with my father, who looked fraught and sad. There has been another mishap at the yard and the men are whispering that Spalding’s boat is cursed. Work is not so plentiful in Liverpool Harbour as to make them boycott the job. Not yet, at least. But men involved with the sea are always superstitious. And the project is taking its toll on my father’s mood and perhaps also his health. I don’t think he is sleeping well. I don’t think he is sleeping much at all. He usually teases me about the way I wear my hair and my choice of clothes and my insistence on smoking in public. He does it good-naturedly. It has become a sort of humorous ritual between us. But on this occasion I think my appearance barely registered with my father.

  There does not seem to me to be very much wrong with Harry Spalding’s luck. He did not attend the ball. But he was at the hotel. He is no longer resident there, of course, but can often be found in the evening in the gaming room. On the night of the ball he won five thousand pounds at the blackjack table. It is a colossal sum of money. A streak like that at cards does not come to a man who sails an unlucky boat. If his boat really was unlucky, it would not have survived the worst storm in living memory. It would have sunk under him. Though I have heard an ugly rumour about the fate of his crew during the storm. Spalding says he was sailing alone. The Dublin harbour master insists there were two French crewmen aboard. The log should settle the matter. But so far, Spalding has been reluctant to produce the log. There might be an enquiry and there might not. Probably there will not. Whose jurisdiction covers the fate of two French deckhands aboard an American-registered vessel in the Irish Sea? Perhaps Spalding is telling the truth and he was sailing the Dark Echo alone. He is a very considerable yachtsman. The only thing I know with certainty is that my father will be well rid of the boat when the repairs to her are finally completed. I may not believe her cursed. But I think that he does.

  Pierre Giroud sent a bottle of champagne to our table. It was a nice gesture from a sweet man who would be distraught to hear himself described as such. I don’t mean to sound patronising. He is a sweet man. He is also an accomplished flier and tall and good-looking in his Gallic way. But the shadow cast by Mick Collins is a long one. The affairs I have had in the years since my return from Ireland have been tepid. My heart was not in any of them. It will not always be like this and I am fully aware that fast cars and aeroplanes are my compensation for those sensations most people enjoy between their sheets. It will not always be like this, but poor sweet Pierre Giroud is wasting his time and squandering his money buying Moët & Chandon in the hope of winning over this particular girl.

  July 13th, 1927

  I have deliberately stayed away from this journal for a full four weeks, concerned on rereading it that Harry Spalding was becoming an unhealthy obsession with me. But something occurred this afternoon that has left me badly shaken. It has also confirmed some of my worst suspicions about that monster walking the streets of Southport in the urbane and civilised guise of a man. It happened on Lord Street, near the junction with Nevill Street, as I was crossing from west to east after collecting my wristwatch from the jeweller’s shop where it was being repaired. I almost collided with him. I was fastening the strap of my watch and not really paying attention to what was in front of me when I gained the pavement. I stopped at the sight of Spalding’s broad back and pale trilby hat. He was switching his cane against the heel of his shoe and staring at the cenotaph. I saw him stiffen as he became aware of me. He took off his hat slowly with his free hand. But he did not turn and I did not move an inch from where I stood. He chuckled. And he spoke.

  Great days, Jane, this monument celebrates. I do believe they were the making of me.

  I did not move. The sun was very bright above us. The white stone of the memorial was quite dazzling and Spalding was pale and almost insubstantial in his linen suit and cream leather brogues. He was mistaken, of course. The cenotaph celebrated nothing. It acknowledged sacrifice. It commemorated loss.

  Sacrifice, he said, as though reading my mind. But there’s no point in dwelling on the past, is there? He switched his cane, idly. A man must live in the present, he said. And a wise man must secure his future.

  The riddles in which he spoke seemed to carry the chill of foreboding through the warm air. Everything about him felt and sounded threatening. I shivered.

  Shame about poor Mick Collins, he said. He still had not turned to face me. He could fight, could Collins, Spalding said. It would be churlish not to concede the fact. He could fight. But could he love, Janey? That’s the question.

  Janey. It was what Mick had called me only in our tender moments together.

  It was then I saw Harry Spalding cast no shadow on the pavement.

  I hurried away from him. But he had one more trick. He had stopped my watch. Later in the day I took it back to Connards and their man took the back off it and could find nothing wrong with it at all. He blew on the movement and it started again. He was mystified. I was relieved that the trick was only temporary, the magic simply mischievous and not permanent. But I know now that Spalding really is a monster. He has known who I was all the time and toyed with me. He is evil and powerful and deranged. Can it be a coincidence that three women from the vicinity have gone missing while he is in our midst?

  I think a clue was presented and ignored by all of us at Tommy and Nora’s party back in May. Little Bonnie came down and raised her arm and pointed at something and screamed. Tommy has long recovered from the shock of it, of course. And Bonnie, thankfully, has no conscious memory of the event. Tommy even jokes about it, saying that Bonnie was pointing in the direction of Blackpool Tower. It’s a vulgar eyesore, Tommy says. It has earned his daughter’s scorn. And he’s right that she was pointing in that direction. But I think she may have been pointing at something a lot closer than the tower across the bay at Blackpool. I overfly the town and know the lay of it. I can close my eyes and see a map of it painted accurately on my mind. And I know that Bonnie pointed that evening precisely in the direction of the house rented for the summer by Harry Spalding on Rotten Row. You could draw a line from Bonnie’s pointing finger to the tower and it would pass through Spalding’s garden. What secrets does he harbour there? I wonder. What summoned that little girl’s unconscious accusation and her scream?

  July 16th, 1927

  I have rowed bitterly with Vera Chadwick. She does not think my evidence compelling enough to take to the police. She thinks her Liverpool detective would laugh in my face presented with my accusations. I’m not making accusations, I told Vera. I am merely raising suspicions. Surely the police need to follow all lines of enquiry if they are to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the three missing girls?

  You cannot make accusations against a rich and popular visitor to the town, Vera says. The evidence simply is not there. You will look like a bigoted fool, taking against a stranger simply because he is a stranger and not a Southport man born and bred. And the culprit is likely to be a local man, her fiancé says. Only someone who knows the ground could stalk the victims and evade capture without leaving witnesses or clues. He’s from Ainsdale or Crossens. He is not a stranger to the terrain. He is likely to be someone inconspicuous, superficially unremarkable. And this is all well and good and makes perfect sense, of course. But Spalding was able to ghost through enemy lines on the Western Front not a decade ago, wreaking havoc and eluding capture. The taking of three women would be child’s play to a man with his deadly predatory skills.

  I should have kept my own counsel. I had hoped for an ally in Vera’s detective, or a least a sympathetic hearing for one of the closest friends of his intended. I fear that the real problem for Vera is less the subject of Harry Spalding than my own past Fenian connection. She is loyal enough to stay my friend despite that. But she doesn’t want our friendship known about by her police detective. Perhaps she fears it would compromise him. As I said, I wish I had kept my own counsel. But there is something concrete I can do myself. And I intend to do it tomorrow. Vera is ri
ght in one regard. I have no hard evidence. Tomorrow I believe I might be able to provide myself with some.

  I made the preparations earlier today, shortly after my angry exchange with Vera. I motored down to the Giroud hangar where Pierre was in his overalls stripping the turbine yet again on the troublesome Sopwith they bought. The Sopwith is supposed to be an easily maintained aircraft. It has a reputation for being relatively trouble-free. But theirs isn’t.

  Did you come to thank me for the champagne, Pierre said. He looks more handsome in his blue overalls with grease smeared across his face than he does in black tie and tails. He looks more the man of action, which of course he is. He and his brother both.

  I want to fly early tomorrow, I told him.

  Of course. How early is early?

  Dawn.

  He did something French with his mouth, a sort of shrug of the lips, and nodded. The Tiger Moth?

  I shook my head. The Hawker Siddeley, I told him. And I need it fully equipped.

  He smiled at that. You want us to mount the machine gun?

  Almost all of their aircraft once belonged to the Royal Flying Corps. The brothers Giroud made a killing on military surplus when it was still cheap. I’m quite surprised they did not buy a tank just to tow their aeroplanes through the soft sand on the beach to the landing strip.

  Not armed, Pierre, I said. But fully equipped.

  Of course, he said. I will see you here tomorrow at dawn. And the Siddeley will be ready for you.

  July 28th, 1927

  I am just returned from Liverpool. I do not think I have ever felt more exhausted in my life. Detective Chief Inspector Bell of the Liverpool Constabulary had finally acceded to my request for an audience. Perhaps it was the newspaper headlines that persuaded him to grant me half an hour of his precious time. Three days ago Helen Sykes became the fourth woman from our little corner of South Lancashire to disappear. The other women were not worth a splash in print on their own account. Too poor and too plain, I expect. But Helen is both well-off and beautiful. I use the present tense in the hope that she still lives. But each day that passes makes that less likely, as even DCI Bell was moved to agree. Helen has no motive for orchestrating her own vanishing act. And she has no reason for ignoring the appeals to allay concern by coming forward made in every edition of the Post and the Echo and the Visitor sold by those bellowing urchins from the hoardings on the streets.

  Bell is senior to Vera’s policeman in rank. And he showed no sign whatsoever of recognising my name when I was ushered into his office. He made me wait. But I waited in an anteroom rather than in the general waiting area, with its green linoleum and scatter of flattened cigarette ends and stink of sweaty desperation. The anteroom was bad enough. It had a large brass lock on a door which whooshed on its steel frame, flush with the floor and the top of the lintel it hung so heavily in. The green canvas chairs and heavy brown varnish and silence of the anteroom could not have symbolised confinement more solidly without bars and handcuffs. The only way out was when they came to escort me to Bell.

  The Detective Chief Inspector’s office was replete with the shields and rosettes of achievement on all four walls. Liverpool is a port city and a town as rough as they come and he looked as hard as granite. He was slender and cold-eyed where I had expected him to be stout and bellicose. But there was steel in his handshake as he rose from behind his desk to greet me and offered me a seat. Please, he said, gesturing to the stiff-backed chair. The one word carried the thick, adenoidal character of unschooled Scouse. I know it from my father’s yard. Mr Bell, I knew instantly, had come up on merit earned on the streets through the police ranks. I noticed then a glass case on the wall with a truncheon and a constable’s helmet displayed inside it. And I had no doubt they had belonged to him at the outset of his career. I could see him on Scotland Road under the street lights at closing time, putting violent drunks to punishing rights at the business end of that hardwood club.

  He asked did I want tea or coffee and I declined. He poured a glass of water for each of us from the carafe on his desk. He held his hands out in a gesture of expansiveness and said, I’m naturally intrigued by your claim to have information regarding the missing women.

  Helen Sykes is a friend of mine, I said.

  And our colleagues in Southport are doing everything they can to try to find her, he said.

  But they lack your expertise and resources, I said. They do not possess your rank. And though two of the missing women are from Southport, two are from elsewhere in the region. It all falls under your general jurisdiction, does it not?

  He did not answer that question. He just looked at me over his steepled fingers and said, tell me what you think you know, Miss Boyte.

  It was sweltering in his office. There was a fan on a filing cabinet, the curved blades of it like a Sopwith propeller in miniature. But he had not turned it on. His one window was open to the hot blast of our relentless heatwave. It displayed the thrilling vista of the building opposite, soot-blackened over decades of belching Liverpool industry. He did not seem discomforted by the heat at all. He had on a suit with a coat of heavy gabardine wool, and a tie was knotted firmly at his throat. These were distinctions he had earned, the plain-clothes trappings of rank, and a spot of seasonal sunshine was not about to oblige him to shed them.

  I told him about my encounter at the Shelbourne with Harry Spalding seven years ago. I did not mention Mick or Boland. I did not seek to explain what I was doing then in Dublin.

  He never took his eyes off me. When I had finished, he said, seven years is a long time.

  I opened the briefcase I had brought with me and took out the print I had brought for him to see.

  What’s this?

  It is an aerial photograph of the garden of the house Spalding has taken for the summer on Rotten Row, I said. It was taken a week ago. There is clear and substantial visual evidence of excavation. He is burying the bodies, Chief Inspector. He is burying the women in his backyard.

  Bell looked at the photograph. But he did not touch it. I was not encouraged by this.

  How did you obtain this picture?

  I fly, Chief Inspector. I leased an aircraft used in the war for aerial reconnaissance. I overflew Spalding’s house. There is a camera in the fuselage.

  His eyes were still on the print. It is not a crime to have your garden dug, he said.

  He’s a monster.

  DCI Bell finally looked at me. It was not a pleasant look. He smiled and it was not an encouraging smile. Some weeks ago Mr Spalding won five thousand pounds at blackjack, he said. He gave every penny of the money to local charities. An orphanage near here received the gift sum of a thousand pounds. It will transform lives, that money. It will enable them to repair the building’s roof. It will buy clothing and pay for books. Coke for their fires in the cold of winter, you see. Solid food for fatherless kids deprived of nourishment all of their young lives.

  I wondered if Bell himself had been an orphan.

  Please listen to me, Chief Inspector.

  His only stipulation was that his generosity go unrecorded publicly.

  Please, Chief Inspector. Listen to me.

  No, Miss Boyte. You listen to me. You are a Fenian. You have been an associate of assassins and traitors. Some would cloak you in the romanticism of independence and rebellion. Others might point to your treachery and the timing of it and argue compellingly that you were bloody lucky not to hang.

  He was shaking with rage. I have never been sworn at before. The Liverpool police are known to recruit sometimes at the Orange Lodge. All was abundantly clear. Bell’s spirit lay in Ulster, regardless of where his career resided.

  Scum rises, I said, rising myself. And you, sir, are the proof.

  He grinned and tore my photograph in two and tossed the pieces across his desk at me.

  I don’t know your motive in maligning a generous and distinguished man, he said. But you should go home, Miss Boyte, and investigate more wholesome pursuits than sno
oping on innocent people from the skies.

  I walked the route from the police headquarters to the harbour. I was numb. I walked through Liverpool’s dark and sweltering streets, over her greasy cobbles, until I came to the cranes and gantries and the proud hurtle and industrious filth of the Mersey river. I saw the great funnels of the ships in dock, heard the wail of tugboat horns and saw the hemp sacks of unknown cargoes hauled on straining ropes. I smelled the steaming shit, rich from the drays tethered to horsecarts, and had the rumble of petrol engines fill my ears from lorries in patient, throbbing convoys. All my life this stuff has raised my spirits in a soaring, living cocktail of sensation and excitement. All my life, I have felt privileged in the access to all this given me by my father’s status and profession. But not today. Today I found a public bench behind a row of iron bollards and took my precious torn photograph and sat and tried to reassemble it between clumsy fingers, certain that Helen is dead. She is dead. The monster Spalding, the sneering beast I saw at the cenotaph in Southport, has killed her. I wondered how much of his recent largesse had gone to the Liverpool Police Benevolent Fund. It would not have mattered, though, to Chief Inspector Bell. My Fenian past had undone me with him before we ever met.

  Disconsolate in the heat, I wiped a tear away. Frustration rather than self-pity or grief for poor Helen had prompted it, I think. But it was all the same. It was all the same. I latched the pieces of my precious evidence back into my briefcase and stood. And I found the way as a somnambulist would towards my father’s yard.

  My father wasn’t there. He was away doing business with a lumber cutter, his clerk said, buying a consignment of hardwood. But the Dark Echo was there. She was in the dry dock, her hull supported on a great wooden brace, her new rudder fitted and her masts erect. She looked like someone’s gigantic toy, which is what she was, I suppose, the Devil’s handsome plaything. Her brass gleamed under the high sun and her paintwork and varnish were immaculate. She was almost ready to sail. Any day they would flood the dock and float her into the gentle waters of the estuary and see how she balanced and manoeuvred and performed generally. I had no doubt she would handle well. My father knows his craft.