by F. G. Cottam
I stole up the gangway aboard her. There was no one else aboard. She really was as good as finished, only awaiting the rigger for the final task Spalding would no doubt wish to supervise himself. She was quiet and serene in the light and heat of the day. Inside all was turmoil with me from my interview with the Orangeman and bigot detective, Bell. Without, all was teak splendour and seductive curves and the faint smells of metal polish and beeswax. There was no threat on the deck of Spalding’s boat, no sense of menace whatsoever. The stars and stripes lay furled in brightly coloured coils on the short mast at her stern. She really was almost ready.
I went below. I sneaked into the master cabin. Everything had been taken from the storage shed and put back there at the service of the vessel’s master. There were first editions on his bookshelves of Eliot and Ford Madox Ford and Michael Arlen and Pound. I saw a copy of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. There was a copy of Scott Fitzerald’s The Great Gatsby and one of Ulysses, the banned novel by James Joyce. The Pound and the Eliot, though, were well-thumbed. He had a taste for poetry.
There was a cabinet filled with his trophies from the war. Displayed there were several Luger pistols and saw-edged bayonets and a couple of the stick grenades the German infantry used. There were some barbaric-looking knives and clubs I supposed had been improvised by his Jericho Crew. They did not look like war material from the Krupp factory. They looked like relics from a medieval battlefield. Oddly, there was a crucifix. Even more oddly, it had been positioned upside down. It lay anchored like this in a little hill of black-painted putty, surrounded by a circle of rusty trench wire I thought might be a tasteless visual pun on Christ’s crown of thorns. I hoped it had some other than this blasphemous significance. But then I forgot about this puzzling composition of keepsakes altogether, because I became aware of the smell in Spalding’s cabin.
It was faint, but growing curiously stronger. It was the bitter odour of Turkish tobacco mingled with a perfume I half recognised, the two scents competing over something altogether cruder and more primitive. It was more a secretion than a manufactured smell, I thought. Was it sweat? It was more urgent than sweat, somehow more pungent. It was something similar to the musk of a large animal distressed.
There was a recording machine on Spalding’s desk. The wax cylinders on to the surface of which the sound is cut by a vibrating needle lay next to it in a velvet-lined display. It almost made me smile. The machine was a symbol of his preening vanity. He would love the sound of his own high, harsh-vowelled voice, of course. I could imagine him reciting Pound’s unfathomable stanzas to himself. Another symbol of his vanity was the brass-bound mirror fixed to the cabin wall. I went over and looked into it. Was the glass dirty? No. The reflection was lazy with tobacco smoke. It cleared. And behind me, I saw the face of Helen Sykes, her mouth fixed in the rictus of terror, her eyes bulging in her pale head with it. I turned. And there was no one there. And I fled the vessel and the boatyard, too, aware of what the smell had been in the master cabin aboard her. It was the stink of dying in mortal fear. It was the scent of poor Helen’s last moments of life.
I ran along the cobbles, desperate to hail a taxi. And when I found one and told the driver to take me on to Southport I had to formulate a plan to fight my own shock and panic. I could barely control my breathing. I was dripping perspiration. The briefcase handle felt greasy in my grip and I was cold and shivering as the heat-drenched streets thrummed under me against the hard suspension of the cab. I would talk to Seamus Devlin in London. I would get explosives. I would buy dynamite and rig a bomb and blow Harry Spalding and his boat to kingdom come. If I could not use the law I would become the law. I did not possess a bomb-maker’s skills. But Devlin did. I would pay him to assemble one. I would pay whatever it cost.
August 4th, 1927
With Devlin’s lethal construction in my bag I went to the yard at dawn today after a sleepless night spent at the Adelphi Hotel. Of course, I arrived unannounced. My father was there, dishevelled and distracted, his collar soiled and askance and his whiskers unshaven. He looked stale and rattled. He was surprised to see me, but he showed no pleasure at the sight of me. Nor did he show any sign of suspicion. He is resigned to me and my unpredictability, I suppose. In his defeated way, I know my father loves me.
Spalding’s boat had gone. I had missed him by but half an hour. I asked my father, as casually as I could, what his destination was.
I’ve no idea, he said. And then he mumbled something.
What?
I said I expect he’s gone back to Hell, my father said. That’s where he came from and that’s where he damn well belongs.
I stood on the dock with my deadly cargo redundant in my carpet bag, nodding my head and knowing in my heart two things. The first was that my father spoke the truth. The second was that I had failed in the most vital task I had attempted in my life. It was not for the want of trying. But I had failed.
Twelve
It was almost dark when Suzanne reached the last page of Jane’s deposition. She went inside the pub, because she felt cold despite the gentle warmth of the summer night. She got a drink from the bar, found an interior table and called the seminary in Northumberland and asked for the Jesuit, Delaunay.
‘I think I know where to find your desecrated relic, Monsignor,’ she said to him.
He was silent for so long that she thought the connection broken. Then he spoke. ‘I’m relieved to hear you’re safe,’ he said. ‘Has there been any further attempt to harm you?’
‘No. When I return your relic, Monsignor, you must straight away bless or re-sanctify or exorcise the thing. You must do whatever it is you have the power to do to nullify the effects of the desecration.’
‘That would be the sacred duty of any priest,’ Delaunay said.
There had been no further attempt to harm her, it was true. There had been no spiteful, spectral attempt to impede her. And that was puzzling to her. But it was a mystery that solved itself in Suzanne’s mind when she was awoken early the following morning in her hotel room by a return call from Northumberland.
‘Half an hour after I spoke to you last night, I received an email sent from aboard the Dark Echo,’ Delaunay said. ‘It had a lengthy written attachment. I’ve only just finished reading it now. The last dozen or so pages of it deal with the voyage. You need to see those, I think.’
‘Magnus is keeping a log?’
‘It’s Martin’s account. It’s Martin’s log. I’ll send you the pages now.’
She read the log in her hotel room, sitting by the open window. When she had finished, she switched on her computer. He had sent her a message at the same time as he had sent his testament to the priest. The laptop came to life. Hers was a much briefer missive.
I loved you. I did not love you for long enough, but I loved you as well as I could. I will die loving you.
Martin.
She looked at her watch. The Botanical Gardens Museum would be open in an hour. She ordered a minicab at reception, thinking that Martin was not going to die if there was anything humanly possible that she could do to prevent it from happening. She loved him back, and he was right. They had not had anything like long enough with one another.
‘Boyce, you say?’
‘Boyte.’ And she smiled at her museum skiver. She had returned the borrowed document meeting her own twenty-four-hour deadline. She was comfortably within it. Now she wanted to know if anything else had been deposited here all those years ago by poor, desperate Jane. She felt very strongly that something had.
‘There’s a box,’ he said, looking up from the written ledger he was perusing. ‘Contents not inventoried.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘You can see it, certainly. But you cannot look inside it. Not until a member of the staff here has inventoried the contents and signed and dated the inventory. It’s the rules.’
Suzanne took fifty pounds in tens from her wallet and spread the notes on the desk between them. ‘Ten minutes,’
she said.
He stared at the money. ‘Five,’ he said.
He just had to have the last word.
‘Done.’
He swept up the cash like a croupier. ‘I’ll find you the key.’
She took what she needed from the strongbox Jane had left at the museum. She did so swiftly and without sentiment. In other circumstances, she would have lingered over the legacy of someone she had come so greatly to like and respect. She would have opened the box on eighty years of darkness and history and carried out the necessary violation with gentleness and decorum and perhaps even a touch of ceremony. But there was not time. If the speed of the Dark Echo were consistent, the vessel would arrive in a couple of days. Magnus Stannard had been wrong. Her destination was not the West Coast of Ireland. She would alter course and skirt the Irish coast and not founder and break up on the reefs there at all. She was headed for the coast of Lancashire. She would beach somewhere between Formby Point and the pier at Southport. And she would float off again for ever on the next high tide. Here was where the thing that had once been Harry Spalding would board her and become her master again, where Magnus and Martin both would be enslaved as her crewmen. And Spalding did not have the best of reputations, did he, when it came to the treatment of his regular crews.
Spalding was here. She had seen him behind the windows of his old house, just fleetingly. Out of cowardice she had fooled herself into thinking it was the figure of some domestic helper there. She had felt his presence and could feel it still. He could not hurt her, she did not think. The attempt to crush the life out of her on the road in Northumberland had been the first and last he had been able to make. He could not hurt her because all his power was consumed at present by his efforts to lure back his boat. He was subduing and bewildering Martin and his father. He was somehow blocking the vessel’s bristling array of instruments. He was shifting, by some demonic sorcery, seventy tons of wood and steel with some urgency through the silent ocean. But when he got aboard the Dark Echo, with Magnus and Martin in thrall to him, she felt that he would be powerful again. He would flex the insectile muscles Jane had spoken of with such distaste. And then, at his leisure, she supposed that he would take delight and relish in dealing finally with her.
She walked the short distance from the museum to the Hesketh Arms. She sat at a table and used her mobile phone to get the number for the police at Southport from directory enquiries. She asked if there was an officer designated to handle cold crimes and closed her eyes and prayed that there was.
‘How cold?’ said a jocular voice.
‘Eighty years.’
There was a pause. ‘Goodness, that is chilly. That’s not so much felony, madam, as history.’
‘It’s murder, is what it is,’ Suzanne said. Her tone must have conveyed some of the seriousness and anger she was feeling.
‘Wait a moment,’ the voice said. ‘I’ll patch you through to Mr Hodge.’
She had been hoping for a Wright or a Rimmer or a Halsall. She knew the names from her genealogy work on the northern comic. She had said a short prayer to herself in the hope of a really local man to listen to what she had to say. Hodge was about as good as she could have wished for, though. And now she silently thanked God for that. There were Hodges from around here in the Domesday Book. They had cultivated the land at Hundred End and Ormskirk a thousand years ago. The word itself was the Viking word for farmer. It helped to know the land, Suzanne thought, if you were going to be excavating it. Her appointment with Mr Hodge of the Southport Division of the Merseyside Cold Crimes Squad was made for nine thirty the following morning.
She went to the library and used her laptop in the reference section. The Paddy McAloon ballad ‘When Love Breaks Down’ had entered the chart in September of 1985. That was when it was current, when it was getting its airplay, when it would likely enter whatever passed for the conscious mind of Harry Spalding. She went over and asked to see the microfiche files. It seemed a remote time, 1985, when she saw the page layouts and the photographs. She found what she was looking for in an issue of the Southport Visitor from October of that year.
Two friends had disappeared fishing off Formby Point. They were assumed drowned, but their bodies had not washed up. They were both seventeen. They had been at school together. Their fishing hobby had progressed from freshwater brooks and ponds and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to the bigger catches to be had sea fishing from the end of Southport Pier. This was only the second time their parents had permitted them to fish by night from a boat. The weather had been calm. The forecast had been clear. And they and their dinghy had vanished. The families had provided the paper with portrait shots. Fashionable lads, in their quiffs and overcoats, they looked in these photographs a little like rock stars of the period themselves. They did not look like Paddy McAloon. They had that look of the period more defined by bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, or The Smiths. Suzanne did not think they had drowned. But she thought she knew what had been playing on their radio or tape machine when the prow of the Dark Echo loomed in the night over their little craft.
‘How did the picture get torn?’ Hodge asked. He was scrutinising Jane’s aerial photograph, recovered from the strongbox left at the museum. He was doing so in bifocals, seated at his desk, the picture tilted into the bright sunshine coming in through his window. Suzanne guessed he was in his mid-fifties. He was unremarkable-looking. His hair was turning from blond to grey and was close-cropped and thick. There were lines around his blue eyes. His worsted suit seemed a bit warm for June and, like his plaid flannel shirt, looked straight off a rack at Marks & Spencer. His rank had been Detective Inspector at the time of his retirement. Perhaps he was bored in retirement. Perhaps his pension had not stretched as far as it needed to. It could just be that he needed something to keep him from the temptation of the lounge bar of his local pub. But he did not look like a drinker. He looked alert and competent and, though he was polite, seemed rather distrustful. She could hardly blame him, in the circumstances, for that.
Suzanne had given Mr Hodge some of the background. She had told him about the missing girls. She had told him about Jane’s suspicion of Harry Spalding. She had told him about the Dublin encounter between Spalding and Jane and how the picture came to be taken. Now she told him about the meeting in Liverpool between Jane and DCI Bell.
Hodge nodded, without comment. He had not commented so far on anything that Suzanne had said. He had restricted himself to a couple of questions just to establish chronology and fact. Now, he did comment.
‘I remember my granddad telling me something about these disappearances.’
‘Was he a police officer?’
‘No. He wasn’t. He was head barman at the Palace Hotel. He knew the chambermaid.’ Hodge put the separate pieces of Jane’s photograph down on his desk. ‘He knew Helen Sykes and her circle. Miss Sykes was a lavish tipper. My grandfather remembered that. Could I get you some tea or coffee, miss? Have you been offered anything?’
‘Please, call me Suzanne. Coffee would be great.’ And a cigarette would be even greater. But that comfort would have to be forgone.
‘I have to go to our computer room for a few minutes,’ Hodge said. He closed the notebook he had been filling during Suzanne’s monologue and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. ‘You are welcome to drink your coffee in our canteen. Or I can have it brought to you in the yard to the rear of the station where you are welcome to smoke.’
‘The yard, please,’ she said.
Hodge smiled at her. The smile seemed warm enough but the eyes above it stayed alert. Suzanne did not think he was doing this to prevent himself from downing too much beer or to pay off stubborn credit card bills. They had brought him back only because he was so bloody good at it.
It was thirty-five minutes before he returned to his office and he did so with a sheaf of documents under his arm. ‘Much easier, now everything is computerised,’ he said. She nodded. Without computers, her own job would be near impossible. Not
that she really had a job any more. With a shock, she realised that the struggle to deliver Martin from the spectre of Harry Spalding had taken over her entire life.
He sat down and gestured for her to sit, then he lowered the open blind so that the light was not dazzling through his window. It was still bright in his office through the chinks of the blind. He tapped his fingers in a tattoo on his desk and sucked his teeth. Then he sifted amid the pile of printouts his computer time had delivered him. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Suzanne?’
‘No.’
There was a silence.
‘Do you?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said. He slid a black and white picture of a woman seated at a café table across the desk. Suzanne looked at it and coloured. It was like seeing a snapshot she hadn’t known existed of herself.
‘Surveillance picture. Taken by the Special Branch on Lord Street in 1925. Miss Boyte was a known associate in Dublin of a bomb-maker by the name of Devlin. It isn’t surprising that Bell gave her short shrift. He wasn’t an Orangeman, either, by the way. He was a Freemason. That’s probably neither here nor there. Lots of police officers were and are Freemasons. What is more significant is that his brother was killed in Tipperary serving with the Black and Tans. Corporal David Bell was blown to pieces in a Republican ambush.’
Suzanne didn’t say anything.
‘Not everyone was so enamoured of Michael Collins as Jane Boyte so clearly was.’
‘So she was kept under supervision.’