by F. G. Cottam
‘There’s quite a comprehensive file on her. She was pulled in from time to time. Did you know that she gave birth to a daughter?’
‘I suspected it. She wrote something in her journal about children and one’s feelings towards them. It struck me at the time as something only a mother would have written, an insight only a mother would have had. Is her daughter’s married name Daunt?’
‘Was. It was. Alice Emmeline Daunt. She died three years ago. She was eighty-four.’
Suzanne swallowed. ‘And she was born in 1921. She was the daughter of Jane Boyte, and her father was Michael Collins.’
‘Do you have a more sensible pair of shoes than the ones you’re wearing, Suzanne?’
‘Why?’
‘Because even in clement weather, digging is a very dirty business.’
‘You’re going to start digging today?’
‘Not personally. But I’ll have a team there by this afternoon. SOCOs, forensics, a mechanical digger, men with spades. You, if you so wish.’
‘You can move that fast?’
‘Spalding was either very unsavoury or incredibly accident-prone where propriety was concerned. That picture Jane Boyte took is highly suspicious. I don’t believe very much in coincidence. And if those women are there, I think they’ve waited long enough to be laid decently to rest. Don’t you?’
Suzanne turned the two pieces of the picture around, put them together and looked at the image there, at the grainy reality of turf torn and earth disturbed. ‘What’s particularly suspicious about it, Detective Inspector?’
‘The timing. The fact that it is there at all. Playboys like Spalding didn’t dig holes big enough to be seen from the air for fun or as a hobby. Unless he was nostalgic for the war and was digging himself a trench.’
‘What about the occupants of the house? Won’t the people living there object?’
‘There aren’t any people living there,’ Hodge said. ‘The house is Grade II listed and empty. It’s never really been successfully occupied. People don’t feel comfortable there. They say it is haunted.’
Suzanne stood. She was momentarily at a loss. ‘What should I do now?’
‘We’re close to Lord Street. You could do some window-shopping and then grab an early lunch. Then you should go back to your hotel and change out of that smart outfit you so courteously assembled for our appointment. Put on some practical clothes. Meet me at the site at two o’clock. Bring something to wear on your head. The sun is hot in June. And bring something to drink. We are in for a long day.’
Suzanne left the police station and walked along Lord Street. She felt that in a few days she had come to know Southport very well. The past kept breaking through into the present, but in a peculiar way it was that kind of place and the intrusion was only fitting. Once, she thought she glimpsed Jane Boyte staring at her from inside a chic department store. But when she looked again, it was just her own reflection, with her hair groomed, in the grey pencil skirt and tailored black jacket she had worn for her appointment with the old policeman.
She stopped at the Costa coffee shop. It was eleven o’clock, a busy coffee time, and there was a queue. She saw again the street sign in the Costa montage that reminded her of the home she shared in Lambeth with Martin Stannard. She wondered if she had seen Martin for the last time. She remembered their last awkward night together. She had been remote from him, cold with disapproval of the intended voyage. That disapproval had been fully vindicated. But she regretted her coldness deeply now. The invitation to share one another had been offered by neither of them. She hoped now with all her ardent heart to be given the chance to compensate for that.
She took her coffee to one of the tables on the pavement outside. Through the line of old trees on the kerb, she could see the pale splendour of the cenotaph. It was magnificent from here in its scale and simplicity, the seamless blocks of Portland stone shaped in two great, white edifices flanking a tall obelisk. She thought of Spalding standing in linen, switching his cane and paying mock homage to the dead while he teased Jane Boyte on the flagstones behind him. There was no one there now. The flagstones shifted in patterns of light and shade wrought by the canopy of trees and the sun through their summer leaves. Suzanne sighed and sipped coffee and shifted her attention to her own side of Lord Street. It was very crowded and bright with people in their summer attire. She realised that she was looking for Alice Daunt. But she knew she had seen the last of Alice, as she knew she had seen the last of her father, too.
There were five bodies, when they had done their digging. The remains were skeletal. It was dusk by the time they were done and the bones were bleached white by the big searchlights fighting the encroaching night and illuminating the scene. They were positioned sideways on in the attitude of jackknifing divers, the dead women, with their spines at the apex and their hands touching the feet of their neighbour. The significance of this human geometry was plain to see. The remains formed a gruesome pattern. It was the five-sided star, the pentagram. The killing had been a ritual. The purpose had been sacrificial. Suzanne wondered how the women had died.
‘Not well,’ Hodge told her. He looked a full decade older than he had in the bright sunshine of his office that morning. He was sipping coffee poured from a steel flask. ‘We won’t know the specifics until forensics have a proper look and we won’t get the full picture until the pathologist’s report. But judging from the abrasions plain on their neck bones, I would say that the women had their throats cut. My guess is that it was done with a saw-edged weapon, perhaps a German infantry bayonet Spalding kept as a memento from the war. My belief is that they bled to death where they lay and were arranged like this afterwards. But I’ve got no context for this kind of killing, to be honest with you. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire professional life. And I hope to God I never do again.’
The women had been buried deep. The pentagram was twelve feet below the surface. It was why the police digging had taken so long. The circular pit they had gouged from the earth had needed to be shored up by poles and scaffolding planks banked behind the poles on their edges. Even with this revetting, the soil tried to bulge and break through. It was unstable, like a living organism trying to conceal itself. Little avalanches trickled through breaches and cracks in the planks down to the pit.
‘It was dug by hand, by shovel and pick, we can tell that much,’ Hodge said. ‘If it was dug by one man alone, then he had colossal strength. Carrying the women here would have been no burden to him. A man possessed of that kind of strength could have carried these poor wretches here two at a time.’
From the centre of the star formed by the dead women, they had retrieved a brass cylinder about three and a half feet long. It had been buried bound in oilcloth. The oilcloth had been very carefully removed. The cylinder was barely tarnished by its time under the earth. Suzanne had at first assumed it was a telescope. But its sides were parallel and it was not sectioned and it had a cap, on close inspection, that screwed on to protect and secure whatever it contained.
Everyone at the scene crowded round when the cap was unscrewed and the contents of the tube revealed. Suzanne watched in some anxiety. The whole operation was conducted with incredible delicacy but she was concerned anyway because by now she knew what the object was and she was afraid that it would simply crumble to nothing in the exposure to the white, halogen-lit air. The thought terrified her. This was sea air, harsh with ozone and salt. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes and murmured a prayer. But when she opened her eyes again what emerged, emerged intact.
She could imagine no more unprepossessing an object. It looked like a piece of broom handle. Except that it was almost petrified with age and, in the brilliance of the lights, you could see the faint indentations where the twine or rawhide of its grip had once been tightly wound.
‘Some kind of staff,’ Hodge said.
‘Not a staff, Detective Inspector. A shaft,’ Suzanne said.
He turned to her. The suspi
cion and hostility had gone from his gaze during the course of the afternoon and evening. Suzanne suspected she had vindicated herself. She could not really imagine any vindication more terrible and sad.
‘Call me Bernard,’ Hodge said. He held out his hand. She realised that he had held off from this gesture from their outset until this moment. She shook hands with him.
‘What will happen now?’
‘There are all sorts of protocols. Not least, the American Embassy will have to be notified. We won’t have a forensic report for a while and it might be useless when we get it, unless we exhume Spalding and recover DNA. But the circumstantial evidence is too compelling to ignore.’
‘It always was.’
‘Yes, Suzanne. Jane Boyte was quite right in that. It always was.’
And anyway, Suzanne thought, Spalding’s casket in his cemetery in New York lies empty. Because Harry Spalding never died.
‘You know what that object is, don’t you, Suzanne? That modest little bit of wood uncovered just now.’
‘What do you think it is?’
‘I’m a stranger to demonic ritual. At least, I was until today,’ Hodge said. He sipped coffee from his steel cup. He was speaking softly, so that his voice would not carry beyond his audience of one. ‘I’d say it is a holy relic. And it was the subject here of an awful desecration. But that’s just an old copper’s intuition. It doesn’t look much.’
‘It’s priceless,’ Suzanne said.
‘It’s just a stick to me.’
‘I know a Jesuit priest who would be very relieved to get it back on behalf of the Church from which it was looted.’
‘Then he’d best give me a call. On my mobile number.’
‘It isn’t evidence?’
‘It isn’t the murder weapon, if that’s what you mean. I’d be as keen as anyone to see as much of what was done here undone as can be. My keeping that piece of wood won’t bring back the women killed here. Have your priest give me a call.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘Good ones on the brass of the case. And I think we both know whose they are. We don’t need that stick.’
‘Won’t people see it’s missing?’
‘It won’t be missing. I’ll replace it myself with one similar from the dead wood in the park over the way.’ He was almost whispering. ‘Materially, it doesn’t matter to this investigation. Whatever properties you think it possesses, it isn’t bringing those poor lasses back.’
Suzanne nodded. He was right about that. ‘If you release it into my charge, I’ll take it to the priest myself, Bernard,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘At some stage, you are going to need to make a statement. I’m going to trust you to come back and see me over the next few days to do that.’
She nodded again.
‘Call yourself a taxi. I’ll meet you outside the front in five minutes. Goodbye, Suzanne. And God go with you.’
She risked her first real look at Spalding’s house. The windows stared back blackly at her. She was fearful of the face that might be gazing out from behind the glass. But he wasn’t there. The house was empty. She had no sense of him at all. He was elsewhere, in one of his other places. He was deliberately elusive, as Jane had remarked of him. And Harry Spalding must have known many places on the travels of his long and awful life, the affliction of him spreading like disease.
She drove all night to get to Northumberland, having taken a taxi from Southport to Liverpool Airport to hire a car. She had to go south to go north-east. But she thought it was worth it as she pulled up at 5 a.m. outside Delaunay’s Gothic keep and saw him waiting there for her amid a deputation of grim and eminent-looking Catholic clergy. She wondered for how long they had maintained their vigil. And she saw that it did not matter to them in their relief and joy when she took the holy relic from its bed of screwed-up newspaper pages in the boot of her rental car.
She had a mind to turn round immediately and press on. But Delaunay leaned into the open driver’s window and the look of concern on his face persuaded her that this was foolish. The window was open because she had nearly nodded off at the wheel once already. She had been awake too long. She had never in her life needed greater alertness, sharper clarity of thought and instinct for danger. She had time. She had done the calculation. At ten to twelve knots, it would be another couple of days before the Dark Echo reached its destination. At Delaunay’s invitation, at his insistence, she ate a bowl of soup and slept for two oblivious hours in their guest quarters before setting out again.
Delaunay was waiting for her at the door.
‘Re-consecrate what I gave you, Monsignor.’
‘It’s done,’ he said, simply.
She drove to Dover in five hours, crashing every speed camera on the route. She prayed she would not be stopped for speeding and she wasn’t. Others were praying on her behalf, she knew. And she thought she might need every intercession made for her, every flicker of flaming brightness from every candle lit, if she was going to succeed. The weather was good and the traffic, as far as the London orbital at least, was light. She was forced to slow down in Kent. But she made the 11 a.m. ferry with five minutes to spare. And this time she did not need to slow for directions. She knew where she was going. She did not turn on the radio, of course. But one thing was the same. The sky grew sullen and bruised and, still a dozen miles from her destination, the rain began to steeple down from the clouds.
She drove over Duval’s fields to his barn along the track beside his ditch, hoping that the rain was a recent thing and that her wheels would not be claimed by a quagmire of French mud. It was muddy, but the ground had been cindered. She could hear the crunch and squeal of the cinders wedging in the tread of her tyres. The barn grew in her windscreen from a monument incongruous and remote to one ever closer and more disturbing. She felt the tiny hairs prick on the backs of her hands with the sheer, out-of-kilter strangeness of it. All her instinct, just as on the first occasion, was to flee this odd and morbid place. But she could not.
She slammed on her brakes with a final, cindery crunch and sat in the silence before her destination. Rain pattered on the car roof. The stopped engine ticked, cooling. And she saw that the high door of the barn was slightly ajar. It opened on a void of pure blackness. And as she got out of the car she felt her legs buckle and her resolve weaken, engulfed by the pure terror flooding through her. She watched the rain dance on summer puddles. She felt drops of it plaster her hair to her head. And she was undone. And she thought then of Martin with his arm cleaved open in an underground carriage and she battled with her quavering will and she gathered her strength.
She took the spade she had borrowed from the seminary out of the car boot. She walked into the barn and heard a collusive whisper from the spectral army of coats that hung, shivering, under a draught that wasn’t there, over on the far wall. She heard a distinct and undeniable whistling. The tune was ‘Camptown Races’. And it was distorted and faint with some last, scornful vestige of remembered humanity. There was a bark of laughter, a short explosion of mirth. And there was accordion music, heard as if through a dim green sea, ‘Roses of Picardy’, the notes distorted, drowning on the air.
‘Fuck this,’ Suzanne said. ‘Fuck you all, you crew of fucking butchers. And fuck you in particular, Harry Spalding.’ And she gathered the spade in the grip of both hands and began to shovel away the beets at the base of the high pyramid of them. And all around her, they tumbled and they fell. Rolling down from the pinnacle, they ricocheted and bounced and ran. And she heard what she thought sounded like explosive gunfire, twice, in her ears and ignored it, teeth clenched with such ferocious resolve that she brought forth the blood from her own gums and swallowed it bitterly down.
She booted away beets from the centre of the flattened pyramid and revealed the earth and began to dig. And only a foot beneath the surface, she encountered bone. It was a skull. It was long with bleak-shaped eye sockets and a narrow jaw and she knew it had been the head of a goat. An
d what she was looking for had been used, she thought, to kill the goat, skewering the brain of this animal sacrifice in some baleful ceremony from which the other remnants, revealing themselves now, included a burned Bible and a votive candle, a smashed statue of the Virgin and a chamber pot, amid the old encrusted filth of which had been placed a set of rosary beads. Shit had been daubed on the crucifix. Blasphemy was a puerile art. But it was the blade embedded in the skull of the goat, only, that concerned her. It was the tip of the ancient spear to which she had already recovered the shaft.
She thought she heard another noise outside. She disregarded it. It would wait. Outside would wait. There was business here. There was no more important business in the world. Knowing what it was, she felt reluctance to touch the spear tip with her hands. This was not squeamishness. Suzanne was not a squeamish woman. This was awe. She had been told the significance, symbolic and actual, too, of the glimmering, ancient shard of hammered and honed iron she retrieved from inside the skull of the goat and held between her own soiled fingertips. On her knees, she kissed the metal, as Delaunay had told her to. As Delaunay had told her to, she crossed herself with the metal in the grip of her right hand.
The assault of corruption hit her then. From the crates heaped high over against the wall of the barn, she could hear the fizz and burst of decay and smell the blister of erupting, rotten fruit. All around where she knelt, the beets steamed and flattened with decomposition, gaseous, foul, an affront to nature exposed finally to nature’s immutable laws. Suzanne coughed and retched and rose to her feet and looked over at the ragged army of Jericho Crew greatcoats and saw that they were becoming thin and threadbare, pale shrouds descending to dust as they should have done decades ago. She gave out a grunt of satisfaction. It was not triumph, though. Some sly instinct told her that pride in such a situation would be a dangerous, perhaps even deadly indulgence. Cradling what she had recovered, she made for the door.
Duval, the farmer who owned the land, was there outside, with his shotgun over his arm. He was waiting for her. Trespass on his domain was not a thing that went unnoticed. She knew that from her last visit here. But this time, the gun was not broken. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat and his mouth was set under the bristles of his moustache. Rain dripped, too, from the twin barrels of the gun. And smoke drifted lazily upward from them. There was a van, Suzanne saw, beside her car. And she thought with a shock that she recognised the livery. She approached the van. She saw the legend, Martens & Degrue, etched on the black body of the van in gold. She walked around to the front of the vehicle. There were two men inside. They wore pale-brown overalls. The windscreen of the van was punched with twin holes in front of where they sat. And they were dead. Each wore the fatal blossom of a shotgun blast, florid across his chest.