Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  Suzanne dragged her eyes away. She turned round. She saw only the gloom of the cabin. One of the pictures fell from the wall with a decayed thump when it hit the floor.

  The mirror seemed to blink, bright and sudden like a camera flash. She looked back into it. She did not possess the will to look away. The scene had changed. Spalding was in evening wear. The cabin was bright under a glittering chandelier. A woman Suzanne thought might be Helen Sykes reclined with a drink on a leather sofa. Yes, it was Helen Sykes. Suzanne recognised the jewellery that had glittered in the soil under the hard lights of the police excavation, adorning Helen’s remains.

  Suzanne groaned. Helen faced the mirror in an ivory satin gown. She was blonde and quite stunningly beautiful. No wonder Vera Chadwick had felt insecure, with friends like Jane and Helen around. Her long legs were crossed at the knee. She was laughing at something Spalding was saying, standing to her rear, busying himself with a cocktail shaker. She seemed relaxed and amused, having a good time.

  And then he turned and made a remark. And Helen paled and stiffened as though petrified at whatever it was he had said. And in two strides he crossed to her and bent and drew a knife smoothly across her bare throat and just as swiftly recoiled again. He had moved with the speed of a striking snake. Helen’s drink slipped from her fingers. There was a pause when nothing else happened. And then blood engulfed her dress in a purple tide and she brought her hands hopelessly to her throat and her feet thrummed on the cabin floor.

  Spalding strolled around to the front of the sofa. He moved more deliberately now. He had taken off his coat. There was a cocktail glass in his hand. There was a towel over his shoulder. He dropped it to the floor and used his foot to move it, mopping the blood. Helen’s legs jerked behind him in spasm. Spalding mopped with the towel under his shoe. He was calmly dealing with the aftermath of the murder before the life had fully drained from his victim. He sipped almost absently from his cocktail glass as he dealt with the mess.

  The mirror went dark. It was reflecting the present again, the dank gloom of what lay behind Suzanne. She lowered her eyes and shivered. She heard the wet stab of a needle into a cylinder of corrupt wax and the silence groaned into sound. There was the crump of artillery fire and the screams and imploring of men. There was a snatch of marching song. There was the hard stride of a jazz piano and low conversation and wind thrumming against canvas and some sonorous recitation of verse and more screams, female this time. There was the judder of a springboard and the spinning ball of a roulette wheel and a pistol hammer being cocked and high, bitter laughter. She heard more moans, anguished, infant. Water lapped idly as though against tiled sides of a pool in sunlight. Cloth tore raggedly and beads unravelled from their string and danced on a floor of stone, and there was the saw of a knife though something yielding and wet. Ice tinkled in a glass and matches struck and flared and there was the low murmur of seductive conversation. She was hearing the soundtrack of Spalding’s long and destructive life and bleak music it made, she thought, but it played with a churning glee.

  ‘What a time I’ve had,’ his voice whispered to her. ‘What a time, Jane!’

  And now it’s over, she thought, clutching her bag under her arm, fingering the copper talisman of her lucky penny deep in her pocket. You’re human again. You don’t know it yet, but you are. And you can die like anyone else. And by God, you will.

  She walked out, towards the door of Martin’s cabin. His door was unlocked. She tested the handle and it moved freely. She opened the door a chink. Everything inside was darkness and silence. There was a smell of decomposition that was sour and sweet at the same time. She did not think it was human decomposition, though. It was not the smell of a rotting corpse. It smelled like food, as though rations had been hoarded here and then allowed to go bad. She entered the room and felt her way about it in darkness. She became aware of the shape of a sleeping figure in a chair. There was another in the bunk. She could tell from the silvery outline of his head that this was Magnus. The figure in the chair stirred. And Martin awoke and saw her with eyes that must have grown entirely accustomed in there to the prevailing absence of light.

  ‘Suzanne?’ His voice was a whisper, hoarse, incredulous and fearful.

  She rushed to him and gathered him in her arms.

  ‘How did you get aboard?’

  ‘We’re aground.’

  ‘You’ve got to get away. Spalding is coming. You have to get away, Suzanne. You should not have come aboard. He’s real and alive and he’s coming.’ Martin had stood. He was half pulling and half dragging her out of the cabin towards the companionway. She stopped and shook off his grip. She slapped him as hard as she could, realising as the heel of her palm hit his jaw that he was bearded. Something slithered against her leg.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A rat,’ Martin said, dully.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Rats aren’t the half of it. He’s coming, Suzanne.’

  ‘I got the log you sent Delaunay, Martin. I read it. I found you. I came here deliberately and I won’t leave without you.’

  ‘He can’t get you, too. Oh, God, he can’t.’

  She slapped him again. She was very frightened and she loved him very much, but there were times when he was too noble for his own good. She was not running away. Not by herself, she wasn’t. They were all getting out of this. ‘What’s wrong with your father?’

  Magnus Stannard was a light sleeper, she knew. He had not stirred.

  ‘Has he had a stroke?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s shock. He has stirred, sort of, once. But he lapsed back again, deeper, afterwards. I’ve been feeding him, chewing his food. He throws a lot of it up.’ He looked with concern and tenderness at his unconscious father.

  ‘Can we get any light in here?’

  He gripped her shoulders. ‘There’s no time. Spalding is coming.’

  ‘Matches, candles – think, Martin. I want him to come. I want him to see the light burning all over the boat and come here in a rush. His haste will be our advantage.’

  Martin smiled. She thought that he looked beaten. She hoped for all their sakes he wasn’t. ‘Not much of an advantage,’ he said. He found candles and lit one. Suzanne’s eyes, too, had by now become accustomed to the cabin gloom. The candlelight seemed very bright, dispelling it. She looked at Magnus, who looked grey-complexioned under his grey hair. But his breathing did not sound laboured in his sleeping retreat from the world. She saw a framed picture on the wall. She took in its detail. She knew it from Martin’s description, a black and white picture of the two of them taken at some garden party. Magnus had had it done as a surprise. Except that now it showed Jane Boyte sharing a picnic on what Suzanne thought looked like College Green in Dublin with Michael Collins.

  Martin had his head in his hands.

  ‘Marty?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She thought he looked very handsome in his beard. ‘Do you remember what I said to you? When I was leaving for my trip to Dublin that wasn’t to Dublin at all?’

  ‘Yes. You said there is no room in your life for ghosts.’

  ‘It wasn’t true when I said it. It was more in the way of a wish than a fact. I’d like, more than anything, to make it true.’

  ‘Then wish it harder.’

  But Suzanne knew that wishing would never be enough.

  ‘He’s coming,’ Martin said.

  ‘Can you carry your father?’

  ‘He’s my dad. Of course I can.’

  ‘Then put him over your shoulder and follow me. We’re leaving.’

  Martin had to knot a rope around his father’s chest and lower him down from the deck to the sand where Suzanne waited. As he tied the knot and looped the rope through a block and tackle in the rigging, she looked to see if there was any thinning of the fog around the boat. But there was not. It was dense, enveloping.

  Their feet were wet, sloshing around the hull. The tide was coming in to bear the Dark Echo away. Spal
ding would be here soon, on his way to board her. Her master would want to set her course and take her helm when she floated off the sand. Martin’s tread was heavy under the burden of his father. He was strong, but his ordeal had weakened him. She hoped with all her heart he had some fight still left to offer.

  Suzanne heard something large slither or scuttle, crablike, through the folds of mist. Martin must have heard it, too, because he stopped.

  ‘Jane!’ a voice said.

  Martin put his father down carefully on a dry bar of sand amid the swelling rivulets of incoming tide. The scuttling sound clattered through the mist again.

  ‘Oh, it’s good to see you, Jane! You’ve no idea of the fun we’re going to have.’ Spalding’s voice rattled and brayed through the foggy air. Martin Stannard took off his shirt and dropped it on the sand and raised his fists. Suzanne saw with a sinking heart that the old knife wound on his arm had opened up again. It was deep and suppurating. The flesh was raw and the bruising around it a livid yellow. A blow exploded from the fog and caught him flush on the jaw. Martin staggered, but he did not go down. His adversary scuttled, on the edge of sight, poised for another assault.

  ‘We’ll conclude that tender business begun at the Shelbourne, Jane. I can promise you I’ve matured since then. We’ll linger over our embraces. You’ll enjoy me. I’ll enjoy you. I know now how to take my time. I know how to pleasure a woman.’

  A kick, no more than a vicious blur of a blow, followed the punch, doubling Martin up with its force. He groaned and gathered himself and resumed his guard.

  ‘Necessary chastisement,’ the voice said. ‘You’ve been intolerably insubordinate.’

  ‘Come and chastise me, then.’

  ‘You can’t beat me,’ Spalding crooned from somewhere close.

  ‘You’re old,’ Martin said. ‘It’s a young man’s game.’ He spat a tooth on to the sand.

  Suzanne could see the hatred and contempt in him, giving him strength, feeding him endurance. He had suffered aboard the boat. She thought that his arm looked gangrenous. She could have wept for him. She could have wept for all three of them in the fearful proximity of Harry Spalding. But she needed to wait. She was obliged to bide her time.

  A punch pistoned out of mist and hit Martin squarely in the face and broke his nose with a sharp snap of bone. And he staggered and reeled. And Suzanne saw a hulking, agile shape come on to him. But he did not go down. And somehow, Martin slipped the follow-up blow. And in the blur of fog she heard him land the first measured and precise punches of his own. They landed solidly in a hard and rapid cluster. Suzanne could hear their impact more than see them hit home. Spalding was still just an indistinct, dangerous, imposing shape. But Martin could hit, Suzanne knew. She’d seen how destructively he could fight up close in the bright glare of a tube carriage. Through the dark unseeing air, she heard Martin’s fists beat a spiteful tattoo of retaliation. And she was sure Spalding could not now avoid becoming human again. She had done what was needed to make him so.

  Spalding countered then with a huge blow of his own and Martin staggered under its impact back out of the mist. The mist was thinning, shrinking. He took another clubbing punch and this time, he did go down, sinking to his knees on the swift-flooding sand. He was hurt, stunned. And he was damaged. The side of his face looked punctured like a balloon, to Suzanne, his handsome features spoiled, his cheekbone smashed. Spalding stole into sight, the first of him a rotting canvas boat shoe under the flapping hem of ragged whites, as he tipped Martin with a toe at the temple and then pressed his head down hard into the ooze of the tide. Martin’s head and shoulder sank in a drowning fizz of bubbles and blood. Scum on the water lapped at his floating hair. Suzanne watched and thought that it did not matter. It did not matter to her that he had lost the fight. He had possessed the strength to accomplish this. He had antagonised Harry Spalding into her sight. That was Martin’s victory. That was all that signified for any of them, now.

  Suzanne took Jane Boyte’s pistol out of her bag. She took the pistol she had retrieved from the museum strongbox and that Delaunay had devoutly blessed. She flicked off the safety catch and she raised and steadied and aimed the weapon, entirely mindful of Boland’s considered advice about shooting people. And Harry Spalding turned and grinned at her, because he did not know. She had time to see that the decades of bloodlust had turned his eyes from the bright blue Jane had described to a dark crimson, and that the teeth in his grinning skull were almost black. And then she emptied the full eight-bullet magazine into his body.

  She dropped the pistol on to the sand. She pulled Martin from under the tide. When his eyes opened, alertness had returned to them. In the aftermath of the shots, the fog began more rapidly to clear. But no corpse was revealed to them on the shore. There were just rags and bones there when they looked, the bones mired and sinking and the rags washing away in flurries on urgent water.

  ‘Pick up your father, Martin,’ Suzanne said. ‘We’re going home.’

  Martin pawed at his face where the cheekbone was depressed. There was raw agony in his expression. He was trying to control himself, to accommodate the pain. But he was very badly hurt. When he spoke, his voice was shaky and the words slurred with shock. ‘My dad knew that Spalding kept coming back to the boat.’

  ‘Hush.’

  ‘He half came round last night, told me as much.’

  ‘Hush, Martin.’

  ‘He hoped Spalding might return once more. He thought he would be charming, like Jay Gatsby.’

  ‘It’s hurting you to talk.’

  ‘I need to tell you this.’

  She nodded. Martin’s voice was an urgent slur in the damage done to him.

  ‘My dad thought Spalding might share the secret with him of communicating with the dead. He never reconciled himself. Not to the loss of his wife. Not to the loss of his daughter. He never gave up on that hope.’

  ‘It’s overrated,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Communicating with the dead.’

  Martin looked at her. ‘He thought you were Jane Boyte.’

  ‘I’ve got to know Jane.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Brave and beautiful.’

  ‘Sounds like someone I know.’ He smiled. He looked terrible. His jaw was swollen and his cheekbone was fractured. He was missing a tooth and his broken nose was dripping blood down from his chin on to his chest. He was slurring his words like a drunk.

  ‘How is your arm?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Getting better already.’

  Suzanne saw a burnished flicker on the water beneath her and wondered if the sun was coming up. But when she turned, she saw that the light was coming from the wrong direction for the dawn. And it was not the sun at all. It was still much too early for the sun. The candles they had lit to lure her master had caught aboard the boat. And the paraffin she had smelled must have caught from the candle flames. And the Dark Echo was ablaze now, a listing pyre drifting off on the tug of the tide, orange and burning fiercely and finally, fittingly she thought, doomed.

  No one would mourn her. But her belated fate was one that others should have witnessed and enjoyed. It was a pity they could not. A strong part of Suzanne wished that Frank Hadley and Jack Peitersen and Patrick Boyte and Bernard Hodge and Monsignor Delaunay could be watching this. And maybe, too, the brave and taciturn farmer, Duval. And Captain Straub of the proud and bedraggled Andromeda. And Magnus Stannard, of course. Magnus was missing it, in his therapeutic slumber on the shore. There were others, people long dead, she thought might enjoy the spectacle. In being dead, without the strictures of the living, perhaps they were. Actually, she was sure they were. But she had given up on ghosts. And she sincerely hoped that ghosts had altogether given up on her.

  Suzanne crossed the distance between them to Martin, bloodied and filthy as he was, and she embraced him. ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘Thank God you do,’ he said.

  ‘Pick your father up a
nd carry him,’ she said. ‘Gather your dad gently, Marty. Gather him gently, now. We’re all of us going home.’

  Epilogue

  I almost lost the arm. It was touch and go for while, but the surgeon was skilful and persistent and he saved it. The physiotherapy was even more painful and boring than the first time I managed to hurt it. But the muscle recovered and the skin grafts took and eventually I healed. The arm would never punch with the speed and impact it had once possessed. But I hoped and prayed my punching days were over and could be forgotten.

  I thought my father’s recovery would be trickier. I had not known until we got aboard the boat how debilitated grief had made him. His spirit had been damaged and diminished even at the outset of the voyage. Retirement gave him the time to dwell, I think, on the people he had loved and cherished in his life and lost. His latest marriage had disintegrated. Chichester was only a superficial thing, a diversion that did not really divert him at all from the pain and solitude that he felt. He bet everything on the boat providing him not just with a challenge but with a new way of living. He bet everything. And, of course, he lost.

  I thought that a return to business, even a partial return, might be beneficial for him. Or I thought that he might take a more active role in a charity. He has always been a generous giver to the needy. He could have taken on a more structured role in representing one of these good causes. It would have been a positive thing to do. Virtue is its own reward, as the saying goes. But it did not work out like that, because he found a new vocation. He still Chichesters off on his libidinous trips to Bath, or Edinburgh, or even Chichester itself, from time to time. I’m pretty sure he does. His housekeeper finds the first-class rail travel tickets in his suits when she searches the pockets before they go to be cleaned and pressed. But this pursuit no longer has the importance in his life for him that it did.