Dark Echo (15 page)

Who was the other bidder? Suzanne asked, as casually as she was able.

A Naples-based firm called Cardoza Associates, she was told. They, too, were unhappy about the circumstances of the auction. But it was David Preston’s opinion that the auction at Bullen and Clore had been won by the right party. Magnus Stannard, who was surely long overdue his knighthood, was a real English gentleman with suitably deep pockets and a properly generous regard for the custom of tipping. Martens and Degrue and Cardoza Associates could go to hell as far as David Preston was concerned. Hell was probably where they belonged.

But despite the bravado, Suzanne thought the whole experience had shaken David Preston. She left with the feeling that her conversation with him had been less indiscretion on his part than a sort of catharsis. Whatever threats had been barked at him down the telephone line from Brussels had taken their toll. When she left him, it was four thirty in the afternoon in his showroom and he was on his third quite large gin and tonic. And the alcohol inside him did not yet have the tremor in his drinking hand under control.

An internet search revealed nothing about Martens and
Degrue beyond what she had already assumed she would find. It was a fronting company, basically an alias for an enterprise that was publicity-shy about whatever business it was really up to.

‘I had more success with Cardoza Associates,’ she told me. ‘They bid at auctions all the time, all over the world. Mostly what they buy is religious art.’

‘It’s a fair hop from religious art to the wreck of a dubious boat,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Particularly when you consider the source of their funding. Everything Cardoza Associates successfully bid for is paid for by the Vatican Bank.’

‘So you went to France to find out about Martens and Degrue?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been listening properly. I told you, I went to France on the trail of Harry Spalding, to find out what I could about the Jericho Crew.’

‘A cold trail,’ I said.

Suzanne sipped from her drink and smiled. ‘You’ve no idea how cold,’ she said.

Spalding’s family had been in Rhode Island for generations. They had been among the original settlers of the colony. They were wealthy by the time of Harry’s birth. But they were very quiet and discreet. Just about the only club or organisation they belonged to, according to Suzanne’s research, was a debating society. Several prominent Rhode Island families belonged to this society. Its character seemed not just exclusive, but to have some sort of dynastic element to it. The builder of Harry’s boat, Josiah Peitersen, was among its members.

‘There were initiation rites,’ Suzanne said. ‘There were elaborate rituals. And even in the heyday of the clandestine gathering and the exclusive members’ club and the elite sorority in Eastern Seaboard America, which this was,
there was an incredible degree of secrecy surrounding this society.’

‘It sounds like a cult,’ I said. ‘What was it called?’

‘If it had a name, and I think it almost certainly did, it was kept a very great secret. When it was referred to, it was referred to only as The Membership.’

‘Does it still exist?’

She shook her head. ‘No. It was destroyed in the time of Prohibition, its premises torn down and gasoline poured over the wreckage to burn it where it lay. Bulldozers trundled in afterwards to eradicate all trace of it from the earth.’

‘So it was a drinking club.’

‘No, Martin, it was not. The Prohibition legislation was the flimsiest of pretexts for its destruction. There were G-men present. There were also two Jesuit priests. One of them was a powerful exorcist from the Diocese of New York. You said cult just now. I think occult would be truer to history. I think that Harry Spalding’s family were Satanists, practitioners of black magic going back perhaps to the time of the New England witch trials and the burnings. The report I read said nothing about sowing the ground with salt in the wake of the bulldozers. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.’

‘So Frank Hadley was right with his talk of witchcraft.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘There’s one good way to find out,’ I said. ‘We ask Peitersen. He’s the self-elected expert on the
Dark Echo
. We ask him what his great-grandfather was up to when he debated with the Spalding clan.’

If Suzanne’s smile had been unconvincing earlier, now it was sickly. And her face was as pale as bone. ‘We could ask him. But there would be no point. Because Jack Peitersen is not who he says he is. Jack Peitersen does not exist.’

I groaned. ‘You’d better tell me what you’ve learned about Peitersen.’

‘I’ll get to Peitersen,’ she said. ‘First, I have to tell you about the Jericho Crew.’

‘Can I take it Waltrow and Tench were members?’

‘To Harry Spalding, they would have been Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench. And they were in it, alright, Martin. They were in it to the bitter end.’

She had been anything but reassured by the visit to the boatyard at Lepe. She had been concerned on the way there about how I would react to setting foot once more on the
Dark Echo
. And when we arrived and were greeted, she had thought there was something entirely bogus about Peitersen. It was as though, she said, on the other side of the lobster pot and saltbox Yankee charm, there was nothing really there. His smile, she said, was like a sign saying ‘vacant’ in a brightly lit motel window. Despite my impression of how they got on, she had disliked him even more violently than I had. But she did not just dislike him on sight. She distrusted Peitersen, too.

In the aftermath of the Lepe trip, she felt an obligation to learn as much as she could about the mystery of the boat to which my father and myself seemed so determined to entrust our lives. Despite her detective skills, which were sharp and well practised, she said that she felt a certain hopelessness in doing so. She said it seemed it was unlikely to matter what she discovered. The scheme had already gained too much momentum for her to be able to arrest events now. The whole ill-advised, dangerous adventure had about it the pre-ordained nature of fate. She also had grave doubts about deceiving me. The Collins work was done and dusted. But I did not know that, did I? She was able to persuade herself with the reasoning that if she found nothing, I need never know about France and the deception. But if she did find something, it might help prevent my father and me sailing
into some horrible tragedy. There were all sorts of flaws and contradictions in her logic, Suzanne knew. But after her encounter at the Lepe yard with Peitersen, she felt that she had to act.

She learned about the war service of Waltrow and Tench first from their obituaries and then in more detail from American military records she was able to bring up on computer, using BBC access, still claiming she was looking for information to do with her Michael Collins programme research. Her pretext was the IRA’s purchase on the black market of surplus American rifles after the 1918 armistice. It was a trade that increased steadily throughout the Irish Civil War. Nobody questioned this supposed line of enquiry. It sounded plausible enough. Searches in the American military archive for Waltrow, Tench and Spalding brought up some details about the Jericho Crew and the tantalising information that almost ninety years after it had been compiled, the file describing in full their activities in France and Flanders was still classified.

‘I learned they had a base,’ she told me. ‘It wasn’t an official base, a barracks or anything like that. It was a barn belonging to a farm about five miles to the rear of the Allied trench system near the village of Béthune in northern France. The land is still agricultural. The original farm still exists. They would gather in this building. If any of them became detached from the main party on a mission, or were left behind or lost, that’s the spot they would head for as soon as they could. Water, tinned provisions, fuel and spare clothing, and even weapons and ammunition were kept there.’

‘I’m amazed the stuff wasn’t all lifted by Allied units passing the barn. Even if they’d had a guard on it, the rations in particular must have been a temptation. Soldiers in wartime are not noted for their honesty over that sort of thing.
Pilfering was rife on the Western Front, even among members of the same company, never mind the same battalion.’

‘I don’t think the Jericho Crew were the sort of people you stole from,’ she said. ‘Soldiers may not be terribly honest. But they are extremely superstitious.’

‘And you thought the barn might still be there?’

‘I thought there was a fair chance. This is rural France we’re talking about. Space is not at any great premium there, the way it is in England. There’s no urgent requirement for intensive farming. And farmers don’t knock any building down without a very good reason for doing so. They tend to be a conservative breed. They don’t seek out change for its own sake. I thought there was probably a fair chance the barn was still basically intact. And then I was able to identify it in an aerial photograph. I did that, like I did the preliminary research into Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench, without getting up from my chair in front of the computer at work.’

‘What did you find in the barn?’

‘I will get to that. First I should tell you about what it was the Jericho Crew did.’

I fetched us fresh drinks from the bar. I was tired after the trip from Antwerp. I was tired and grubby and the docking of the
Andromeda
in the grip of my hands that same morning seemed like a memory growing fond with distance already. Billy Paul’s adulterous pleading had been replaced through the bookshelf speakers behind the bar by Marvin Gaye, crooning plaintively about the good dying young. Sometimes the bad died young, too, I thought, fishing for change and examining my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I thought of my father’s photograph of the Jericho Crew, of the look of shared derangement in their lost, youthful faces. I shivered, though it was not cold in the pub. I paid for and picked up our drinks and returned to where Suzanne sat. And she started to explain matters to me.

The Canadians invented the trench raid. They had a vigour and an obstreperousness that probably came from the outdoor lives they lived at home. They were not the factory fodder of industrialised England, used to manning a lathe slavishly in a factory in Birmingham or Leeds for a twelve-hour shift six days a week. They were outdoorsmen and the stalemate of the line forced them into ways of finding physical action to alleviate the tedium. So they invented the trench raid, carried out at night, to boost their morale and satisfy their youthful appetite for killing the enemy.

The weapons used were improvised, medieval almost in their design and the crude viciousness of their intent. They had to be silent. So they were basically variations on the knife and the club and the knuckleduster. They used machetes, daggers, bowie knives. The garrotte was a firm favourite, too, in the art of noiseless killing, but it required a degree of skill that came only from experience in the field. And it took a lot of commitment to choke a man to death.

The raids were daring and successful. They raised morale and did physical damage, and they added greatly to the burden of fear and fatigue faced by the men occupying the enemy trenches. They made sleep a liability. They made relaxation foolhardy. They spread stress and rumour and panic. They were the cause of men shooting at their own sentries and scout patrols. Altogether, trench raids were a big success, so much so that they were taken up by the Aussies and the New Zealanders and the Jocks. Eventually, even the English cottoned on to what an effective and economical tactic they represented.

By the time the Americans entered into the war, the trench raid was an established part of life at the front. And the farm boys from Kentucky and the boys from the swamps of Louisiana took to it like pigs to gravy. One junior officer in particular showed a real thirst for this bloody, guerrilla style
of conflict. Interestingly, this fellow was not from the boonies. His name was Harry Spalding. He’d excelled both as a sportsman and a scholar at Yale. His people came from Rhode Island and he had been groomed for a banking career in New York. He was rich and clever and cultured, a lover of modern painting and poetry with a good command of the French and German languages. He had influential friends, or at least his father did. He had an easy charisma that made him a natural leader among the particular group of men chosen for the type of combat at which he proved to be so adept. And he was the bloodiest, most remorseless killer anyone on the staff of the American Third Army could remember ever having encountered.

One old colonel compared him to the Apache killers of the Indian Wars in which his own father had fought in the American West. But he came to believe that Harry Spalding was different from them, in the end. They had been skilled at killing. They were great hunters using their hunting prowess in the service of their own survival, faced with the threat of extinction. Spalding seemed to possess the same preternatural gift for tracking his prey. He had the same lethal savagery in combat. But it was not a matter of survival for him. The old colonel, who was forcibly retired on the basis of it, said in a report on the Jericho Crew that Spalding seemed to kill with a sort of glee. He was a man who revelled in killing. In a conflict where civilisation was at stake, the report concluded, to rely on such men for important results was more than a contradiction. It was an abject surrender to the standards and values espoused by our enemy, the Hun.

The Canucks invented the trench raid. The Americans refined it. And the Jericho Crew turned it from an art into a science. They did detailed surveillance work during their night patrols across no-man’s-land. They carried out assassinations. They snatched intelligence personnel and
interrogated them. They conducted acts of sabotage. They stole battle plans and brought back items of experimental ordnance for detailed examination. And they never lost a man.

‘Come on,’ I said, in the pub, as the bell tolled for last orders. ‘They never lost a man? You’re exaggerating, Suzy.’