Dark Echo (38 page)

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 snooping 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.

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.

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.