Dark Echo

Ten

She was hungover the following morning, waiting for Alice Daunt at a pavement table outside the coffee shop. She had drunk too much wine the previous evening, seeking the numbness of drink because she felt lonely and frustrated with her lack of progress and fearful for Martin. She had a reasonable head for alcohol. But she was slightly built. There was only so much of her. And this morning, most of that felt full of last night’s Merlot. The furled umbrellas of Costa’s lurid purple livery made her wince. In the hard sunlight, they were as bright and poisonous as pirate sails. Everything on the street shared the same vivid, sinister cast. The shadows were black on the pavement and capered when people innocently passed.

Alice Daunt sat down, punctual to the minute. Suzanne looked up at her and tried to conceal a yawn she could not stifle. Alice smiled over her at the waiter from Poland. She took off her Ray-Bans and put her handbag on the table. It was crocodile skin and very glossy with a clasp that wore the dull sheen of gold. ‘One over the eight, dear?’

Suzanne smiled. The smile was rueful. ‘I don’t know, Alice. I lost count at six.’ And most of a pack of Marlboro. She could have done with Jane Boyte’s Dublin ashtray. She could have filled it.

‘The woman you’re researching was a very rebellious creature,’ Alice Daunt said. ‘She was a supporter of the suffragettes from the age when she began to be able to read. She didn’t understand the politics, but she could appreciate the gestures. Flinging bricks through windows. Hunger strikes. Sitting down in Whitehall to stop the traffic. That sort of thing excited her.’

Suzanne nodded.

‘This isn’t my opinion, by the way. It’s received opinion. But I received it from my mother, who was a good woman and an impartial judge.’

‘Go on.’

‘Jane Boyte became disillusioned with the suffragette movement when Christabel Pankhurst started making patriotic speeches at the outbreak of the Great War.’

‘She could only have been an adolescent.’

‘A disillusioned adolescent. But her next big cause wasn’t far away. In 1916, the Easter Rising destroyed a large section of the centre of Dublin. I might add that it did so much to the disgust of the vast majority of the Dublin public. But Miss Boyte had another banner to brandish.’

‘She became a Fenian,’ Suzanne said.

‘Indeed she did. When she was nineteen or twenty, she met Michael Collins. I believe she worked for him. There was talk of an affair, but there always was with that fellow where any woman in his proximity was concerned.’

Suzanne nodded.

‘Overcompensating in my view,’ Alice Daunt said. ‘He was probably trying to cover up his incipient attraction to men.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Suzanne said.

‘Oh?’

‘Only received opinion, Alice. But received from an impeccable source. He really did prefer girls.’

‘Well. Jane Boyte was certainly one of those. I’ll give you no argument in that department.’

‘Was this allegiance embarrassing for her family?’

‘Not really. Certainly not after the conclusion of the war, when it became public knowledge. The Fenian cause would always have had support in and around Liverpool once it gained ground in Dublin. Lot of Catholics of Irish extraction in Liverpool in those days. Even more than now. And Patrick Boyte, Jane’s father, was one of those. And Collins always enjoyed personal popularity in England. When his train pulled into London for the treaty negotiations with Churchill, he was practically mobbed.’

Suzanne knew about that. ‘What else can you tell me about her, Alice?’

Alice Daunt toyed with her coffee glass. ‘Nothing. After Collins’ death, after the fratricidal bloodbath of the Irish Civil War, she became disillusioned with all that, too.’

‘You hinted yesterday that there was more.’

The old lady shifted in her seat. ‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

For a moment, Suzanne did not think that she was going to add to her account. Then she said, almost imperceptibly, ‘Don’t imagine it can hurt, can it? Not after eighty years, it can’t.’

She was talking to herself. It was herself she was trying to convince. She looked at Suzanne and Suzanne knew that her internal effort had succeeded. ‘There was some trouble with the police. Jane Boyte made a very serious allegation against a prominent and wealthy foreigner.’

‘Harry Spalding.’

Did Alice Daunt shudder at the mention of the name?

‘Him. Yes. She made the allegation against him.’

‘Do you know the nature of the allegation?’

‘I do not. I was a little girl at the time. I was never told. You will have to find that out for yourself.’

‘I’ve tried,’ Suzanne said. She gestured back in the direction of the library. ‘I’ve discovered nothing. It all went under the bulldozer, as you said yourself yesterday, when Birkdale library was demolished.’

Alice Daunt drained the last of her coffee. Ice slipped and clacked against her dentures. She lowered the glass. ‘There is one other place you might try. There is a museum in Southport, at the Botanic Gardens in Churchtown. If Jane Boyte had things to say, and I’m sure she did, she might have deposited the relevant papers there. It would be worth a try.’

‘What happened to her, Alice?’

‘She was broken,’ Alice said, simply. ‘The business with the American broke her completely.’

‘You won’t say his name, will you?’

And Alice Daunt smiled, tightly. She put on her sunglasses and she picked up her bag. ‘I never have, dear. And I shan’t as long as I live.’

‘We should confront our fears,’ Suzanne said.

‘My son’s name was David. He was a wonderful boy and a wonderful man. And he was wise, despite the effects of the tumour, almost to the very last. But when he said that, my dear, I believe he was referring to our earthly fears.’

Alice smiled a final time and turned and walked away through the flitting sunlight and the shadows of the trees and the shop awnings lining either side of the street. Suzanne watched her stiff, stately progress until her pale coat disappeared in the throng of shoppers and trippers indistinct in the distance. Then she got up and crossed the road and asked about the opening hours of the Botanic Gardens Museum in the tourist office. The tourist office looked like someone’s giant conservatory plonked on an empty patch of pavement. But they were very helpful. The girl behind the counter did not know the museum opening hours without having to look, which suggested to Suzanne that it was possibly one of the resort’s more obscure attractions. She thought that a good thing. She thought the new, interactive, user-friendly breed of museum both terrible and virtually useless. A repository of the past should be just that, was her opinion. She was provided with a map. The route was north along Lord Street and then east along a lengthy road called Roe Lane. She asked if it was walking distance. The girl screwed her face up, debating this with herself. It was three or four miles. Suzanne decided that she would walk. The exercise would punish her for drinking too much and might cure her hangover at the same time.

Walking to Churchtown, she did not think about Jane Boyte and what she might discover there. She did not think much either about Harry Spalding, or not consciously. She thought about Martin and his love and tenderness and the courage that he had displayed before she had even known him. His bravery she thought remarkable and deeply impressive. She did not think it was a quality of which his father was aware at all.

She had been on an East London Line underground train. She had been to see Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames. She had been researching the great engineer for a series about Victorian technologies. She had her laptop with her. Three hoodies burst into the carriage. One of them had been brandishing a knife. It was a large, open-bladed weapon, somewhere between a bowie knife and a machete. It was meant to terrify. It was also meant to hurt. When the thug with the knife made a grab for her laptop, she had stupidly tried to hang on to it. And he had brought the knife down to slash her face.

Martin took the blow. He came out of nowhere and held out his arm to protect her from disfigurement, and the blade was embedded with the force of the blow deep in his forearm. And the thug lost his grip on the weapon as Martin wrenched his arm away and jerked the knife out of the meat of him and sent it skittering along the carriage floor. And then he grinned and inflicted a few blows of his own. He delivered a series of savage punches with incredible accuracy and speed. He just beat the three of them senseless while the rest of the carriage looked away and pretended that none of this was actually going on.

He saved her from disfigurement. He did it purely on instinct, oblivious to the pain it would cause him or the further physical consequences. When he was released from arrest afterwards and treated, it was discovered that he had severed a tendon. Fighting with a severed tendon in his arm had made the damage worse. It took an operation and four months of physiotherapy to enable full recovery. The scars, from the knife blow and the op, he would always carry.

When she tried to thank him, it was obvious from his reaction that he thought he had done nothing at all remarkable. He thought that everyone, in those circumstances, would behave exactly as he had done. There was a right way and a wrong way to do things and he had done the right thing because, well, that was what you did. It was one of the things she loved about him. It was not the thing about him she loved most, but courage nobly used was a very attractive quality. She had made a joke about it, they both had, knights in armour, damsels in distress and so on. But it was an attractive quality for a man to possess. And she also thought it rare.

Churchtown announced itself in a cluster of tiny cottages, some of them thatched. They were plain as well as small and Suzanne knew that they dated from the early nineteenth century. This was the oldest part of the whole settlement of Southport. Neighbouring places like the hamlet of Hundred End and the village of Ormskirk were much older. They dated back to the first Viking invasion. But Churchtown was as old as anywhere in Southport and so a fitting location for the town’s museum. Some of the cottages had been turned into shops of an artsy-craftsy variety. They sold hand-painted children’s toys and embroidery kits and watercolours and antiques. The roads were very narrow and the shops were very quaint. But the effect was somewhat spoiled by the huge lorries trundling through in a procession of stinking diesel in the heat. Churchtown seemed to be a traffic rat run.

The Botanic Gardens themselves were quiet and secluded, well away from the sound and smell of traffic. But they did not look spry. Everything seemed mossy and mildewed. There was a lake, green with silt and clogged with floating lily pads, a few ducks besieged on its surface. A wooden bridge arched over the lake. Its paint was peeling and its planks sodden and Suzanne would barely have trusted it to take her weight. The museum was off to the left, occupying a building with a classical portico next to an old conservatory that had been converted into a souvenir gift shop and café. She took in the scene, thinking that nothing she was looking at would have been incongruous fifty years ago or, for that matter, eighty years ago, in 1927. She climbed the steps to the entrance and walked inside.

Most of the ground floor was occupied by a shrimper’s cart with its nets extended and a full-sized figure of a shrimper in oilskins staring through sightless glass eyes at a point where the sea and his catch under it would have scurried. There was a Victorian fire appliance and a vintage motorcycle. There was a faithfully reproduced High Victorian parlour. It was all very picturesque and interesting. But there were no books. Suzanne was not encouraged. And there were no staff, either. She could hear a transistor radio very faintly somewhere. But there seemed to be no one about.

She climbed the stairs. The first-floor display comprised two large rooms. One of them was pretty much dedicated to the Mexico disaster and its aftermath. The other was full of stuffed wildlife from the Fylde Coast. The taxidermist had done an excellent job. The animals were as lifelike as any dead beast was ever going to be. But Suzanne was starting to feel that Alice Daunt had surely misdirected her to this haphazard assemblage of local relics and curios. She wanted books. Or she wanted microfiche or an easily accessed computer database. She wanted facts and revelations, not dust and elderly pictures.

She followed the tinny sound of the radio. It was playing ‘When Love Breaks Down’. Suzanne thought that she had never disliked a song more. But she listened carefully, trying to track its source. It was coming from down below her, from the ground floor. She descended the stairs. The music barely increased in volume. It was being listened to surreptitiously, in a sly near-silence. Gaining the ground floor, she looked around. There was something in the gloom to the right of the Victorian parlour. It was darkness on darkness, an added dimension, the suggestion of a shadow or opening. She walked towards it. The song grew louder without gaining body. It was shrill, exactly the sort of sound reproduced by a pocket radio from the 1960s or 1970s. Suzanne thought that no pleasure could be gained from listening to this starved melody. With a song you liked, it would be even worse.

It was a sort of cupboard without a door. Her eyes adjusted and she saw a figure sitting there. He looked up at her and jumped. He was wearing a liveried sweater, uniform trousers. He was the museum staff. And if he wasn’t on his break, he was skiving. He switched off the radio.

‘Can I help you?’ He stood, finger-combing his hair, clearly caught out and embarrassed.

‘I’m researching a Southport resident called Jayne Boyte.’ Suzanne took out her BBC accreditation and showed it to the man.

‘People generally make an appointment. I mean, they email us or telephone ahead, unless they’re just casual visitors.’

‘I’m not a casual visitor, as you can see. But I’m not from Southport, obviously. I wasn’t previously aware of the existence of this museum, of this resource.’

The man had recovered from her ambush. He seemed to like the flattery implicit in his place of work being termed a resource by someone with a laminated pass. Work avoidance, Suzanne thought, looking down at the radio where it sat on his bench. It was silver and rectangular and held together in one corner by adhesive tape.

‘Essentially, we have two separate archives,’ the man said. ‘The photographic archive is catalogued both by date and by subject matter. The written archive is not catalogued at all. We did have an archivist scheduled to put it all in some kind of order about three and a half years ago. But budget cuts put paid to that.’

Suzanne nodded. It was a familiar complaint.

‘You’re more than welcome to have a look. It’s all on shelves, roughly alphabetically listed by author, in a room in our basement.’ He began to search for a key from a bunch attached to a key ring on his belt. ‘You have to come with me around to the back of the building to gain access to it. It’s through a door at the rear and down a set of steps. Do you have a mobile phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put my number in it. I will have to lock the door behind you. It’s nothing personal, but we have to do it as a security measure. It’s one of our rules.’

‘Fine,’ Suzanne said.

He shuffled past her and began to lead the way. ‘I hope you don’t have any allergies.’

‘What?’

‘Specifically, I hope you’re not allergic to dust.’

Suzanne expected mildew. She expected splotched pages and books with gummy spines. But there was a dehumidifier purring away in the corner when the museum worker switched on the overhead lights in the subterranean room. Everything looked dry and comparatively clean and well ordered. The shelves were neatly stacked. The lights cast a brilliant flare of white brightness. They revealed her guide’s glasses as bifocals and gave his eyes an avaricious gleam. She realised that the remark about dust had been his little joke.

‘Good luck.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We close at five. Appreciate it if you could summon me to come and get you by a quarter to, at the latest.’

Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just approaching one. She had not eaten breakfast, but this was one day when lunch could wait. The walk along Roe Lane to Churchtown had been just the thing, she realised now, for her hangover. All trace of it was gone. She felt alert and fresh. And she was excited at the nature of the archive that clearly resided here, well maintained but scarcely ever used. There might be secrets here, committed to paper by Jane Boyte before her rebel instinct was destroyed. As she heard the key turning to lock the basement door, Suzanne had Jane pictured in her mind on the sand in the sunshine, wearing her flying leathers, feline and gorgeous with her bobbed hair raven black and her smile full of life and mischief between the brothers Giroud.

She found what she was looking for within fifteen minutes. The Dáil delegation press picture had led her to expect something typed rather than handwritten. And it was typed, double-spaced across eighty pages which had then been professionally bound. The binding was blue canvas-backed board and it had faded with the years from what Suzanne had imagined was cobalt to something much paler. There was nothing on the cover to tell you what you were reading. But on the volume’s slim spine were printed the words: Jane Elizabeth Boyte. My Deposition. August 12, 1927.

There was a desk in the corner of the museum basement. Suzanne went over to it and pulled up its chair and sat. She had no protective gloves with her to shield the pages of the deposition from damaging secretions. But she had the strong instinct that she was the first person in eighty years to open what she held between her hands. And she thought that it would survive the experience. She opened the volume and flicked through the leaves with her thumb. They were thicker than flimsy, thicker than foolscap. They were somewhere between foolscap and cartridge paper and would have been stiff in the roller of Jane’s Royal or Remington machine. The letters forming the words were even in their depth of ink and the impression left by the individual keys on the page. Jane Boyte had been an expert typist, fast and confident and clean. There were no mistakes at all. Her deposition was, Suzanne could see from the dates at the top of each entry, strictly speaking, a diary. At least, it was a chronological account. It ran from May 10 to August 8. And it concerned itself only with the days and weeks and months in between those two dates during the single year of 1927.

Jane’s entire deposition had been written during Harry Spalding’s Southport summer.

There was an introduction. Jane had signed it with a fountain pen, writing her full name. There was a curious, sombre formality about the whole vintage exercise. There were secrets here, Suzanne was sure. She lifted the document and held it to her nose. It smelled very faintly of ancient tobacco and expensive scent. Suzanne was pretty sure the perfume Jane had worn at that time was Shalimar. She had been a proto-feminist, a privileged revolutionary who flew an aeroplane and smoked cigarettes in public. She had been bright. She had been a celebrated beauty. When she was nineteen or twenty, she might have shared Michael Collins’ bed.

Suzanne read the introduction.

Every word of what is written here was written in sincerity. You, reader, can draw your own conclusions as to its veracity. But there was no revision, no tinkering or retrospective editing of the account. I have described events as they occurred. My conclusions have been based on compelling evidence. That evidence is circumstantial, but when you have read what is contained here, you might agree that this unfortunate fact was not for the want of me trying to effect its reversal. And I really did try. But wealth is a more compelling imperative than truth, even in our modern times. And the weight of a woman’s opinion and justified suspicions are still not accorded that of a man’s. I am given to wonder if they ever will be.

When you have read this, you might justifiably wonder about the writer. What can I honestly tell you? I am impressionable and impulsive. My morals might not sit very easily with you. I am comfortably off. I possess independence of spirit and was, until recently, generally a stranger to fear. I have known real and thrilling greatness in a human being. And I knew that human intimately and the knowledge did not impair or diminish in any way the impression of that greatness.

But, reader, I have also known the Devil himself. And it is with this encounter that the following account is concerned.

Suzanne rang the number given her by the skiving museum staff member. She did not want to read Jane’s deposition in that barren, white-lit, book-infested room. She had followed her intuition to Southport in the absence of hard information about Harry Spalding and his blighted boat. She felt vindicated now. But she wanted to read what she had discovered in the space and at the time of her choosing. There was urgency here. But she felt she would glean more from the deposition away from where she had discovered it. She would take it, if she was permitted to, and read it at one of the tables outside the Fisherman’s Rest. There was no doubt in her mind about the identity of the devil to whom Jane referred. The Fisherman’s Rest had been an adjunct to the long-demolished Palace Hotel. And it was only a few hundred yards from the mansion hidden on Rotten Row where Jane’s devil had lived. She would read her deposition there, as afternoon turned to evening, as close to the memory and spoor of Harry Spalding as she was able to get.

‘Hello?’

‘I’ve found what I came here for.’

His radio was on again. Coldplay were feeble, almost anorexic in the background. He was hiding in his cupboard. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Could I take it away with me?’

There was a pause. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Why?’

‘Intrinsic value.’ The Southport accent had a flat quality. It wasn’t nasal, like Mancunian. And it was slower and more deliberate than Liverpudlian. Words delivered in it had a finality about them. But Suzanne was not intimidated. ‘This isn’t Magna Carta we’re talking about here.’

‘Then photocopy it.’

‘Not the same. Twenty-four hours?’

But the museum skiver was entrenched. ‘No.’

‘I’ll leave you a deposit. Fifty quid. Non-returnable. Twenty-four hours.’

There was a pause. ‘More than my job’s worth.’

Suzanne thought the pause significant. ‘A hundred?’

‘Done.’

She left the Botanic Gardens museum with Jane Boyte’s deposition in her bag. On her way back to Roe Lane through Churchtown she stopped at a picturesque pub with tables outside called the Hesketh Arms. She did not read. She ate. It was after two thirty now and she was very hungry. The sun was warm on the weathered surface of the table she sat at. Ivy grew green and verdant on the white walls of the pub. Flowers in window boxes filled with freshly watered soil smelled sweet and fragrant. She ordered a cheese salad and it was very good: fresh, crusty bread and crumbly Lancashire cheese and plump tomatoes freshly picked from the greenhouses outside the town at one of the farms on the South Lancashire plain. The scene would have been idyllic, were it not for the lorries trundling by, their emissions rippling in the summer light, distorting the view.

Suzanne walked back the way she had come. They did not have taxis you could hail in Southport. They had minicabs. And there were plenty of those, but none stopped for her when Suzanne had tried in the preceding days to hail them. They stopped at designated ranks to pick up fares, she supposed. But she did not know where any of the ranks were located. Or you could ring them. But she did not know the numbers. They would have put her right on that score in the Hesketh Arms, of course. But the weather was lovely and the unfamiliar streets were picturesque and totally different from what she was used to. Southport was largely Victorian and very largely, in terms of its domestic architecture, still intact. She was enjoying the exercise. She was enjoying the anticipation. And so she walked.

It was almost four when she reached the point on Rotten Row where she knew Spalding’s mansion lurked above the rise. She looked at her bag. Jane’s deposition wore the protection of a large padded envelope. The fellow in the museum had provided it, to keep the covers of the volume from the sun. It was his overdue bid at professionalism and conscientiousness, his tardy attempt to be seen as competent. Suzanne was very keen to examine the contents of the envelope. But the lure of the house over the steep grass slope was inexplicably strong. She wanted another look. She wanted just a peek at the place. She did not see how, in the bright sunshine, with schoolgirls passing on the way to the cement courts in Victoria Park with their tennis rackets swinging from their hands, it could hurt just to sneak another look.

This time she was more brazen about it. She climbed the stone steps with their smooth inlay of terracotta tiles. She unlatched the wooden gate at the top, took a breath and walked through into the garden. And it hit her immediately. It hit her like an arctic shift in the weather or a solid punch to the gut. Everything was different here and none of it was right. She began to shiver and sweat at the same time, chilled but clammy at the forehead and temples. The feeling got worse with every footstep she extended towards the house. She was surrounded by a silence that her deep foreboding insisted would be torn asunder any moment by a scream she knew she would share. And she recognised this feeling. She remembered it. It was the selfsame instinct of terror she had felt in Duval’s barn, before she reached the barn door and Duval himself confronted her, comforting in his surly rudeness, safe wielding his shotgun, after the other-worldly hazards of the barn interior.

What had he done here? She turned round. She had to. She could not will herself to take another step. The ground felt corrupt under her feet. The taint of death hung like a pallor above the earth. She ran for the gate and escape, and descended the brick steps back to sanity, back to smiling pedestrians, a clopping bunch of riders, back to cars in the sunshine driving slowly along Rotten Row, giving the horses a wide berth as they edged past them in the safe and pleasant hope and colour of a lovely June afternoon.

Aboard Dark Echo

It seems that the writing habit is a hard one to lose. Though I am writing this in longhand in one of the handsome morocco-bound volumes my father intended to have serve aboard the vessel as his log. My laptop battery has failed. Since we have no electrical power aboard any more, I write by the light of a paraffin lamp. And the instrument in my hand is my father’s fountain pen. The master of the Andromeda himself could not better me at this moment for simplicity or tradition. But Captain Straub would not be proud of me. He passed on a warning that I should have heeded but chose to ignore. I was no longer strictly under his command when he delivered the warning. But I should have listened to him. He would be disappointed to know my predicament now. And he would be right in thinking that I have only myself to blame for it.

I am in my cabin, writing this seated at my desk behind the locked cabin door. My father lies unconscious on my bunk. Occasionally, things slither past along the gangway outside. Or at least, they sound as if they do. There is the growl of a dog or the whimper of a child. More rarely, and the more shocking for it, there is the sudden loud scream of a woman hysterical with terror. That sound comes from my father’s cabin, which is really Spalding’s cabin, of course. There is often laughter, but it is dark. There is whispered pleading, which is met by silence. And there are scents. These are more varied than the noises. Sometimes they are pungent and sometimes subtle. Sometimes it is a hint of perfume, Arpège or Mitsouko, florid and heavy. Sometimes it is the whiff of strong tobacco. Sometimes the treacle aroma of rum is in the air. On occasion I’ve smelled cordite, sharp and strong as though from the barrel or firing chamber of a gun just discharged in close proximity. There is often the coppery odour of blood, freshly spilled. There is the sour secretion of fear. Worst of all, there is now and then the overwhelming stench of mortal decay that radiates from the self-murdered corpse of Gubby Tench as his remains stew in the heat of Havana Bay.

They are the boat’s memories, these various and randomly occurring sounds and smells. And they are growing in strength and vividness as we approach our meeting with its one true master. Harry Spalding haunts the boat. But he does this in a paradoxical way. For I believe Spalding haunts the Dark Echo without really being a ghost at all.

Suzanne encountered a ghost, I remember, in Dublin back in January. Her ghost was benign. I suspect she encountered him again and never let on to me about the fact. Her ghost, in life, had an eye for the ladies. She was looking pretty hard at him, back then. He probably considered he had the justification to take a look right back at her. Whether she sensed him again or not, he meant no harm. And being dead, he could do no harm, either. I don’t believe a dead man can physically hurt the living.

Nothing about Spalding was ever benign. I had pondered on this after my efforts to send my account of events to Monsignor Delaunay, as my father got steadily drunker and the boat shifted under me as it continues to do now on its own relentless course. He had used his occult knowledge to keep death at bay in the war. He had practised barbaric and blasphemous rituals to guarantee his survival. He had sacrificed and kept on sacrificing. I suspected that the woman who supposedly dumped him on the quay at Rimini had been the first of his peacetime offerings. But Tench and the Waltrow brothers had been sacrifices, too, hadn’t they? Another had been made only recently, in the man who bled to death following that impossible accident in Frank Hadley’s yard. Between Gubby Tench and Hadley’s man, I suspected that the lost log of the Dark Echo would have documented a lot more deaths down the years and decades. But Spalding had ended his own life in 1929. Why did a man, long since deceased, need to go on paying the Devil the price of immortality? There was no reason. He did not need to do so. So what was the obvious conclusion? My own logic impelled me to believe that Spalding had never died at all.

The ‘Send’ light was still flashing feebly on my computer screen. Providence would determine whether Delaunay ever got my emailed testament. It was beyond my fingertips now, in cyberspace, out of my hands. I got up and went to confront my father. I wanted to ask him about the log. He once said he had read it. I’d thought the claim blithely made and untrue, just something said to shut me up when, at Hadley’s yard, the Dark Echo really had seemed cursed. But it was possible he had actually read it. He was a voracious reader and an intellectually curious man and the boat had been his coveted prize.

But when I got to him he was beyond interrogation. He was stretched unconscious on the floor. At first, I feared he had suffered a stroke. But his features wore their familiar symmetry and there was nothing rigid in his posture, lying there. His breathing was ponderous but steady. I bent to listen to his heart and it was regular and strong. The sounds aboard of infant crying had tormented him, as perhaps they were supposed to do. I knew with dull certainty in my own heart it was not my sister but some infant victim of the boat’s bloody history. My father, though, had believed it was Catherine Ann, come back to chastise him for some sin he had never committed.

My father had now taken to the refuge aboard the Dark Echo of deep shock. I was on my own. I gathered him in my arms and carried him to my cabin and put him in my bunk. I kissed him on the cheek and brought the blanket snugly to his chin. I smoothed down his dishevelled hair to restore some dignity to my dad. I said a prayer for him. Locking the door behind me, I returned to the master cabin. The machine that played the wax cylinders looked like it had when I’d brought it out of its rotting box. It looked like it would never play again. I took the cylinder we had listened to from the cradle bevelled for it and put another in. It stank and slipped between my fingers with greasy decay.

‘Why did you fake your suicide?’

The needle dropped on to the cylinder and the cylinder began to turn.

‘You’ll call me captain,’ Spalding’s voice commanded, ‘or you’ll call me sir. I will not suffer insubordination, sport. You will learn this to your cost.’

‘Why, sir, did you fake your suicide?’

There was a long silence. I could hear the sludgy moan of the needle on the wax. What I was hearing defied the laws of physics. But Harry Spalding had engineered his own bleak path through the rational world. He had harnessed magic to do it.

‘My parents followed a faith frowned upon by the land of the brave and the home of the free. Our faith was persecuted, outlawed. A Federal Bureau man called Grey oversaw the destruction of our place of worship. My parents prayed for revenge.’

To whom, I wondered. But I knew the answer.

‘Grey had a daughter. She had aspirations to be a dancer. I courted her. I wooed her, Martin, old chum. I took her to Europe cherishing dreams of the stage and ovations and garlands. And I butchered her with a boning knife and dropped her corpse in weighted pieces in the harbour at Rimini.’

‘And her father found out.’

‘Her father was dead by then. But he had buddied up for years with a loyal and dogged partner in the Bureau by the name of Gianfranco Genelli. Genelli’s entire family were Sicilian hoods. He was the white sheep of the flock. But he kept on good terms with people on both sides of the law. Things became a little hot for old Harry Spalding in the years after Rimini. Harry moved around, but Genelli’s people were only ever a step behind. It rather cramped my style. Eventually and somewhat flamboyantly, Harry was obliged to say adieu.’

Which was not a hard thing to accomplish, I supposed, in the New York of 1929. Not for a man as stupendously wealthy as Spalding had been. Not after the Crash, when it must have seemed as though the Great Depression would just go on deepening for ever.

‘So you got away with it.’

‘With what?’

‘With her murder.’

‘I get away with everything.’

‘Where are you now, Spalding?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough, sport. And you will call me captain or you will call me sir. I sparred with Hemingway, you know. And I bested Hem. I drank Scott Fitzgerald under the table.’

‘And you offered Bricktop a hundred grand to sleep with you and she turned you down, you fucking creep.’

There was a groaning, smudgy silence. Then, ‘I’ll see you soon, shipmate. I’m looking forward to it.’

My bravado was exactly that. I retreated to the dim, troubled refuge of my cabin and my ailing dad. Nothing will happen aboard the boat. Nothing will happen until we reach land. We are in no real danger until then. When we reach land, we will be in the proximity of Harry Spalding, who has never died. He will come aboard and take command. We will embark upon our real voyage. The Dark Echo will begin to fulfil its real purpose. And what will happen then does not bear further speculation.