Dark Echo

Eleven

Southport, May 10th, 1927

I am to meet him after all. The Rimmers are holding a garden party and I accepted my invitation ages ago, and this morning I discovered that the man everyone refers to as Jane’s obnoxious American is also on the list of invited guests. Tommy Rimmer, who was very apologetic on the telephone this morning about it all, does not think that he will attend. He has, apparently, a reputation for not turning up to things. It’s something he probably cultivates, a kind of unpredictability designed to make him appear interesting rather than merely uncouth. But I think he will turn up. I have thought a meeting with him inevitable ever since his battered racing schooner limped into Liverpool Harbour and my father’s yard. He does not know about me. It was a ghastly coincidence, the fact that his boat fetched up for repair where it did. My father has had no reason, I’m sure, to mention me to him and I have every reason for never mentioning him to my father.

I will have to go to the Rimmers. It would be rude, now, not to go. And I will not have my life dictated to me by any man. This one in particular I will not allow to force me to act out of fear. Do I fear him? I suppose I do. Even after eight years of added experience and maturity and the resilience those elements bring to a person’s character, I still do fear Harry Spalding. But it would be absurd for me to miss the Rimmers’ party on his account.

Perhaps he will not remember me. I will not remind him if my face and name have slipped from his memory. I have always confronted my terrors, but this one is different. Where he is concerned, if he has forgotten me, I will be pragmatic. In the words of a saying expressing a sentiment I would ordinarily loathe, I will, just this once, let discretion be the better part of valour.

But he won’t have forgotten me. What would be the point of us meeting if he had? I’ve already said I believe this confrontation has the inevitability of fate about it. Of course he will remember me. I just hope he has matured enough to feel the shame and remorse that seemed to elude him in the aftermath back then.

Harry Spalding tried to rape me. He forced the door of my room at the Shelbourne Hotel and attempted to take me by force. I fought back, but he was enormously strong for so slightly built a man. He seemed inconceivably strong. Perhaps it was the strength of a madman. I was changing for dinner when he burst in. He tore my dress off and flung me across the bed and pinned my arms. I bit him hard enough to draw blood. But he seemed encouraged by that. I must have been screaming. Boland came into the room with a pistol. He put the point of the pistol under Spalding’s chin and told him very calmly that he would blow his head off if he did not release me. I swear the grin never left Spalding’s face. It was a rictus, death’s head grin that stretched his features grotesquely. He moved back from the bed, but Boland kept the gun on him. He did not look safe. As I have said already, he did not look sane.

Mick Collins came in. He must have heard the commotion. He took off his coat and put it over me and asked me was I alright. He asked Boland to take me to his room and to book me another. You can’t stay in this one, he said. I heard the first blows land as Boland closed the door on the room. Mick Collins was a powerful figure in the peak of condition then and every ounce of his reputation as a fighting man had been earned. I thought he would beat Spalding to a pulp. I hoped he would. But he did not. After I had been brought brandy in Mick’s room by Boland, Mick himself came in. He went into the bathroom and ran the tap until the water could only have been scalding and I heard him wash scrupulously. When he emerged, his hands were bruised, the knuckles visibly swelling. And one of his eyes was marked.

I caught a glimpse of Spalding later, leaving the hotel between two of Mick’s men. And his lip was cut and his face was swollen and carried contusions. But they were healing already. A half-smile played under the congealing gash on his upper lip.

I’d easier have beaten Lucifer himself, Mick said, helping himself to a brandy from the bottle Boland had fetched. Maybe I should just have him shot, he said.

You’ll shoot no one on my account, I said.

Cause a stink with the rest of the Yanks, Boland said.

The rest of them are decent men, Mick said.

You will shoot no one on my account, I repeated.

Then we’ll have that scum on the first boat out of Dublin. Boland here will make the call. Mick put down his glass and came over to me. I still wore his coat, the smell of him on the collar a comfort as I tried to stop trembling. He smiled and stroked my cheek. The touch of his sore hand was infinitely tender.

And that was the end of it. And I did not really think about Harry Spalding again. I did not think about him until his boat struggled listing up the Mersey and I read the story of the storm in the newspapers.

May 12th, 1927

The Rimmers host their party tonight. Their house is one of the grandest on Westbourne Road. It overlooks the golf links, which is where Tommy and my obnoxious American met. I am slightly surprised that the party is going ahead as planned. But this is nothing to do with Spalding. A chambermaid has vanished from the Palace Hotel. The same girl worked for the Rimmers for a while, helping Nora Rimmer look after their youngest daughter until Bonnie started school. She left because she wanted the variety, she said, of hotel work. And her departure was cordial enough. But she worked for the Rimmers for almost a year. And the police say in the papers that they suspect foul play. And Bonnie was really very fond of her. It seems slightly callous to hold the party until there’s word of the girl turning up safe. But maybe that’s just me and what Tommy Rimmer would call my Fabian pretensions. Fabian or Socialist. I don’t think men like Tommy are aware of any distinction. When a man lives only to see his handicap get down to scratch, his mind can’t help but suffer from the consequent neglect.

May 13th, 1927

The party passed without incident. At least, it did so far as the obnoxious American was concerned. Spalding had greatly changed. He is no longer the scrawny fellow in pinstripes of Dublin in 1919. He is the international playboy and yacht-racing sportsman now. He is very tanned and has filled out physically. There is no fat on him. But he is muscular, I suppose from all that raising of sail and hauling of anchor. His blond hair has been so bleached by exposure to the sun and salt water it is almost white. He was dressed impeccably, with pearl studs embellishing his collar and cuffs. I do not think I have ever been in the proximity of a more deeply unattractive man.

He did not recognise me. Or if he did, he did not successfully place me in his mind. No one is that accomplished an actor and his manner was relaxed and expansive throughout the evening. He held forth about the Paris scene before an audience of Southport’s self-styled bohemians. I could hear enough on its periphery. He has this harsh tone to his voice and New England vowels that carry on the summer air through the hubbub, whether in a room or outside. He knows Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. He knows Braque and Picasso and Delaunay. Anyway, he says he does. His world when on dry land seems to be the world of Bricktop’s nightclub and the racetrack at Auteuil and ringside seats at Montparnasse for the boxing matches fought by Georges Carpentier. It all begs the question, what is he doing here? But of course, he is here more by accident than design. And with the aero club and the golf at Birkdale and racing at Aintree there is enough to keep him temporarily entertained while my father’s men toil to fix his boat by that rash deadline Father gave the press.

He likes Dublin, too. He speaks fondly of Ireland. I would have thought his treatment at the hands of Mick Collins and Harry Boland at the Shelbourne Hotel would have ended any nascent love affair with the ould sod, as he calls it. But Mick and Boland are long dead now, distinguished footnotes both in the bloody saga of Irish political history. But only footnotes, when you subtract the sentiment. So perhaps Spalding has had the last laugh and can afford a bit of magnanimity where Ireland generally and Dublin in particular are concerned.

I don’t think my estimation of Spalding as repulsive is widely shared. He is rich and strange and athletic and worldly. And that is enough of a cocktail of attractions for many women. It was not only the bohemian crowd surrounding him in the hope of titbits of gossip from the table of the artistic greats. Several of the unattached women drifted into his orbit during the course of the party. But despite his presence, it was generally all very pleasant. The weather was glorious, the food wonderful and Tommy Rimmer on outrageous form. Spalding was only one among over a hundred guests at the Rimmers’ place. There was a jazz band. Orchid and rose petals had been strewn like a glorious carpet over the surface of the swimming pool. Iced bowls were piled on the tables with gleaming mounds of caviar, and two professionals from London played an exhibition game on the tennis court and then coached any of the more competitive guests on how to improve their strokes. Though there was one unfortunate incident I shall recount that spoiled things slightly for myself, at least.

Tommy Rimmer has a happy knack for making money. He discovered this during the war, in which he served as a lowly second-lieutenant. They put him in supplies, because he has a flair for detail and a slight congenital weakness of the heart. He was invalided out, after a German bombardment that must have gone astray. Instead of hitting front-line troop positions, the shells detonated in Tommy’s supply dump. He recovered. But in his time in the field hospital and then the proper French hospital to which they sent him for convelescence, he worked out in his mind a more efficient approach to the logistics of war supply than the chaotic model he had been obliged to follow.

He was not so stupid as to try to apply this to the conflict that had almost cost him his life. But, decommissioned after the armistice, he was able to persuade a War Ministry panel to listen to his conclusions. They were impressed enough to take him on as an adviser on the procurement of war material. Tommy’s reward was to be a shilling for every pound he was proved to have saved. The contract signed, he set about making himself a very wealthy man.

Tommy Rimmer’s politics are a mystery to me. I think they are to him. And I’m sure they are to Nora, the wife whom he adores. But the one area in which he has been very liberal is the raising of his children. They have the run of the house. The doctrine of children being seen but not heard seems anathema to the Rimmers.

Or it did until today.

It was a garden party. So, of course, the children were there. But darkness comes late to Southport in May. It was still light at nine o’clock, when the three Rimmer children were all ushered up to their various cots and cribs and beds. By then they were exhausted, I think. Parents, mindful of their own children, make a sentimental fuss of the children of their friends. It’s a cherished instinct. It is one of the things that makes us human. In my guise of Auntie Jane, I gave each of them a kiss myself before they trooped off, tired and obedient, to the land of nod.

Except that Bonnie came back. I heard rather than saw her return at first, as the conversation subsided with her unsteady progress through the Rimmers’ garden. Then I saw her. Everybody did. The entire gathering turned with their drinks and cigarettes and cigars in hand and, much less than sober, saw this small child sway on unsteady feet through the throng. All was silent. Bonnie raised an arm and turned. Except that she did not so much turn, as swivel. And she pointed. And she let out a scream that would have curdled sleeping blood.

She swooned afterwards. And her father scooped her into his loving arms and took her off to bed. And such was the momentum of the party that it continued on, despite the poor child’s sleepwalking fit. But my appetite for revelling, poor already because of Spalding’s presence, was killed entirely by the moment. I tried to talk to one of the brothers Giroud, excited about the great oval lido about to open on the Southport foreshore. Having overflown the last of the workings, the placement of the plunge slide and the high diving boards, he described it as magnifique. But my enthusiasm for gossip and sensation was entirely gone. I said my goodbyes and gained the happy refuge of the car Father had provided for my journey home. I was not drunk. I could have driven my own car. I could have walked, the Rimmers’ house being only a mile or so from my flat. But it would have been foolhardy to plan to walk home from the party without first knowing how Harry Spalding would react to my presence.

When Bonnie screamed, I looked at Spalding. And I saw that he was looking back at me. His expression was impossible to read. There was nothing obvious, no salaciousness or overt curiosity about the look. But it was as though he were blind and deaf to the odd distress of the little girl. And then a woman in a brightly feathered stole approached him and he was all smiles and solicitous charm with her and seemed to forget entirely about me.

It was very foolish of me to mention to anyone that I had ever met this man. I did so casually, after reading of the storm and his survival in the newspaper. I did not explain the circumstances, merely saying that we had shared an unpleasant encounter in Dublin. But I should have kept the matter a secret to myself. Under the urbane talk of Hemingway and Picasso, I think Harry Spalding is a cold and dangerous man. Polishing enhances the facets of the stone, brings a bright glitter to its surface. It does not reduce its hardness or change its fundamental nature. What I wish is that I had let Mick Collins have him shot. What I really wish is that I had taken Boland’s pistol and blown his brains out myself.

Suzanne looked up from the pages she was reading and blinked at the sky. The light was fading. The evening would be long, but the heat and intensity had gone out of the day. It was six o’clock. Already, she liked Jane Boyte very much. And she felt very sorry for her. She had not even had the consolation of seeing Michael Collins’ reputation restored, his achievement recognised. They had been relatively recent developments. Self-serving Irish politicians resentful of their place in his shadow had undermined Collins’ character and deeds for decades after his death. In 1971, when Jane Boyte had died, he had still been the footnote in Irish history she had described him as in 1927. There had been no consolation in her grief.

Suzanne slid the deposition across the table, opened her bag and took out her Marlboro pack and lit a cigarette. She was too fastidious to breathe smoke over the precious pages. She would wait to read on until she had finished. She sipped her drink. She was the only customer outside the haunted pub. There were but three or four inside. Off across the tarmac to her right, there was a concrete barbecue pit veined by rust stains. Clearly it rained here sometimes. But she had been very lucky with the weather. She looked out over the area where the Palace Hotel had been, vast and imperious in its high gables and princely turrets. There was nothing of it now, no sense that it had ever been there at all, with its ghostly lifts and glittering guests and sad little litany of deaths still awaiting proper explanation.

To her rear, a hundred yards or so away on the other side of Weld Road, Rotten Row began. And the sense of Spalding’s house and lurking presence there was contrastingly strong, a cold prickle of the flesh between her shoulder blades, an itch she could not scratch. She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and exhaled at the sky, slightly dismayed at how wonderful the tobacco had tasted.

May 26th, 1927

A group of us went to the open-air bathing pool for the first time today. The queue for the twin turnstiles stretched and wound in a gaudy, excited procession. I thought it would take ages to clear, but it did not and we were in after a wait of only ten minutes or so. The pool really is immense, a great oval lake of seawater surrounded by landscaped rocks and seats rising as they would in an ampitheatre. On the side to seaward there is a huge domed cafeteria with a great glass globe of the world at its summit. I saw it from the air, overflying it a week ago. But the whole place is much grander and more spectacular from the ground. The changing suites, at either end, are pillared and gabled like temples. It made me proud of the town. Civic pride is a novelty to me, something I would have dismissed as a bourgeois conceit a decade ago. But I have grown up somewhat since then. And this magnificent amenity is open to anyone who can pay the modest entry fee. With its high diving boards and steepling metal slide, it is a wonderful place. People deserve it.

Even seeing Harry Spalding there could not much diminish my enthusiasm. I saw him on his haunches in his bathing costume, rubbing oil into the back of a companion I recognised as the woman in the feather stole from the Rimmers’ party. He was wearing sunglasses and his tan has deepened even further. He is extraordinarily muscular and, in the harsh sunshine, his dark body reminded me with a shudder of the carapace of some large and deadly creature. There is something of the crab or the praying mantis about him.

I went to the pool with Helen Sykes and Vera Chadwick. Helen vaguely knows the Ormskirk girl who went missing a week ago. Vera is courting a police inspector who works with the murder squad in Liverpool. As if having a romantic liaison with a police officer isn’t bad enough in itself, Vera is full of the phraseology of crime and investigation. She told Helen, with me a reluctant audience, that the police are linking this latest disappearance with that of the Palace Hotel girl. I suppose it was fair enough for them to discuss this subject, since Helen has an interest and Vera seems to have the inside line. But it did seem grim stuff in the circumstances, surrounded by languid sunbathers and with the squeal of delighted children splashing down the water slide shrill in our ears.

I smoked a cigarette and tried not to listen. I watched the divers in their acrobatic grace, gathering for a leap and then launching from the springboard, showing off to their sweethearts. Then I saw Spalding in the line in a blue rubber cap the same sudden colour as his eyes. He executed a perfect jackknife and entered the water so cleanly he left barely a ripple on the surface. And I thought that the man should by rights be dead at the bottom of a Dublin dock and not sullying our bright little town with his dark presence.

The town doesn’t mind him, of course. The town has welcomed him and his style and extravagance with open arms. It is only my spirits that his presence here darkens.

You can bet there are more than two, Vera was telling Helen. That is what her detective has told her. If two disappearances have been reported, there will be others that people have tried to explain away without raising public alarm.

What does he think the motive is, Helen asked her.

Sexual, Vera said, flatly. But she had lowered her voice.

I was contemplating a swim. Instead, I lit another cigarette. The girl who worked for the Rimmers was far from beautiful. And the picture in the paper of the Ormskirk girl showed her to be bland-looking and overweight. They did not seem to me the sort of women a sexual predator would obviously seek out. I looked around me. My immediate conclusion was that attractive and shapely would-be abduction victims are plentiful in this part of the country. It wasn’t a charitable thought and there would have been a time when I would have regarded even thinking it as a betrayal of the sisterhood. But contemplation of lethal acts of crime requires clear thinking, not blind loyalty to one’s gender. There are many more tempting targets than those two would have been. Perhaps the Palace chambermaid simply upped sticks and spent her savings on a ticket aboard a steamer to America. Women are capable of independent thought. She was a somewhat restless girl with an impulse for action and change.

That still leaves the Ormskirk girl, of course.

I went for a swim. The depths of the pool were deliciously cold in the heat of the day. I swam five lengths. It is only yet spring, but we are in the grip of a heatwave. After my lengths I floated with my eyes closed against the sun and my hair floating in fronds like seaweed as the water lapped about my head. I hope that the missing girls are safe. I hope that Vera’s detective is given to lurid exaggeration in the cause only of impressing her. But I doubt it.

Afterwards we walked back and along the promenade to the end of the pier. I am always amazed at the number of crippled men and amputees one sees out when the weather is warm. Almost ten years after its conclusion, the casualties of the war are still very much among us, living their diminished lives in pain and poverty in the land they were promised would be fit for heroes on their return. I stopped to give a man with a begging bowl half a crown. Blinded by gas, the sign around his neck said, and he wore a ragged, filthy blindfold to hide the disfigurement of his eyes. He was genuine, too. Some scoundrels beg, but I heard the wheeze and rattle of his liquefied lungs when I bent to put the money in his bowl. My half-crown joined a tarnished threepenny bit. I paused and took a guinea from my purse and pressed it into his grateful palm and he blessed me for the gift and then raised a salute.

He’ll spend it on drink, Vera Chadwick said. Her courtship with the murder detective has made her hard, I think, bled out of her the compassion that originally made her so attractive to me as a friend.

I hope he does, I said.

And Helen Sykes laughed.

I hope he finds happy oblivion for a night at my expense, I said. We should be humbled at the bravery and sacrifice of men like him.

I thought you were a Fenian, Vera said. But I did not reply to that. Perhaps she has discussed her Fenian friend with her policeman sweetheart. I want no trouble to embarrass my father. My heart went out of rebel politics when Mick Collins was killed. Before that, to tell the truth, with the senseless killing of the civil war even before it claimed his life.

At the end of the pier, there was a Punch and Judy show. It is the one seaside and fairground entertainment I detest. The violence of a man against a woman, even caricatured, is not to my mind a fit subject for humour. Nothing is funny about Punch cudgelling his shrew of a wife. It is comedy from a more robust time, I suppose. But it is crude and cruel. Punch beats Judy because she is ugly. I watched him do so, feeling a pang of guilt about my own thoughts earlier regarding the looks of the missing women.

There was a Pierrot show. And there was a brass band sweltering in their thick serge uniforms as they blew through the mouthpieces of their burnished instruments. Some of the players were very young, a couple no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. At the interval, Vera Chadwick bought ices for the band’s child players and congratulated them on their musical prowess. And I liked her again, recognising my friend happily returned in her pretty smile and thoughtfulness.

Afterwards we went for cocktails at the Prince of Wales Hotel. We were not really dressed for the restaurant, but took a balcony table in the cocktail bar and had sandwiches and fruit served there. We were all three of us famished after the swim and long exposure to the sun. I have a strong head for drink but was quite light-headed after two pink gins.

Ballast is what you need, girl, Helen Sykes said, ordering a bowl of pistachio nuts and some salted crackers.

Mention of ballast made me uneasy. And then I realised why. Her image of things nautical brought thoughts of my father’s boatyard and his race to have Spalding’s schooner repaired by his own impossible deadline. That deadline seems more than ever impossible now. Two men were seriously injured aboard the Dark Echo yesterday. They were proofing a section of the keel with some sort of varnish or protective paint that should not be used in confined spaces. They were doing so under an open hatch that slammed shut and somehow jammed. The heat apparently made the toxic effects of the stuff they were using worse. Father said it was sweltering on the dock, ninety degrees in the open air and more in the vessel’s hold. The more fortunate of the two has badly blistered skin. He is burned and scarred. The other man is unconscious in a bed in Liverpool infirmary and is not expected to recover.

Helen and Vera tried to tease me about the money I gave my war hero, asking had the impulse cleaned me out, speculating on whether I would honour my share when the bill was presented, asking was I prepared for washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. But the sombre mood had descended and would not lift.

Tommy Rimmer told me the other day that his new golf friend Harry Spalding is a war hero on his own account. Apparently he led a special unit called the Jericho Crew. They were charged with particularly dangerous missions carried out behind enemy lines. They were very successful and greatly feared by the enemy. And I was not greatly surprised to hear this. Courage comes in many forms. It can be noble and reckless, as Mick’s brand of it certainly was. And it can be a function of savagery. Who can say a snake lacks a certain primeval courage, locked in a battle to the death against a mongoose? Spalding is a killer. I’ve known it in my heart since the night it took Boland’s gun to discourage him from raping me. He would not have stopped with the violation. The evening would have ended in my death. How he must have loved the war and the killing spree to which it would have treated him.

June 10th, 1927

A farm girl from Burscough has gone. Vera Chadwick telephoned and told me this morning. Tonight there is a grand ball at the Palace Hotel. I do not feel like going, with the intimation of death about the region. Vera says her detective beau has told her confidentially that no woman in the area is safe. Three makes five, he said. He is an experienced catcher of killers, so I suppose his opinion has to be respected. Three makes five. His theory is that if the police know about three, there are likely to be at least two other victims whose disappearance has gone unreported.

Vera asked him why. And I asked Vera.

Shame, he said, is the reason. Families think their little girl has absconded. They do not want the attentions of the police. Even less do they want the attentions of the press. What would their neighbours think? How would the dismaying news be received by the congregation at their church? Perhaps they had given their daughter just cause to bolt the family home. The police would press them on this and the police were expert and relentless in their questioning.

Three makes five, Vera’s detective says. And I am apt to think him right. And I am impressed with his psychological insight. But there is no suspect yet identified for the crimes he believes he is investigating. And he has told Vera that the best thing she and her friends can do is to be escorted or stay off the streets altogether and double-lock our doors. I am less impressed with that. We pay for the police through our taxes. We are entitled to their protection. The notion of being confined to my home is an unattractive one. My home is a spacious and comfortable Birkdale Village flat. I have good furniture and a marble bathroom and a painting by Bonnard on the wall. But I do not want the place I live in to be my prison.

And it won’t be. The one advantage I possess that those poor girls did not, is a gun. I have a Mauser pistol given me as a keepsake years ago by Mick Collins. It has existed more as a treasured memento than as a weapon all this time. But I have had it serviced regularly if only out of respect for its proper function. I like mechanical things. I like them to work, whether at the joystick of a Tiger Moth or the wheel of a Morgan roadster. And, of course, the Mauser is, before it is anything else, a functioning tool. It is a potent weapon. Mick, also, was of a practical turn of mind. The Mauser was a keepsake. But it was intended to protect me should the need for it to do so ever arise.

My gun is oiled and loaded with eight soft-point nine millimetre bullets. I was never the best shot on the range at Parbold when I taught myself how to use it, but I was far from being the worst. My marksmanship was good enough to make some of the men embarrassed. And I remember well the advice given me by Boland on firing a pistol. Aim for the centre of the target, he said. And keep on squeezing the trigger until the gun is empty. Never trust to accuracy. Trust to the percentages. Blow the life out of what you wish to kill. Never stop until you’re out of ammunition.

I liked Harry Boland. He was a good and spirited man. I liked him even before his intervention saved my life. Mick was wrong over their falling out and the breach depressed Mick afterwards, I knew. Anyway, Boland taught me something that might save my life. If it does, I’ll walk to Saint Theresa’s Church in Birkdale and light a candle and say a prayer for the safe delivery of his soul. Do I need to? I imagine both their souls were safely delivered. They were good men. They were the best of men, says she, having re-encountered the worst.

I feel weary and defeated after Vera’s call. I have never felt less like a party in my life. But I will go. It’s what we do. It’s the modern way. In a sense, I suspect that in this modern age, it’s what we’re all of us for. There is a painting in one of the rooms at the Atkinson Gallery. It portrays this mad whirligig. The passengers aboard are frenzied, their grins crazed and their knuckles white with the insane strain of hanging on to the ride. I cannot remember the name of the painter. It is someone from the Modernist school. But it is us he has portrayed in this painted metaphor. It is us, in our hysteria and hurtle and addiction to novelty and the future.

Suzanne groaned. She was in the gloaming, now, outside the Fisherman’s Rest. She was amid the creeping shadows of the night. And she had in her hands a document that had told her in an evening more about the character of Michael Collins than she had learned from the known sources in a year. And Collins wasn’t even the point of what she’d been reading. Her glass was empty. She wanted another drink. She had about a third of Jane Boyte’s deposition to go.

‘God, you were wonderful,’ she surprised herself by saying out loud. ‘You were really something, Jane.’ Suzanne wiped at a tear she could not suppress or contain. ‘You were brave and true.’ She sniffed. She bent over the typed pages and continued to read.

June 15th, 1927

The ball was a spectacular success. The ballroom at the Palace was decked out in balloons and taffeta and silk ribbon of every shade and two bands shared a swivel stage. There was a full orchestra for half of the evening. And that alternated with a jazz band playing the wild and frenzied music of New Orleans. It was sweltering in the heatwave. Someone at the hotel had come up with the clever idea of ice sculptures to cool the dancing throng. They decorated the ballroom on two opposing sides, depicting a four-funnelled ocean liner running almost the full length of one and a great, streamlined steam locomotive on the other. Someone told me that the steam engine fashioned from ice was modelled on the prototype of one being built at York to break the world rail speed record. By the end of the evening, there were puddles on the parquet from these perishable masterpieces adorning the room. But they were very finely wrought and kept the air cool and breathable for the crowd in the cigar smoke under the bright, burning electric globes of the ballroom’s giant chandeliers.

I went with my father, who looked fraught and sad. There has been another mishap at the yard and the men are whispering that Spalding’s boat is cursed. Work is not so plentiful in Liverpool Harbour as to make them boycott the job. Not yet, at least. But men involved with the sea are always superstitious. And the project is taking its toll on my father’s mood and perhaps also his health. I don’t think he is sleeping well. I don’t think he is sleeping much at all. He usually teases me about the way I wear my hair and my choice of clothes and my insistence on smoking in public. He does it good-naturedly. It has become a sort of humorous ritual between us. But on this occasion I think my appearance barely registered with my father.

There does not seem to me to be very much wrong with Harry Spalding’s luck. He did not attend the ball. But he was at the hotel. He is no longer resident there, of course, but can often be found in the evening in the gaming room. On the night of the ball he won five thousand pounds at the blackjack table. It is a colossal sum of money. A streak like that at cards does not come to a man who sails an unlucky boat. If his boat really was unlucky, it would not have survived the worst storm in living memory. It would have sunk under him. Though I have heard an ugly rumour about the fate of his crew during the storm. Spalding says he was sailing alone. The Dublin harbour master insists there were two French crewmen aboard. The log should settle the matter. But so far, Spalding has been reluctant to produce the log. There might be an enquiry and there might not. Probably there will not. Whose jurisdiction covers the fate of two French deckhands aboard an American-registered vessel in the Irish Sea? Perhaps Spalding is telling the truth and he was sailing the Dark Echo alone. He is a very considerable yachtsman. The only thing I know with certainty is that my father will be well rid of the boat when the repairs to her are finally completed. I may not believe her cursed. But I think that he does.

Pierre Giroud sent a bottle of champagne to our table. It was a nice gesture from a sweet man who would be distraught to hear himself described as such. I don’t mean to sound patronising. He is a sweet man. He is also an accomplished flier and tall and good-looking in his Gallic way. But the shadow cast by Mick Collins is a long one. The affairs I have had in the years since my return from Ireland have been tepid. My heart was not in any of them. It will not always be like this and I am fully aware that fast cars and aeroplanes are my compensation for those sensations most people enjoy between their sheets. It will not always be like this, but poor sweet Pierre Giroud is wasting his time and squandering his money buying Moët & Chandon in the hope of winning over this particular girl.

July 13th, 1927

I have deliberately stayed away from this journal for a full four weeks, concerned on rereading it that Harry Spalding was becoming an unhealthy obsession with me. But something occurred this afternoon that has left me badly shaken. It has also confirmed some of my worst suspicions about that monster walking the streets of Southport in the urbane and civilised guise of a man. It happened on Lord Street, near the junction with Nevill Street, as I was crossing from west to east after collecting my wristwatch from the jeweller’s shop where it was being repaired. I almost collided with him. I was fastening the strap of my watch and not really paying attention to what was in front of me when I gained the pavement. I stopped at the sight of Spalding’s broad back and pale trilby hat. He was switching his cane against the heel of his shoe and staring at the cenotaph. I saw him stiffen as he became aware of me. He took off his hat slowly with his free hand. But he did not turn and I did not move an inch from where I stood. He chuckled. And he spoke.

Great days, Jane, this monument celebrates. I do believe they were the making of me.

I did not move. The sun was very bright above us. The white stone of the memorial was quite dazzling and Spalding was pale and almost insubstantial in his linen suit and cream leather brogues. He was mistaken, of course. The cenotaph celebrated nothing. It acknowledged sacrifice. It commemorated loss.

Sacrifice, he said, as though reading my mind. But there’s no point in dwelling on the past, is there? He switched his cane, idly. A man must live in the present, he said. And a wise man must secure his future.

The riddles in which he spoke seemed to carry the chill of foreboding through the warm air. Everything about him felt and sounded threatening. I shivered.

Shame about poor Mick Collins, he said. He still had not turned to face me. He could fight, could Collins, Spalding said. It would be churlish not to concede the fact. He could fight. But could he love, Janey? That’s the question.

Janey. It was what Mick had called me only in our tender moments together.

It was then I saw Harry Spalding cast no shadow on the pavement.

I hurried away from him. But he had one more trick. He had stopped my watch. Later in the day I took it back to Connards and their man took the back off it and could find nothing wrong with it at all. He blew on the movement and it started again. He was mystified. I was relieved that the trick was only temporary, the magic simply mischievous and not permanent. But I know now that Spalding really is a monster. He has known who I was all the time and toyed with me. He is evil and powerful and deranged. Can it be a coincidence that three women from the vicinity have gone missing while he is in our midst?

I think a clue was presented and ignored by all of us at Tommy and Nora’s party back in May. Little Bonnie came down and raised her arm and pointed at something and screamed. Tommy has long recovered from the shock of it, of course. And Bonnie, thankfully, has no conscious memory of the event. Tommy even jokes about it, saying that Bonnie was pointing in the direction of Blackpool Tower. It’s a vulgar eyesore, Tommy says. It has earned his daughter’s scorn. And he’s right that she was pointing in that direction. But I think she may have been pointing at something a lot closer than the tower across the bay at Blackpool. I overfly the town and know the lay of it. I can close my eyes and see a map of it painted accurately on my mind. And I know that Bonnie pointed that evening precisely in the direction of the house rented for the summer by Harry Spalding on Rotten Row. You could draw a line from Bonnie’s pointing finger to the tower and it would pass through Spalding’s garden. What secrets does he harbour there? I wonder. What summoned that little girl’s unconscious accusation and her scream?

July 16th, 1927

I have rowed bitterly with Vera Chadwick. She does not think my evidence compelling enough to take to the police. She thinks her Liverpool detective would laugh in my face presented with my accusations. I’m not making accusations, I told Vera. I am merely raising suspicions. Surely the police need to follow all lines of enquiry if they are to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the three missing girls?

You cannot make accusations against a rich and popular visitor to the town, Vera says. The evidence simply is not there. You will look like a bigoted fool, taking against a stranger simply because he is a stranger and not a Southport man born and bred. And the culprit is likely to be a local man, her fiancé says. Only someone who knows the ground could stalk the victims and evade capture without leaving witnesses or clues. He’s from Ainsdale or Crossens. He is not a stranger to the terrain. He is likely to be someone inconspicuous, superficially unremarkable. And this is all well and good and makes perfect sense, of course. But Spalding was able to ghost through enemy lines on the Western Front not a decade ago, wreaking havoc and eluding capture. The taking of three women would be child’s play to a man with his deadly predatory skills.

I should have kept my own counsel. I had hoped for an ally in Vera’s detective, or a least a sympathetic hearing for one of the closest friends of his intended. I fear that the real problem for Vera is less the subject of Harry Spalding than my own past Fenian connection. She is loyal enough to stay my friend despite that. But she doesn’t want our friendship known about by her police detective. Perhaps she fears it would compromise him. As I said, I wish I had kept my own counsel. But there is something concrete I can do myself. And I intend to do it tomorrow. Vera is right in one regard. I have no hard evidence. Tomorrow I believe I might be able to provide myself with some.

I made the preparations earlier today, shortly after my angry exchange with Vera. I motored down to the Giroud hangar where Pierre was in his overalls stripping the turbine yet again on the troublesome Sopwith they bought. The Sopwith is supposed to be an easily maintained aircraft. It has a reputation for being relatively trouble-free. But theirs isn’t.

Did you come to thank me for the champagne, Pierre said. He looks more handsome in his blue overalls with grease smeared across his face than he does in black tie and tails. He looks more the man of action, which of course he is. He and his brother both.

I want to fly early tomorrow, I told him.

Of course. How early is early?

Dawn.

He did something French with his mouth, a sort of shrug of the lips, and nodded. The Tiger Moth?

I shook my head. The Hawker Siddeley, I told him. And I need it fully equipped.

He smiled at that. You want us to mount the machine gun?

Almost all of their aircraft once belonged to the Royal Flying Corps. The brothers Giroud made a killing on military surplus when it was still cheap. I’m quite surprised they did not buy a tank just to tow their aeroplanes through the soft sand on the beach to the landing strip.

Not armed, Pierre, I said. But fully equipped.

Of course, he said. I will see you here tomorrow at dawn. And the Siddeley will be ready for you.

July 28th, 1927

I am just returned from Liverpool. I do not think I have ever felt more exhausted in my life. Detective Chief Inspector Bell of the Liverpool Constabulary had finally acceded to my request for an audience. Perhaps it was the newspaper headlines that persuaded him to grant me half an hour of his precious time. Three days ago Helen Sykes became the fourth woman from our little corner of South Lancashire to disappear. The other women were not worth a splash in print on their own account. Too poor and too plain, I expect. But Helen is both well-off and beautiful. I use the present tense in the hope that she still lives. But each day that passes makes that less likely, as even DCI Bell was moved to agree. Helen has no motive for orchestrating her own vanishing act. And she has no reason for ignoring the appeals to allay concern by coming forward made in every edition of the Post and the Echo and the Visitor sold by those bellowing urchins from the hoardings on the streets.

Bell is senior to Vera’s policeman in rank. And he showed no sign whatsoever of recognising my name when I was ushered into his office. He made me wait. But I waited in an anteroom rather than in the general waiting area, with its green linoleum and scatter of flattened cigarette ends and stink of sweaty desperation. The anteroom was bad enough. It had a large brass lock on a door which whooshed on its steel frame, flush with the floor and the top of the lintel it hung so heavily in. The green canvas chairs and heavy brown varnish and silence of the anteroom could not have symbolised confinement more solidly without bars and handcuffs. The only way out was when they came to escort me to Bell.

The Detective Chief Inspector’s office was replete with the shields and rosettes of achievement on all four walls. Liverpool is a port city and a town as rough as they come and he looked as hard as granite. He was slender and cold-eyed where I had expected him to be stout and bellicose. But there was steel in his handshake as he rose from behind his desk to greet me and offered me a seat. Please, he said, gesturing to the stiff-backed chair. The one word carried the thick, adenoidal character of unschooled Scouse. I know it from my father’s yard. Mr Bell, I knew instantly, had come up on merit earned on the streets through the police ranks. I noticed then a glass case on the wall with a truncheon and a constable’s helmet displayed inside it. And I had no doubt they had belonged to him at the outset of his career. I could see him on Scotland Road under the street lights at closing time, putting violent drunks to punishing rights at the business end of that hardwood club.

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.