Dark Echo

Twelve

It was almost dark when Suzanne reached the last page of Jane’s deposition. She went inside the pub, because she felt cold despite the gentle warmth of the summer night. She got a drink from the bar, found an interior table and called the seminary in Northumberland and asked for the Jesuit, Delaunay.

‘I think I know where to find your desecrated relic, Monsignor,’ she said to him.

He was silent for so long that she thought the connection broken. Then he spoke. ‘I’m relieved to hear you’re safe,’ he said. ‘Has there been any further attempt to harm you?’

‘No. When I return your relic, Monsignor, you must straight away bless or re-sanctify or exorcise the thing. You must do whatever it is you have the power to do to nullify the effects of the desecration.’

‘That would be the sacred duty of any priest,’ Delaunay said.

There had been no further attempt to harm her, it was true. There had been no spiteful, spectral attempt to impede her. And that was puzzling to her. But it was a mystery that solved itself in Suzanne’s mind when she was awoken early the following morning in her hotel room by a return call from Northumberland.

‘Half an hour after I spoke to you last night, I received an email sent from aboard the Dark Echo,’ Delaunay said. ‘It had a lengthy written attachment. I’ve only just finished reading it now. The last dozen or so pages of it deal with the voyage. You need to see those, I think.’

‘Magnus is keeping a log?’

‘It’s Martin’s account. It’s Martin’s log. I’ll send you the pages now.’

She read the log in her hotel room, sitting by the open window. When she had finished, she switched on her computer. He had sent her a message at the same time as he had sent his testament to the priest. The laptop came to life. Hers was a much briefer missive.

I loved you. I did not love you for long enough, but I loved you as well as I could. I will die loving you.

Martin.

She looked at her watch. The Botanical Gardens Museum would be open in an hour. She ordered a minicab at reception, thinking that Martin was not going to die if there was anything humanly possible that she could do to prevent it from happening. She loved him back, and he was right. They had not had anything like long enough with one another.

‘Boyce, you say?’

‘Boyte.’ And she smiled at her museum skiver. She had returned the borrowed document meeting her own twenty-four-hour deadline. She was comfortably within it. Now she wanted to know if anything else had been deposited here all those years ago by poor, desperate Jane. She felt very strongly that something had.

‘There’s a box,’ he said, looking up from the written ledger he was perusing. ‘Contents not inventoried.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘You can see it, certainly. But you cannot look inside it. Not until a member of the staff here has inventoried the contents and signed and dated the inventory. It’s the rules.’

Suzanne took fifty pounds in tens from her wallet and spread the notes on the desk between them. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said.

He stared at the money. ‘Five,’ he said.

He just had to have the last word.

‘Done.’

He swept up the cash like a croupier. ‘I’ll find you the key.’

She took what she needed from the strongbox Jane had left at the museum. She did so swiftly and without sentiment. In other circumstances, she would have lingered over the legacy of someone she had come so greatly to like and respect. She would have opened the box on eighty years of darkness and history and carried out the necessary violation with gentleness and decorum and perhaps even a touch of ceremony. But there was not time. If the speed of the Dark Echo were consistent, the vessel would arrive in a couple of days. Magnus Stannard had been wrong. Her destination was not the West Coast of Ireland. She would alter course and skirt the Irish coast and not founder and break up on the reefs there at all. She was headed for the coast of Lancashire. She would beach somewhere between Formby Point and the pier at Southport. And she would float off again for ever on the next high tide. Here was where the thing that had once been Harry Spalding would board her and become her master again, where Magnus and Martin both would be enslaved as her crewmen. And Spalding did not have the best of reputations, did he, when it came to the treatment of his regular crews.

Spalding was here. She had seen him behind the windows of his old house, just fleetingly. Out of cowardice she had fooled herself into thinking it was the figure of some domestic helper there. She had felt his presence and could feel it still. He could not hurt her, she did not think. The attempt to crush the life out of her on the road in Northumberland had been the first and last he had been able to make. He could not hurt her because all his power was consumed at present by his efforts to lure back his boat. He was subduing and bewildering Martin and his father. He was somehow blocking the vessel’s bristling array of instruments. He was shifting, by some demonic sorcery, seventy tons of wood and steel with some urgency through the silent ocean. But when he got aboard the Dark Echo, with Magnus and Martin in thrall to him, she felt that he would be powerful again. He would flex the insectile muscles Jane had spoken of with such distaste. And then, at his leisure, she supposed that he would take delight and relish in dealing finally with her.

She walked the short distance from the museum to the Hesketh Arms. She sat at a table and used her mobile phone to get the number for the police at Southport from directory enquiries. She asked if there was an officer designated to handle cold crimes and closed her eyes and prayed that there was.

‘How cold?’ said a jocular voice.

‘Eighty years.’

There was a pause. ‘Goodness, that is chilly. That’s not so much felony, madam, as history.’

‘It’s murder, is what it is,’ Suzanne said. Her tone must have conveyed some of the seriousness and anger she was feeling.

‘Wait a moment,’ the voice said. ‘I’ll patch you through to Mr Hodge.’

She had been hoping for a Wright or a Rimmer or a Halsall. She knew the names from her genealogy work on the northern comic. She had said a short prayer to herself in the hope of a really local man to listen to what she had to say. Hodge was about as good as she could have wished for, though. And now she silently thanked God for that. There were Hodges from around here in the Domesday Book. They had cultivated the land at Hundred End and Ormskirk a thousand years ago. The word itself was the Viking word for farmer. It helped to know the land, Suzanne thought, if you were going to be excavating it. Her appointment with Mr Hodge of the Southport Division of the Merseyside Cold Crimes Squad was made for nine thirty the following morning.

She went to the library and used her laptop in the reference section. The Paddy McAloon ballad ‘When Love Breaks Down’ had entered the chart in September of 1985. That was when it was current, when it was getting its airplay, when it would likely enter whatever passed for the conscious mind of Harry Spalding. She went over and asked to see the microfiche files. It seemed a remote time, 1985, when she saw the page layouts and the photographs. She found what she was looking for in an issue of the Southport Visitor from October of that year.

Two friends had disappeared fishing off Formby Point. They were assumed drowned, but their bodies had not washed up. They were both seventeen. They had been at school together. Their fishing hobby had progressed from freshwater brooks and ponds and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to the bigger catches to be had sea fishing from the end of Southport Pier. This was only the second time their parents had permitted them to fish by night from a boat. The weather had been calm. The forecast had been clear. And they and their dinghy had vanished. The families had provided the paper with portrait shots. Fashionable lads, in their quiffs and overcoats, they looked in these photographs a little like rock stars of the period themselves. They did not look like Paddy McAloon. They had that look of the period more defined by bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, or The Smiths. Suzanne did not think they had drowned. But she thought she knew what had been playing on their radio or tape machine when the prow of the Dark Echo loomed in the night over their little craft.

‘How did the picture get torn?’ Hodge asked. He was scrutinising Jane’s aerial photograph, recovered from the strongbox left at the museum. He was doing so in bifocals, seated at his desk, the picture tilted into the bright sunshine coming in through his window. Suzanne guessed he was in his mid-fifties. He was unremarkable-looking. His hair was turning from blond to grey and was close-cropped and thick. There were lines around his blue eyes. His worsted suit seemed a bit warm for June and, like his plaid flannel shirt, looked straight off a rack at Marks & Spencer. His rank had been Detective Inspector at the time of his retirement. Perhaps he was bored in retirement. Perhaps his pension had not stretched as far as it needed to. It could just be that he needed something to keep him from the temptation of the lounge bar of his local pub. But he did not look like a drinker. He looked alert and competent and, though he was polite, seemed rather distrustful. She could hardly blame him, in the circumstances, for that.

Suzanne had given Mr Hodge some of the background. She had told him about the missing girls. She had told him about Jane’s suspicion of Harry Spalding. She had told him about the Dublin encounter between Spalding and Jane and how the picture came to be taken. Now she told him about the meeting in Liverpool between Jane and DCI Bell.

Hodge nodded, without comment. He had not commented so far on anything that Suzanne had said. He had restricted himself to a couple of questions just to establish chronology and fact. Now, he did comment.

‘I remember my granddad telling me something about these disappearances.’

‘Was he a police officer?’

‘No. He wasn’t. He was head barman at the Palace Hotel. He knew the chambermaid.’ Hodge put the separate pieces of Jane’s photograph down on his desk. ‘He knew Helen Sykes and her circle. Miss Sykes was a lavish tipper. My grandfather remembered that. Could I get you some tea or coffee, miss? Have you been offered anything?’

‘Please, call me Suzanne. Coffee would be great.’ And a cigarette would be even greater. But that comfort would have to be forgone.

‘I have to go to our computer room for a few minutes,’ Hodge said. He closed the notebook he had been filling during Suzanne’s monologue and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. ‘You are welcome to drink your coffee in our canteen. Or I can have it brought to you in the yard to the rear of the station where you are welcome to smoke.’

‘The yard, please,’ she said.

Hodge smiled at her. The smile seemed warm enough but the eyes above it stayed alert. Suzanne did not think he was doing this to prevent himself from downing too much beer or to pay off stubborn credit card bills. They had brought him back only because he was so bloody good at it.

It was thirty-five minutes before he returned to his office and he did so with a sheaf of documents under his arm. ‘Much easier, now everything is computerised,’ he said. She nodded. Without computers, her own job would be near impossible. Not that she really had a job any more. With a shock, she realised that the struggle to deliver Martin from the spectre of Harry Spalding had taken over her entire life.

He sat down and gestured for her to sit, then he lowered the open blind so that the light was not dazzling through his window. It was still bright in his office through the chinks of the blind. He tapped his fingers in a tattoo on his desk and sucked his teeth. Then he sifted amid the pile of printouts his computer time had delivered him. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Suzanne?’

‘No.’

There was a silence.

‘Do you?’

‘I didn’t,’ he said. He slid a black and white picture of a woman seated at a café table across the desk. Suzanne looked at it and coloured. It was like seeing a snapshot she hadn’t known existed of herself.

‘Surveillance picture. Taken by the Special Branch on Lord Street in 1925. Miss Boyte was a known associate in Dublin of a bomb-maker by the name of Devlin. It isn’t surprising that Bell gave her short shrift. He wasn’t an Orangeman, either, by the way. He was a Freemason. That’s probably neither here nor there. Lots of police officers were and are Freemasons. What is more significant is that his brother was killed in Tipperary serving with the Black and Tans. Corporal David Bell was blown to pieces in a Republican ambush.’

Suzanne didn’t say anything.

‘Not everyone was so enamoured of Michael Collins as Jane Boyte so clearly was.’

‘So she was kept under supervision.’

‘There’s quite a comprehensive file on her. She was pulled in from time to time. Did you know that she gave birth to a daughter?’

‘I suspected it. She wrote something in her journal about children and one’s feelings towards them. It struck me at the time as something only a mother would have written, an insight only a mother would have had. Is her daughter’s married name Daunt?’

‘Was. It was. Alice Emmeline Daunt. She died three years ago. She was eighty-four.’

Suzanne swallowed. ‘And she was born in 1921. She was the daughter of Jane Boyte, and her father was Michael Collins.’

‘Do you have a more sensible pair of shoes than the ones you’re wearing, Suzanne?’

‘Why?’

‘Because even in clement weather, digging is a very dirty business.’

‘You’re going to start digging today?’

‘Not personally. But I’ll have a team there by this afternoon. SOCOs, forensics, a mechanical digger, men with spades. You, if you so wish.’

‘You can move that fast?’

‘Spalding was either very unsavoury or incredibly accident-prone where propriety was concerned. That picture Jane Boyte took is highly suspicious. I don’t believe very much in coincidence. And if those women are there, I think they’ve waited long enough to be laid decently to rest. Don’t you?’

Suzanne turned the two pieces of the picture around, put them together and looked at the image there, at the grainy reality of turf torn and earth disturbed. ‘What’s particularly suspicious about it, Detective Inspector?’

‘The timing. The fact that it is there at all. Playboys like Spalding didn’t dig holes big enough to be seen from the air for fun or as a hobby. Unless he was nostalgic for the war and was digging himself a trench.’

‘What about the occupants of the house? Won’t the people living there object?’

‘There aren’t any people living there,’ Hodge said. ‘The house is Grade II listed and empty. It’s never really been successfully occupied. People don’t feel comfortable there. They say it is haunted.’

Suzanne stood. She was momentarily at a loss. ‘What should I do now?’

‘We’re close to Lord Street. You could do some window-shopping and then grab an early lunch. Then you should go back to your hotel and change out of that smart outfit you so courteously assembled for our appointment. Put on some practical clothes. Meet me at the site at two o’clock. Bring something to wear on your head. The sun is hot in June. And bring something to drink. We are in for a long day.’

Suzanne left the police station and walked along Lord Street. She felt that in a few days she had come to know Southport very well. The past kept breaking through into the present, but in a peculiar way it was that kind of place and the intrusion was only fitting. Once, she thought she glimpsed Jane Boyte staring at her from inside a chic department store. But when she looked again, it was just her own reflection, with her hair groomed, in the grey pencil skirt and tailored black jacket she had worn for her appointment with the old policeman.

She stopped at the Costa coffee shop. It was eleven o’clock, a busy coffee time, and there was a queue. She saw again the street sign in the Costa montage that reminded her of the home she shared in Lambeth with Martin Stannard. She wondered if she had seen Martin for the last time. She remembered their last awkward night together. She had been remote from him, cold with disapproval of the intended voyage. That disapproval had been fully vindicated. But she regretted her coldness deeply now. The invitation to share one another had been offered by neither of them. She hoped now with all her ardent heart to be given the chance to compensate for that.

She took her coffee to one of the tables on the pavement outside. Through the line of old trees on the kerb, she could see the pale splendour of the cenotaph. It was magnificent from here in its scale and simplicity, the seamless blocks of Portland stone shaped in two great, white edifices flanking a tall obelisk. She thought of Spalding standing in linen, switching his cane and paying mock homage to the dead while he teased Jane Boyte on the flagstones behind him. There was no one there now. The flagstones shifted in patterns of light and shade wrought by the canopy of trees and the sun through their summer leaves. Suzanne sighed and sipped coffee and shifted her attention to her own side of Lord Street. It was very crowded and bright with people in their summer attire. She realised that she was looking for Alice Daunt. But she knew she had seen the last of Alice, as she knew she had seen the last of her father, too.

There were five bodies, when they had done their digging. The remains were skeletal. It was dusk by the time they were done and the bones were bleached white by the big searchlights fighting the encroaching night and illuminating the scene. They were positioned sideways on in the attitude of jackknifing divers, the dead women, with their spines at the apex and their hands touching the feet of their neighbour. The significance of this human geometry was plain to see. The remains formed a gruesome pattern. It was the five-sided star, the pentagram. The killing had been a ritual. The purpose had been sacrificial. Suzanne wondered how the women had died.

‘Not well,’ Hodge told her. He looked a full decade older than he had in the bright sunshine of his office that morning. He was sipping coffee poured from a steel flask. ‘We won’t know the specifics until forensics have a proper look and we won’t get the full picture until the pathologist’s report. But judging from the abrasions plain on their neck bones, I would say that the women had their throats cut. My guess is that it was done with a saw-edged weapon, perhaps a German infantry bayonet Spalding kept as a memento from the war. My belief is that they bled to death where they lay and were arranged like this afterwards. But I’ve got no context for this kind of killing, to be honest with you. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire professional life. And I hope to God I never do again.’

The women had been buried deep. The pentagram was twelve feet below the surface. It was why the police digging had taken so long. The circular pit they had gouged from the earth had needed to be shored up by poles and scaffolding planks banked behind the poles on their edges. Even with this revetting, the soil tried to bulge and break through. It was unstable, like a living organism trying to conceal itself. Little avalanches trickled through breaches and cracks in the planks down to the pit.

‘It was dug by hand, by shovel and pick, we can tell that much,’ Hodge said. ‘If it was dug by one man alone, then he had colossal strength. Carrying the women here would have been no burden to him. A man possessed of that kind of strength could have carried these poor wretches here two at a time.’

From the centre of the star formed by the dead women, they had retrieved a brass cylinder about three and a half feet long. It had been buried bound in oilcloth. The oilcloth had been very carefully removed. The cylinder was barely tarnished by its time under the earth. Suzanne had at first assumed it was a telescope. But its sides were parallel and it was not sectioned and it had a cap, on close inspection, that screwed on to protect and secure whatever it contained.

Everyone at the scene crowded round when the cap was unscrewed and the contents of the tube revealed. Suzanne watched in some anxiety. The whole operation was conducted with incredible delicacy but she was concerned anyway because by now she knew what the object was and she was afraid that it would simply crumble to nothing in the exposure to the white, halogen-lit air. The thought terrified her. This was sea air, harsh with ozone and salt. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes and murmured a prayer. But when she opened her eyes again what emerged, emerged intact.

She could imagine no more unprepossessing an object. It looked like a piece of broom handle. Except that it was almost petrified with age and, in the brilliance of the lights, you could see the faint indentations where the twine or rawhide of its grip had once been tightly wound.

‘Some kind of staff,’ Hodge said.

‘Not a staff, Detective Inspector. A shaft,’ Suzanne said.

He turned to her. The suspicion and hostility had gone from his gaze during the course of the afternoon and evening. Suzanne suspected she had vindicated herself. She could not really imagine any vindication more terrible and sad.

‘Call me Bernard,’ Hodge said. He held out his hand. She realised that he had held off from this gesture from their outset until this moment. She shook hands with him.

‘What will happen now?’

‘There are all sorts of protocols. Not least, the American Embassy will have to be notified. We won’t have a forensic report for a while and it might be useless when we get it, unless we exhume Spalding and recover DNA. But the circumstantial evidence is too compelling to ignore.’

‘It always was.’

‘Yes, Suzanne. Jane Boyte was quite right in that. It always was.’

And anyway, Suzanne thought, Spalding’s casket in his cemetery in New York lies empty. Because Harry Spalding never died.

‘You know what that object is, don’t you, Suzanne? That modest little bit of wood uncovered just now.’

‘What do you think it is?’

‘I’m a stranger to demonic ritual. At least, I was until today,’ Hodge said. He sipped coffee from his steel cup. He was speaking softly, so that his voice would not carry beyond his audience of one. ‘I’d say it is a holy relic. And it was the subject here of an awful desecration. But that’s just an old copper’s intuition. It doesn’t look much.’

‘It’s priceless,’ Suzanne said.

‘It’s just a stick to me.’

‘I know a Jesuit priest who would be very relieved to get it back on behalf of the Church from which it was looted.’

‘Then he’d best give me a call. On my mobile number.’

‘It isn’t evidence?’

‘It isn’t the murder weapon, if that’s what you mean. I’d be as keen as anyone to see as much of what was done here undone as can be. My keeping that piece of wood won’t bring back the women killed here. Have your priest give me a call.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘Good ones on the brass of the case. And I think we both know whose they are. We don’t need that stick.’

‘Won’t people see it’s missing?’

‘It won’t be missing. I’ll replace it myself with one similar from the dead wood in the park over the way.’ He was almost whispering. ‘Materially, it doesn’t matter to this investigation. Whatever properties you think it possesses, it isn’t bringing those poor lasses back.’

Suzanne nodded. He was right about that. ‘If you release it into my charge, I’ll take it to the priest myself, Bernard,’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘At some stage, you are going to need to make a statement. I’m going to trust you to come back and see me over the next few days to do that.’

She nodded again.

‘Call yourself a taxi. I’ll meet you outside the front in five minutes. Goodbye, Suzanne. And God go with you.’

She risked her first real look at Spalding’s house. The windows stared back blackly at her. She was fearful of the face that might be gazing out from behind the glass. But he wasn’t there. The house was empty. She had no sense of him at all. He was elsewhere, in one of his other places. He was deliberately elusive, as Jane had remarked of him. And Harry Spalding must have known many places on the travels of his long and awful life, the affliction of him spreading like disease.

She drove all night to get to Northumberland, having taken a taxi from Southport to Liverpool Airport to hire a car. She had to go south to go north-east. But she thought it was worth it as she pulled up at 5 a.m. outside Delaunay’s Gothic keep and saw him waiting there for her amid a deputation of grim and eminent-looking Catholic clergy. She wondered for how long they had maintained their vigil. And she saw that it did not matter to them in their relief and joy when she took the holy relic from its bed of screwed-up newspaper pages in the boot of her rental car.

She had a mind to turn round immediately and press on. But Delaunay leaned into the open driver’s window and the look of concern on his face persuaded her that this was foolish. The window was open because she had nearly nodded off at the wheel once already. She had been awake too long. She had never in her life needed greater alertness, sharper clarity of thought and instinct for danger. She had time. She had done the calculation. At ten to twelve knots, it would be another couple of days before the Dark Echo reached its destination. At Delaunay’s invitation, at his insistence, she ate a bowl of soup and slept for two oblivious hours in their guest quarters before setting out again.

Delaunay was waiting for her at the door.

‘Re-consecrate what I gave you, Monsignor.’

‘It’s done,’ he said, simply.

She drove to Dover in five hours, crashing every speed camera on the route. She prayed she would not be stopped for speeding and she wasn’t. Others were praying on her behalf, she knew. And she thought she might need every intercession made for her, every flicker of flaming brightness from every candle lit, if she was going to succeed. The weather was good and the traffic, as far as the London orbital at least, was light. She was forced to slow down in Kent. But she made the 11 a.m. ferry with five minutes to spare. And this time she did not need to slow for directions. She knew where she was going. She did not turn on the radio, of course. But one thing was the same. The sky grew sullen and bruised and, still a dozen miles from her destination, the rain began to steeple down from the clouds.

She drove over Duval’s fields to his barn along the track beside his ditch, hoping that the rain was a recent thing and that her wheels would not be claimed by a quagmire of French mud. It was muddy, but the ground had been cindered. She could hear the crunch and squeal of the cinders wedging in the tread of her tyres. The barn grew in her windscreen from a monument incongruous and remote to one ever closer and more disturbing. She felt the tiny hairs prick on the backs of her hands with the sheer, out-of-kilter strangeness of it. All her instinct, just as on the first occasion, was to flee this odd and morbid place. But she could not.

She slammed on her brakes with a final, cindery crunch and sat in the silence before her destination. Rain pattered on the car roof. The stopped engine ticked, cooling. And she saw that the high door of the barn was slightly ajar. It opened on a void of pure blackness. And as she got out of the car she felt her legs buckle and her resolve weaken, engulfed by the pure terror flooding through her. She watched the rain dance on summer puddles. She felt drops of it plaster her hair to her head. And she was undone. And she thought then of Martin with his arm cleaved open in an underground carriage and she battled with her quavering will and she gathered her strength.

She took the spade she had borrowed from the seminary out of the car boot. She walked into the barn and heard a collusive whisper from the spectral army of coats that hung, shivering, under a draught that wasn’t there, over on the far wall. She heard a distinct and undeniable whistling. The tune was ‘Camptown Races’. And it was distorted and faint with some last, scornful vestige of remembered humanity. There was a bark of laughter, a short explosion of mirth. And there was accordion music, heard as if through a dim green sea, ‘Roses of Picardy’, the notes distorted, drowning on the air.

‘Fuck this,’ Suzanne said. ‘Fuck you all, you crew of fucking butchers. And fuck you in particular, Harry Spalding.’ And she gathered the spade in the grip of both hands and began to shovel away the beets at the base of the high pyramid of them. And all around her, they tumbled and they fell. Rolling down from the pinnacle, they ricocheted and bounced and ran. And she heard what she thought sounded like explosive gunfire, twice, in her ears and ignored it, teeth clenched with such ferocious resolve that she brought forth the blood from her own gums and swallowed it bitterly down.

She booted away beets from the centre of the flattened pyramid and revealed the earth and began to dig. And only a foot beneath the surface, she encountered bone. It was a skull. It was long with bleak-shaped eye sockets and a narrow jaw and she knew it had been the head of a goat. And what she was looking for had been used, she thought, to kill the goat, skewering the brain of this animal sacrifice in some baleful ceremony from which the other remnants, revealing themselves now, included a burned Bible and a votive candle, a smashed statue of the Virgin and a chamber pot, amid the old encrusted filth of which had been placed a set of rosary beads. Shit had been daubed on the crucifix. Blasphemy was a puerile art. But it was the blade embedded in the skull of the goat, only, that concerned her. It was the tip of the ancient spear to which she had already recovered the shaft.

She thought she heard another noise outside. She disregarded it. It would wait. Outside would wait. There was business here. There was no more important business in the world. Knowing what it was, she felt reluctance to touch the spear tip with her hands. This was not squeamishness. Suzanne was not a squeamish woman. This was awe. She had been told the significance, symbolic and actual, too, of the glimmering, ancient shard of hammered and honed iron she retrieved from inside the skull of the goat and held between her own soiled fingertips. On her knees, she kissed the metal, as Delaunay had told her to. As Delaunay had told her to, she crossed herself with the metal in the grip of her right hand.

The assault of corruption hit her then. From the crates heaped high over against the wall of the barn, she could hear the fizz and burst of decay and smell the blister of erupting, rotten fruit. All around where she knelt, the beets steamed and flattened with decomposition, gaseous, foul, an affront to nature exposed finally to nature’s immutable laws. Suzanne coughed and retched and rose to her feet and looked over at the ragged army of Jericho Crew greatcoats and saw that they were becoming thin and threadbare, pale shrouds descending to dust as they should have done decades ago. She gave out a grunt of satisfaction. It was not triumph, though. Some sly instinct told her that pride in such a situation would be a dangerous, perhaps even deadly indulgence. Cradling what she had recovered, she made for the door.

Duval, the farmer who owned the land, was there outside, with his shotgun over his arm. He was waiting for her. Trespass on his domain was not a thing that went unnoticed. She knew that from her last visit here. But this time, the gun was not broken. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat and his mouth was set under the bristles of his moustache. Rain dripped, too, from the twin barrels of the gun. And smoke drifted lazily upward from them. There was a van, Suzanne saw, beside her car. And she thought with a shock that she recognised the livery. She approached the van. She saw the legend, Martens & Degrue, etched on the black body of the van in gold. She walked around to the front of the vehicle. There were two men inside. They wore pale-brown overalls. The windscreen of the van was punched with twin holes in front of where they sat. And they were dead. Each wore the fatal blossom of a shotgun blast, florid across his chest.

‘They would have killed you,’ Duval said. He said it flatly. It was a simple truth.

Suzanne looked at the ground. She looked up at the sky. ‘Does it always rain here?’

Duval shrugged. ‘It suits the crops.’

Suzanne nodded. She tried to smile. In the face of death, in the presence of its immediacy, she could not.

‘I must compliment you on your courage, madame. You are resolute. You have laid the curse.’

‘Could you not have done it?’

‘My father tried. It destroyed him.’

She gestured to the van. ‘And them?’

‘Food for the pigs,’ he said. ‘My crime. My sin to reconcile, not yours. As much as they deserve.’

So he was reconciled already. ‘Thank you, Pierre Duval,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving my life.’

He looked at her for a long moment in the dripping rain. ‘It is the least that you deserve.’

She turned back to the barn. It was a strange building, still. But it was a curiosity now of site and architecture and no longer a threat, she knew, at all.

‘Bonne chance!’ Duval said, as she drove away. The spear tip was in a velvet bag on the seat beside her. Delaunay had begged her not to consign it to the boot. It was an easy request to grant. She did not feel inclined to be careless or cavalier with what she had recovered. She had never endured a more difficult ordeal in her life. And then there was the artefact itself. She could feel the sacred nature of the metal radiating off it as plainly as intense cold or vibrant heat.

It was Suzanne’s belief that the thing that had once been Harry Spalding waxed and waned in its power and grip on life. The suicide in Manhattan in 1929 had been it testing its claim to immortality. By then it had been very strong. And by then, it was no longer really human. It was not the Devil, as Jane Boyte had supposed. But it had bargained with the Devil. It had gained a sort of reckless invulnerability as reward for the desecration enacted in the barn. Then, back in 1917, the black mantle of safety from harm had extended to the rest of the Jericho Crew. It was still working, to some extent, for their leader after the war. But Suzanne thought the effect had weakened by that time. Mick Collins had not really been able to hurt Harry Spalding at the Shelbourne Hotel with his cudgelling brawler’s fists. But by 1919 the barrel of Boland’s revolver had given Spalding pause for thought with the tip of it shoved under his chin.

Later, in Southport, he had carried out the second blasphemous ceremony. The sacrifice had been greater, the desecration all the worse. And Jane had seen Spalding’s subsequent transformation into something more diabolical than strictly human. His strength had increased. His appearance and even the dimensions of him had shifted and altered.

But there was no harder or more demanding striker of a bargain than the Devil. Eventually, each and every one of the Jericho Crew had needed to be sacrificed. It was the fate of the Waltrow brothers. It was the fate of the gambler Gubby Tench, who rode Spalding’s demonic luck at the tables until the debt to his old commander was called in. They were all in thrall to Spalding. And Spalding was in thrall to Satan. And when Satan realised Spalding’s sacrilegious offerings no longer held, when he realised Spalding’s pledges were no longer honoured, he would be human again and fallible, and no longer able to cheat a mortal death himself. He was strong, now, though. Wasn’t he? He would be strong until it came to the Devil’s attention that there was nothing left worth having any more in Harry Spalding’s depleted account.

This was Suzanne’s logic. This was her rationale, arrived at driving a rental car towards Calais through the French rain. And it made her laugh out loud. With the covered relic on the seat beside her, with the blood from the bodies of the men sent to kill her by Martens and Degrue still fresh in her nostrils, she had to laugh. She thought she might cry, otherwise. Her logic was the logic of nightmare. And the nightmare was not over yet.

When she got back to Northumberland and Delaunay, he wept as she handed over the thing she had recovered. ‘Why is it so important, Monsignor?’

‘It was the spear used to kill Christ.’

She knew that. She knew the story. The Romans had crucified Christ. And as he hung on the cross in the long agony of dying, a Roman soldier took the spear and pierced his side with it, draining the last of the life from him in a brutal act of mercy. But Christians did not believe in mercy killing. The Roman, Longinus, had repented, had converted to Christianity after the death himself. But she could not see that as the significant fact in the story either.

‘The spear thrust marked the moment of God’s sacrifice of his son for the sake of man,’ Delaunay said. ‘It is the only thing physical we have of our Redeemer. It pierced His flesh. It was bathed in the blood of Christ.’

‘Aren’t there nails somewhere from the crucifixion? Aren’t there supposed to be wood fragments in existence from the true cross?’

Delaunay smiled. He shook his head. ‘Medieval forgeries,’ he said. ‘They are objects with no provenance, manufactured for the profit of unscrupulous men at the expense of those desperate to believe. But this . . .’ He kissed the metal.

Whatever endowed the spear with its significance, she had no doubt concerning its power. There were other relics claiming to be the Spear of Longinus. There was one in the museum at Cracow. There was one Hitler had taken to Germany from Austria after the Anschluss. General Patton had been most keen to recover that after the fall of Berlin. But this was the genuine article. The fact of Spalding’s continuing existence and baleful influence was surely proof of that. She remembered the thing of Jane’s she had taken from the strongbox in Southport and left hidden in the guest quarters at the seminary the previous night. She went with Delaunay to retrieve it.

‘I need you to bless this, Monsignor.’

He frowned. ‘I cannot.’

‘You must.’

‘I blessed the boat, Suzanne. To what avail?’

‘Just do it, please. Matters are different now. The circumstances have changed. I myself have altered them. Do it with the spear point held in your hand. Do it for Magnus and Martin’s sake.’

He hesitated. Then he nodded, relenting. And when it was done, Suzanne slept eight hours of wretched, troubled sleep, dreaming of women writhing as they bled to death under the ground.

Suzanne knew the boat would beach by night. Spalding liked to think himself the sun god, the bright, Jazz Age boulevardier who quoted poetry and possessed an incandescent sophistication and dazzled with the white innocence of his smile. He was dapper and wealthy and well connected and generous. But he was a creature of the night. He was a thing of the Devil. And all his most distinguished work had been done in darkness. The Jericho Crew, which had first given him his name and status in the world, was a nocturnal entity. The crew slouched out from their hides in the earth and killed and maimed after the sun had gone down and before it rose again. It was his preference and his habit. He had done his digging above Rotten Row in the darkness, she was certain. He played by day and worked by night. His days had been in Southport for golf with Tommy Rimmer and the track at Aintree. His nights had been for murder and ritual. Muffled to silence in its shroud of mist, the boat would beach with the sun shining on the other side of the world.

She stood and waited on the night beach at Birkdale. She had the beach to herself. Off to her right, she could see pricks of light delineating the outline of the pier. She fingered her penny from 1927, still the talisman carried everywhere in her pocket. It seemed a long time since she had first come across her lucky coin. It had come from the pier, her penny. It seemed she had possessed it for eternity. In fact she had owned it only for a couple of days. Out over the hard-packed sand and the distant water, she could see the lights of an oil or gas rig twinkle. The structure was tiny and vague from here, miles out on the brink of a horizon she could only sense and guess at. The lights aboard it would be fierce, bright orbs, gigantic electric lamps. But from here, they were scarcely visible.

She suffered a moment, then, when the futility of what she was attempting came close to overwhelming her. The boat would not come. The boat had sunk in the fathomless, indifferent depths of the North Atlantic, its hapless crew of two lost in some shared, hopeless delusion at the moment they perished. And she could not fight Harry Spalding. He was a phantom and a monster and she had not the means to confront and beat him. She had not the power or the knowledge. Her legs buckled and dumped her on the sand. She did not try to get up. The sand was soft here and still warm from the heat of the long summer day. It was a small, radiant comfort through her clothes against her skin. She let it sift through her fingers in tiny, countless grains. They were very fine, the grains of sand. And she could no more fight Harry Spalding than she could guess at their number.

Suzanne began to cry. She looked up, blinking out at the sea, and the tears blurred and clouded her vision. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. And the cloud was still there. But it was not a cloud. It was a rolling patch of mist. It was tumbling over itself, growing or seeming to, as it neared the shore. Steadily and in eerie silence, it was approaching the land. Suzanne climbed wearily back to her feet. She sniffed. She brushed sand from her fingers. She felt for her lucky penny and clutched the strap of the bag on her shoulder. She looked around, but she sensed that she was entirely, profoundly alone. She began to walk towards where the mist approached. The sand firmed under her feet until it was packed hard in dry rivulets baked by the sun after the going-out of the last tide. The tide was coming in again though, wasn’t it? And the Dark Echo was coming ashore on the flood.

She heard footsteps then. She heard a rhythmic plucking of feet out of the mud sucking at them. She remembered there was quicksand here. In the past, it had swallowed the wheels of their cars, those fools who sometimes tried to drive to Blackpool over the treacherous illusion of solid ground. She steeled herself for the onslaught of the beast and turned and looked. But it was not Spalding. It was a woman in a fur stole and a cloche hat, struggling through slime and seaweed in a pair of buttoned boots.

‘Jane?’

‘I’m not Jane.’

The woman came closer. She peered. Her kohled eyes were bloodshot and her face was pale. Her lipstick looked black in the darkness and she was dead. ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘You’re Vera Chadwick.’

‘And I’ve come to say I’m sorry, Jane. I wish I’d listened to you. If I’d listened to you, we might have saved poor Helen’s life.’

Suzanne nodded. She had seen Helen lying in the ground. They had known it was the wealthy woman from the jewellery her bones still wore. There had been a bracelet, earrings. Helen had been taller than the other victims, a tall and slender woman. And, as Bernard Hodge had observed, she had not died well.

Vera Chadwick sighed. In the freshness of the night beach, her breath was the cold odour of the crypt. ‘It was nothing to do with you being a Fenian, of course, Jane. I only said that. Philip’s family were Bootle Catholics. He’d probably have approved.’

Suzanne said nothing.

‘I discouraged you from meeting him because I thought he’d be taken with you. Everyone was, you know. You’re very beautiful, Jane. You always were. It was never fair, really. It wasn’t.’

‘Nothing is fair,’ Suzanne said.

‘Anyway,’ the ghost of Vera Chadwick said, ‘I’m very sorry. I really am so very sorry.’ She took gloves from the pocket of her coat and struggled to pull them on to pale, flapping hands. Then she wandered into the darkness with that sucking noise her feet made and was gone.

Suzanne turned back to the sea, to the direction from which the boat had been approaching. Tendrils of mist were snaking now around her ankles on the sand. She could make out the bulk of the Dark Echo, at rest and canted slightly to one side on its hull, aground and huge in front of her, wrapped in its cloak of fog.

A rope ladder hung from the stern when she reached it. She walked from the bow, the length of the hull, unable to believe how weathered and barnacled the boat had become over the course of a single voyage. The wood was scarred and scraped. In places it looked soft and spongy with incipient rot. Patches of her timber smelled waterlogged. She dripped and oozed from a dozen small breaches in her superstructure. Whatever magic had been used to bring her here had taken a terrible toll on the integrity of the vessel. It was as though immense strain had been put on her. She had not travelled willingly. She had been aged and wearied by her perverse trail through a thousand miles of reluctant ocean.

Suzanne climbed the rungs of the ladder carefully to the deck. There was no one there to greet her. She climbed into the open hatch at the stern, down the steps that led to Magnus Stannard’s master cabin. There was a dim, yellowy sort of illumination below, the light cast by oil or paraffin lamps. There was a smell of paraffin. And she saw that the master cabin door was open. She walked into it. And she saw that the rot afflicting the Dark Echo was not confined to her hull.

The cabin walls were hung with mildewed pictures. They were photographs. They were framed black and white prints. Many were so rotted that the image they portrayed had been completely spoiled. But others retained some detail as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. They were everywhere on the walls. She thought there must have been close to a hundred of them. She felt compelled to look more closely.

There was a shot of Spalding sharing a boxing ring with a grinning, hirsute Ernest Hemingway. A sign behind them on the gymnasium wall advertised Caporal cigarettes. There was a shot of Spalding in harsh sunlight holding up a trophy against the backdrop of a brilliant, billowing sail. In black tie and tails, he chatted to a strong-featured woman in a feather boa in front of the wheels of a giant locomotive hewn from ice. Elsewhere he was poised on his toes in a bathing costume, darkly tanned and muscular at the end of a diving board. There was a formal portrait of Gubby Tench, grinning under the ragged rim of hair and bone where the top of his skull had been. His teeth were stained and his eyes were open and he still held in his lap the Very pistol that had ended his life. One photograph showed a headless, limbless female torso puddled in congealing gore on a rubber sheet. A blood-soaked linen towel had been folded neatly beside the corpse. The victim was young and possessed a slender waist and high, pert breasts. The handle of a boning knife protruded from the area just below her sternum. In a landscape shot, three crosses illuminated by the light of burning torches had men in uniforms nailed to them with bayonets, upside down. The bayonets had been hammered to the hilt through their ankles and wrists. The left hand of each man had been hacked off and stuffed in his mouth. Fingers protruded like the scrambling limbs of pale spiders. The expressions on their faces told Suzanne that this work had been done to the men while they were still living.

She began to back away from this image of obscene atrocity, recoiling instinctively, stumbling slightly. Then she stopped. There was a sort of rustling noise over by the bookcase to her right. She did not look towards it.

‘Don’t leave us so soon, Jane,’ a high, harsh voice from over by the bookcase said. And she knew it was the voice of Harry Spalding. He was aboard already.

Suzanne risked a look across the cabin. Spalding wasn’t there. She heard his laughter, a dry and penetrating chuckle devoid of mirth. It was the recording machine. She saw the waxed cylinder on its spindle, saw the handle that had no right to do so on its own, revolving slowly to crank out the words. She heard Spalding’s disembodied laughter again. It was an awful sound.

‘See you soon, Jane. Can’t begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Where are you?’

There was a pause. ‘I’ve a suite at the Palace Hotel.’

‘It isn’t there any more. It was pulled down. It was demolished forty years ago.’

‘It’s there, Jane,’ Spalding said. ‘It’s there if you know where to look.’

He slipped between worlds, voyaged through the past in the periods of the boat’s dereliction. After what she had accomplished, she did not think he would be doing it any more after tonight.

She turned towards the door. There was a small brass mirror screwed to the wall to the right of the doorframe. The metal was tarnished and the glass was cracked. But the reflection it showed was rich with glamour and detail.

In the waxy illumination of a dozen or more large candles, Spalding was fastidious in spectacles and cotton gloves and a buttoned, chalk stripe three-piece suit. His hair had been carefully combed and gleamed almost a tortoiseshell colour, groomed with cream or oil. He was standing at his cabin desk unstrapping the fastenings of a circular box made from rich, embossed leather. Its buckles were silver in the candle flames. He undid the last of them. He lifted the lid and smiled. There was no sound. It had happened, Suzanne was sure. But she knew it wasn’t happening now, to her rear. It wasn’t happening now because behind her, the cabin was entirely silent. But she had no doubt it had happened. What she was seeing had occurred.

He placed the lid delicately on the desktop and put a hand into the box. It emerged again, gripping a human head by the hair. Suzanne recognised the heavy-featured woman who had chatted to Spalding wearing a feather boa before the frozen locomotive in one of the photographs on the walls. She no longer had need of her feathers. Her hair was auburn and abundant and her neck ended in a ragged absence. Spalding smiled and turned the head slowly by the hair in the grip of his fist. In candlelight, it still wore the creamy pallor of life. Then he closed his eyes and brought the head close and kissed it passionately on the mouth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She rushed to him and gathered him in her arms.

‘How did you get aboard?’

‘We’re aground.’

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

‘What was that?’

‘A rat,’ Martin said, dully.

‘Nice.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Has he had a stroke?’

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

‘Can we get any light in here?’

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

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

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

Martin had his head in his hands.

‘Marty?’

‘Yes?’

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

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

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

‘Then wish it harder.’

But Suzanne knew that wishing would never be enough.

‘He’s coming,’ Martin said.

‘Can you carry your father?’

‘He’s my dad. Of course I can.’

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

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

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

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

‘Jane!’ a voice said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Come and chastise me, then.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hush.’

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

‘Hush, Martin.’

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

‘It’s hurting you to talk.’

‘I need to tell you this.’

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

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

‘It’s overrated,’ Suzanne said.

‘What is?’

‘Communicating with the dead.’

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

‘I’ve got to know Jane.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Brave and beautiful.’

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

‘How is your arm?’

‘Oh, you know. Getting better already.’

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

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

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

‘Thank God you do,’ he said.

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