Dark Echo (28 page)

But she was glad of that. As calm and normality returned to her, she was glad of the fact of where she was and the potent reminder of it up there on the wall. When she went to bed and turned out the lights, she knew she would be grateful for the reassurance of the holy fortress surrounding her.

‘You’ll lose nothing by leaving in the morning, in the daylight,’ Delaunay had said.

‘I owe you my life,’ she repeated.

‘It’s to God you owe your life,’ he said. ‘But thank you anyway, Suzanne. I’m a vain enough man to accept any compliment going.’

She laughed. But she had known that about him.

‘Where do you intend to go? You’re going after Spalding, aren’t you? You’re undeterred.’

Suzanne nodded.

‘I tried telephoning them. I wanted to appeal to their good sense and urge them to return.’

‘They won’t,’ she said.

‘I couldn’t get through. We’ve a satellite phone, but I could not get through on that either.’

‘I’m going to Southport, Monsignor Delaunay. He settled there for a while. He must have had a reason. Like you, I sometimes have intuitions. You’re right. I’m going after him. I can’t just do nothing. I’d go mad.’

‘Then for God’s sake take the train.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve no choice. My hire care isn’t up to the journey.’

Delaunay waved an imaginary irritant away. His hands were still bandaged, blood in dried clots and stains on the fabric. ‘I’ll talk to the hire car people. They’ll believe a priest. They might call you for confirmation and send you papers to sign, but I’ll deal with it here. And I’ll have one of the lads drive you to the station in the morning.’

‘My travel bag is still in the boot. My laptop’s in the bag.’

‘I’ll have one of the lads go and fetch it now. Novices live for the opportunity to do someone a good turn.’ He winked.

She hugged him. She had not known she was going to do it until it was done. ‘There,’ she said.

He held her head between his hands and kissed her forehead. ‘There,’ he said.

In the flat in the seminary, Suzanne turned the computer
on in the drowsy preamble to going to bed. She logged on to the web and accessed the BBC news homepage and saw an item about storms raging across the North-East of England. It was only then, with a start, that she realised neither she nor Delaunay had even for a moment indulged the notion that what had happened to her earlier had been an accident. But trees fell in tempests, didn’t they? And some of them fell on cars. She, of course, had heard the song on the radio immediately prior to the impact. But he had not. She had switched off the radio in the fraction of time before it occurred.

She went to her email. There were no messages for her she had not read. She pulled up Martin’s email address. And she tapped in the sentence:
I’ve been researching Harry Spalding.

Aboard
Dark Echo

We were three full days out. We had made about nine hundred miles at an average of twelve knots since departing Southampton. We were in the middle of the North Atlantic and the sea was running high and the wind was gusting at around thirty knots. Every fourth or fifth wave was breaking over the bow. The sun was going down and the ocean was a lurid, foaming crimson where the last of it glimmered and sank. I was cold and wet and needed a break and something hot to drink and there was no sign above deck of my father. I had not seen him for what seemed like hours.

He had taken to spending more time in his cabin over the past couple of days. I thought this reasonable enough. Sailing becomes a chore when there is nothing to look at except an endless expanse of churning sea. His cabin was warm and dry and handsomely appointed, and if he chose
to take refuge there when he wasn’t at the wheel or the galley stove, that was a captain’s privilege. But I had a suspicion that he locked the door. And when I listened outside his door, I could hear something beyond the groan of the hull beneath me and the sound of straining rigging and the whip in the wind of the sails above. The opera was played, when it was played at all, very quietly, as a backdrop. Above it, I could hear my father conversing quietly and earnestly with himself.

Wet through and more than slightly pissed off, I engaged the auto-steer and went below, stripped off my wet weather gear, towelled down and then went to make myself a cup of cocoa. I took it into my cabin. And I saw that I had new email and the source of the message was Suzanne.

Sometimes the email connection on the little white laptop worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was supposed to function wherever you were in the world but in the middle of the ocean there seemed to be voids or black spots that stopped it from doing so. Maybe it was something to do with electromagnetic fields or something. Possibly it was a consequence of atmospheric conditions. Maybe it was deliberate interference, jamming from a submarine or a warship somewhere in our proximity. The Cold War was long over, of course. But beyond their own borders, it was no secret to anyone that the superpowers still played out their hostile psychological games.

I sat down at my desk and sipped cocoa. She had only just sent the email. She should be online right now, I thought. I opened the message, which comprised a single line.

I’ve been researching Harry Spalding.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Outside, I heard the wind shriek and caterwaul. It was going to be a testing night, our roughest yet by far.

Oh? What have you found out?

I pressed ‘Send’ and waited for a moment. My cocoa was not as good as I’d imagined it would be in the half-hour I’d deliberated about leaving the wheel and making it. A drink is never that good when you have to prepare it yourself. It’s never as good as when someone else makes it for you.

He spent the summer of 1927 in England. He rented a mansion on Rotten Row in Southport while his boat was laid up for repair in Liverpool. He joined the flying club run by a pilot war veteran on Southport sands. He played golf at Birkdale. And he partied hard.

Suzanne was very skilled at her occupation. She was clever and tenacious. But nobody was going to pay her for this particular job of research. I wondered why she was wasting her time with it.

Sounds like an Anglophile Jay Gatsby.

I pressed ‘Send’. A moment later, a reply came back.

Not really. Gatsby was only a bootlegger. Harry Spalding was the Devil himself.

And then the screen on my laptop froze. I switched off the power button and drained my cup. What the hell was my father doing? I went and stood outside his cabin door with my knuckles raised to knock. And I hesitated. I thought I could hear music, very faintly, from within. And I felt incredulous and cold when I thought I recognised the tune as ‘When Love Breaks Down’.

‘Come in.’

But I had not knocked. My knuckles were still poised an inch from the walnut burr of his door.

‘I said, come in, Martin.’

He was seated at his desk with his back to me. The room smelled curious. It smelled of smoke. It was not the plump whiff of one of my father’s Havanas, though. It was the thin, strong odour of Turkish tobacco. The music had stopped.
There was some effect in the cabin, some dulling of the acoustic that made the rising sea outside distant and numb. And in the haze of smoke, objects seemed to ripple slightly before settling, subtly out of focus. The barrels seemed bloated, swollen and belligerent on the shotguns and rifles where they gleamed in his gun cabinet. The handles of the knives in their case on the opposite wall of the cabin looked yellowy. The pale bone and ivory hilts seemed tainted and nicotined. I did not want my father to turn round. I felt very strongly for a moment that I did not want to see the expression on his face. Then this sensation of dread passed and he did turn round. He looked frayed, distracted, as though dragged reluctantly from some refuge of the mind where he vastly preferred to be.

‘What do you want, Martin?’

‘What are you doing, Dad?’

‘I’m composing a letter I’ll never write and shall never send, Martin.’

‘To my mother?’

‘Not on this occasion to your mother, no. This one is to your sister. To Catherine Ann.’

I nodded. I was not surprised. His mood was that of a man dwelling among the dead. I turned and closed the door behind me and, in my own cabin, climbed back into my foul weather gear and went up on the deck to take my place at the wheel in the gathering fury of the night storm.

For nine straight hours, I battled the sea. The sun was well up by the time the cloud cleared and calm returned the following morning. I took a bearing. We were twelve hundred miles from home. The storm had propelled us further into the wilderness of the Atlantic. I stayed at the wheel, dazed with fatigue, as the salt dried in crystals in my beard stubble and my eyes began to play the tricks they will when everything they try to fix on is in turbulent motion. I retched,
not with seasickness but with exhaustion. There was nothing by then in my stomach for me to part company with but bile. I thought about Suzanne, wondering what she had meant by what she had said in our cut-short email conversation. In my mind I saw Harry Spalding in his golden, Southport summer. The only thing I knew about Southport was the story of the long-demolished Palace Hotel. A huge neo-Gothic pile built near the sands at Birkdale, it had been haunted, so it was said. The men who demolished it had heard the lifts ascending and coming down again long after the electricity that powered them had been cut. Had Spalding dined at the Palace Hotel? Had he sipped cocktails on one of the sun-drenched terraces there? He had probably danced in the great ballroom at the Palace in his white tie, charming the local beauties with his murderous smile. Almost certainly, in his Southport summer, he would have done that.

I woke with a start over the wheel. I was dozing, which was dangerous. Where was my father? Was he still grieving and remembering below, wreathed in old tunes and bitter tobacco smoke? I engaged the auto-steer. I was desperate for sleep, close to hallucinating with tiredness. What had awoken me? Of all things, I had been brought back to full alertness by what had sounded like a baby crying. It must have been a gull, I thought. But the sky when I glanced about was empty. And there were no gulls perched on the rail or the rigging of the boat. Below deck, I paused outside my father’s cabin door. He was talking to himself again. It sounded like a grim and antagonistic monologue. His tone lacked any tenderness. He was no longer communicating, I thought, with his lost, precious daughter. I was beyond tired. I limped to my cabin. My mind engaged in a numb debate over which was more disturbing – the howl of a phantom dog or the crying of a ghostly baby. It was the baby, I decided. It was the distressed, invisible child. I was no great
lover of dogs, and I thought the crying baby might be my little sister, conjured back to be among us. It was a sinister and disturbing thought. I wrestled my way out of my clothes and took to my berth and oblivion.

She arrived in Southport at four in the afternoon of the following day. She left the apocalyptic weather in the wake of the express as it rattled south-west across the country. By mid-morning there were fields golden with wheat and vivid with rapeseed to remind her again that it was June. She had to change twice. Southport was not the resort it had been in Victorian times, when trains full of excursionists in their masses made the summer rail journey faithfully there each holiday from Scotland or the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns and the Black Country of the Midlands. Nor was it the gaudy seaside tribute to wealth it had been in the 1920s. The great Art Deco outdoor pool had gone now, replaced by a windblown retail park full of discount names. The grand, and some said haunted, Palace Hotel was long demolished. Even Lord Street, the great tree-lined boulevard of exclusive shops, was in decline. Panes were missing from many of the cast-iron pillared awnings that covered the pavement for most of a mile. And there were security guards outside a couple of the splashier jeweller’s shops.

Suzanne knew all this before seeing the evidence herself. She had been able to print off information about Southport in her guest quarters at the seminary. The most openly critical assessments of the town’s aesthetic and economic decline had come from its own tourism department. The town had been beautifully planned and maintained and then systematically vandalised from the early 1970s onwards, when Southport ceased to be an independent
borough and came under the authority of Sefton Metropolitan Council. Sefton’s rule seemed to be typified by spite, envy, indifference and greed. If ever there was a goose to lay a golden egg, in Southport, Sefton killed it. The first big decision was symptomatic of what followed. Southport’s buses, attired in a splendid yellow and red livery and proudly adorned with the town’s crest, were painted over in Sefton’s drab, utilitarian green. It was the imposition of a grim visual austerity entirely out of keeping with the gaiety visitors expected. Subsequent decisions were just as crass and much more damaging. Sefton’s decision to sell sand from the beach to the building trade had destroyed the dunes on which generations of families had picnicked and played. The yellow, rolling hills of sand had vanished from the end of Weld Road in Birkdale, all the way south to the nature reserve at Formby. Sefton had been obliged to leave the nature reserve intact. That was Formby’s reprieve. Southport had not been treated so mercifully.

But the Southport Harry Spalding had known had been a splendid place; handsome, sun-drenched and dedicated to pleasure. It was a cut above Blackpool and Morecambe to the north, and knew it. There were casinos and luxury cinemas and theatres and concert halls. There was marble and terrazzo and parquet and there was money. The thoroughbreds ridden at Aintree were trained on the shore. Birkdale was considered the best links golf course in the whole of England. The Giroud brothers ran their aviation club on a hard, smooth strip between the sand hills and the sea. Star entertainers were lured in the season to the Floral Hall and the summer flower show held in Victoria Park was at least the rival of the show held annually at Chelsea. Then, Lord Street had boasted an array of shops to compete with anything in Paris or Milan.