field. All of them were. He led them.’
‘Did they have a name? Did this unit have a designation?’
My father sipped champagne. ‘They were called the Jericho Crew.’ He reached inside his suit coat, brought out his wallet and took from it a picture he put on the white linen of the table between us. I picked it up and studied it in the subdued lighting of the Kundan interior. There was a candelabra on our table and I pulled it closer. The print was new but the picture, I knew, was ninety years old. The men in it were posed like a football team, half standing in a line behind those kneeling in front of them. All wore their hair brutally shorn. All were white and young. They were a hollow-eyed, savage-looking bunch, armed to the teeth with knives and knuckledusters and revolvers and short-snouted, heavy calibre assault rifles. You could judge the weight of shot by the thickness of the rounds wedged into bandoliers wound across their bodies from the shoulder. They all wore the same weird, infected grin. They looked like men drunk on killing. But I did not think this a verdict on the men in the photograph it would be wise to share with my father. I nodded in what I hoped would pass as a gesture of appreciation. But to me the men assembled in the picture looked like the sort of soldiers who sawed battlefield trophies from the extremities of the dead.
‘Which one is Spalding?’
My father’s forefinger extended over the print and he tapped a figure.
I should have guessed. Spalding, the well-born hero, was half a head taller than the rest. In those days, prosperity almost always translated into physical height. He was very slender. He was loose-limbed, with long thighs and supple fingers. His grin showed a jaw full of white, perfectly even teeth. He was a startlingly handsome man, when you really scrutinised his features. In conventional terms, his facial appearance was almost flawless. But there was nothing attractive about him at all. He seemed dangerous. You wouldn’t want to meet him and, if you did, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him. I rubbed my eyes. Perhaps it was just the wine, drunk after a swift beer, itself swallowed after a long day and a tense, fog-hampered drive. I looked again at Spalding. But the effect was the same. The one word his photograph brought to mind, more than any other, was feral.
‘Why the Jericho Crew?’
A shrug. ‘Haven’t been able to source an explanation for the name. Not a convincing one, at any rate. And the men in the picture have all been dead for far too long to provide it.’
Thank God, I thought.
‘Wondered if Suzanne might be able to find that out for me.’
‘If she can’t, nobody can,’ I said. ‘She’s in Dublin at the moment, digging up fresh revelations for a documentary film about Michael Collins.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ my father said, taking back his picture. ‘It’s hardly important.’
I studied the wine in my glass.
‘She’s wasting her time, of course.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The Irish are a loquacious people. There is nothing about Michael Collins that we don’t already know.’
Over our aromatic lamb and drily spiced chicken, he took me through the rest of Spalding’s short and energetic life. The first significant thing he did in the peace was to survive the Spanish flu epidemic that killed something over half of his comrades on the steamer returning them home from France. In the years after the armistice, he took two six-month-long sabbaticals from the bank to sail his bright new toy. In the autumn of 1922, he could stomach the bank no longer and, to his father’s apparent dismay, quit the commercial world altogether. Curiously, far from being cut off in the classic retaliatory manner, his already generous living allowance was increased to the point where he could afford to squander a literal fortune every month. He sailed his boat to Europe, a girlfriend crewing for him until she tired of life on the ocean and jumped ship, apparently jilting him for good, on the quay at Rimini. He gambled at the tables in Monaco, where he won. He berthed the boat for the winter and travelled to Paris, where he played tennis with Ezra Pound, and boxed a few inevitable rounds with Hemingway, and bought on a whim a polo pony he never rode and attended a seance conducted by the English black magician, Aleister Crowley. In the manner of all men quietly traumatised by the carnage of the trenches, he drank too much and spoke too recklessly and could discover no great hope or value or salvation in human life.
And how would he, I wondered on hearing this, inured to the practicalities of life by such fabulous wealth?
Spalding spent a period in the middle 1920s in England. He had put out on a jaunt from Dublin Bay and was forced for refuge to Liverpool by a storm that almost destroyed the
In Cowes, his exploits on the water were still an awed folk memory among old salts whose grandfathers had piloted or crewed in races for Harry Spalding. They still talked about the way you had to watch out for his evil bull mastiff, Toby, should a chart be required and the aft cabin therefore need to be risked. And they still talked about tips aboard a winning boat so lavish that a man could spend the next six months idle, arse parked on the beach in a Ventnor deckchair.
There was amazement at the memory of the yachtsman Harry Spalding, but there was no fondness. And he had possessed no love for himself, it seemed. For in the cold December of 1929, he had lain down in a Manhattan hotel with his boat berthed in the thickening ice of New York Harbour a mile and a half away and had put a bullet from his own gun into his right temple. He was thirty-three years old and made a beautiful corpse. Even the NYPD detective called to the scene to investigate said as much, seeing Harry in deathly repose. He looked serene in death. The only mark on him was the small hole left by the bullet and a dark, delicate halo of powder burn around the hole. There was no exit wound. The bullet had apparently lodged in his skull.
Having drunk too much to drive, I left the Saab on its meter and saw my father safely into a Mayfair-bound cab before walking across Lambeth Bridge to the home I shared with Suzanne on the other side of the river. When I got in and had taken off my coat, I looked into her tiny study and switched on the light. The air in her workspace retained the subtlest hint of her scent and I inhaled what there was of it gratefully. There were reference books in a line on the window sill with yellow slips of paper marking crucial passages. The award she had won for her work on a three-part documentary series on the elusive Rudolph Hess sat, a little silver-mounted perspex trophy, on top of her computer monitor. She had Blu-tacked it there, incredibly proud. The sight of it now made me smile. The wall she faced when she worked was a gallery of the gifted and the infamous whose mysteries she had worked hard to unravel. There was Auden and the Kray Brothers, and a pencil sketch of Christopher Marlowe and a sepia studio shot of Dan Leno in costume. Among the collage of pictures on the wall was the famous shot of Michael Collins, thin-lipped and preening in his leather gloves and army uniform as Chief of the Irish Free State, a Parabellum pistol swinging on his hip. I studied him. And the man who did for the Cairo gang in one bloody night of assassination looked a cosy sort of fellow altogether, when I recalled the picture I had seen earlier that evening of the Jericho Crew and their leader, Harry Spalding.
I noticed that the flowers in a vase sharing the sill with her books were dying. I would buy a fresh bunch to greet her return. I switched off the light, shaking my head. The flat felt very quiet and empty in Suzanne’s absence from it. I closed the study door softly and went to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. The spiced food and the beer and wine drunk with it would have made me seek water anyway, so close to bed. But it was my father’s request, over dinner, that made me really thirsty now. I felt the dry-mouthed affliction of nervousness, even of fear. And it was my father’s proposition at our table in the Kundan that had triggered it. That, and the walk back to the flat. The river had been low under Lambeth Bridge, lapping softly and invisible, what little noise it made distorted by the fog. The fog, almost impenetrable in Portsmouth, had extended its tendrils as far as the capital. There was almost no traffic and curiously no pedestrian traffic at all, though it was not remotely late by London standards. But from the moment my father’s taxi drew away, I endured the strange suspicion of being trailed though dissipating mist, all the way over the bridge and to the safe refuge of home.
That night I dreamed that Harry Spalding and Michael Collins met, the encounter in some dim and monochromatic no-man’s-land. They were uniformed and they took off their caps and their Sam Browne belts and came together to wrestle. And Collins, the broth of a boy from his father’s farm in County Cork, naturally the bigger and stronger man and much the more skilled at grappling, gained the upper hand. And then Spalding’s limbs seemed to lengthen and burnish and they blackened like those of some great, bony insect and he crushed and then greedily devoured his opponent, his arms and legs segmented now and chittering foully as he scrabbled away into
