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.
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.
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
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
