the darkness from the scene. I awoke, sweating. It had been a horrible dream, all the worse, as nightmares so often are, for being so nonsensical and meaningless.
I got out of bed, went back into Suzanne’s study and took the cashmere sweater she had left draped across the back of the chair at her desk. It had been the source of the earlier scent, a mingling of her skin and hair and the perfume she habitually wore. I folded it on to my pillow for comfort but still felt spooked. I sat up and took my mobile from the bedside table and texted Suzanne to call me if she was still awake. I was grateful she was only in Dublin, in the same time zone. Her research work could take her anywhere in the world. In Dublin and London it was only just after midnight.
She called me back straight away.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Have you heard of a man called Harry Spalding?’
There was a silence as I’m sure she flicked through the mental Rolodex in her clever, beautiful head. ‘Yes. In Paris in the 1920s he once offered Bricktop a hundred thousand dollars if she would sleep with him.’
I had no idea who or what Bricktop was. A courtesan? An entertainer? ‘Bricktop’s response?’
Suzanne laughed. ‘Something fairly unprintable, I should think.’
‘Have you heard of the Jericho Crew?’
There was another silence. This one was less productive. ‘No, I haven’t. It doesn’t sound very salubrious, though, whatever it is. Or was. What’s this about, Martin?’
‘My father bought the wreck of Spalding’s boat today. His yacht. The
At the other end of the line, I heard Suzanne swallow. ‘Well. Your father has never been one for superstition.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you, Martin. I’ll tell you all about Bricktop, too.’
‘My father intends to have the boat restored, made seaworthy once again. He intends to sail her. He wants to sail her around the world. And he told me tonight he wants me to accompany him.’
She laughed. There was no mirth in the sound. ‘I thought your father liked me.’
‘He does like you.’
‘But he wants to take you away,’ she said.
‘Which means that he must like me as well.’
I could hear her thinking. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ she said. It was Wednesday. She was due back on the Saturday. ‘Take care, Martin.’
She never said that. I thought it was an odd thing for her to say. Take care of what?
I lay on the bed for a while with her sweater a soft, sweet-smelling pillow under my head, but I still could not discover sleep. So I went back to her study and switched on Suzanne’s computer. Then, almost without thinking, I reached across and switched on Suzanne’s little radio. She had taken her laptop with her and our home computer was old and slow. It was nice to have a diversion while it groaned slowly into life. The radio was tuned to one of the digital stations, bebop and modern jazz and fusion, tunes segueing into one another without the hindrance of some insomnia jockey’s coffee-and-ego-fuelled patter to spoil the music.
I tapped my fingers on the desk surface and smiled, remembering the unlikely way in which Suzanne and I had first met. It was far below the streets of Wapping, on an East London Line train. She had simply been a strikingly attractive girl sharing the same carriage until three hoodies burst in and began steaming the most vulnerable-looking passengers. What happened next was down to Father O’Hanlon, who had passed on the necessary skills, and my father, who had secured for me the tutelage of O’Hanlon.
No one, in that modern London way, was doing anything about the gang. Those not being singled out as victims were just pretending that nothing untoward was going on. There were no screams, no threats, no jarring assaults or violation. It was just a normal London commute, wasn’t it? It was just routine as those not being robbed stared at the black glass of the tunnelling train windows and the gang approached the pale, pretty woman clutching a laptop case protectively under her arm. Everything was normal. Or, at least, it was until I got off my seat and approached the gang, hauled them round and knocked the three of them cold.
Suzanne later called it my KOWK (knight on white charger) moment. For her, the moment had been DID (damsel in distress). The acronyms amused her. The roles were amusing, too, so absurdly far removed were they from the balance of our relationship once it properly began.
I was arrested and taken to Wapping police station and charged with assault and bailed in person by my beaming father. Suzanne attended voluntarily, as a witness. Six weeks later, I was summoned back to be told that no charges were going to be pressed.
‘The scum you encountered used to be known as the Shadwell Posse,’ the detective sergeant I saw there told me in the seclusion of an interview room. ‘Ever since your brush with them, we’ve been calling them the Shadwell Pussies. And I’m delighted to say that the name has caught on.’
Suzanne had dinner with me to celebrate my reprieve. A week later, we were living together.
The computer finally came to life. I did a search for Bricktop. I searched images first, and found only old pictures of a venerable black woman and then shots from the same woman’s rather lavish and showy funeral. Then I did another search and, of course, discovered who she was – the legend she had been, the picaresque life she had led and the glittering array of talent she had showcased at her nightclub in Paris in that febrile decade after the Great War. I read about Bricktop and her long legs and lengthy list of admirers. Gangsters and painters and hucksters and writers vied for her favours, and some of the names on the list were legendary. Spalding’s wealth couldn’t get him to the front of the queue, where the likes of Jack Johnson and Pablo Picasso and Duke Ellington jostled and preened.
How long the song had been playing I don’t know, but when my attention to the words on the screen faltered sufficiently for me to become aware of it a shiver of cold spread up my spine as I listened to something old and sonorous and crackling with the vintage speed at which I could hear it revolving on the plinth. I looked at the radio. Suzanne had bought it only recently. It was a very modern little item and the sound leaking out of it seemed horribly incongruous. For a dreadful moment I was listening to Bricktop, her dead voice creaking forth seventy-odd years after the death of her failed suitor, on the very day my father had purchased the possession that suitor prized most greatly. The song ended. For once, I craved a spoken voice. And it came, the presenter crediting the performance I had just heard to Josephine Baker. I felt a surge of relief. Baker had been a Bricktop protege, of course, even a Bricktop discovery. I’d just learned as much. But the long arm of coincidence was allowed to stretch that far. At least, to my tired mind it was. But it could stretch no further, so I switched off the radio before giving it the chance to.
Back in bed, sleep still proved elusive. I breathed in the warm comfort of Suzanne’s improvised cashmere pillow and smiled at the irony of how I was behaving now, compared to my behaviour in the circumstances in which the two of us had met. Was I afraid of the dark? Suzanne believed I was afraid of nothing. I’d given her reason, I suppose, to think it. It was an awfully long way from being the truth. But was I? Afraid of the dark?
I don’t honestly think that I was. But I was afraid, I know, even then, of the malignant memory of the American called Harry Spalding.
Two
There was at least some method in my father’s madness. Before buying Spalding’s boat, he had commissioned a precise estimate of what the craft would cost to restore, refit and make seaworthy. The estimate had been carried out by a boatyard on the Hamble with the best reputation for this kind of work in what was an exact, esoteric and quite exclusive business. The original specification of the boat was very high. Craftsmanship to equal it did still exist. But it was uncommon. And it was bought in the modern age only at great expense. Computer simulation could and had made the design of a modern boat a much cheaper proposition altogether. But restoration was a matter of painstaking artistry done with arcane tools and precious raw materials.
Frank Hadley said his yard could do the job. But he told my father honestly that it would take six months if it were to be done properly and not botched. The timescale suited my dad. Six months would enable him to learn the necessary seamanship to sail the
