Dark Echo

some other than this blasphemous significance. But then I forgot about this puzzling composition of keepsakes altogether, because I became aware of the smell in Spalding’s cabin.

It was faint, but growing curiously stronger. It was the bitter odour of Turkish tobacco mingled with a perfume I half recognised, the two scents competing over something altogether cruder and more primitive. It was more a secretion than a manufactured smell, I thought. Was it sweat? It was more urgent than sweat, somehow more pungent. It was something similar to the musk of a large animal distressed.

There was a recording machine on Spalding’s desk. The wax cylinders on to the surface of which the sound is cut by a vibrating needle lay next to it in a velvet-lined display. It almost made me smile. The machine was a symbol of his preening vanity. He would love the sound of his own high, harsh-vowelled voice, of course. I could imagine him reciting Pound’s unfathomable stanzas to himself. Another symbol of his vanity was the brass-bound mirror fixed to the cabin wall. I went over and looked into it. Was the glass dirty? No. The reflection was lazy with tobacco smoke. It cleared. And behind me, I saw the face of Helen Sykes, her mouth fixed in the rictus of terror, her eyes bulging in her pale head with it. I turned. And there was no one there. And I fled the vessel and the boatyard, too, aware of what the smell had been in the master cabin aboard her. It was the stink of dying in mortal fear. It was the scent of poor Helen’s last moments of life.

I ran along the cobbles, desperate to hail a taxi. And when I found one and told the driver to take me on to Southport I had to formulate a plan to fight my own shock and panic. I could barely control my breathing. I was dripping perspiration. The briefcase handle felt greasy in my grip and I was cold and shivering as the heat-drenched streets thrummed under me against the hard suspension of the cab. I would talk to Seamus Devlin in London. I would get explosives. I would buy dynamite and rig a bomb and blow Harry Spalding and his boat to kingdom come. If I could not use the law I would become the law. I did not possess a bomb-maker’s skills. But Devlin did. I would pay him to assemble one. I would pay whatever it cost.

August 4th, 1927

With Devlin’s lethal construction in my bag I went to the yard at dawn today after a sleepless night spent at the Adelphi Hotel. Of course, I arrived unannounced. My father was there, dishevelled and distracted, his collar soiled and askance and his whiskers unshaven. He looked stale and rattled. He was surprised to see me, but he showed no pleasure at the sight of me. Nor did he show any sign of suspicion. He is resigned to me and my unpredictability, I suppose. In his defeated way, I know my father loves me.

Spalding’s boat had gone. I had missed him by but half an hour. I asked my father, as casually as I could, what his destination was.

I’ve no idea, he said. And then he mumbled something.

What?

I said I expect he’s gone back to Hell, my father said. That’s where he came from and that’s where he damn well belongs.

I stood on the dock with my deadly cargo redundant in my carpet bag, nodding my head and knowing in my heart two things. The first was that my father spoke the truth. The second was that I had failed in the most vital task I had attempted in my life. It was not for the want of trying. But I had failed.

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