Dark Echo

time, the gun was not broken. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat and his mouth was set under the bristles of his moustache. Rain dripped, too, from the twin barrels of the gun. And smoke drifted lazily upward from them. There was a van, Suzanne saw, beside her car. And she thought with a shock that she recognised the livery. She approached the van. She saw the legend, Martens & Degrue, etched on the black body of the van in gold. She walked around to the front of the vehicle. There were two men inside. They wore pale-brown overalls. The windscreen of the van was punched with twin holes in front of where they sat. And they were dead. Each wore the fatal blossom of a shotgun blast, florid across his chest.

‘They would have killed you,’ Duval said. He said it flatly. It was a simple truth.

Suzanne looked at the ground. She looked up at the sky. ‘Does it always rain here?’

Duval shrugged. ‘It suits the crops.’

Suzanne nodded. She tried to smile. In the face of death, in the presence of its immediacy, she could not.

‘I must compliment you on your courage, madame. You are resolute. You have laid the curse.’

‘Could you not have done it?’

‘My father tried. It destroyed him.’

She gestured to the van. ‘And them?’

‘Food for the pigs,’ he said. ‘My crime. My sin to reconcile, not yours. As much as they deserve.’

So he was reconciled already. ‘Thank you, Pierre Duval,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving my life.’

He looked at her for a long moment in the dripping rain. ‘It is the least that you deserve.’

She turned back to the barn. It was a strange building, still. But it was a curiosity now of site and architecture and no longer a threat, she knew, at all.

‘Bonne chance!’ Duval said, as she drove away. The spear tip was in a velvet bag on the seat beside her. Delaunay had begged her not to consign it to the boot. It was an easy request to grant. She did not feel inclined to be careless or cavalier with what she had recovered. She had never endured a more difficult ordeal in her life. And then there was the artefact itself. She could feel the sacred nature of the metal radiating off it as plainly as intense cold or vibrant heat.

It was Suzanne’s belief that the thing that had once been Harry Spalding waxed and waned in its power and grip on life. The suicide in Manhattan in 1929 had been it testing its claim to immortality. By then it had been very strong. And by then, it was no longer really human. It was not the Devil, as Jane Boyte had supposed. But it had bargained with the Devil. It had gained a sort of reckless invulnerability as reward for the desecration enacted in the barn. Then, back in 1917, the black mantle of safety from harm had extended to the rest of the Jericho Crew. It was still working, to some extent, for their leader after the war. But Suzanne thought the effect had weakened by that time. Mick Collins had not really been able to hurt Harry Spalding at the Shelbourne Hotel with his cudgelling brawler’s fists. But by 1919 the barrel of Boland’s revolver had given Spalding pause for thought with the tip of it shoved under his chin.

Later, in Southport, he had carried out the second blasphemous ceremony. The sacrifice had been greater, the desecration all the worse. And Jane had seen Spalding’s subsequent transformation into something more diabolical than strictly human. His strength had increased. His appearance and even the dimensions of him had shifted and altered.

But there was no harder or more demanding striker of a bargain than the Devil. Eventually, each and every one of the Jericho Crew had needed to be sacrificed. It was the fate of the Waltrow brothers. It was the fate of the gambler Gubby Tench, who rode Spalding’s demonic luck at the tables until the debt to his old commander was called in. They were all in thrall to Spalding. And Spalding was in thrall to Satan. And when Satan realised Spalding’s sacrilegious offerings no longer held, when he realised Spalding’s pledges were no longer honoured, he would be human again and fallible, and no longer able to cheat a mortal death himself. He was strong, now, though. Wasn’t he? He would be strong until it came to the Devil’s attention that there was nothing left worth having any more in Harry Spalding’s depleted account.

This was Suzanne’s logic. This was her rationale, arrived at driving a rental car towards Calais through the French rain. And it made her laugh out loud. With the covered relic on the seat beside her, with the blood from the bodies of the men sent to kill her by Martens and Degrue still fresh in her nostrils, she had to laugh. She thought she might cry, otherwise. Her logic was the logic of nightmare. And the nightmare was not over yet.

When she got back to Northumberland and Delaunay, he wept as she handed over the thing she had recovered. ‘Why is it so important, Monsignor?’

‘It was the spear used to kill Christ.’

She knew that. She knew the story. The Romans had crucified Christ. And as he hung on the cross in the long agony of dying, a Roman soldier took the spear and pierced his side with it, draining the last of the life from him in a brutal act of mercy. But Christians did not believe in mercy killing. The Roman, Longinus, had repented, had converted to Christianity after the death himself. But she could not see that as the significant fact in the story either.

‘The spear thrust marked the moment of God’s sacrifice of his son for the sake of man,’ Delaunay said. ‘It is the only thing physical we have of our Redeemer. It pierced His flesh. It was bathed in the blood of Christ.’

‘Aren’t there nails somewhere from the crucifixion? Aren’t there supposed to be wood fragments in existence from the true cross?’

Delaunay smiled. He shook his head. ‘Medieval forgeries,’ he said. ‘They are objects with no provenance, manufactured for the profit of unscrupulous men at the expense of those desperate to believe. But this . . .’ He kissed the metal.

Whatever endowed the spear with its significance, she had no doubt concerning its power. There were other relics claiming to be the Spear of Longinus. There was one in the museum at Cracow. There was one Hitler had taken to Germany from Austria after the Anschluss. General Patton had been most keen to recover that after the fall of Berlin. But this was the genuine article. The fact of Spalding’s continuing existence and baleful influence was surely proof of that. She remembered the thing of Jane’s she had taken from the strongbox in Southport and left hidden in the guest quarters at the seminary the previous night. She went with Delaunay to retrieve it.

‘I need you to bless this, Monsignor.’

He frowned. ‘I cannot.’

‘You must.’

‘I blessed the boat, Suzanne. To what avail?’

‘Just do it, please. Matters are different now. The circumstances have changed. I myself have altered them. Do it with the spear point held in your hand. Do it for Magnus and Martin’s sake.’

He hesitated. Then he nodded, relenting. And when it was done, Suzanne slept eight hours of wretched, troubled sleep, dreaming of women writhing as they bled to death under the ground.

Suzanne knew the boat would beach by night. Spalding liked to think himself the sun god, the bright, Jazz Age boulevardier who quoted poetry and possessed an incandescent sophistication and dazzled with the white innocence of his smile. He was dapper and wealthy and well connected and generous. But he was a creature of the night. He was a thing of the Devil. And all his most distinguished work had been done in darkness. The Jericho Crew, which had first given him his name and status in the world, was a nocturnal entity. The crew slouched out from their hides in the earth and killed and maimed after the sun had gone down and before it rose again. It was his preference and his habit. He had done his digging above Rotten Row in the darkness, she was certain. He played by day and worked by night. His days had been in Southport for golf with Tommy Rimmer and the track at Aintree. His nights had been for murder and ritual. Muffled to silence in its shroud of mist, the boat would beach with the sun shining on the other side of the world.

She stood and waited on the night beach at Birkdale. She had the beach to herself. Off to her right, she could see pricks of light delineating the outline of the pier. She fingered her penny from 1927, still the talisman carried everywhere in her pocket. It seemed a long time since she had first come across her lucky coin. It had come from the pier, her penny. It seemed she had possessed it for eternity. In fact she had owned it only for a couple of days. Out over the hard-packed sand and the distant water, she could see the lights of an oil or gas rig twinkle. The structure was tiny and vague from here, miles out on the brink of a horizon she could only sense and guess at. The lights aboard it would be fierce, bright orbs, gigantic electric lamps. But from here, they were scarcely visible.