He came to her for the last time on the evening of the most miserable day of her professional life. It was the day after Martin’s departure for America and she had cried herself to sleep before the presence awoke her. Her mouth felt gummy and dry from cigarettes and wine. Her eyes were raw. And she felt his still, patient presence watching, beside her.
She had been exposed at work. Someone from the Yale University alumni archive had returned a call she had made and left a message concerning Spalding. The producer of the Collins documentary had been told. She was being paid during her notice period out of the depleted balance of the Collins series budget. She was supposed to be fielding calls and emails from interested members of the public, academics and the press, concerning the claims made in the Collins series. Her brief was to verify those claims. She was not supposed to be working on anything else for the BBC. She was certainly not supposed to be doing private work on BBC time claiming BBC status and using the corporation’s resources.
She was stripped of her passkeys and accreditation and hauled into the office of her boss. He closed the door and unleashed about three months’ worth of bile, frustration and contempt. She did not have the protection of a chaperone from human resources. She was a freelance and therefore not entitled to that.
She was slipshod, he told her. She was lazy and stupid and amateurish and, since there would be no reference, she would be very lucky to find work again. She was also dishonest. Abuse of the resources that licence payers funded amounted to theft. In doing her private work on corporation time, she had stolen from the public. In acknowledgement of that fact and to punish her for it, she would forfeit her pay for the last month of her employment. And she should consider herself lucky to get away with that punishment. There were precedents in such cases in the new BBC regime, he said, for bringing in the police. After telling her this, he told her to leave the building, though the actual words he used were, ‘Get out of my fucking sight.’
Her ghost shifted close to her side. She smelled the familiar, warm cocktail of scents he brought with him. And she heard his voice, for the first time, as he spoke to her.
He’s picked his moment, she thought, lying still in the darkness. She could taste the charred tobacco and stale budget red on her own breath. She was broke and jobless and disgraced. Martin was in peril, she felt that with a gloomy certainty, and she had lost the means to help him. And her ghost was speaking to her at her bedside in the Lambeth flat in the soft, singsong lilt of County Cork.
‘You were right, of course. You were right and the feller was entirely wrong. I was never queer.’
She had known who it was. But she had not really known. Now she did. And she knew that she would never again see the world in the same way. It was bigger and she could not imagine where its boundaries lay. It was swapping a small room for a vast hall walled in mirrors.
‘Not that I ever had anything against them, mind. There’ve been some fierce brave and noble queers, you know. Casement, as an example. And Pearse.’
‘Pearse was gay?’
‘I didn’t say he was gay. Patrick Pearse was the very opposite of gay. Men resigned to martyrdom are not by nature cheery. I never saw the feller crack a smile. But he was a very brave man. And I’d say he was queer, alright.’
She could hear the humour in his voice. She had not made enough of that. She could hear the humour and the humanity of him. But she could hear something else, too. It was an involuntary, background sound. ‘This feller’s been giving you all the trouble. Slime? Snot?’
‘Smythe,’ she said.
‘Him. He shouldn’t drink and drive a motor car. He should not submit inflated expenses. He should never have entertained that lady of the night.’
Someone should tell him, Suzanne thought.
‘I have,’ her ghost said. ‘I told him myself not half an hour ago. Gave the man a terrible start. Report for work tomorrow morning, Suzanne. Trust me on this. You’ll get no more trouble out of Smythe.’
She knew what the sound was. It was the drip on to the bedroom floor of blood from the bullet wound that had killed him. There was the faint, coppery taint of blood on the air. But there would be no bloodstain on the bedroom carpet in the morning.
‘I can’t help you any more after this, Suzanne,’ her ghost said. ‘Be careful over the Spalding fellow. You’re putting your hand in a bucket of snakes. And all of them are vipers.’
‘Why did you come to see me? I don’t mean tonight, and I’m very grateful for the help. But why did you come, in the first place?’
Her ghost laughed, softly. ‘Couldn’t help myself. You’re very easy on the eye, so you are, Suzanne. And in a manner of speaking, you came to visit me first. I thought I’d return the compliment. I thought I might pay my respects. And now, I have.’
And he was gone.
Gerald Smythe, Michael Collins series producer and all-round BBC hotshot, had a complexion the same colour as his office walls when he called her up from reception the following morning. Her laminated pass was restored to her. Her library card was returned. There was a note from IT saying that all her computer access codes had been restored. Smythe told her that she had been upped a pay band and should report to him, but need not do so for a month. Any travel expenses she expected to incur in her research work could be drawn in advance from petty cash. It would be helpful if she kept receipts, of course.
‘Of course.’
She caught him staring at her intently as she put the pass and the cards into her bag. The look was an uneasy mingling of intense curiosity and draining fear. Then he excused himself to go and be sick in the lavatory. Then, she later heard, he went home.
She went and sat at the desk she had cleared the previous afternoon. She attracted a few curious glances from her neighbours on the floor. She was sure of three things. Nobody would ever know the level of personal and possibly even slanderous abuse to which Smythe had subjected her over a period of months. Nobody would ever know the true reason for her reinstatement. And she had heard the last ignoble word that Smythe would ever utter in her presence. Actually, when she thought about it, there was a fourth thing she was sure of. She was pretty confident that he had cheated on his expenses for the last time.
She switched on her computer. There was an email for her from the alumni archive at Yale. She read it. Harry Spalding had not graduated. He had been asked to leave towards the end of his second year. He had distinguished himself on the sports field and in the seminar room. But they had felt it necessary to banish him. The issue had been his membership of an organisation, ‘the very existence of which is contrary to the ethos and guiding principles of this university and this great nation, besides being an affront to Almighty God’. The offending organisation was named as the Jericho Club. So now, almost by accident, she had learned a secret. She knew what the self-elected Membership back in Rhode Island had been members of. Their cabal had been the Jericho Club. It must have been a New World offshoot of the Société Jericho. It showed that not all of France’s exports to the great and new republic of America had been so benign and beneficial as de Tocqueville, or Lafayette. And Spalding had taken its guiding principles to war with him, where she had to presume he had made converts of his men. Except for Derry Conway, of course. Spalding had not made a convert of him.