She wished the log of the Dark Echo had not been destroyed. Something compromising had been recorded there. The log had contained some information it was considered necessary to conceal from the world. Given that Spalding’s reputation was so insalubrious anyway, Suzanne could not imagine what it was he would wish to hide. He had seemed in his lifetime a man profoundly beyond shame or remorse. But there had been something in the log, some detail that could hurt him.
She would do an internet search for the Jericho Club. She was not optimistic about finding anything useful that way. She felt that you could divide followers of the occult into very serious and necessarily discreet practitioners on the one hand and a legion of cranks on the other. People who discussed the subject in cyberspace fell largely into the latter category. But she had to try. Before typing in the words, however, she took a pad from her bag and wrote down on it a list of the topics that she considered she needed most urgently to investigate. When she read back to herself what she had written on the pad, the word at the top of her list was Peitersen.
She knew from Martin about Peitersen’s passport made out in the name of Cardoza. She had got nowhere in trying to find out anything about Cardoza Associates. Their motives in bidding for the boat remained a mystery. But Martin had told her about the blessing of the Dark Echo, too, on their last, miserable evening together in the Windmill. She wondered if the Jesuit Monsignor Delaunay would grant her an audience, just out of his obvious affection for the Stannard family. He might tell her nothing. He might let something slip. He might not know anything. But it was Suzanne’s firm belief that Jesuits and secrecy went together like tarts and high heels or tea and biscuits. One was pretty much unthinkable without the other. It was worth a try, if only because she had no other immediate leads.
She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. She had glimpsed the red corner of the packet in her bag when she had taken out her notepad. And then she had thought of tea and biscuits. She did not want a biscuit. But she did want to get a cup of tea from the machine and take it outside and sip it while she smoked a cigarette. She stood up. And then she sat down again, because that was how addiction worked, wasn’t it? Insinuating itself in sly increments. She did not allow herself her first smoke of the day until twelve o’clock and it was only just ten. She would be strong.
‘Fuck it,’ she said aloud, standing, gathering her bag. She would cut down when Martin and his father had safely returned. It wasn’t twelve hours since she had spoken to the ghost of Michael Collins. She would give up altogether when she knew that the Stannard men were safe. But now was not the time to try to cut down on her cigarette consumption. Right now, it just wasn’t a realistic ambition at all.
Delaunay was not at the seminary in Northumberland. He was at the Jesuit retreat in Barmouth with a mixed group of ordained priests and novices. She was told her request to see him would be passed on. The rules of the retreat were not strict unless that strictness was self-imposed, she was told. He might be out with a hiking party on Cader Idris. He might be swimming. He might be at prayer, but it was unlikely at this time of day. She was not offered the number of the mobile she was assured he was carrying with him. But she was assured that the monsignor would call her back, probably within the hour.
She did a computer search for the Jericho Club, with predictably useless results. Then she began to ponder on the words of warning spoken by her ghostly visitor of the previous night. He had known something of Spalding’s character. But she could not see how there could be a connection between the two men. Collins had been dead by the late summer of 1922. Spalding had only a year or so later come to Europe from America and begun his splashy, playboy effort to squander his father’s limitless cash.
She put her mind to the possibility of a connection. Spalding’s family had accrued their wealth through banking in New York. By the end of the Great War, America was the wealthiest country in the world and the world’s biggest lender. In 1919, Irish president Eamon de Valera had made Michael Collins Minister of Finance. The logic behind this had been two-fold. For a guerrilla fighter, Collins was surprisingly good at administration. And his impeccable rebel credentials made him just the man to try to raise loans to finance the birth of his new nation from America, a country ideologically opposed to imperialism and a natural friend and champion of any emerging democracy.
Excitedly, Suzanne tapped in the two disparate names and she did a web search. But she came up with nothing. Undeterred, she did an image search. She was twenty pages in and about to call it quits when an old photograph appeared. It was an interior shot. It showed a line of men in dark suits and stiff collars being presented to a solid and charismatic figure with whom she had, in recent months, grown very familiar. She knew the location. She recognised the stately decor of one of the reception rooms at the Mansion House in Dublin. One of the men in the line was slender and blond and noticeably tall. She knew, without reading the picture caption, who that was, too.
There was someone else in the photograph, someone who competed even with Collins for attention. And it was not because she was the only woman in the frame. She was seated at a large upright manual typewriter. The bankers were to the left of Collins. She was to his rear and to their right. Collins was smiling genially at this gathering of American capital funds. The woman was looking straight at the camera. And the tall, blond man in the line of bankers was staring with a look of avarice at the typist.
Except that, for a typist, she wore an altogether disdainful look. Her dark hair was glossily bobbed. Under the fringe, her eyes had a feline, upward slant. She had sharp cheekbones and a mouth struggling not to smile at some secret, mutinous amusement. My God, she really does look just like me, Suzanne thought, who knew that her looks had intimidated more men than they had attracted before Martin had turned up, shining in his armour, his sword clanking in its scabbard as he played the goodly knight in her moment of peril on the East London Line.
She read the caption. It began: At the Mansion House in Dublin yesterday, Dáil Finance Minister Mr M. Collins meets New York Finance chiefs in a bid to drum up funds for the new Irish Free State.
The caption went on to name everyone present. Harry was still called Henry Spalding Jr then. He had not yet imposed his playboy persona on the world. He was not the easy, glamorous, Lost Generation self-invention he later became. He was thin and tall and slightly awkward. This picture had been taken before the maturing of Harry on his crossing aboard the Dark Echo from America to the Riviera. In this picture he was the youthful representative of a New York banking dynasty, a business apprentice with a distinguished war record. He had successfully shed the vulpine look of the Jericho Crew. But he had not yet really grown into himself. He had yet to develop his tan. And there was nothing louche or bohemian about him. He was still, in modern parlance, what is disparagingly referred to as a suit.
What about the woman? What about the sepia mirror image Suzanne had found herself staring at? She was an afterthought for the subeditor who had compiled the photo caption. But they were nothing if not punctilious, in those great days of hot metal in the print room and five or six editions a day rolling off the presses on to the streets.
Also pictured, extreme right, Miss Jane Boyte.