Jane wore a white, high-buttoned blouse with three-quarter sleeves that revealed a wristwatch. Suzanne thought it still unusual for a woman to wear a wristwatch in that period. It would be considered a rather masculine affectation. In the decade to come, the likes of Amelia Earhart might buckle one on. But she was an exception in the late 1920s. And this was still only 1919. Ladies were not expected to need to be accurate timekeepers then. And Jane was a lady. She was not some clerical skivvy. Her father was a prosperous boatbuilder with his own dock in Liverpool Harbour. Jane’s status was obvious from her expensive and fashionable haircut, from the rope of black pearls around the high collar of her tailored blouse and from her general hauteur. It was gratifying to see the large ashtray on her desk, black glass with crenellations like the tower of a castle, Suzanne thought. Her own ashtray was a little pressed foil dish that sat on the study window sill. Hers was an apology. Jane’s was a grand statement of intent. That too, though, challenged convention. Ladies smoked in 1919. But they rarely did so in public.
The biggest clue to Jane Boyte’s position in the ruling mechanism of the Irish Free State was that she was in the photograph at all. Since she wasn’t central to proceedings, was literally on the edge of the picture, it would be the logical thing for a picture editor to crop her out. A secretary would certainly have been cropped out. Jane had survived because of her status. Her presence here was the proof of that status. Her evident and brazenly public commitment to the Fenian cause made her later arrest in Liverpool much less of a mystery in Suzanne’s mind, too. But the significant thing here was that she was the link between Harry Spalding and Michael Collins.
Suzanne was about to tap Jane Boyte’s name into her search engine when the phone on the desk began to ring. It was Monsignor Delaunay, the Jesuit priest whom she had never met but of whom Martin had spoken fondly and often. Martin always described him as jocular, a sort of jolly giant of the priesthood. He did not sound jocular now, though. He sounded guarded, suspicious. But at least he had returned the call. She thanked him for doing so. She apologised for cold-calling him out of nowhere, for interrupting his hike on the slopes of the mountain, his dip in the Barmouth sea.
‘It’s quite alright,’ he said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but. ‘I was expecting you to call.’
‘Really?
‘I had resolved that, if you did, I would meet you and speak to you. You are concerned about the Peitersen business. You are worried about the deception. You believe the deception might place Martin and his father in jeopardy aboard the boat.’
‘Does it?’
At the other end of the line, there was a pause. ‘Not directly, it doesn’t. But Magnus Stannard is owed an explanation concerning the Peitersen farrago. All three of you are, since all three of you were deceived.’
‘I wasn’t deceived for long,’ Suzanne said.
‘Nevertheless. You are owed an explanation. And I believe you are owed an apology. And I would prefer to offer both in person.’
After concluding her conversation with Delaunay, she did her search for Jane Boyte. She found nothing written. But she did find another photograph. This one was in an archive copyrighted by Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council and the sub-classification under which it was filed was Southport Tourism (Heritage). It showed two men wearing leather coats and gauntlets, standing next to a biplane on an expanse of hard sand. One of them wore a cap with goggles perched above the peak. The picture had been taken on a sunny, windy day. The detail in the shot was good, the contrast very sharp. Between the grinning flyers stood Jane Boyte. If anything she had grown into herself since the Dublin picture. Her precisely cut hair was raven black in strong, breeze-blown tresses. She wore a leather jacket, tightly cinched by a tied belt at the waist. The calf-length boots under her canvas jodhpurs buttoned all the way up the front. She was smiling, and her teeth were very white.
Suzanne whistled. It was a bit like discovering you had been a film star in a former life. The resemblance was so undeniably strong it almost made her laugh out loud. It did actually make her blush. The difference was the glamour. Jane Boyte was possessed of a swaggering sexual glamour that programme researchers employed on a freelance contract by the BBC in the early twenty-first century were generally and probably understandably denied. She felt a stab of something and, assuming it was hunger, looked at her watch. It was just after twelve thirty. But it wasn’t a hunger pang at all, she realised. It was the feeling of envy.
The caption read: The brothers Giroud pictured at their airstrip on Southport beach with Birkdale aviator Miss Jane Boyte. French Canadians and veterans of the late conflict on the Western Front, the Giroud brothers have assembled an impressive and varied collection of aircraft, all of which can be seen regularly flying over the North-West’s premier resort.
Suzanne considered it a bit unfair that the brothers Giroud were denied Christian names in the caption. She thought it likely they had been discriminated against on the grounds that they were both French and Canadian. Miss Boyte was Birkdale’s, so she was local. She did another web search. She tapped in Dark Echo Boyte. And this time, she got written information. And it was substantial. It came in the form of a story from an edition of the Liverpool Daily Post dated April 20, 1927. And it ran thus:
Crack American yachtsman Harry Spalding brought his storm-damaged schooner Dark Echo into Liverpool Harbour early yesterday morning in a feat of seamanship that had veteran sailors raising their caps in admiration.
Spalding was caught in a sudden and very severe storm off the Irish coast having left the harbour at Howth intending to sail to Scotland for a week of shooting and rod fishing. But his racing vessel was blown off course by a sea with waves cresting at close to fifty feet in an easterly wind meteorologists insist was gusting at its peak at between 80 and 90 miles an hour.
Esteemed Mersey boat builder Patrick Boyte will undertake the challenge of trying to restore the damaged craft to the condition that has seen her triumph so often in regattas held off the coast of the United Kingdom and beyond.
He describes the task as an honour and says he is confident that two months of works will see the Dark Echo restored to a level of seaworthiness and general reparation that will delight the dashing millionaire sportsman who has earned such seagoing distinction at her helm.
The story was written like a dictated telegram, Suzanne thought. But it wasn’t just commas that were missing. There was no colour, no anecdotage. Spalding, crucially, had supplied no quotes. He was described as dashing. But the story had been written in a period when millionaires were dashing by definition. What had been omitted? Any mention of his crewmen had been omitted. Not even Harry Spalding could sail a schooner single-handedly through a storm like that described. The one thing the Liverpool Daily Post would be unlikely to exaggerate would be the severity of the storm. Its readers, many of them, would have been seafarers themselves in that period. Its shareholders would have also held shares in shipping lines. A port city prospered because of the sea. It was not in the interest of the major newspaper serving that city to exaggerate the sea’s hazards. The storm would have been as bad as they said it was. Had Spalding aboard the Dark Echo lost crewmen to it? It was an intriguing question.
More intriguing was what he had done for the duration of the repairs being carried out to his boat.
Suzanne sighed to herself. She tapped the surface of her desk. Now she really did feel hungry. The thing was, intriguing didn’t really cut it. She had felt at some nagging, intutive level that there must have been a connection between Collins and Spalding. And she had proved to herself that there was, through Jane Boyte. Jane had been present with both men at the Dáil in 1919. Eight years later, the Dark Echo had limped into a Mersey boatyard owned by her father, Patrick Boyte. This at a time when the successful businessmen of Liverpool built their expansive houses in the smart seaside town of Southport, eighteen miles away from the murk and spoil of the soot and steam-bound city from which they profited. Jane Boyte was a Southport girl, from the posh suburb of Birkdale. Harry Spalding had spent his Southport summer in the very places where Jane would naturally have socialised. And whatever her Fenian affiliations, Jane had been no drab political apparatchik. She was a pioneer aviator and drop-dead gorgeous to boot. This was a single woman with a social life. Encountering the playboy Spalding afresh at some party or reception somewhere would have been inevitable.