But so what? What did all that prove? It proved only that Suzanne had a knack for research. It reaffirmed her belief that she had a happy gift for what she did for a living. It did not help Martin and his father. It did not ease by one small fraction the danger her instinct told her they were in, aboard Spalding’s boat, in the unkind vastness of the North Atlantic Ocean.
She should concentrate on Peitersen, her one real lead, and her meeting scheduled for tomorrow with Delaunay in Northumberland. The seminary was a hell of a long way away. But she felt she had no choice but to go and talk to the priest. The anxiety she had felt at Martin’s departure had only increased in the time since then. He and his father had made themselves into competent sailors. They had all sorts of high-tech gizmos on board to attract help should they get into any kind of trouble. And the boat was incredibly substantial and completely seaworthy. Modern racing vessels, with their obsession with weight and drag, were absurdly flimsy by comparison. Despite all this, though, she was still worried and the worry was increasing. So she should go and see Delaunay and see whether he could offer some help or peace of mind.
She went to lunch. In the afternoon, because she did not want to go home and bite her nails and pace the carpet, she tried to find out more about the storm that had hit in the Irish Sea in the early hours of April 16, 1927. Trawlers putting out from Holyhead and Dublin had foundered in it. A warship had beached in it near Douglas on the Isle of Man. There was coastal damage as far north as Bangor and Carrickfergus on the Irish coast and Whitehaven in England. It was estimated that twenty-one sailors had perished. The storm had been huge and very violent and had lasted for three days. And Harry Spalding had survived it in a boat built for recreation. That fact alone said something for the Dark Echo. But it was not reassuring. The bad presentiments had begun for Suzanne in the barn in France that had not looked very much like a barn at all. They had been worsening ever since.
She used a BBC account to pay the nominal amount that enabled full access to the archive of the Liverpool Daily Post. She searched for stories concerning Spalding in the weeks after the storm. And from the issue dated May 2 she discovered this:
Following a disturbance at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool described by management as a practical joke that got out of hand, American yachtsman Mr Harry Spalding has been asked to vacate his suite there forthwith.
Mr Spalding is expected to relocate to the Palace Hotel in Southport to be nearer to the Birkdale links course where this keen golfer regularly plays off an impressively low handicap. He is also believed to be interested in chartering an aircraft from the aviation club owned by the Giroud brothers at the resort, and seeing from the sky something of the area where he plans to spend the summer.
‘The incident was a storm in a teacup,’ Mr Spalding told the Post. ‘And I’m an authority on storms. I’m looking forward to Southport. I’m looking forward to spending some money on Lord Street.’
An Adelphi chambermaid was treated for burns at Speke infirmary following the failed prank. She was kept in overnight but allowed home the following day. A detective from the Liverpool constabulary took statements both from the injured woman and from Mr Terence Sealey, night manager of the hotel. He is also believed to have interviewed Mr Spalding, but the Post is told no charges are likely as a consequence of the incident.
So Spalding had possessed a sense of humour, or at least a sense of irony. The incident itself must have been very serious back in those cap-doffing, forelock-tugging days for the police to have been called and for a millionaire guest to have been told to pack his bags. The clear implication was that the maid had been paid off. Suzanne assumed her injuries had been quite serious. In 1927, twenty-one years before the National Health Service was introduced, a hotel chambermaid did not qualify for hospital treatment unless it was a medical necessity.
Suzanne had wondered about Harry Spalding’s attitude towards what was then called the fairer sex. She knew that he had been dumped by a girlfriend in Marseilles or Rimini or somewhere on arriving in Europe. Now she wondered if he had dumped her in the harbour. All she had to go on was the feral look he was giving Jane Boyte in the photograph she’d seen earlier of the US bankers invited to Ireland by de Valera’s government. Had that been the source of some friction between Spalding and Collins? Had Spalding made a crude pass at Jane, or made her the victim of one of his practical jokes? Collins was notably chivalrous and quick to defend any woman he considered insulted. There were five or six recorded incidences of him leaping to a woman’s defence, the most famous being when he came close to punching Lord Birkenhead at dinner in London during the treaty negotiations in 1922 over a perceived insult to his hostess, Hazel Lavery.
But it didn’t matter, did it? It was neither here nor there in helping Martin and his father if they were in peril on the sea. Suzanne thought that she was making progress on the subject of Harry Spalding. Detail was accruing, a picture emerging. But she felt that she would have to wait until late the following afternoon and her audience with the Jesuit in Northumberland before there would be any real further enlightenment.
Her search revealed only one other mention of Spalding in the Post. It was a page-two filler. It said:
American playboy Harry Spalding has rented a mansion for the summer in Birkdale’s prestigious Rotten Row. Flamboyant millionaire Mr Spalding had previously been resident at a luxury suite in the nearby Palace Hotel.
It was interesting that in just a few weeks, he had gone from being a heroic yachtsman fabled for his sporting prowess, to a mere playboy. Was his behaviour so degenerate? The disdain of the press virtually dripped off the page. The impression was of a man barely in control of himself.
Lastly, she sourced the piece in the Post she had first seen and shown to Martin months earlier, detailing Jane Boyte’s release from arrest. She printed it off and compared the photograph there to the picture of Jane, the aviator, on the beach between the brothers Giroud. One picture had been taken willingly in benign and jolly circumstances. The other seemed by comparison a stolen moment in a blighted life. Jane was still glamorous in the second picture. She was perfectly tailored and fiercely beautiful. But the joy had vanished from her face. And Suzanne sensed that this absence of mischief, of the defiance that characterised her expression elsewhere, had to do with more than just the ordeal of her arrest. A woman who had moved in Michael Collins’ political orbit was not a woman to be traumatised by twenty-four hours in a Liverpool police cell. Jane had been much tougher than that. She had been resilient, steely. But something had happened to her. The carefree adventuress pictured on the sands in her flying outfit had endured some dreadful ordeal. And the outcome had been a bleak and dispiriting one.