Again, she came up with nothing at the library in Southport. After two hours of musty, futile digging she went and got her cup of coffee and sat in the shade of an umbrella at a pavement table on sun-drenched Lord Street and pondered on what to do next. Maybe she ought to go to Liverpool and examine the maritime archive at the library there. What if, as she supposed, Dark Echo had been as accident-prone in Patrick Boyte’s boatyard as it had in that owned by poor Frank Hadley? There might be something.
She sighed. She sipped cappuccino. She watched traffic for a bit, the cars predominantly that silver metallic they were everywhere nowadays, and she toyed with her Marlboro packet without opening it and lighting one. What would an accident-prone boatyard in the Liverpool of eighty years ago prove? She knew that Martin and his father were in danger. She did not need a catalogue of old accidents to prove that to her. She knew it already. What she needed was the something indefinable that her instinct had impelled her to Southport in search of. It was not a coincidence in all of this that she did what she did for a living. It was her duty and her solitary hope. And sipping coffee, and resisting the craving for nicotine, she had to do what she could now to prevent a deep and powerful hopelessness from engulfing her like the tide.
‘Mind if I sit here, love?’
Suzanne smiled into the light against which the voice was silhouetted. The honest answer was that she did, of course. In the proximity of old people, you risked conversation. And this was particularly true in the north, where she knew that complete strangers often inflicted chat on you in the way that only care in the community victims ever did back in London. Age wasn’t even a consideration. Young people here did it, too. It was an indiscriminate vice.
Martin had warned her about it, years ago. But he had not done so deliberately. Magnus Stannard did it. Magnus was from Manchester. He talked to strangers all the time. He actually engaged people he did not know and had never met in conversation. Suzanne was there on a couple of occasions when he was blatantly guilty of it.
‘What is it with your dad?’
‘What?’
‘The compulsive attention seeking.’
‘He’s an attention seeker. But it’s not compulsive.’
‘He’ll talk to anyone.’
And Martin had laughed. ‘He’s from Manchester, Suzanne. And he might be a terrible show-off. Christ knows he’s got his faults. But my dad’s never had any side.’
‘Any what?’
‘Never mind.’
Eventually, she had understood. It was why she smiled in a manner she hoped might be warm and welcoming to the old lady who had invited herself to share her table outside Costa on Lord Street in Southport in the north of England where people spoke habitually to strangers and had no side. She swivelled her eyes, surreptitiously, to right and left.
‘All taken, love.’
Which they were. Every other table was occupied by families, by shop girls on their break, by fat men sweating in suits and dragging furiously on their outlawed choice of smoke.
‘I’m truly sorry,’ Suzanne said. And she was. She stood slightly and held out her hand. ‘My name is Suzanne. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.’
The old woman smiled. A waiter from somewhere in Eastern Europe delivered her iced coffee. So she was a regular. Of course she was. Suzanne had felt surprised at the choice of beverage and now cursed herself for her snobbery. It was a kind of bigotry. What it was, was parochial.
Harry Spalding had not been parochial.
‘You look a bit lost, love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’
Her hair had been blonde a lifetime ago. Now it was grey and tied back above the patina of tiny creases on her forehead. It was fine and thick and still abundant on her head. She wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, which she took off and put on the table. They had those old-fashioned green lenses. They had tortoiseshell frames. She put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands together and Suzanne saw that she wore a Cartier Tank wristwatch and a huge ruby eternity ring. So much for care in the community.
‘My name is Alice Daunt. I’m tempted to ask why someone so beautiful looks so crestfallen. And you are beautiful, you know, dear. You are exquisitely beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I won’t ask.’
Suzanne nodded.
Alice Daunt winked. ‘I’ll just let you tell me. If, and only if, you choose to do so.’
Suzanne sighed. ‘I’m researching a woman from Southport. Specifically, she was from Birkdale. Her name was Jane Boyte.’
‘I knew her.’ Alice Daunt raised and sipped her drink. There was condensation beading on the glass. Her hand was steady as she brought it to her lips. ‘Well, I say I knew her. I didn’t really. But my mother did.’
‘I’m trying to research her life.’
‘Oh? How?’
‘Over at the library there.’ Suzanne gestured.
Alice Daunt snorted into her drink. ‘Jane Boyte was a Birkdale girl.’
‘I know. I know that was where she lived.’
‘There was a Birkdale library, love. Gone now, like everything that was great about this town. Destroyed, the land sold on, by Sefton. Flats. Offices. Desecration.’
‘What was she like?’
Alice Daunt smiled. The smile was sly, concealing. ‘She looked uncannily like you do, Suzanne. It might be why I stopped. I was walking along Lord Street and I was transposed these eighty years. I thought for a moment I’d seen a ghost.’
Suzanne smiled back, or tried to. ‘Aren’t you afraid of ghosts, Alice?’
Alice Daunt sipped from her glass. ‘Of course I am. But a man whose opinion I respected very much told me a long time ago that we should confront our fears.’
The use of the past tense was not lost on Suzanne. ‘Your husband?’
‘My son,’ Alice Daunt said.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘And you’re very nice.’ She put down her iced coffee and picked up her sunglasses from the tabletop. ‘I could have only been seven or eight. But if you would like to meet me here at the same time tomorrow, Suzanne, I’ll tell you what I remember about the rather unfortunate person you so resemble.’
Suzanne sat for a while after Alice Daunt’s departure and watched the ice slip and subside in the June warmth at the bottom of her coffee glass. Southport had a lot of elderly residents and they had lived here all their lives. It was a demographic oddity. But it was a fact. There was a sprinkling of nonagenarians and even centurians among their frail number. But how many of them had known Jane Boyte? Had her meeting with Alice Daunt just now been a matter of coincidence or fate? Suddenly, she missed Monsignor Delaunay. His strength and certainty had been a reassuring comfort to her. She felt very alone and isolated, doing this. She shivered in the warmth and decided she would spend the afternoon exploring parts of the town relevant to her stalled investigation.
She walked south towards Birkdale and Weld Road. The shops petered out and eventually the road became lined instead with huge gardens and enormous, grand houses. Many of the houses had been turned into rest homes or dental clinics or bases for genteel professionals like chartered accountants, architects, solicitors and surveyors. She saw the signs on the grass and the brass plates on the gateposts saying so. Some had been divided into flats, their expansive lawns pulled up and paved over to accommodate residents’ cars. But many more of these grand houses were still still exactly that. Merchants made wealthy by businesses in Lancashire and Merseyside had come to live here in their opulent droves. That had been the Southport of Harry Spalding’s golden summer here.
Eventually she reached Birkdale and turned right on to Weld Road. The road rose into a gentle hill at its conclusion half a mile away, beyond which she knew the beach lay. To right and left, if anything the houses were even grander here. No two were exactly alike. But they shared characteristics beyond their enormity. Many had turrets and towers and crenellations. She smiled, reminded of her preconceptions concerning the women’s guest quarters at the seminary in Northumberland. Here, there was a great deal of Victorian Gothic. It was easy to imagine dark drawing rooms filled with William Morris furniture beyond those high front doors of studded oak and stained-glass panelling. The theme had been continued and exaggerated at the Palace Hotel, which had sprawled across the area approaching now to her left as she neared the rise that would take her to the sea. What a self-styled modernist like Harry Spalding had made of it was anyone’s guess. The Palace had been much more Tennyson than T.S. Eliot. Then again, it had been haunted. And that might have amused and even delighted its sardonic American guest.