And how would he, I wondered on hearing this, inured to the practicalities of life by such fabulous wealth?
Spalding spent a period in the middle 1920s in England. He had put out on a jaunt from Dublin Bay and was forced for refuge to Liverpool by a storm that almost destroyed the Dark Echo. He found the climate, and perhaps the northern coolness of the people and their detachment, more congenial to his soul than continental Europe. This was the time of his winning things at Cowes and in other places, the great lines of his boat forming a familiar, celebrated shape against the dappled waters of the Solent.
In Cowes, his exploits on the water were still an awed folk memory among old salts whose grandfathers had piloted or crewed in races for Harry Spalding. They still talked about the way you had to watch out for his evil bull mastiff, Toby, should a chart be required and the aft cabin therefore need to be risked. And they still talked about tips aboard a winning boat so lavish that a man could spend the next six months idle, arse parked on the beach in a Ventnor deckchair.
There was amazement at the memory of the yachtsman Harry Spalding, but there was no fondness. And he had possessed no love for himself, it seemed. For in the cold December of 1929, he had lain down in a Manhattan hotel with his boat berthed in the thickening ice of New York Harbour a mile and a half away and had put a bullet from his own gun into his right temple. He was thirty-three years old and made a beautiful corpse. Even the NYPD detective called to the scene to investigate said as much, seeing Harry in deathly repose. He looked serene in death. The only mark on him was the small hole left by the bullet and a dark, delicate halo of powder burn around the hole. There was no exit wound. The bullet had apparently lodged in his skull.
Having drunk too much to drive, I left the Saab on its meter and saw my father safely into a Mayfair-bound cab before walking across Lambeth Bridge to the home I shared with Suzanne on the other side of the river. When I got in and had taken off my coat, I looked into her tiny study and switched on the light. The air in her workspace retained the subtlest hint of her scent and I inhaled what there was of it gratefully. There were reference books in a line on the window sill with yellow slips of paper marking crucial passages. The award she had won for her work on a three-part documentary series on the elusive Rudolph Hess sat, a little silver-mounted perspex trophy, on top of her computer monitor. She had Blu-tacked it there, incredibly proud. The sight of it now made me smile. The wall she faced when she worked was a gallery of the gifted and the infamous whose mysteries she had worked hard to unravel. There was Auden and the Kray Brothers, and a pencil sketch of Christopher Marlowe and a sepia studio shot of Dan Leno in costume. Among the collage of pictures on the wall was the famous shot of Michael Collins, thin-lipped and preening in his leather gloves and army uniform as Chief of the Irish Free State, a Parabellum pistol swinging on his hip. I studied him. And the man who did for the Cairo gang in one bloody night of assassination looked a cosy sort of fellow altogether, when I recalled the picture I had seen earlier that evening of the Jericho Crew and their leader, Harry Spalding.
I noticed that the flowers in a vase sharing the sill with her books were dying. I would buy a fresh bunch to greet her return. I switched off the light, shaking my head. The flat felt very quiet and empty in Suzanne’s absence from it. I closed the study door softly and went to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. The spiced food and the beer and wine drunk with it would have made me seek water anyway, so close to bed. But it was my father’s request, over dinner, that made me really thirsty now. I felt the dry-mouthed affliction of nervousness, even of fear. And it was my father’s proposition at our table in the Kundan that had triggered it. That, and the walk back to the flat. The river had been low under Lambeth Bridge, lapping softly and invisible, what little noise it made distorted by the fog. The fog, almost impenetrable in Portsmouth, had extended its tendrils as far as the capital. There was almost no traffic and curiously no pedestrian traffic at all, though it was not remotely late by London standards. But from the moment my father’s taxi drew away, I endured the strange suspicion of being trailed though dissipating mist, all the way over the bridge and to the safe refuge of home.
That night I dreamed that Harry Spalding and Michael Collins met, the encounter in some dim and monochromatic no-man’s-land. They were uniformed and they took off their caps and their Sam Browne belts and came together to wrestle. And Collins, the broth of a boy from his father’s farm in County Cork, naturally the bigger and stronger man and much the more skilled at grappling, gained the upper hand. And then Spalding’s limbs seemed to lengthen and burnish and they blackened like those of some great, bony insect and he crushed and then greedily devoured his opponent, his arms and legs segmented now and chittering foully as he scrabbled away into the darkness from the scene. I awoke, sweating. It had been a horrible dream, all the worse, as nightmares so often are, for being so nonsensical and meaningless.
I got out of bed, went back into Suzanne’s study and took the cashmere sweater she had left draped across the back of the chair at her desk. It had been the source of the earlier scent, a mingling of her skin and hair and the perfume she habitually wore. I folded it on to my pillow for comfort but still felt spooked. I sat up and took my mobile from the bedside table and texted Suzanne to call me if she was still awake. I was grateful she was only in Dublin, in the same time zone. Her research work could take her anywhere in the world. In Dublin and London it was only just after midnight.
She called me back straight away.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Have you heard of a man called Harry Spalding?’
There was a silence as I’m sure she flicked through the mental Rolodex in her clever, beautiful head. ‘Yes. In Paris in the 1920s he once offered Bricktop a hundred thousand dollars if she would sleep with him.’
I had no idea who or what Bricktop was. A courtesan? An entertainer? ‘Bricktop’s response?’
Suzanne laughed. ‘Something fairly unprintable, I should think.’
‘Have you heard of the Jericho Crew?’
There was another silence. This one was less productive. ‘No, I haven’t. It doesn’t sound very salubrious, though, whatever it is. Or was. What’s this about, Martin?’
‘My father bought the wreck of Spalding’s boat today. His yacht. The Dark Echo?’
At the other end of the line, I heard Suzanne swallow. ‘Well. Your father has never been one for superstition.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you, Martin. I’ll tell you all about Bricktop, too.’
‘My father intends to have the boat restored, made seaworthy once again. He intends to sail her. He wants to sail her around the world. And he told me tonight he wants me to accompany him.’
She laughed. There was no mirth in the sound. ‘I thought your father liked me.’
‘He does like you.’
‘But he wants to take you away,’ she said.
‘Which means that he must like me as well.’
I could hear her thinking. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ she said. It was Wednesday. She was due back on the Saturday. ‘Take care, Martin.’
She never said that. I thought it was an odd thing for her to say. Take care of what?
I lay on the bed for a while with her sweater a soft, sweet-smelling pillow under my head, but I still could not discover sleep. So I went back to her study and switched on Suzanne’s computer. Then, almost without thinking, I reached across and switched on Suzanne’s little radio. She had taken her laptop with her and our home computer was old and slow. It was nice to have a diversion while it groaned slowly into life. The radio was tuned to one of the digital stations, bebop and modern jazz and fusion, tunes segueing into one another without the hindrance of some insomnia jockey’s coffee-and-ego-fuelled patter to spoil the music.