I am in my cabin, writing this seated at my desk behind the locked cabin door. My father lies unconscious on my bunk. Occasionally, things slither past along the gangway outside. Or at least, they sound as if they do. There is the growl of a dog or the whimper of a child. More rarely, and the more shocking for it, there is the sudden loud scream of a woman hysterical with terror. That sound comes from my father’s cabin, which is really Spalding’s cabin, of course. There is often laughter, but it is dark. There is whispered pleading, which is met by silence. And there are scents. These are more varied than the noises. Sometimes they are pungent and sometimes subtle. Sometimes it is a hint of perfume, Arpège or Mitsouko, florid and heavy. Sometimes it is the whiff of strong tobacco. Sometimes the treacle aroma of rum is in the air. On occasion I’ve smelled cordite, sharp and strong as though from the barrel or firing chamber of a gun just discharged in close proximity. There is often the coppery odour of blood, freshly spilled. There is the sour secretion of fear. Worst of all, there is now and then the overwhelming stench of mortal decay that radiates from the self-murdered corpse of Gubby Tench as his remains stew in the heat of Havana Bay.
They are the boat’s memories, these various and randomly occurring sounds and smells. And they are growing in strength and vividness as we approach our meeting with its one true master. Harry Spalding haunts the boat. But he does this in a paradoxical way. For I believe Spalding haunts the Dark Echo without really being a ghost at all.
Suzanne encountered a ghost, I remember, in Dublin back in January. Her ghost was benign. I suspect she encountered him again and never let on to me about the fact. Her ghost, in life, had an eye for the ladies. She was looking pretty hard at him, back then. He probably considered he had the justification to take a look right back at her. Whether she sensed him again or not, he meant no harm. And being dead, he could do no harm, either. I don’t believe a dead man can physically hurt the living.
Nothing about Spalding was ever benign. I had pondered on this after my efforts to send my account of events to Monsignor Delaunay, as my father got steadily drunker and the boat shifted under me as it continues to do now on its own relentless course. He had used his occult knowledge to keep death at bay in the war. He had practised barbaric and blasphemous rituals to guarantee his survival. He had sacrificed and kept on sacrificing. I suspected that the woman who supposedly dumped him on the quay at Rimini had been the first of his peacetime offerings. But Tench and the Waltrow brothers had been sacrifices, too, hadn’t they? Another had been made only recently, in the man who bled to death following that impossible accident in Frank Hadley’s yard. Between Gubby Tench and Hadley’s man, I suspected that the lost log of the Dark Echo would have documented a lot more deaths down the years and decades. But Spalding had ended his own life in 1929. Why did a man, long since deceased, need to go on paying the Devil the price of immortality? There was no reason. He did not need to do so. So what was the obvious conclusion? My own logic impelled me to believe that Spalding had never died at all.
The ‘Send’ light was still flashing feebly on my computer screen. Providence would determine whether Delaunay ever got my emailed testament. It was beyond my fingertips now, in cyberspace, out of my hands. I got up and went to confront my father. I wanted to ask him about the log. He once said he had read it. I’d thought the claim blithely made and untrue, just something said to shut me up when, at Hadley’s yard, the Dark Echo really had seemed cursed. But it was possible he had actually read it. He was a voracious reader and an intellectually curious man and the boat had been his coveted prize.
But when I got to him he was beyond interrogation. He was stretched unconscious on the floor. At first, I feared he had suffered a stroke. But his features wore their familiar symmetry and there was nothing rigid in his posture, lying there. His breathing was ponderous but steady. I bent to listen to his heart and it was regular and strong. The sounds aboard of infant crying had tormented him, as perhaps they were supposed to do. I knew with dull certainty in my own heart it was not my sister but some infant victim of the boat’s bloody history. My father, though, had believed it was Catherine Ann, come back to chastise him for some sin he had never committed.
My father had now taken to the refuge aboard the Dark Echo of deep shock. I was on my own. I gathered him in my arms and carried him to my cabin and put him in my bunk. I kissed him on the cheek and brought the blanket snugly to his chin. I smoothed down his dishevelled hair to restore some dignity to my dad. I said a prayer for him. Locking the door behind me, I returned to the master cabin. The machine that played the wax cylinders looked like it had when I’d brought it out of its rotting box. It looked like it would never play again. I took the cylinder we had listened to from the cradle bevelled for it and put another in. It stank and slipped between my fingers with greasy decay.
‘Why did you fake your suicide?’
The needle dropped on to the cylinder and the cylinder began to turn.
‘You’ll call me captain,’ Spalding’s voice commanded, ‘or you’ll call me sir. I will not suffer insubordination, sport. You will learn this to your cost.’
‘Why, sir, did you fake your suicide?’
There was a long silence. I could hear the sludgy moan of the needle on the wax. What I was hearing defied the laws of physics. But Harry Spalding had engineered his own bleak path through the rational world. He had harnessed magic to do it.
‘My parents followed a faith frowned upon by the land of the brave and the home of the free. Our faith was persecuted, outlawed. A Federal Bureau man called Grey oversaw the destruction of our place of worship. My parents prayed for revenge.’
To whom, I wondered. But I knew the answer.
‘Grey had a daughter. She had aspirations to be a dancer. I courted her. I wooed her, Martin, old chum. I took her to Europe cherishing dreams of the stage and ovations and garlands. And I butchered her with a boning knife and dropped her corpse in weighted pieces in the harbour at Rimini.’
‘And her father found out.’
‘Her father was dead by then. But he had buddied up for years with a loyal and dogged partner in the Bureau by the name of Gianfranco Genelli. Genelli’s entire family were Sicilian hoods. He was the white sheep of the flock. But he kept on good terms with people on both sides of the law. Things became a little hot for old Harry Spalding in the years after Rimini. Harry moved around, but Genelli’s people were only ever a step behind. It rather cramped my style. Eventually and somewhat flamboyantly, Harry was obliged to say adieu.’
Which was not a hard thing to accomplish, I supposed, in the New York of 1929. Not for a man as stupendously wealthy as Spalding had been. Not after the Crash, when it must have seemed as though the Great Depression would just go on deepening for ever.
‘So you got away with it.’
‘With what?’
‘With her murder.’
‘I get away with everything.’