You cannot make accusations against a rich and popular visitor to the town, Vera says. The evidence simply is not there. You will look like a bigoted fool, taking against a stranger simply because he is a stranger and not a Southport man born and bred. And the culprit is likely to be a local man, her fiancé says. Only someone who knows the ground could stalk the victims and evade capture without leaving witnesses or clues. He’s from Ainsdale or Crossens. He is not a stranger to the terrain. He is likely to be someone inconspicuous, superficially unremarkable. And this is all well and good and makes perfect sense, of course. But Spalding was able to ghost through enemy lines on the Western Front not a decade ago, wreaking havoc and eluding capture. The taking of three women would be child’s play to a man with his deadly predatory skills.
I should have kept my own counsel. I had hoped for an ally in Vera’s detective, or a least a sympathetic hearing for one of the closest friends of his intended. I fear that the real problem for Vera is less the subject of Harry Spalding than my own past Fenian connection. She is loyal enough to stay my friend despite that. But she doesn’t want our friendship known about by her police detective. Perhaps she fears it would compromise him. As I said, I wish I had kept my own counsel. But there is something concrete I can do myself. And I intend to do it tomorrow. Vera is right in one regard. I have no hard evidence. Tomorrow I believe I might be able to provide myself with some.
I made the preparations earlier today, shortly after my angry exchange with Vera. I motored down to the Giroud hangar where Pierre was in his overalls stripping the turbine yet again on the troublesome Sopwith they bought. The Sopwith is supposed to be an easily maintained aircraft. It has a reputation for being relatively trouble-free. But theirs isn’t.
Did you come to thank me for the champagne, Pierre said. He looks more handsome in his blue overalls with grease smeared across his face than he does in black tie and tails. He looks more the man of action, which of course he is. He and his brother both.
I want to fly early tomorrow, I told him.
Of course. How early is early?
Dawn.
He did something French with his mouth, a sort of shrug of the lips, and nodded. The Tiger Moth?
I shook my head. The Hawker Siddeley, I told him. And I need it fully equipped.
He smiled at that. You want us to mount the machine gun?
Almost all of their aircraft once belonged to the Royal Flying Corps. The brothers Giroud made a killing on military surplus when it was still cheap. I’m quite surprised they did not buy a tank just to tow their aeroplanes through the soft sand on the beach to the landing strip.
Not armed, Pierre, I said. But fully equipped.
Of course, he said. I will see you here tomorrow at dawn. And the Siddeley will be ready for you.
July 28th, 1927
I am just returned from Liverpool. I do not think I have ever felt more exhausted in my life. Detective Chief Inspector Bell of the Liverpool Constabulary had finally acceded to my request for an audience. Perhaps it was the newspaper headlines that persuaded him to grant me half an hour of his precious time. Three days ago Helen Sykes became the fourth woman from our little corner of South Lancashire to disappear. The other women were not worth a splash in print on their own account. Too poor and too plain, I expect. But Helen is both well-off and beautiful. I use the present tense in the hope that she still lives. But each day that passes makes that less likely, as even DCI Bell was moved to agree. Helen has no motive for orchestrating her own vanishing act. And she has no reason for ignoring the appeals to allay concern by coming forward made in every edition of the Post and the Echo and the Visitor sold by those bellowing urchins from the hoardings on the streets.
Bell is senior to Vera’s policeman in rank. And he showed no sign whatsoever of recognising my name when I was ushered into his office. He made me wait. But I waited in an anteroom rather than in the general waiting area, with its green linoleum and scatter of flattened cigarette ends and stink of sweaty desperation. The anteroom was bad enough. It had a large brass lock on a door which whooshed on its steel frame, flush with the floor and the top of the lintel it hung so heavily in. The green canvas chairs and heavy brown varnish and silence of the anteroom could not have symbolised confinement more solidly without bars and handcuffs. The only way out was when they came to escort me to Bell.
The Detective Chief Inspector’s office was replete with the shields and rosettes of achievement on all four walls. Liverpool is a port city and a town as rough as they come and he looked as hard as granite. He was slender and cold-eyed where I had expected him to be stout and bellicose. But there was steel in his handshake as he rose from behind his desk to greet me and offered me a seat. Please, he said, gesturing to the stiff-backed chair. The one word carried the thick, adenoidal character of unschooled Scouse. I know it from my father’s yard. Mr Bell, I knew instantly, had come up on merit earned on the streets through the police ranks. I noticed then a glass case on the wall with a truncheon and a constable’s helmet displayed inside it. And I had no doubt they had belonged to him at the outset of his career. I could see him on Scotland Road under the street lights at closing time, putting violent drunks to punishing rights at the business end of that hardwood club.
He asked did I want tea or coffee and I declined. He poured a glass of water for each of us from the carafe on his desk. He held his hands out in a gesture of expansiveness and said, I’m naturally intrigued by your claim to have information regarding the missing women.
Helen Sykes is a friend of mine, I said.
And our colleagues in Southport are doing everything they can to try to find her, he said.
But they lack your expertise and resources, I said. They do not possess your rank. And though two of the missing women are from Southport, two are from elsewhere in the region. It all falls under your general jurisdiction, does it not?
He did not answer that question. He just looked at me over his steepled fingers and said, tell me what you think you know, Miss Boyte.
It was sweltering in his office. There was a fan on a filing cabinet, the curved blades of it like a Sopwith propeller in miniature. But he had not turned it on. His one window was open to the hot blast of our relentless heatwave. It displayed the thrilling vista of the building opposite, soot-blackened over decades of belching Liverpool industry. He did not seem discomforted by the heat at all. He had on a suit with a coat of heavy gabardine wool, and a tie was knotted firmly at his throat. These were distinctions he had earned, the plain-clothes trappings of rank, and a spot of seasonal sunshine was not about to oblige him to shed them.
I told him about my encounter at the Shelbourne with Harry Spalding seven years ago. I did not mention Mick or Boland. I did not seek to explain what I was doing then in Dublin.
He never took his eyes off me. When I had finished, he said, seven years is a long time.
I opened the briefcase I had brought with me and took out the print I had brought for him to see.
What’s this?
It is an aerial photograph of the garden of the house Spalding has taken for the summer on Rotten Row, I said. It was taken a week ago. There is clear and substantial visual evidence of excavation. He is burying the bodies, Chief Inspector. He is burying the women in his backyard.
Bell looked at the photograph. But he did not touch it. I was not encouraged by this.
How did you obtain this picture?
I fly, Chief Inspector. I leased an aircraft used in the war for aerial reconnaissance. I overflew Spalding’s house. There is a camera in the fuselage.