F. Cottam - Dark Echo

Between discarding Rebecca and meeting Suzanne, I did have relationships with women. But they were casual and sometimes callous and always fleeting. Romance and spontaneity are, I think, the biggest casualties of the age of the text and the email. Everything now seems so contingent and circumscribed. There’s no place for sincerity when you can so easily avoid the honest call of a human voice. Thank God for the Shadwell Pussies, I used to think. They delivered Suzanne, saved me from solitude and brought me love. That’s what I used to think, before I sat her down after her return from Dublin and told her everything that had occurred since my father’s purchase of the wreck of the Dark Echo .

Her flight from Dublin had been delayed and she got back tired and a bit fraught anyway. She was not making the progress with the Michael Collins research that she had been expected to. Someone superior to her in the programme-making hierarchy had fallen into the trap of reaching conclusions about some aspects of Collins’ life and character before the research had vindicated them. It was the classic pitfall in their particular line of work. Everybody did it, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable a tendency. It was unreasonable and unfair. It had put extra pressure on Suzanne. She got back to London frustrated and angry.

She stood over by our open sitting-room window and smoked a cigarette while she considered what I had told her. She had been a heavy smoker from a family of smokers when I’d met her. She’d cut down considerably since then. But she still smoked Marlboro Reds. And the smoke drifted from her nostrils in two satisfied plumes when she smoked. She stood there in the chill of the window with her cigarette poised elegantly in her hand beside her pale jaw, thinking. Her black hair was cut into a glossy and precise bob. Her eyes, a brown so burnished they were almost black, glittered in the light from the street below. She was dressed in a black pencil skirt and a white shirt and her hair at its edge was geometrically neat above the white, open collar of the shirt. Not for the first time, I thought she looked like a woman from another time, from an era when the circumstances in which the two of us lived would have been nothing other than scandalous. She wouldn’t have cared. That was something else again about her.

Smoke wreathed around her lovely head. You could easily imagine Michael Collins making a play for her at some dinner held to fête him during the London peace negotiations that indirectly caused his death. You could imagine Harry Spalding doing the same at some plush and exclusive tennis or yachting club. He would click across the parquet in his leather heels approaching her. His tread would be light but determined. She would catch the eye of any man. There was a challenge in her, though, that the predators among them might find irresistible.

Eventually, she ground out her cigarette stub in a foil ashtray on the sill and flicked it out of the window. ‘I’d heard something about the curse of the Dark Echo . More precisely, it might be termed the curse on the Dark Echo . I did a bit of preliminary digging after our conversation on the evening of the day of auction.’

‘Why did you do that?’

She turned to me. ‘I did it because of your father’s proposition. Because although you sounded proud and flattered, you also sounded afraid.’

‘Something spooked me,’ I said. ‘Looking at Spalding’s face in the group picture of the Jericho Crew, I felt something so strong it was almost a premonition. Walking home afterwards in the fog across Lambeth Bridge, I felt as though I was being followed.’

She nodded. And she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. The London night was very quiet outside our open window in the flat. But you could feel the drift of river damp on the air. It was now early March and the air still raw. ‘You’re a very intuitive man, Martin.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Because you didn’t see the punch coming that broke your nose? Or because you wasted a year and a half of your life on a failed vocation?’

‘Either example would stand as evidence.’

‘How do you think the fire was started that destroyed the vessel’s log? Bearing in mind that it burned with such stubborn ferocity, I mean.’

‘I don’t know, Suzanne. In my mind’s eye I see the spectre of Harry Spalding with a Very pistol in his hand. He grins his death’s head grin in the darkness in the vault as he pulls the trigger and fires a distress flare into the pile of volumes.’

‘But we’ll never know. Everything burned, so we’ll never know,’ she said. And this surprised me.

‘I thought you’d laugh out loud, telling you that,’ I said.

She rubbed at her shivering arms again with her hands. She closed the window. She always waited a while, like this. She hated the thought of my smelling the burned tobacco on her breath. I didn’t mind it, really. I had grown up with the ubiquitous stink of my father’s cigars all my young life.

‘Something happened to me on my earlier visit to Dublin, Martin. It happened on the Wednesday. It happened on the same day as the auction.’

The Michael Collins series producer was a BBC high-flyer called Gerald Smythe. He was an obnoxious and unreasonable bully and he was driving Suzanne very hard, I knew. ‘Smythe treat you to one of his bollockings?’

I knew she dreaded the edicts sent her via his BlackBerry. But she shook her head. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘Then tell me.’

She had been on one of those interminably long Georgian streets on the North side of the Liffey. She had been looking under her umbrella, in the rain, for a particular address. The streets were so long and so straight in that part of the city that you could see their gentle incline as they rose towards the distant smudge of the Dublin Mountains. She could hear rain hiss and gurgle in the gutter on its descent to the drains. The streets to her in this part of the city were indistinguishable from one another. In a sense they were featureless. All the houses looked the same; rain-stained and austere with iron boot cleaners outside imposing doors standing at the top of worn sets of stone steps. They were handsome in their way, the houses. But they were a bleak sight in the flat rainy light, dwellings redolent of a harder, plainer age.

After years of near dereliction, this part of Dublin had finally caught the fraying tail of the Celtic Tiger and was coming up in the world. The owner of the house was a psychiatrist. He had bought it only recently. But he was not there, was away at a symposium, and Suzanne had been entrusted with the key. And the neglect was good news for her. This area had provided Collins with a warren of safe refuges. In the period ninety years ago, after his release from the internment camp at Frongoch in Wales, he had hidden here. And it had been the same. Those same steps would have heard the patter of his rapid boots. His soft rap would have sounded on that very bronze doorknocker.

He had been by then a member of the executive of Sinn Fein and a director of the Irish Volunteers. He was a veteran of the Post Office siege during the failed Easter Rising. His will and his charisma had singled him out as a natural leader in his time at Frongoch. There, the British Secret Service had been sufficiently impressed to begin the file they would compile on him. She stopped walking. She had found her address. She rummaged in her pocket for the key. She climbed the wet stone steps. In his time of hiding here, Michael Collins had been twenty-seven years old.

She opened the front door and collapsed her umbrella, aware of the slight staleness coming from within and grateful that the new owner had not yet commissioned the refurbishment work to the house that would gut its interior. She closed the door softly behind her and unbuttoned her coat.