F. Cottam - Dark Echo

The interior of the house was dim and chilly in the dank late morning. The hallway was long and high-ceilinged. Its walls were covered in plain and dingy plaster and its floor was stone, and inlaid with a chipped and worn stucco design. At the end of the hall there were stairs leading both down and up. Suzanne guessed on up. Collins was too wily and too practised a fugitive to trap himself at night in a cellar. He would want to sleep where the crash of army boots ascending stairs would provide him with fair warning. He would want a point of exit to take him to the escape route across the flat terraced roofs.

She climbed the stairs. She had left her umbrella dripping on the cold stone of the entrance hall. But she had kept her coat on. The house was not heated in its owner’s absence and she could see her breath exhaled in little puffs as she climbed the steep, uncarpeted staircase. She paused only when she reached a door at the very top of the house. She had discovered the address scrawled on a series of expenses chits that were part of a cache of old Irish Volunteers papers kept in the archive at Dublin Castle. They detailed the cost of food and drink ordered over a period of evenings from Dooley’s Hotel around the corner. The name attached to these punctiliously numbered and dated chits was not Collins. It was Browne. But Collins, while strict about expenses, was lavish with aliases. And Suzanne had recognised the careful script learned during his clerical service in London as a youth. It had been him. He had stayed here. He had held meetings here. Plans had been formulated and strategy decided upon that had changed the course of a nation’s history.

She opened the door.

The room was furnished with a truckle bed, a wardrobe and a single straight-backed chair. There was a narrow, rectangular window, its small panes drab with dust. The bed was long stripped, its bare springs slightly rusted but still taut against the pull of the angle-iron frame. The floor was of bare boards. She shivered. There was nothing menacing about this small and modest room. She could hear rain patter above her on a skylight. She pulled the chair over and stood on it, the better to examine this. One of the boyos handy with a chisel and a hammer had put it there, she knew. The work was neat enough. But it was not an original feature of the house. The wooden frame had been canted slightly so that rain would not puddle on the pane. There was a catch at one edge of the skylight and, at the opposite edge, there was a sturdy double hinge. A man would need to be able to lift his own weight with his arms to lever himself through there from the height of a chair. But Collins had been young and very strong. No bother, as he would have said himself. No bother at all.

She stepped off the chair and walked over to the wardrobe, smiling to herself. She thought they should photograph as a still image rather than film the room she was in. It was intact and complete. They had the budget to run to one of those docudrama recreations of actors playing Collins and Cathal Brugha, or someone, seated on the made-up bed, plotting atmospherically by lamp or candlelight. And she was sure the psychiatrist who owned the place would tolerate the disruption involved in that process. But a still image would better reflect the simplicity of the places in which Collins rested from his war against the most powerful empire in the world, the places where he hid in temporary refuge from his enemies.

She was smiling because she was sure there would be a mirror. She stepped over to the wardrobe and opened it. It was a narrow item with a single door. It opened on the faintest scent of Bay Rum and mothballs. She saw the space where his overcoat and dapper suit would have hung. She saw the thin brass rail screwed to the inside of the door over which his unknotted tie would have hung and smoothed itself out during the night. And above that, she saw the little mirror in which he would have fussed and preened, indulging the peacock vanity that was so much a part of this complex man’s make-up.

Suzanne closed the wardrobe door with her secret smile widening. And she sensed a warmth envelop her in the room, in the quiet. And she did not feel that she was any longer alone in it. It was very sudden, this change in atmosphere. She turned sharply and looked around. Everything was the same. But the temperature in there had risen, she was sure. The room no longer had the same raw, desolate quality of neglect that had characterised it only a moment earlier. It felt entirely different. It felt occupied. She could feel a presence. She could almost smell the warm, amused humanity of the energetic presence watching her there, in repose. She heard a slight creak from the bed as though the weight of someone sitting there shifted and stretched in relaxation.

‘Then what happened?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing happened,’ she said. ‘The moment passed. The feeling sort of . . . evaporated. But I felt it. I did not imagine it. For a moment, he was there.’

‘What time was this? Roughly?’

‘I’ll tell you exactly. It was twelve fifteen. I looked at my watch. And then I left.’

Twelve fifteen. Just after the auction. She had looked at her watch at the exact moment I had looked at mine at the boatyard of Bullen and Clore on seeing the foreman there cross himself in the presence of my father’s prize.

‘It was why I was still awake and alert when you sent me that text late in the evening,’ she said. ‘Nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me before. I was still pondering on the experience. It was inexplicable. But it was real.’

I did not say anything. I did not doubt her, though.

‘I want to show you something,’ Suzanne said. She went and got her travel bag and put it on the table and unzipped and rummaged in it. She took out a Manila envelope with the flap folded rather than gummed, and opened it. She took out the contents, a Xerox copy of a page of newsprint, folded into four. And she handed it to me. She had attached a Post-it note to the upper left-hand corner of the photocopied document. She was very punctilious about her research, even when it was research she wasn’t supposed to be doing. On the Post-it note, she had written Liverpool Daily Post, August 9, 1927 . I removed that and unfolded the photocopied broad-sheet page. It was laid out like a diary rather than a news page. There were three photographs, far too many for a news page of the period, which might carry one picture at most. The relevant article was the most prominent. It had been printed under the heading BOATBUILDER ALL AT SEA.

Distinguished boatbuilder Mr Patrick Boyte, 54, yesterday attended James Street police station to witness the release from custody of his daughter, Jane Elizabeth Boyte, 29. Miss Boyte had been arrested and questioned on a matter neither the Liverpool Constabulary, nor the Boyte family, proved willing to disclose or further discuss. Mr Boyte was at pains, however, to emphasise that his daughter was released without precondition or charge, and that bail was never set and, further, that no charge or charges are pending.

Our reporter attempted to engage Mr Boyte on the happier matter of the successes enjoyed at Cowes last week by Mr Harry Spalding aboard his racing schooner, Dark Echo . Regular Post readers will recall that the vessel put into the Boyte dock little more than a listing hulk in the aftermath of the great storm of April last. Did Mr Boyte agree that the Cowes victories of last week were testament to the refurbishment work completed in his own yard?

But Mr Boyte would not be drawn. ‘I’ve nothing to say concerning the vessel or her master,’ he said.

Would he not wish, through the columns of the Post, to extend his congratulations to Mr Spalding?

‘I would not,’ he said. And with his newly liberated daughter on his arm, he bid our correspondent a curt goodbye.