F. Cottam - Dark Echo

The dinghy tragedy could have meant that the boys were somehow doomed. The twins could be written up as a living and dying example of how it just wasn’t possible to cheat fate. Or he could just go with the unlucky boat angle. Spalding’s suicide had made national headlines. Stephen Waltrow had been the second millionaire in a year to come to a sticky end as owner of the Dark Echo . Surely she was cursed? People liked stories about unlucky boats. For whatever reason, they were apt to believe them, just as they were apt to believe in stories about haunted mansions.

‘Which story did he go with?’

‘Neither,’ Suzanne told me. At our table in the corner of the pub, she was worrying at a thumbnail with her teeth. ‘He interviewed Kevin Waltrow’s widow and was told about Kevin’s increasing moodiness and violence in the home in the weeks leading up to the voyage. And cynically, he approached Kevin’s seven-year-old son Michael in search of further lurid detail. I don’t believe Boston’s finest were too keen on stories about recently deceased officers who beat their wives and heard commanding voices in their heads at night. Ernie Howes woke up in a Boston hotel one morning and discovered a live bullet on the pillow next to his head. This item of ammunition was a soft-point police issue .38 calibre. He took the hint. He never wrote a word about the Waltrows or the Dark Echo .’

‘How did you find all this out?’

‘Believe it or not, the outcome of the story is not entirely tragic. Michael Waltrow and his younger sister Mollie eventually inherited the bulk of their uncle’s fortune. Michael is eighty-four now, in full possession of his senses and a distinguished landscape painter living out his last years on Martha’s Vineyard. I found his number and telephoned him and spoke to him there. I told him I was researching the Dark Echo . He did not ask for what purpose, so I was not obliged to lie.’

‘He was happy to speak to you?’

Suzanne shook her head. ‘Happy would be entirely the wrong word. But he said he was relieved to be able to speak about it at last. It was he who told me about Howes, an unpleasant, sweaty man who stank of whisky and dime-store cigars, he said.’

‘What did he tell you about his father?’

‘He said his father became possessed by the Devil. From being a gentle, humorous man, he turned into a volatile monster they all feared and none of the household recognised. The transformation occurred over a few weeks. He was convinced his father murdered his own brother aboard the boat before destroying himself. But he was adamant the Devil was to blame.’

‘He didn’t blame the boat herself?’

‘No. He was a seven-year-old boy from a Boston Catholic family when these events occurred. He thought his father became possessed. Still does.’

‘What did he do with the boat?’

‘Nothing. Mollie Waltrow inherited the Dark Echo . She sat gathering rust, a hulk in dry dock. Mollie sold the boat for salvage the day she reached the age of maturity without ever having put a foot aboard her.’

I sat back in my seat and took this in. I swallowed the dregs of tepid beer from my glass. There was music playing in the bar, but it was indistinct in the fuzziness afflicting my mind after what Suzanne had told me.

‘How did you source the story about Patrick Boyte?’

I knew Spalding had stayed at the Palace Hotel in Birkdale after being forced into Liverpool to repair storm damage. I just did a Google search for Spalding, Liverpool and boatyard. That piece came up.’

‘You were non-committal when I asked you if you knew anything about Dark Echo . You were downright evasive.’

‘Don’t be angry, Martin. I didn’t want to rain on your dad’s parade. That’s all.’

‘Then why come clean now?’

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I care about you. After what you told me this evening, I didn’t feel I had any choice but to tell you what I have.’

‘My father must know all this stuff.’

‘I suspect so. He’ll know some of it, anyway. You said he’d read the log.’

‘Two owners, Suzanne. You said there were two owners.’

‘And I’ll tell you about the second of them. But I badly need a cigarette. Can I tell you at home?’

She recounted the second story in her study after I had poured her a glass of wine. There was a small extractor fan in the window in her study and she switched it on before she sat at her desk and turned to face me. It was the one room in the flat where I suppose she felt she could smoke relatively guilt-free. She had turned on the radio, too, when I returned to the study with the wine. Bebop from a jazz station drowned out the hum of the fan’s whirring electric motor.

Gubby Tench was a third-rate playboy who bought the Dark Echo in the summer of 1937 when he was thirty-nine years old and fresh, if that’s the term, from his second divorce. The fact that he was able to afford the boat proved that he had extricated himself from marriage without going broke. But the vessel was floating by this time in much reduced circumstances. A diesel engine had been fitted to cut down on the cost of crewmen experienced at manipulating sails. Tench was adept enough as a sailor. But when financial circumstances demanded it, the engine meant that he could haul in the sails and manage the craft single-handedly in most sorts of weather.

The boat had lost a lot of its lustre. She had also lost her original name. When Tench became the vessel’s master, she had been rechristened Ace of Clubs . It was an appropriate choice. Tench was an inveterate, even compulsive gambler. His first voyage took him from Miami, where he bought the boat, to Havana, where he berthed her in the bay to go ashore eager for action in the Cuban capital’s many celebrated casinos.

The crossing from Miami took him three days and three nights in a fog other masters in the area described afterwards as pretty near impenetrable. It played havoc with their instruments. It interfered with wireless transmission. Compass readings were inconsistent, inaccurate, useless. It would have been interesting, in the light of subsequent events, to know what was happening to Gubby Tench during this weird period of unnavigable weather. But, of course, the log had been destroyed, so nobody knew or would ever know what he had been up to, what he had been thinking.

‘Unless my dad knows,’ I said. ‘He claims to have read every volume of the log.’

Suzanne smiled and lit another cigarette. She was chain-smoking, well above her self-permitted ration of ten a day. ‘I doubt Gubby Tench committed a single line to the log during his voyage,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was much of a stickler for any sort of seagoing protocol. And I don’t get the impression he was much of a diarist.’

He arrived in Havana running a high temperature. Epidemics were common in pre-war Cuba. The floor manager of one of the casinos, supervising the blackjack tables, thought that Gubby Tench looked like a man incubating cholera. He was sweating heavily and his breath was a shallow wheeze. But such diseases were generally confined to the slums and contagion rare among high-rolling American visitors. And this visitor had only just disembarked. Nevertheless, the comment was made later by more than one witness that Tench looked feverish and ill. But it didn’t affect his form at the tables. On his first night, he won big. On his second, he won even bigger. On his third evening, drawing a crowd by now, he turned from blackjack to roulette and took on the house, betting consistently on the black, taking close to one hundred thousand dollars in winnings by the time the spell broke at around four thirty in the morning.

‘By the time the spell broke?’