F. Cottam - Dark Echo

The static of eighty years ago filled the cabin. And then the voice came, keen and high and cruel. ‘Magnus, old sport. Wanted to welcome you aboard. And your son, of course. Wanted to welcome Martin, too. Hope you’re both having a fine old time.’ There was laughter, then. And it was sardonic down the decades, reaching us. The hair on the back of my neck prickled at the sound of it. It was a sound neither sane, nor human.

‘Thought I’d tell you about the Jericho Crew, Magnus. But make yourself comfortable, sport. Take a seat. Occupy a pew, why don’t you. Please don’t worry about the machine. It will continue to function quite capably.’ My father nodded. He took his hand off the handle. He went and sat down and reached absently for his whisky glass. His face was rapt. I had lost him.

‘Took me weeks to find twelve apostles with just the right combination of qualities, Magnus. I needed the sly and the insubordinate, the savage and the self-interested. It helped enormously to have men who were both cunning and stupid at the same time. And that’s an unusual blend of attributes. A dash of cowardice was an advantage, too. I needed men prepared to do pretty much anything to guarantee their own survival in the fray. They had to be willing to submit to the necessary ceremonies, you see. There were, too, what might be termed certain contractual obligations. It helped if, above all else, they valued their own skins. It smoothed things along.

‘It was terrible at first, Magnus. They lined up the brave and the noble for me. There was lots of bravery and nobility among the American forces in France in the fall of 1917.’ On the cylinder, he laughed. ‘Those qualities were as common in the line as chocolate and chewing gum. And they were all very fine in their way. But they were no good to me in the way I intended to fight the war. Bravery and nobility would have been . . . how shall I put it? Help me out here, Magnus. You’ve been a leader of men.’

‘They would have been impractical,’ my father said.

‘Precisely,’ Spalding said. ‘Knew you’d understand, sport. Took me weeks to select my band of faithful acolytes. One of them was plucked from the cell of a makeshift military prison. Always a mistake to rape a civilian from the side you’re supposed to be fighting for. Positively dumb when they’re under age. Another two were deserters, snatched from in front of firing squads with the blindfolds already tied. And, of course, I was only starting out myself. I was pretty green, Magnus, a raw tenderfoot in the business of killing. But I had leadership quality, I think, as history proved. And I had an appetite for the work.’

My father nodded. He was no more enjoying this than he could escape it.

‘Still do, Magnus. Still possess that appetite, don’t you know. And, if anything, I’d say it’s grown.’

My father had his head in his hands.

‘We’ll enjoy being shipmates,’ Spalding said. ‘You’ll have to accept a subordinate role, of course. But you’ll be keeping the boy in line, so you won’t be on the bottom of the heap.’ The voice turned to steel. ‘And I will want the boy kept in line, Magnus. I run a tight ship. I will not tolerate insubordination. The Waltrow brothers discovered that, to their cost. So have other crewmen over the years. There is no escape on the high seas from the need for discipline.’

The voice had risen to a high, angry screech.

‘Why the Jericho Crew?’ I said.

There was a pause. ‘You’ll refer to me as captain, boy.’

‘Why the Jericho Crew, Captain?’

‘The name derives from the Jericho Society, into which I initiated my men. We completed an important mission in the cathedral city of Rouen. We arrived aboard a barge, berthing in the port there in the fog. We became a crew aboard that barge. It was a joke made by Corporal Tench. But the name stuck. We became the Jericho Crew.’

‘Rouen was always in Allied hands.’

Laughter snickered. ‘Student of conflict, are you, boy? I’ll teach you about war. I’m looking forward to you, Martin.’

The voice had subsided, become lower and more intimate again. ‘Let me tell you about our base in France, Magnus. Indulge the reminiscences of a proud old soldier. Let me tell you about how we came to build our own Calvary by a barn on a farm near the town of Béthune.’

But I knew already about their Calvary. I knew from Suzanne, who knew from Pierre Duval. And I had no wish to listen to the voice of Harry Spalding any longer as it smirked and bragged. I turned and walked out of my father’s cabin and closed the door behind me and went back to my own. I had my writing to conclude.

Passing through the galley I saw a rat. It saw me first and tried to slither into a cupboard it had prised partially open. But my hands were fast when I boxed and I have retained that speed of reflex and I was too quick for it. I grabbed it by the tail and raised and smashed it with a vicious downward swing against the sink edge. Blood flecked the metal. I unscrewed the butterfly nuts locking a porthole, opened it and dropped the dead rodent out of it into the sea. It had been a large rat. Its tail was as thick and coarse in my fist as an abseil rope. It was large enough for me to hear the splash as it hit the water. I cleaned the stain off the sink with some wadded kitchen roll and dropped that out of the porthole, too.

And now, a momentary change of tenses, as I sit for the last time and tap out the letters forming each painstaking word of this account, in what will be my last contribution to it.

All this has happened before. I knew it in my heart back as long ago as the winter, when clever Suzanne found that news page from the archive of the Liverpool Daily Post . I was distracted by the resemblance then between Jane Boyte, the beautiful criminal suspect in the picture, and Suzanne herself. Who wouldn’t have been? The likeness was uncanny. But it wasn’t the point. The point was the worry and fatigue worn on the face of her father, Patrick Boyte. I had seen it in life on the face of Frank Hadley with the Dark Echo lashed to his dock and tragedy afflicting the men in his boatyard. Spalding just now, his disembodied voice, had referred to contractual obligations. It seems to me that sacrifices were required, also. And I think that thought occurred both to Patrick Boyte and Frank Hadley in the period when their men were the ones being sacrificed. Suzanne said as much at the time. It has all happened before, she said. Jesus, I wish I had listened. In a moment, I will write to her. It may be the last opportunity I will get and she may never get the message. But I will do it anyway. She is owed that.

Earlier I called this part diary, part chronicle and part confession. And one of those words has given me my clue as to whom I shall send it to. It is likely to be the last of me, I think. And as such I value it. In doing so, do I commit the sin of pride? I suppose I do. But it is a small sin to be guilty of in the scheme of things. And I want this story to be a warning. Because I really do believe all this has happened before. And I do not want what is happening to my father and me now ever to happen to anyone again.

Are you reading, Monsignor Delaunay? I very much hope that you are. And I’m equally very sorry to have burdened you with this. But you are almost at the end of the account, now. I must break off to write my goodbye to Suzanne. I hope, with all my heart, this reaches you. You will know what to do. You called the Dark Echo benign. You called her a beautiful toy. In that judgement you were woefully wrong. But Spalding has been at this game of his a long time. The boat has gone under different guises and its master many aliases, I am sure. But it has always been essentially the same vessel, the same game, the same nightmarish voyage.