F. Cottam - Dark Echo

That still leaves the Ormskirk girl, of course.

I went for a swim. The depths of the pool were deliciously cold in the heat of the day. I swam five lengths. It is only yet spring, but we are in the grip of a heatwave. After my lengths I floated with my eyes closed against the sun and my hair floating in fronds like seaweed as the water lapped about my head. I hope that the missing girls are safe. I hope that Vera’s detective is given to lurid exaggeration in the cause only of impressing her. But I doubt it.

Afterwards we walked back and along the promenade to the end of the pier. I am always amazed at the number of crippled men and amputees one sees out when the weather is warm. Almost ten years after its conclusion, the casualties of the war are still very much among us, living their diminished lives in pain and poverty in the land they were promised would be fit for heroes on their return. I stopped to give a man with a begging bowl half a crown. Blinded by gas, the sign around his neck said, and he wore a ragged, filthy blindfold to hide the disfigurement of his eyes. He was genuine, too. Some scoundrels beg, but I heard the wheeze and rattle of his liquefied lungs when I bent to put the money in his bowl. My half-crown joined a tarnished threepenny bit. I paused and took a guinea from my purse and pressed it into his grateful palm and he blessed me for the gift and then raised a salute.

He’ll spend it on drink, Vera Chadwick said. Her courtship with the murder detective has made her hard, I think, bled out of her the compassion that originally made her so attractive to me as a friend.

I hope he does, I said.

And Helen Sykes laughed.

I hope he finds happy oblivion for a night at my expense, I said. We should be humbled at the bravery and sacrifice of men like him.

I thought you were a Fenian, Vera said. But I did not reply to that. Perhaps she has discussed her Fenian friend with her policeman sweetheart. I want no trouble to embarrass my father. My heart went out of rebel politics when Mick Collins was killed. Before that, to tell the truth, with the senseless killing of the civil war even before it claimed his life.

At the end of the pier, there was a Punch and Judy show. It is the one seaside and fairground entertainment I detest. The violence of a man against a woman, even caricatured, is not to my mind a fit subject for humour. Nothing is funny about Punch cudgelling his shrew of a wife. It is comedy from a more robust time, I suppose. But it is crude and cruel. Punch beats Judy because she is ugly. I watched him do so, feeling a pang of guilt about my own thoughts earlier regarding the looks of the missing women.

There was a Pierrot show. And there was a brass band sweltering in their thick serge uniforms as they blew through the mouthpieces of their burnished instruments. Some of the players were very young, a couple no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. At the interval, Vera Chadwick bought ices for the band’s child players and congratulated them on their musical prowess. And I liked her again, recognising my friend happily returned in her pretty smile and thoughtfulness.

Afterwards we went for cocktails at the Prince of Wales Hotel. We were not really dressed for the restaurant, but took a balcony table in the cocktail bar and had sandwiches and fruit served there. We were all three of us famished after the swim and long exposure to the sun. I have a strong head for drink but was quite light-headed after two pink gins.

Ballast is what you need, girl, Helen Sykes said, ordering a bowl of pistachio nuts and some salted crackers.

Mention of ballast made me uneasy. And then I realised why. Her image of things nautical brought thoughts of my father’s boatyard and his race to have Spalding’s schooner repaired by his own impossible deadline. That deadline seems more than ever impossible now. Two men were seriously injured aboard the Dark Echo yesterday. They were proofing a section of the keel with some sort of varnish or protective paint that should not be used in confined spaces. They were doing so under an open hatch that slammed shut and somehow jammed. The heat apparently made the toxic effects of the stuff they were using worse. Father said it was sweltering on the dock, ninety degrees in the open air and more in the vessel’s hold. The more fortunate of the two has badly blistered skin. He is burned and scarred. The other man is unconscious in a bed in Liverpool infirmary and is not expected to recover.

Helen and Vera tried to tease me about the money I gave my war hero, asking had the impulse cleaned me out, speculating on whether I would honour my share when the bill was presented, asking was I prepared for washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. But the sombre mood had descended and would not lift.

Tommy Rimmer told me the other day that his new golf friend Harry Spalding is a war hero on his own account. Apparently he led a special unit called the Jericho Crew. They were charged with particularly dangerous missions carried out behind enemy lines. They were very successful and greatly feared by the enemy. And I was not greatly surprised to hear this. Courage comes in many forms. It can be noble and reckless, as Mick’s brand of it certainly was. And it can be a function of savagery. Who can say a snake lacks a certain primeval courage, locked in a battle to the death against a mongoose? Spalding is a killer. I’ve known it in my heart since the night it took Boland’s gun to discourage him from raping me. He would not have stopped with the violation. The evening would have ended in my death. How he must have loved the war and the killing spree to which it would have treated him.

June 10th, 1927

A farm girl from Burscough has gone. Vera Chadwick telephoned and told me this morning. Tonight there is a grand ball at the Palace Hotel. I do not feel like going, with the intimation of death about the region. Vera says her detective beau has told her confidentially that no woman in the area is safe. Three makes five, he said. He is an experienced catcher of killers, so I suppose his opinion has to be respected. Three makes five. His theory is that if the police know about three, there are likely to be at least two other victims whose disappearance has gone unreported.

Vera asked him why. And I asked Vera.

Shame, he said, is the reason. Families think their little girl has absconded. They do not want the attentions of the police. Even less do they want the attentions of the press. What would their neighbours think? How would the dismaying news be received by the congregation at their church? Perhaps they had given their daughter just cause to bolt the family home. The police would press them on this and the police were expert and relentless in their questioning.

Three makes five, Vera’s detective says. And I am apt to think him right. And I am impressed with his psychological insight. But there is no suspect yet identified for the crimes he believes he is investigating. And he has told Vera that the best thing she and her friends can do is to be escorted or stay off the streets altogether and double-lock our doors. I am less impressed with that. We pay for the police through our taxes. We are entitled to their protection. The notion of being confined to my home is an unattractive one. My home is a spacious and comfortable Birkdale Village flat. I have good furniture and a marble bathroom and a painting by Bonnard on the wall. But I do not want the place I live in to be my prison.

And it won’t be. The one advantage I possess that those poor girls did not, is a gun. I have a Mauser pistol given me as a keepsake years ago by Mick Collins. It has existed more as a treasured memento than as a weapon all this time. But I have had it serviced regularly if only out of respect for its proper function. I like mechanical things. I like them to work, whether at the joystick of a Tiger Moth or the wheel of a Morgan roadster. And, of course, the Mauser is, before it is anything else, a functioning tool. It is a potent weapon. Mick, also, was of a practical turn of mind. The Mauser was a keepsake. But it was intended to protect me should the need for it to do so ever arise.