F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘Some kind of staff,’ Hodge said.

‘Not a staff, Detective Inspector. A shaft,’ Suzanne said.

He turned to her. The suspicion and hostility had gone from his gaze during the course of the afternoon and evening. Suzanne suspected she had vindicated herself. She could not really imagine any vindication more terrible and sad.

‘Call me Bernard,’ Hodge said. He held out his hand. She realised that he had held off from this gesture from their outset until this moment. She shook hands with him.

‘What will happen now?’

‘There are all sorts of protocols. Not least, the American Embassy will have to be notified. We won’t have a forensic report for a while and it might be useless when we get it, unless we exhume Spalding and recover DNA. But the circumstantial evidence is too compelling to ignore.’

‘It always was.’

‘Yes, Suzanne. Jane Boyte was quite right in that. It always was.’

And anyway, Suzanne thought, Spalding’s casket in his cemetery in New York lies empty. Because Harry Spalding never died.

‘You know what that object is, don’t you, Suzanne? That modest little bit of wood uncovered just now.’

‘What do you think it is?’

‘I’m a stranger to demonic ritual. At least, I was until today,’ Hodge said. He sipped coffee from his steel cup. He was speaking softly, so that his voice would not carry beyond his audience of one. ‘I’d say it is a holy relic. And it was the subject here of an awful desecration. But that’s just an old copper’s intuition. It doesn’t look much.’

‘It’s priceless,’ Suzanne said.

‘It’s just a stick to me.’

‘I know a Jesuit priest who would be very relieved to get it back on behalf of the Church from which it was looted.’

‘Then he’d best give me a call. On my mobile number.’

‘It isn’t evidence?’

‘It isn’t the murder weapon, if that’s what you mean. I’d be as keen as anyone to see as much of what was done here undone as can be. My keeping that piece of wood won’t bring back the women killed here. Have your priest give me a call.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘Good ones on the brass of the case. And I think we both know whose they are. We don’t need that stick.’

‘Won’t people see it’s missing?’

‘It won’t be missing. I’ll replace it myself with one similar from the dead wood in the park over the way.’ He was almost whispering. ‘Materially, it doesn’t matter to this investigation. Whatever properties you think it possesses, it isn’t bringing those poor lasses back.’

Suzanne nodded. He was right about that. ‘If you release it into my charge, I’ll take it to the priest myself, Bernard,’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘At some stage, you are going to need to make a statement. I’m going to trust you to come back and see me over the next few days to do that.’

She nodded again.

‘Call yourself a taxi. I’ll meet you outside the front in five minutes. Goodbye, Suzanne. And God go with you.’

She risked her first real look at Spalding’s house. The windows stared back blackly at her. She was fearful of the face that might be gazing out from behind the glass. But he wasn’t there. The house was empty. She had no sense of him at all. He was elsewhere, in one of his other places. He was deliberately elusive, as Jane had remarked of him. And Harry Spalding must have known many places on the travels of his long and awful life, the affliction of him spreading like disease.

She drove all night to get to Northumberland, having taken a taxi from Southport to Liverpool Airport to hire a car. She had to go south to go north-east. But she thought it was worth it as she pulled up at 5 a.m. outside Delaunay’s Gothic keep and saw him waiting there for her amid a deputation of grim and eminent-looking Catholic clergy. She wondered for how long they had maintained their vigil. And she saw that it did not matter to them in their relief and joy when she took the holy relic from its bed of screwed-up newspaper pages in the boot of her rental car.

She had a mind to turn round immediately and press on. But Delaunay leaned into the open driver’s window and the look of concern on his face persuaded her that this was foolish. The window was open because she had nearly nodded off at the wheel once already. She had been awake too long. She had never in her life needed greater alertness, sharper clarity of thought and instinct for danger. She had time. She had done the calculation. At ten to twelve knots, it would be another couple of days before the Dark Echo reached its destination. At Delaunay’s invitation, at his insistence, she ate a bowl of soup and slept for two oblivious hours in their guest quarters before setting out again.

Delaunay was waiting for her at the door.

‘Re-consecrate what I gave you, Monsignor.’

‘It’s done,’ he said, simply.

She drove to Dover in five hours, crashing every speed camera on the route. She prayed she would not be stopped for speeding and she wasn’t. Others were praying on her behalf, she knew. And she thought she might need every intercession made for her, every flicker of flaming brightness from every candle lit, if she was going to succeed. The weather was good and the traffic, as far as the London orbital at least, was light. She was forced to slow down in Kent. But she made the 11 a.m. ferry with five minutes to spare. And this time she did not need to slow for directions. She knew where she was going. She did not turn on the radio, of course. But one thing was the same. The sky grew sullen and bruised and, still a dozen miles from her destination, the rain began to steeple down from the clouds.

She drove over Duval’s fields to his barn along the track beside his ditch, hoping that the rain was a recent thing and that her wheels would not be claimed by a quagmire of French mud. It was muddy, but the ground had been cindered. She could hear the crunch and squeal of the cinders wedging in the tread of her tyres. The barn grew in her windscreen from a monument incongruous and remote to one ever closer and more disturbing. She felt the tiny hairs prick on the backs of her hands with the sheer, out-of-kilter strangeness of it. All her instinct, just as on the first occasion, was to flee this odd and morbid place. But she could not.

She slammed on her brakes with a final, cindery crunch and sat in the silence before her destination. Rain pattered on the car roof. The stopped engine ticked, cooling. And she saw that the high door of the barn was slightly ajar. It opened on a void of pure blackness. And as she got out of the car she felt her legs buckle and her resolve weaken, engulfed by the pure terror flooding through her. She watched the rain dance on summer puddles. She felt drops of it plaster her hair to her head. And she was undone. And she thought then of Martin with his arm cleaved open in an underground carriage and she battled with her quavering will and she gathered her strength.

She took the spade she had borrowed from the seminary out of the car boot. She walked into the barn and heard a collusive whisper from the spectral army of coats that hung, shivering, under a draught that wasn’t there, over on the far wall. She heard a distinct and undeniable whistling. The tune was ‘Camptown Races’. And it was distorted and faint with some last, scornful vestige of remembered humanity. There was a bark of laughter, a short explosion of mirth. And there was accordion music, heard as if through a dim green sea, ‘Roses of Picardy’, the notes distorted, drowning on the air.

‘Fuck this,’ Suzanne said. ‘Fuck you all, you crew of fucking butchers. And fuck you in particular, Harry Spalding.’ And she gathered the spade in the grip of both hands and began to shovel away the beets at the base of the high pyramid of them. And all around her, they tumbled and they fell. Rolling down from the pinnacle, they ricocheted and bounced and ran. And she heard what she thought sounded like explosive gunfire, twice, in her ears and ignored it, teeth clenched with such ferocious resolve that she brought forth the blood from her own gums and swallowed it bitterly down.