F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘Come and chastise me, then.’

‘You can’t beat me,’ Spalding crooned from somewhere close.

‘You’re old,’ Martin said. ‘It’s a young man’s game.’ He spat a tooth on to the sand.

Suzanne could see the hatred and contempt in him, giving him strength, feeding him endurance. He had suffered aboard the boat. She thought that his arm looked gangrenous. She could have wept for him. She could have wept for all three of them in the fearful proximity of Harry Spalding. But she needed to wait. She was obliged to bide her time.

A punch pistoned out of mist and hit Martin squarely in the face and broke his nose with a sharp snap of bone. And he staggered and reeled. And Suzanne saw a hulking, agile shape come on to him. But he did not go down. And somehow, Martin slipped the follow-up blow. And in the blur of fog she heard him land the first measured and precise punches of his own. They landed solidly in a hard and rapid cluster. Suzanne could hear their impact more than see them hit home. Spalding was still just an indistinct, dangerous, imposing shape. But Martin could hit, Suzanne knew. She’d seen how destructively he could fight up close in the bright glare of a tube carriage. Through the dark unseeing air, she heard Martin’s fists beat a spiteful tattoo of retaliation. And she was sure Spalding could not now avoid becoming human again. She had done what was needed to make him so.

Spalding countered then with a huge blow of his own and Martin staggered under its impact back out of the mist. The mist was thinning, shrinking. He took another clubbing punch and this time, he did go down, sinking to his knees on the swift-flooding sand. He was hurt, stunned. And he was damaged. The side of his face looked punctured like a balloon, to Suzanne, his handsome features spoiled, his cheekbone smashed. Spalding stole into sight, the first of him a rotting canvas boat shoe under the flapping hem of ragged whites, as he tipped Martin with a toe at the temple and then pressed his head down hard into the ooze of the tide. Martin’s head and shoulder sank in a drowning fizz of bubbles and blood. Scum on the water lapped at his floating hair. Suzanne watched and thought that it did not matter. It did not matter to her that he had lost the fight. He had possessed the strength to accomplish this. He had antagonised Harry Spalding into her sight. That was Martin’s victory. That was all that signified for any of them, now.

Suzanne took Jane Boyte’s pistol out of her bag. She took the pistol she had retrieved from the museum strongbox and that Delaunay had devoutly blessed. She flicked off the safety catch and she raised and steadied and aimed the weapon, entirely mindful of Boland’s considered advice about shooting people. And Harry Spalding turned and grinned at her, because he did not know. She had time to see that the decades of bloodlust had turned his eyes from the bright blue Jane had described to a dark crimson, and that the teeth in his grinning skull were almost black. And then she emptied the full eight-bullet magazine into his body.

She dropped the pistol on to the sand. She pulled Martin from under the tide. When his eyes opened, alertness had returned to them. In the aftermath of the shots, the fog began more rapidly to clear. But no corpse was revealed to them on the shore. There were just rags and bones there when they looked, the bones mired and sinking and the rags washing away in flurries on urgent water.

‘Pick up your father, Martin,’ Suzanne said. ‘We’re going home.’

Martin pawed at his face where the cheekbone was depressed. There was raw agony in his expression. He was trying to control himself, to accommodate the pain. But he was very badly hurt. When he spoke, his voice was shaky and the words slurred with shock. ‘My dad knew that Spalding kept coming back to the boat.’

‘Hush.’

‘He half came round last night, told me as much.’

‘Hush, Martin.’

‘He hoped Spalding might return once more. He thought he would be charming, like Jay Gatsby.’

‘It’s hurting you to talk.’

‘I need to tell you this.’

She nodded. Martin’s voice was an urgent slur in the damage done to him.

‘My dad thought Spalding might share the secret with him of communicating with the dead. He never reconciled himself. Not to the loss of his wife. Not to the loss of his daughter. He never gave up on that hope.’

‘It’s overrated,’ Suzanne said.

‘What is?’

‘Communicating with the dead.’

Martin looked at her. ‘He thought you were Jane Boyte.’

‘I’ve got to know Jane.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Brave and beautiful.’

‘Sounds like someone I know.’ He smiled. He looked terrible. His jaw was swollen and his cheekbone was fractured. He was missing a tooth and his broken nose was dripping blood down from his chin on to his chest. He was slurring his words like a drunk.

‘How is your arm?’

‘Oh, you know. Getting better already.’

Suzanne saw a burnished flicker on the water beneath her and wondered if the sun was coming up. But when she turned, she saw that the light was coming from the wrong direction for the dawn. And it was not the sun at all. It was still much too early for the sun. The candles they had lit to lure her master had caught aboard the boat. And the paraffin she had smelled must have caught from the candle flames. And the Dark Echo was ablaze now, a listing pyre drifting off on the tug of the tide, orange and burning fiercely and finally, fittingly she thought, doomed.

No one would mourn her. But her belated fate was one that others should have witnessed and enjoyed. It was a pity they could not. A strong part of Suzanne wished that Frank Hadley and Jack Peitersen and Patrick Boyte and Bernard Hodge and Monsignor Delaunay could be watching this. And maybe, too, the brave and taciturn farmer, Duval. And Captain Straub of the proud and bedraggled Andromeda . And Magnus Stannard, of course. Magnus was missing it, in his therapeutic slumber on the shore. There were others, people long dead, she thought might enjoy the spectacle. In being dead, without the strictures of the living, perhaps they were. Actually, she was sure they were. But she had given up on ghosts. And she sincerely hoped that ghosts had altogether given up on her.

Suzanne crossed the distance between them to Martin, bloodied and filthy as he was, and she embraced him. ‘I love you,’ she said.

‘Thank God you do,’ he said.

‘Pick your father up and carry him,’ she said. ‘Gather your dad gently, Marty. Gather him gently, now. We’re all of us going home.’

Epilogue

I almost lost the arm. It was touch and go for while, but the surgeon was skilful and persistent and he saved it. The physiotherapy was even more painful and boring than the first time I managed to hurt it. But the muscle recovered and the skin grafts took and eventually I healed. The arm would never punch with the speed and impact it had once possessed. But I hoped and prayed my punching days were over and could be forgotten.

I thought my father’s recovery would be trickier. I had not known until we got aboard the boat how debilitated grief had made him. His spirit had been damaged and diminished even at the outset of the voyage. Retirement gave him the time to dwell, I think, on the people he had loved and cherished in his life and lost. His latest marriage had disintegrated. Chichester was only a superficial thing, a diversion that did not really divert him at all from the pain and solitude that he felt. He bet everything on the boat providing him not just with a challenge but with a new way of living. He bet everything. And, of course, he lost.

I thought that a return to business, even a partial return, might be beneficial for him. Or I thought that he might take a more active role in a charity. He has always been a generous giver to the needy. He could have taken on a more structured role in representing one of these good causes. It would have been a positive thing to do. Virtue is its own reward, as the saying goes. But it did not work out like that, because he found a new vocation. He still Chichesters off on his libidinous trips to Bath, or Edinburgh, or even Chichester itself, from time to time. I’m pretty sure he does. His housekeeper finds the first-class rail travel tickets in his suits when she searches the pockets before they go to be cleaned and pressed. But this pursuit no longer has the importance in his life for him that it did.