She had been anything but reassured by the visit to the boatyard at Lepe. She had been concerned on the way there about how I would react to setting foot once more on the Dark Echo. And when we arrived and were greeted, she had thought there was something entirely bogus about Peitersen. It was as though, she said, on the other side of the lobster pot and saltbox Yankee charm, there was nothing really there. His smile, she said, was like a sign saying ‘vacant’ in a brightly lit motel window. Despite my impression of how they got on, she had disliked him even more violently than I had. But she did not just dislike him on sight. She distrusted Peitersen, too.
In the aftermath of the Lepe trip, she felt an obligation to learn as much as she could about the mystery of the boat to which my father and myself seemed so determined to entrust our lives. Despite her detective skills, which were sharp and well practised, she said that she felt a certain hopelessness in doing so. She said it seemed it was unlikely to matter what she discovered. The scheme had already gained too much momentum for her to be able to arrest events now. The whole ill-advised, dangerous adventure had about it the pre-ordained nature of fate. She also had grave doubts about deceiving me. The Collins work was done and dusted. But I did not know that, did I? She was able to persuade herself with the reasoning that if she found nothing, I need never know about France and the deception. But if she did find something, it might help prevent my father and me sailing into some horrible tragedy. There were all sorts of flaws and contradictions in her logic, Suzanne knew. But after her encounter at the Lepe yard with Peitersen, she felt that she had to act.
She learned about the war service of Waltrow and Tench first from their obituaries and then in more detail from American military records she was able to bring up on computer, using BBC access, still claiming she was looking for information to do with her Michael Collins programme research. Her pretext was the IRA’s purchase on the black market of surplus American rifles after the 1918 armistice. It was a trade that increased steadily throughout the Irish Civil War. Nobody questioned this supposed line of enquiry. It sounded plausible enough. Searches in the American military archive for Waltrow, Tench and Spalding brought up some details about the Jericho Crew and the tantalising information that almost ninety years after it had been compiled, the file describing in full their activities in France and Flanders was still classified.
‘I learned they had a base,’ she told me. ‘It wasn’t an official base, a barracks or anything like that. It was a barn belonging to a farm about five miles to the rear of the Allied trench system near the village of Béthune in northern France. The land is still agricultural. The original farm still exists. They would gather in this building. If any of them became detached from the main party on a mission, or were left behind or lost, that’s the spot they would head for as soon as they could. Water, tinned provisions, fuel and spare clothing, and even weapons and ammunition were kept there.’
‘I’m amazed the stuff wasn’t all lifted by Allied units passing the barn. Even if they’d had a guard on it, the rations in particular must have been a temptation. Soldiers in wartime are not noted for their honesty over that sort of thing. Pilfering was rife on the Western Front, even among members of the same company, never mind the same battalion.’
‘I don’t think the Jericho Crew were the sort of people you stole from,’ she said. ‘Soldiers may not be terribly honest. But they are extremely superstitious.’
‘And you thought the barn might still be there?’
‘I thought there was a fair chance. This is rural France we’re talking about. Space is not at any great premium there, the way it is in England. There’s no urgent requirement for intensive farming. And farmers don’t knock any building down without a very good reason for doing so. They tend to be a conservative breed. They don’t seek out change for its own sake. I thought there was probably a fair chance the barn was still basically intact. And then I was able to identify it in an aerial photograph. I did that, like I did the preliminary research into Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench, without getting up from my chair in front of the computer at work.’
‘What did you find in the barn?’
‘I will get to that. First I should tell you about what it was the Jericho Crew did.’
I fetched us fresh drinks from the bar. I was tired after the trip from Antwerp. I was tired and grubby and the docking of the Andromeda in the grip of my hands that same morning seemed like a memory growing fond with distance already. Billy Paul’s adulterous pleading had been replaced through the bookshelf speakers behind the bar by Marvin Gaye, crooning plaintively about the good dying young. Sometimes the bad died young, too, I thought, fishing for change and examining my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I thought of my father’s photograph of the Jericho Crew, of the look of shared derangement in their lost, youthful faces. I shivered, though it was not cold in the pub. I paid for and picked up our drinks and returned to where Suzanne sat. And she started to explain matters to me.
The Canadians invented the trench raid. They had a vigour and an obstreperousness that probably came from the outdoor lives they lived at home. They were not the factory fodder of industrialised England, used to manning a lathe slavishly in a factory in Birmingham or Leeds for a twelve-hour shift six days a week. They were outdoorsmen and the stalemate of the line forced them into ways of finding physical action to alleviate the tedium. So they invented the trench raid, carried out at night, to boost their morale and satisfy their youthful appetite for killing the enemy.
The weapons used were improvised, medieval almost in their design and the crude viciousness of their intent. They had to be silent. So they were basically variations on the knife and the club and the knuckleduster. They used machetes, daggers, bowie knives. The garrotte was a firm favourite, too, in the art of noiseless killing, but it required a degree of skill that came only from experience in the field. And it took a lot of commitment to choke a man to death.
The raids were daring and successful. They raised morale and did physical damage, and they added greatly to the burden of fear and fatigue faced by the men occupying the enemy trenches. They made sleep a liability. They made relaxation foolhardy. They spread stress and rumour and panic. They were the cause of men shooting at their own sentries and scout patrols. Altogether, trench raids were a big success, so much so that they were taken up by the Aussies and the New Zealanders and the Jocks. Eventually, even the English cottoned on to what an effective and economical tactic they represented.
By the time the Americans entered into the war, the trench raid was an established part of life at the front. And the farm boys from Kentucky and the boys from the swamps of Louisiana took to it like pigs to gravy. One junior officer in particular showed a real thirst for this bloody, guerrilla style of conflict. Interestingly, this fellow was not from the boonies. His name was Harry Spalding. He’d excelled both as a sportsman and a scholar at Yale. His people came from Rhode Island and he had been groomed for a banking career in New York. He was rich and clever and cultured, a lover of modern painting and poetry with a good command of the French and German languages. He had influential friends, or at least his father did. He had an easy charisma that made him a natural leader among the particular group of men chosen for the type of combat at which he proved to be so adept. And he was the bloodiest, most remorseless killer anyone on the staff of the American Third Army could remember ever having encountered.
One old colonel compared him to the Apache killers of the Indian Wars in which his own father had fought in the American West. But he came to believe that Harry Spalding was different from them, in the end. They had been skilled at killing. They were great hunters using their hunting prowess in the service of their own survival, faced with the threat of extinction. Spalding seemed to possess the same preternatural gift for tracking his prey. He had the same lethal savagery in combat. But it was not a matter of survival for him. The old colonel, who was forcibly retired on the basis of it, said in a report on the Jericho Crew that Spalding seemed to kill with a sort of glee. He was a man who revelled in killing. In a conflict where civilisation was at stake, the report concluded, to rely on such men for important results was more than a contradiction. It was an abject surrender to the standards and values espoused by our enemy, the Hun.
The Canucks invented the trench raid. The Americans refined it. And the Jericho Crew turned it from an art into a science. They did detailed surveillance work during their night patrols across no-man’s-land. They carried out assassinations. They snatched intelligence personnel and interrogated them. They conducted acts of sabotage. They stole battle plans and brought back items of experimental ordnance for detailed examination. And they never lost a man.
‘Come on,’ I said, in the pub, as the bell tolled for last orders. ‘They never lost a man? You’re exaggerating, Suzy.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You had better explain.’
‘At home. I’ll explain at home. I’d kill at this moment, Martin, for a cigarette.’
‘Now you are exaggerating.’
‘Not by much, I’m not,’ she said.
It was true to say that the Jericho Crew never lost a man in combat. But they did suffer one casualty. The bloody nature of their work meant that their number, which was fourteen, included a chaplain. He was a Baptist minister. His name was Derry Conway and he was a staunch patriot, an old-fashioned follower of what, a generation earlier, had been termed muscular Christianity. He had been an outstanding athlete at his college and his faith in God was thought unshakeable.
Conway was assigned because of the bloody and incessant nature of the missions charged to the Jericho Crew. By late 1917, quite a lot had been learned about shell shock and battle fatigue, the psychological problems nowadays referred to as combat trauma. If men were to survive these experiences mentally as well as physically intact, they needed spiritual succour. That, at least, was the theory. It was the Reverend Conway’s role to provide this for Harry Spalding and his men.
But a month after being given the assignment, Conway was found hanged from a rope in the Béthune barn. His neck was cleanly broken. He had clambered on to a rafter with one end of the rope tied to it and the other forming a noose around his neck and he had jumped. There was a prayer book still clutched in his hand when he was found. Presumably he had taken it for comfort from a coat pocket before jumping. And despite the crude angle to which the fracture had forced his head, there was a smile on the face of Derry Conway’s young corpse.
The death of their chaplain left the Jericho Crew with thirteen members. And none of them was killed or wounded by the war they fought with such bloody distinction. But Suzanne managed to find out what had happened to eleven of them after the armistice. And she discovered that the members of the crew had not been so very fortunate in their efforts to survive the peace. All of the thirteen were dead before their fortieth birthdays. Gubby Tench had enjoyed the longest life of any of them. Though she felt that where Gubby Tench was concerned, enjoyed was probably an incompatible word applied to life. At least at the end of his life, Tench had seemed to be living in a sort of hell.
She took the train to Dover and the ferry to Calais. As she approached the coast of France, the fine April weather England was enjoying ended as the ferry was enveloped in a grey and persistent rain, washing from an overcast sky. By the time she got to Calais itself, the rain was heavy and unremitting. She hired a car and studied her map. She had managed to contact the farmer whose family had owned for generations the land on which the barn still stood. He had not sounded overjoyed on the telephone about her proposed visit. But neither had he forbidden it. Suzanne spoke some French, but the farmer was content to communicate in rudimentary English.
‘Tuesday,’ he had said.
She tried to establish a time.
‘Tuesday,’ he repeated, sounding amused at this insistence on such precision. ‘I will be here. Where else would I go?’
She tried to describe herself.
‘I will know you,’ he said. ‘Do not worry, madame. This is not an English farm. You are not a candidate for my shotgun.’ He laughed. She thought the joke a poor one.
The French countryside was flat and bleak and rain-defeated. The drive across it was monotonous. In an effort to distract herself from wanting to smoke, she switched on the car radio and tried to tune it. It was Suzanne’s opinion that French pop music usually consisted of several competing tunes hammered out in parallel by lots and lots of fundamentally incompatible instruments. And the French language did not lend itself easily to pop lyrics. None of the words scanned in the convenient way English did. So she searched for a classical music station. But she stopped pushing the tuning button as soon as she heard something familiar and vaguely welcome to her ears that wasn’t French.
It was the Prefab Sprout ballad ‘When Love Breaks Down’ sung plaintively by the failed priest. What had Martin said his name was? She knew it because it was a track from one of the wistful, whimsical albums Martin liked to listen to on the expensive audio equipment in the flat, equipment which he had bought and about which he could be so precious. She’d get the singer’s name in a minute. Nothing stayed on the tip of her tongue for very long. It was one of her talents. She had an excellent memory for detail.
Just then, at that moment in her life, she felt her talents both taken for granted and somewhat abused. She had lost her staff job through a round of BBC cuts, which she felt had left all of the fat in her old department intact while removing most of the muscle. She had been offered the choice of a severance package or a freelance contract and had opted for the latter. But there was something subtly degrading, she felt, about her freelance status. Programme editors and producers treated her differently now that she no longer had the protection of the BBC as an employer. There was more rudeness. There was more pressure. There were shorter deadlines. And programme makers who found it an effort to fight their own sexism or inclination to bully stopped doing so in their encounters with her.
The Collins documentary series was a case in point. It was being billed as definitive and, over three forty-minute episodes, she was confident it would be. But the producer had wanted the Big Revelation. That was how he put it, in his memos to the department, in his capitals. And the Big Revelation he wanted was that Michael Collins was homosexual. His reasoning for this, laughable to Suzanne, was Collins’ notorious fondness for wrestling colleagues and friends and his vanity over his appearance. She still had not decided whether the theory was a bigger insult to Collins or to the gay movement. But she had failed to find a single shred of evidence, physical, anecdotal or otherwise, to support it. And that was being interpreted as her failure, because the producer had a gut feeling about this and knew he could not be wrong. No matter that she had come up with hard facts about Michael Collins that the series would air for the first time. The atmosphere in the edit suite was poisonous. Three weeks before the transmission date, the sense of disappointment was almost palpable. Suzanne had done a brilliant job, she felt, that was being judged as somewhere between superficial and inept. And, as a freelance, she could ill afford a reputation for ineptitude.
‘Paddy McAloon,’ she said out loud at the wheel, remembering the name of the priestly novice turned rock star, startling herself, because the song was still playing and that couldn’t be possible, could it? Unless there was a version of ‘When Love Breaks Down’ that played for ten minutes. That was unless, of course, the station was just playing the same song over and over.
She turned off the radio, glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that there was nothing else on the road. She brought the car to a halt with two wheels on the grass on the roadside and lowered the window and then switched the engine off. The wipers stopped and the windscreen blurred and blinded with rain. She could hear rain patter on the roof and the grass outside the open car window. Essentially, it was a reassuring sound, rhythmic and familiar. But it did not offer reassurance now. She felt alone and vulnerable in a raw way, at odds with the smudged landscape and soft, rainy light. She would smoke a cigarette, she decided. It was almost noon and it would be her first of the day. She reached across to the passenger seat, where she had put her bag. It was a myth, of course, that tobacco calmed you and helped you to relax. But it was a myth she felt she very much needed just at that moment to believe in and take comfort from.
At just after one o’clock, she reached the track leading to the farm, two deep grooves in thin gravel and the black soil underneath it, determined by years and decades of heavy tractor wheels. There was a hedge to either side of the track, high and impenetrable. It was so gloomy that she was obliged to switch on her lights. And the track was longer than she thought, so long that she wondered if she had taken the wrong turning. But there was no going back once she had started, because the way was too narrow. And when the hedge petered out she recognised the pattern of low, old farm buildings beyond from the aerial photos she had studied on her computer screen.
The barn was not among them. That was a solitary building a half-mile across fields from the farmyard, the fields divided by a ditch lined by poplars. You reached the barn by following the ditch. You did it in a tractor or a four-wheel drive over the rough, rain-soaked earth. Or you walked there. You walked across the fields of northern France to your destination. From somewhere not far away, Suzanne could hear the persistent bark of what sounded like a large dog. The bark did not bother her. Farm dogs were territorial, but they were not generally vicious. A vicious dog on a farm took too heavy a toll on the livestock and she knew that the farmer, Pierre Duval, kept geese and chickens and bred lambs here.
She went and knocked on the door of the building that looked most like a dwelling. It was old and brick-built with a porch, and there was smoke raising a thin stain into the rainy sky from a chimney. But there was no response. She walked round the side of the building and peered into a window. The interior was dark, dank even, ancient enamel appliances yellowing in its shadows. It was a kitchen, but it seemed cold and abandoned.
None of the other buildings were occupied either. Perhaps the farmer was just doing what farmers did, out in his fields. Suzanne looked around the farmyard once more, trying to persuade herself that there was something picturesque in the buildings with their half-timbered walls, their rust-coloured brickwork and sagging roof tiles. But in the rain, among the puddles, the place looked squalid. Rustic charm was absent from it. There was a damp and elderly smell of cow shit. Birds flapped in a ragged flock towards the poplars lining the ditch that led to the barn. Suzanne looked at her watch and decided to follow them. She wanted to be well on the way back to Calais and the bright ferry terminal lights by the time darkness descended here.
She walked for ten minutes before the barn started to look any closer. It was a trick of perspective, she decided. The building was both bigger and further away than she had first assumed. The aerial photograph had given an accurate impression of its rectangular outline, but not of its scale. As she got closer, she realised that the barn was of a really substantial size. And it was sturdily constructed, more than just solid, somehow formidable. It did not reflect the humble domestic architecture of the clustered farm buildings she had just left. They were simpler and more recent – built, she guessed, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The barn might be a barn now, in terms of its function. But despite its remote location, it surely must have been something grander at some stage in its past. It was a sombre building. Even in the flat, rainy absence of light, it seemed to cast a shadow bigger than itself.
It had originally possessed windows in what had once been an upper storey. They had been flat rectangles rather than arched. And they had been bricked in a great many years ago with blocks made of the same stone as the rest of the construction. They had weathered over time to the same grey as the walls. But the mortar between them had blackened and rotted and gave the old work away. Suzanne found herself wishing she had at least some working knowledge of architecture. But she possessed very little and what she did know she had learned incidentally. Because she had researched him for a documentary special, she knew quite a lot about the work and working methods of the Nazi architect, Albert Speer. But with a shiver, she realised that the building in front of her was calling to mind something far removed from Speer’s grandiose classical plagiarism. It made her think, of all things, of the Whitechapel killer, Jack the Ripper.
She stopped dead in her own muddy footprints. It was an absurd subject to be entering her head, wasn’t it, by a ditch at the edge of a muddy field in sheeting rain in France on an April afternoon? What did a Victorian serial killer have to do with Harry Spalding and the happy bloodlust of the Jericho Crew?
And then she had it. She had thought the barn looked a little like a Norman church deprived of its tower or its spire. But what it actually resembled, with those square windows it had once possessed, was a Masonic temple. There were tricks and puns and cul-de-sacs of architectural detail about the barn that she did not have the expertise to recognise. But the closer she got to it the more she could see they were there, just as they were perhaps the defining characteristic in Masonic temples. Some people had speculated that the Ripper was a Mason. There had never been any hard evidence to support this belief, because the Ripper had never been identified and convicted. But that had been the link in Suzanne’s mind. And it gave her an even greater sense of uneasiness approaching the barn, thinking it perhaps a place that harboured more than just the chill inherent in buildings that were old and semi-derelict and standing in unhappy isolation.
Her feet were wet as well as muddy, now. The soil, black and clinging, had risen above her leather ankle boots and smeared her tights to the calf. She thought the boots probably ruined. They were from Russell and Bromley and not Millets and they had cost her a penny short of two hundred quid – and the credit card had done the buying, so they weren’t even paid for yet. It was her own fault, of course. But who would think to pack wellingtons to take on a ferry? She looked around. The landscape was wet and desolate. She had thought the farmer would warm to her smile and politeness. She had thought rough-spoken but gallant Pierre Duval would give her a lift across the mire aboard something with a close gear ratio and chunky tyres. But she had got that part of the proceedings badly wrong.
Then, suddenly, she was there. The ground rose and hardened towards the building’s walls. The incline was slight but the drainage effective and her feet approached the last few yards of distance on firm earth. She looked for the bedraggled squadron of birds that had led the way. She had thought they were starlings. But they had veered off on some other course. There were no birds. There were no rabbits or squirrels and the barking dog of the farmyard had long faded into silence. There was nothing living in proximity to Harry Spalding’s old Jericho Crew hideaway. Even the poplars hereabouts seemed stunted and reluctant. But that was just her imagination, Suzanne knew. She looked at the walls, at rain-stained masonry, at the filled-in windows, like blind and baleful eyes looking darkly outwards at the featureless world of Pierre Duval’s domain. She looked at the large oak double door, which did not appear locked. And she felt afraid and awfully alone and vulnerable wildly beyond what she had felt earlier, on the road, when she had stopped for the comfort of a smoke.
She forced her feet forward. What was the matter with her? She was a grown woman. She was here in broad daylight, for Christ’s sake. She had wanted to come. She pulled one of the big doors open a fraction and slipped inside. And her first impression was of an almost sepulchral darkness and cathedral calm. She looked up, looking for the chinks in the building’s fabric that would allow some meagre light for her eyes eventually to adjust to. The first thing that came into focus were the wooden beams from which she assumed Derry Conway had taken the last leap of his life. They were very thick and substantial and she could see no structural reason for them unless they had once supported a floor. That would make sense, too, of the height of the bricked-in windows.
Slowly, reluctantly, she brought her eyes down to the level of where she stood. And she saw that the barn did not stand empty. Crates of produce had been piled almost to the height of the ceiling along the entire length of the wall to her left. And there was, at the centre of the barn on the ground in front of her, a rough, high pyramid of beets. It reached almost to the beams. It was so big and high that it did not really look stable. She almost smiled. The prospect of being crushed by an avalanche of beets was an ignominious one. It would not be at all a dignified death.
The quiet in there was unnerving. And there was nothing very reassuring about the produce in the place. It should have given the building a workaday feel of farming domesticity. But it did not. Suzanne wondered precisely why. The quiet was one reason. Another was the fact that she could smell nothing in there, neither the earth from which the pyramid of root vegetables had been taken, nor whatever was stored in the crates. Perhaps it was not fruit or vegetables, but a hoard of wine, she thought. She would approach and recognise the musty, distinctive smell of corks stoppering old bottles.
She walked across to the crates. Her eyes were adjusted now to the lack of light. The crates were wooden and venerable. Some had dates in faded ink on the pale wood of their sides. Others had the year branded into them. They should have had bottles of wine in them, old and valuable vintages, she thought. None of the dates was more recent than 1915. But the crates were full of apples and plums and damsons and pears. The fruit was fresh, the burnish of red and russet and gold on firm flesh in the gloom. It was odd that nothing smelled. There was not the hint, not the ghost of the ripe and woody scent of an orchard from the fruit.
On the wall opposite the one against which the crates were piled, Suzanne saw something that almost caused her composure to abandon her. She was very frightened in the refuge of the Jericho Crew. Everything here was mundane. Nothing here had threatened her. And yet she was sure she had never been in a place that harboured so much pure and absolute menace. Before the far wall, she saw a uniform line of men standing perfectly still against the shadowy stone. They did not approach. They just waited and watched, motionless and poised. She almost screamed, before her mind was able to rationalise the sight as a line of coats on hooks, hanging there.
She could feel the muscles jump in her legs as she approached the coats. The weight of her body felt light in her ruined boots. They would be musty and rotten, the coats, and there would be thirteen of them. But there were only nine. And when she reached out and touched one, the nap of the fabric, where it was not mud-splashed, was firm and heavy and still soft. She turned the collar of the garment on its hook and could just make out the name, the letters forming it, Waltrow S, machine-stitched on to the pale name tag in red thread. Suzanne recoiled from the greatcoat as light and noise drifted into the building, and she cried out aloud and put her hands to her face.
‘Madame?’
There was a figure at the door in a rain cape and a hat.
‘Madame?’
The farmer Pierre Duval had a shotgun broken over his arm. He was tall in the bath of light at the door and wore a hat with a dripping brim and a heavy moustache and the rain cape was black and slick with moisture. He might keep his earlier promise and not shoot her, but he had brought the gun as a precaution. He frowned at her. In better English than he had displayed over the phone, he said, ‘Have you discovered what you came for?’
She gestured vaguely at the crates, at the pyramid of beets. ‘You use the place for storage?’
He looked around. He had not crossed the threshold. She sensed that he was reluctant to do so. She remembered what Martin had said about Frank Hadley’s refusal ever to call Harry Spalding’s boat by its name. He shifted on his heels and the twin barrels of his shotgun rose and descended again over the crook of his arm. ‘I never come here,’ he said. ‘Nothing of this is work of mine.’
It was very quiet. Suzanne could hear rain splash on the step at the entrance as it dripped from the hem of Duval’s rain cape. She did not understand. And then she thought that perhaps she did.
‘Nothing rots in here?’
He just looked at her. The double shotgun barrel was thick and heavy-seeming, and it gleamed in the matt light from the sky as it rested over his forearm.
‘Nothing perishes?’
‘Not in my lifetime, madame. Nor in my father’s. And nor in his. It is nature’s joke.’ The expression in his eyes told her plainly that Duval knew it was a joke played not by, but against nature.
She turned and looked back behind her at the still pyramid of beets rising from the floor at the building’s centre. She tried to imagine song and camaraderie and the warmth of a campfire with a coffee pot or a bacon skillet rigged over the flames. But the image defeated her. She looked again to the ghostly company of coats in their line against the wall. Stillness and darkness were the only discoveries here. As it was a place where nothing perished, so it was a place where nothing lived. Derry Conway had managed to die here in the autumn of 1917. But Suzanne, having seen the place, having felt its raw malevolence, was pretty sure that Derry Conway had been assisted in achieving his death. She shivered again. What manner of man could ever have found comfort here?
‘There is coffee inside,’ said Pierre Duval, who had seen her shiver, gesturing in the direction of the farm. ‘You were unwise to walk here. Come.’
He had parked his battered Land Rover behind the line of poplars. She thought it odd that she had not heard the approach of its labouring engine, because the engine did labour, when he started it. It chugged and then when he depressed the accelerator pedal, it roared and the vehicle vibrated on its high springs. But too much else was odd about the barn for the failure of sound to carry there to worry Suzanne unduly. She was grateful for the lift. With Duval’s shotgun resting across the back seats, she was grateful also for the company.
He progressed beyond the farmyard, to another structure that the farmyard buildings themselves had obscured during her brief earlier exploration. And he parked outside it. This was a modern dwelling made of wood and designed to blend in with the earth and trees surrounding it. It looked more Scandinavian than typically French. She could see how she had missed it in her aerial search, looking for old stone and sagging clay tiles. Its steep roof was earth-coloured and made of some modern material. Its windows were tinted on the outside so that the building did not reflect light.
The impression that farming was a profitable business after all for Pierre Duval was strengthened when he unlocked the door and she was invited inside his home. He did not like clutter. But his furniture looked expensive. The kitchen was a hard, shining array of steel and granite. A large plasma television screen was mounted on one wall of his sitting room. There were logs in the open iron grate but the fire was unlit. He had a laptop on a small desk and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system in one corner with three immaculate rows of CDs stored on shelves above it. No one else lived here, she was certain. Pierre Duval did not share his life. She smiled inwardly at the thought that he had once lived amid the fading enamel and linoleum squalor apparently abandoned a few hundred metres behind them.
He took her coat and removed his and went to hang them where he said they would dry, and then he gestured for her to sit while he made the coffee. She had wiped her feet vigorously on the doormat outside. Now she saw that her muddy boots had trailed a few crumbs of wet earth across Duval’s wooden floor. He would notice; the place was otherwise immaculate. But she did not think he would mind. She had picked a careful path between his scattered and expensive-looking rugs. And she sensed he had invited her in for a reason beyond her wish for something hot and sustaining to drink. She was here because he wanted to tell her something. He would tolerate a bit of mud to hear it told.
‘In 1917 my grandfather was a boy,’ he said, seated in the chair opposite hers when they both had their coffee. ‘He was fourteen and he was very innocent. He liked the Americans. He liked the doughboys. They were generous with their chocolate and their chewing gum. They were cheerful. Many of them, whole battalions of their infantry, were coloured soldiers. Were you aware of that fact?’
‘None of the Jericho Crew was black,’ Suzanne said.
Duval did not answer her. He looked down at the contents of his cup. ‘My grandfather was Pierre Duval also. And he was still a child. And the war was a great adventure. When the soldiers marched, they sang. Most of them sang. The Scots marched to the pipes, to their tunes of glory in their fighting kilts, with their battle standards raised. At night, in their camps, the coloured doughboys sang their slavish songs of devotion to God.’
‘Spirituals,’ Suzanne said.
Duval smiled, as though he himself were remembering. ‘Their spirituals, yes, of course. They sang their spirituals in this land so far from home, in their canvas settlements, and their strong and ardent voices carried through the night. How marvellous and strange that must have sounded, here.’
He stopped. Suzanne felt no compulsion to interrupt the silence. He sipped coffee. ‘It was all a great adventure to the boy who would become my grandfather. It must have seemed to him as an epic film in the cinema would. And then the Jericho Crew came here,’ he said. ‘And they did not sing, madame. They did not sing at all.’
Pierre Duval, who was fourteen and for whom the war was a great adventure, had seen none of the crew. They moved by night. And they moved with the stealth of ghosts. But he had seen the night glow sometimes of their fires. And knowing the friendliness of the Allied troops generally, and overcome with curiosity, he had approached the barn.
He had done so very quietly and carefully. He did not wish to be mistaken for an approaching enemy, nor to be mistaken for game and shot. His plan, such as it was, was simply to reveal himself in plain sight when the light of their encampment could illuminate him as a harmless, unarmed boy. Later, he was thankful for this cautious instinct because he was sure it saved his life. At the time, as he approached along the forgiving autumn earth between the poplars and the drainage ditch, he felt only a boy’s excitement.
They were clustered in a group outside the rear of the barn. He saw the scene from a hundred feet away, from behind the screen of trees. And at first he could make no sense of it at all. This was because he knew that his father’s land was flat. Every inch of it was flat. Yet they were sitting grouped around their fires on a hill. And then he saw its purpose, what it was they had constructed on their hill.
There were three wooden crosses. A uniformed man hung from each. The oldest and most senior-looking of the prisoners was at the centre. To his right and left, Pierre thought, perhaps the men flanking him were his aide-decamp and his driver. Was the man at the centre a general? It did not matter. Other details imposed themselves with far greater and more shocking clarity on his young mind. They had been nailed to the crosses using bayonets. They were still, the pinioned men. Pierre thought that they were probably dead. And they had each of them been crucified upside down.
As he watched, rigid with the dread overwhelming him, one of the Americans, a man with a pale swatch of hair, rose from the ground and idled across to the victim at the centre of the tableau. He took a knife and sawed at the torso and Pierre was certain now that the German general suffering this mutilation was dead. The man tugged at the corpse and his free hand came away with something wet that glistened in the flames of their fires, and he lifted and dropped this human morsel into his mouth and started to chew.
And Pierre heard laughter and clapping. And then at the edge of the group, he saw a seated man lean over and vomit on the earth. This man was dressed in the same uniform as the other Americans, he saw. But his hands appeared to be bound at his back. And there was the glimmer of a clerical collar in the firelight around his neck.
‘Derry Conway,’ Suzanne said.
‘They built their own Calvary,’ Pierre, who was Pierre Duval’s grandson, said. ‘They constructed an abomination. They were an abomination themselves. After that, no one from the farm went near the place again. And, of course, the boy who was my grandfather revised his views concerning war.’
‘Tell me about the building,’ Suzanne said.
Duval stared down at his coffee mug. Suzanne thought that he looked not just sorrowful, but ashamed. He raised his head and looked her in the eyes. ‘It has been there since the Great Terror that followed the Revolution. It was built by the Société Jericho. Such cults were tolerated, even encouraged, in those times so hostile to organised religion. My ancestors leased them the land on which to build their temple. They paid a toll for their access along the route through our land to get to it. We profited. We profited from them for a time. They were banned in the reign of the First Emperor. The building was gutted and made derelict. But my family has paid and gone on paying for the sin of our opportunism and greed concerning the Jericho Society.’
‘Do you know why they are called that?’
Duval smiled. ‘Jericho is the old Hebrew word for moon,’ he said. ‘They are called that because they are of the night. They are dedicated to the night and what flourishes under the mantle of darkness.’
Suzanne finished her coffee. Duval escorted her back through the rain to her rental car. Leaving his home, in a pen beside a stand of trees, she saw two Doberman dogs. One of them must have been the source of the earlier barking she had heard.
‘Do you keep them for the company?’
He laughed, but it was bitter laughter. ‘On the contrary, madame. The dogs are here not because I am alone. They are here because I have the suspicion that, sometimes, I am not.’
She thanked the farmer and, without another word passing between them, he walked her back to her car and saw her off his land.
She became aware of the vehicle in her rear-view mirror about twenty minutes after exiting the lane that led to the farm. It was a black van. It was quite large and, after a couple of miles, she was pretty sure that it was following her. This was because although she drove with the slow caution of a stranger to the area obliged to drive on the wrong side of the road, the van did not close the distance and attempt to overtake. It just sat in her rear-view mirror. She tried to dismiss her nervousness concerning the van as paranoia. But when, to ascertain the truth of the situation, she reduced her speed, the black bulk of it simply stayed, in relation to her, precisely where it was. She could not avoid the conclusion that it was waiting, deliberately lurking in her wake.
All Suzanne could do was continue to drive. Every kilometre she travelled brought the bright, commercial bustle of Calais and the ferry terminal incrementally closer. Brightness, though, was becoming a problem. More precisely, the lack of brightness was becoming a complication as a mist rose or a fog descended and the ribbon of road in front of her grew pale and spectral in the full, enfeebled beam of her headlights. She groaned. She tapped a tattoo with her fingers on the wheel. She switched off the wipers. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that at least the rain had finally stopped falling. But when she looked in the rear-view mirror, all she could see behind her was an opaque blanket of grey. Her squat black pursuer had slipped from sight altogether.
And then the van flashed past her. It was as sleek and sudden alongside as a shark beside a swimmer in the water. Except that this shark had steel flanks and something was etched and glittered on them in gold. In the dead lustre of the mist, the legend read, ‘Martens & Degrue’. And Suzanne, who did not share her boyfriend’s sometimes charitable belief in coincidence, wondered just how deeply, in what awful sort of trouble, Martin and his father were allowing themselves to become engulfed.
A kilometre or two on, the mist began to lift. She saw a sign at the roadside for Calais. Her numb fear receded enough for her to realise just how badly she was craving the comfort of normality. She looked at her watch and, having the time to do so, pulled in to a roadside café and went inside and ordered hot chocolate. The café was warm and light. Indifferent people with mundane routines sipped beverages around her. The Police played ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ through wall-mounted speakers. The tables were Formica-topped. There were the smells of roasting beans and toasting cheese and ham baguettes and the faint aniseed whiff of Ricard, served from a sticky optic behind the bar. If there was a smoking ban in the café, its patrons were ignoring it.
Sipping her drink, normality beckoned for Suzanne, and it was seductive. But it came only at the price of a sort of willing amnesia concerning the past few hours and their events and revelations. She could forget about them, which would be the painless route back to the certainties of yesterday. Or she could subject them to a clever, sceptical reinterpretation, which would take longer, but would eventually deliver the same comforting effect.
Comfortably numb. There was a song by someone, wasn’t there, called ‘Comfortably Numb’?
And there was a song called ‘When Love Breaks Down’ written by a failed priest called Paddy McAloon. She had heard it playing in a manner it very definitely should not have on the radio of the rental car as she journeyed to the farm near Béthune owned by the brave and cautious Frenchman, Pierre Duval.
Despite the temptation, Suzanne would not allow normality to settle its illusory claim on her. She had seen what she had seen and she had felt what she had felt and she had listened to what she had been told. Given time, she was sure that she could unravel the whole disquieting truth about Harry Spalding. But she hoped that it would not be necessary for her to have to do so. She hoped that what she had learned so far would be enough to deter Martin and more particularly his headstrong father from their planned voyage aboard Spalding’s refurbished boat.
It was late by the time Suzanne wound up this account of her little journey to the old and bloody battleground of the Great War. And with the adventure of the Andromeda not yet a full day behind me, I was bone tired by the time she completed it. I felt pretty numb myself. And I felt pretty comfortably numb, to tell the truth. Nothing she had discovered seemed as bad as the hours-earlier prospect of being abandoned by Suzanne. That had been my fear at the outset of the night. And it had been terrible. In reality, I felt more flattered by her efforts on my behalf than disconcerted by their results.
The lurid atrocities of a conflict fought ninety years ago seemed very distant. The weirdness of the barn near Béthune seemed far more ominous for the stoical Frenchman farming the land around it than for my father or myself in contemplating a voyage aboard a vintage schooner.
Suzanne had gone behind my back, obviously, to discover what she had. Strictly speaking, as I’ve already acknowledged, she had deceived me. Relationships are built on intimacy and none of the ingredients that go to conjure intimacy is so important as trust. But Suzanne had acted with noble intentions. And my own sin, committed after her revelations that night, was simpler but considerably worse than hers. Mine was the sin, of course, of omission.
I know now what I should have done. The truth be told, I knew then. Regardless of my fatigue, regardless of hers, I should have told her about Straub’s ghost. I should have told her that story and allowed the sharp mind behind that lovely face of hers to ponder on the place of it in the emerging pattern of things. But I did not. I dozed instead. She dozed next to me, the two of us close beside one another on our bed. And then, as the clock on the bedside table clicked towards one in the morning, I stirred and stroked the smooth flesh of her shoulder and, remembering, said, ‘Tell me about Peitersen, Suzanne.’
Her eyes opened, dark and slightly bleary with sleep in the night gloom in our flat near the river. She went and made herself some tea, then came back to bed and sipped it as she lay down, alert again.
‘Josiah Peitersen did indeed build the Dark Echo. By any measure, Spalding was still a youth when her keel was laid. So the boat was a tremendous indulgence on the part of his parents, regardless of their wealth. And they were prodigiously wealthy. She was a fabulous prize for someone barely out of his adolescence when she began her sea trials.’
‘Unless she was something else,’ I said, not really knowing why I said it, or where my thoughts were taking me. My mind was voyaging back to the dank waters of East Friesland, to Baltrum and the intrigue of Childers’ Riddle of the Sands.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only that she might not have been merely a gift. She might have been built with some purpose beyond the frivolity of regattas in mind. Perhaps Spalding was groomed to be her master for a reason we haven’t discovered.’
Suzanne pondered. She twisted her neck to face me on the pillow. I could smell the scent of Earl Grey tea warm on her breath.
‘From birth, you mean?’
‘It’s just a thought,’ I said. And a terrifying one. ‘What were they called? The debating society to which the Spaldings and the Peitersens and the rest of them belonged?’
‘I haven’t been able to find out,’ she said. ‘They referred to themselves as The Membership, but they were the membership of something, obviously. It must have been some clan or brotherhood or cabal. There was some secret, ritualistic name I haven’t been able to discover. It’s there in some FBI file compiled when the Feds went after them during Prohibition. But the file is classified or lost.’
‘Or stolen,’ I said. ‘Filched by someone working for a Brussels-based firm called Martens and Degrue. Or lifted by the man masquerading as Peitersen, masquerading as someone else.’
‘Josiah Peitersen and his wife had no offspring,’ Suzanne said. ‘That was an easy thing to discover. Both of them predeceased Harry Spalding. And they left no grieving son behind to carry on their bloodline.’
‘Hadley said that Peitersen’s references checked out.’
But that contradiction was an easy one, even for me. Peitersen was sent ‘from above’, so far as the beleaguered Hadley had been concerned in his storm-bound, curse-prone boatyard. Surrounded by his high-tech toys, with my father’s baleful wreck lashed to the stanchions of the quay through his office window, he must have read the words in the airmail letter and thought Peitersen heaven-sent. Any check on the man’s references would have been cursory at most, if it was ever carried out at all. In the circumstances, most people would have forgiven the desperate Frank Hadley a convenient lie. With the threat of ruin the alternative, he’d certainly have forgiven himself the telling of it.
My father was not usually easily fooled. He was a man only ever willingly gullible. But Jack Peitersen had been everything my father wanted and required of him. He was a part of the Dark Echo’s lineage. He looked and sounded right. His appearance and apparent pedigree would have appealed to my father’s snobbery – a weakness his own childhood, bankrupt of pedigree of any sort, had made him prone to all his adult life. But all this begged the urgent question of who Peitersen was. What was the man’s motive in coming to my father in this fictitious guise? The fact that he seemed only to have done good, his presence an almost miraculous benefit, somehow made the question even more compelling.
‘I need to talk to Peitersen,’ I said. ‘Or whoever he is.’
‘Good luck,’ Suzanne said. ‘I tried myself, this morning, after having what I’d found out about him confirmed in the States late last night. I only saw the confirmation when I switched on the computer this morning. I called the yard at Lepe straight away. And then I called the hotel. But he was at neither place. He seems to have departed as abruptly as he arrived. Whoever he was, he’s vanished.’