Dark Echo (10 page)

But Mr Boyte would not be drawn. ‘I’ve nothing to say concerning the vessel or her master,’ he said.

Would he not wish, through the columns of the
Post,
to extend his congratulations to Mr Spalding?

‘I would not,’ he said. And with his newly liberated daughter on his arm, he bid our correspondent a curt goodbye.

I read this account twice. There was a tone about it, an underlying sarcasm, more spiteful than I would have thought appropriate to a diary piece. That said, being arrested, when you were a woman of quality, was not a light-hearted occurrence eighty years ago. And the Boytes were of quality, both. Patrick was prosperous-looking. The light in the picture exposed the vivid detail of a sunny late-summer day. Patrick Boyte, bald and sturdy and tall, glowered in tailored broadcloth with a thick gold watch chain worn across his waistcoat, and a waxed collar and silk necktie. The hand not gripping his daughter’s carried a hat and a cane. Jane was svelte and groomed with bobbed hair and wearing a light summer coat.

It reminded me of the contemporary reportage about the suffragettes I’d read at university, the tone of the piece. It
was characterised by the same wise, condescending mockery as those stories had been. But it had been written two decades too late for Jane’s crime to be anything to do with the struggle to win votes for women.

And the Boytes had been set up, the
Post
tipped off. Cameras in those days did not take pictures of this quality without a tripod and careful preparation. The distance had been exactly judged and the bright light metred. Someone in the Liverpool police had helped engineer this public embarrassment. The pair had been ambushed on the station steps. It made me wonder what Jane Boyte had done to provoke such hostility. It made me wonder what she had done to get herself arrested.

But that wasn’t what chiefly intrigued me. What really struck me, looking at it, was the image of Jane Boyte herself. She shared her father’s deep expression of indignant fury. She was fiercely beautiful. And she looked so similar in her physique and facial features to the woman standing next to me that she and Suzanne could have been sisters. I folded the page back into four and put it on top of its envelope on the table.

‘Jane Boyte could have been your twin.’

‘There is a resemblance. She’s a similar type to me. At least, she appears so in that particular photograph. But that’s not the point.’

And neither was the arrest. Patrick Boyte was the point, and what he chose not to say to the reporter from the
Post
about the job he had carried out for Harry Spalding.

‘I don’t think what you have told me tonight about poor Frank Hadley is happening for the first time,’ Suzanne said. ‘I think it’s all happened before.’

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘There’s more.’

We went to the pub. It was ten o’clock and, of course,
she was tired from the delayed flight. But we went anyway because Suzanne said that what she wanted to tell me would be better said over a drink. We went to the Windmill around the corner from the flat in Lambeth High Street and found a corner table to the rear of the virtually empty pub. It was fittingly nautical. There were old framed prints on the walls of barques and schooners and tugs from the passed age of the Thames as a working river. Some of them could have been taken as recently as the 1960s. But they all seemed distant and antique, so thoroughly lost in time were they.

His boat had belonged to two illustrious owners after Spalding’s death. The first of these was a Boston speculator who became seriously wealthy after being one of the very few men to see the Crash of 1929 coming. Everyone with any brains knew there would be a stock market crash eventually. Most believed it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Stephen Waltrow guessed it to the week. His buying of Spalding’s boat caused a minor stir on the society pages of the Boston and New York newspapers. Spalding wasn’t quite cold in his grave when Waltrow made the purchase. And the Crash itself was what most people assumed had provoked the young man’s suicide.

In that, they were very much mistaken, Suzanne said. I sipped from my pint of bitter. There was music playing in the pub. Thankfully, it wasn’t Josephine Baker. Billy Paul was lamenting his way through ‘Me and Mrs Jones’.

Stephen Waltrow was a twin. As boys, he and his brother had sailed dinghies. Their upbringing had been lower middle class. But they had grown up close to the harbour and their father had been a keen boatman and had taught them to sail when they were still in knickerbockers. They had an aptitude for it. They were skilled, resourceful and hardy. At the age of fourteen, they were embroiled in a yachting tragedy when six dinghies involved in a race around Boston harbour
were hit by a squall so sudden and savage that there was no real warning of it. Four of the dinghies had capsized and sunk. Seven boys were drowned. It was a wait of nine anxious hours and darkness had long fallen before the Waltrow boys nursed their battered boat back to the slipway from which they had launched. They were shaken and had lost friends. But with the cold resilience of children, they were back on the water the following weekend.

Kevin Waltrow did not share his twin’s business acumen. He became a cop. But when Stephen acquired Spalding’s boat, he was only too happy to weekend aboard her when he could. Unlike his bachelor brother, Kevin was married with two young children and his new weekend hobby was the cause of some friction at home. This was especially true when, three months after buying her, Stephen suggested the brothers spend an Easter week sailing
Dark Echo
to Long Island and back.

A donation made by Stephen to the Boston Constabulary Benevolent Fund seems to have been what secured Kevin sufficient holiday time to go along on the trip, Suzanne said. What his wife had to say about it wasn’t known. Nothing much was known after the boat set off early on the morning of April 4, 1930 into a clear day and a stiffening onshore breeze from Boston harbour. Certainly nothing was reported, though the vessel was equipped with a high-grade Marconi set. Nothing was known or suspected until she was found eight days later, drifting 150 miles offshore, unmanned and travelling lazily with the current.

She was towed back to New Jersey and impounded and searched. Nothing significant was found aboard her. Of the brothers Waltrow, there was no sign at all. Eventually, a month later, she was towed back to Boston. Here, perhaps because of Stephen’s wealth or perhaps because of Kevin’s status as one of Boston’s finest, she was searched
more thoroughly and a primitive forensic examination was carried out.

‘Did they find anything?’

Suzanne sipped her drink. ‘They found quite a lot of blood. It looked as though the brothers might have been fighting. One of them could have been cut on a gaff or something. Accidents occur on boats all the time. But the boys were of different blood groups. And both types were present in fairly liberal quantities.’

‘Anything else?’

She nodded. ‘Stephen Waltrow’s chequebook. It was in a drawer in a bureau in the master cabin. That, too, was blood-smeared. In black ink, in his own hand, he had scrawled five words on the back of it. One sentence: “To be with the others.”’

‘Did the mystery create much of a stir?’

‘Not really. It occurred at a tumultuous time in American life. The country was short neither of scandal nor sensation. But it was the subject of a sort of probe. That’s where I got most of my information.’

The investigator was a man called Ernie Howes. Howes was a former cop and private eye who had turned to psychic investigation in the aftermath of the Great War when the collective grief of desolate parents created a boom for self-styled experts in reaching lost sons beyond the grave. Howes ran a lucrative line in exposing fake mediums. But he also fed the appetites of the gullible by filing news stories with an occult slant of his own whenever he could.

The dinghy tragedy could have meant that the boys were somehow doomed. The twins could be written up as a living and dying example of how it just wasn’t possible to cheat fate. Or he could just go with the unlucky boat angle. Spalding’s suicide had made national headlines. Stephen Waltrow had been the second millionaire in a year to come to a sticky end as owner of the
Dark Echo
. Surely she was
cursed? People liked stories about unlucky boats. For whatever reason, they were apt to believe them, just as they were apt to believe in stories about haunted mansions.

‘Which story did he go with?’

‘Neither,’ Suzanne told me. At our table in the corner of the pub, she was worrying at a thumbnail with her teeth. ‘He interviewed Kevin Waltrow’s widow and was told about Kevin’s increasing moodiness and violence in the home in the weeks leading up to the voyage. And cynically, he approached Kevin’s seven-year-old son Michael in search of further lurid detail. I don’t believe Boston’s finest were too keen on stories about recently deceased officers who beat their wives and heard commanding voices in their heads at night. Ernie Howes woke up in a Boston hotel one morning and discovered a live bullet on the pillow next to his head. This item of ammunition was a soft-point police issue .38 calibre. He took the hint. He never wrote a word about the Waltrows or the
Dark Echo
.’

‘How did you find all this out?’

‘Believe it or not, the outcome of the story is not entirely tragic. Michael Waltrow and his younger sister Mollie eventually inherited the bulk of their uncle’s fortune. Michael is eighty-four now, in full possession of his senses and a distinguished landscape painter living out his last years on Martha’s Vineyard. I found his number and telephoned him and spoke to him there. I told him I was researching the
Dark Echo
. He did not ask for what purpose, so I was not obliged to lie.’

‘He was happy to speak to you?’

Suzanne shook her head. ‘Happy would be entirely the wrong word. But he said he was relieved to be able to speak about it at last. It was he who told me about Howes, an unpleasant, sweaty man who stank of whisky and dime-store cigars, he said.’

‘What did he tell you about his father?’

‘He said his father became possessed by the Devil. From being a gentle, humorous man, he turned into a volatile monster they all feared and none of the household recognised. The transformation occurred over a few weeks. He was convinced his father murdered his own brother aboard the boat before destroying himself. But he was adamant the Devil was to blame.’

‘He didn’t blame the boat herself?’

‘No. He was a seven-year-old boy from a Boston Catholic family when these events occurred. He thought his father became possessed. Still does.’

‘What did he do with the boat?’

‘Nothing. Mollie Waltrow inherited the
Dark Echo
. She sat gathering rust, a hulk in dry dock. Mollie sold the boat for salvage the day she reached the age of maturity without ever having put a foot aboard her.’

I sat back in my seat and took this in. I swallowed the dregs of tepid beer from my glass. There was music playing in the bar, but it was indistinct in the fuzziness afflicting my mind after what Suzanne had told me.

‘How did you source the story about Patrick Boyte?’

I knew Spalding had stayed at the Palace Hotel in Birkdale after being forced into Liverpool to repair storm damage. I just did a Google search for Spalding, Liverpool and boatyard. That piece came up.’

‘You were non-committal when I asked you if you knew anything about
Dark Echo
. You were downright evasive.’

‘Don’t be angry, Martin. I didn’t want to rain on your dad’s parade. That’s all.’

‘Then why come clean now?’

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I care about you. After what you told me this evening, I didn’t feel I had any choice but to tell you what I have.’

‘My father must know all this stuff.’

‘I suspect so. He’ll know some of it, anyway. You said he’d read the log.’

‘Two owners, Suzanne. You said there were two owners.’

‘And I’ll tell you about the second of them. But I badly need a cigarette. Can I tell you at home?’

She recounted the second story in her study after I had poured her a glass of wine. There was a small extractor fan in the window in her study and she switched it on before she sat at her desk and turned to face me. It was the one room in the flat where I suppose she felt she could smoke relatively guilt-free. She had turned on the radio, too, when I returned to the study with the wine. Bebop from a jazz station drowned out the hum of the fan’s whirring electric motor.

Gubby Tench was a third-rate playboy who bought the
Dark Echo
in the summer of 1937 when he was thirty-nine years old and fresh, if that’s the term, from his second divorce. The fact that he was able to afford the boat proved that he had extricated himself from marriage without going broke. But the vessel was floating by this time in much reduced circumstances. A diesel engine had been fitted to cut down on the cost of crewmen experienced at manipulating sails. Tench was adept enough as a sailor. But when financial circumstances demanded it, the engine meant that he could haul in the sails and manage the craft single-handedly in most sorts of weather.

The boat had lost a lot of its lustre. She had also lost her original name. When Tench became the vessel’s master, she had been rechristened
Ace of Clubs
. It was an appropriate choice. Tench was an inveterate, even compulsive gambler. His first voyage took him from Miami, where he bought the boat, to Havana, where he berthed her in the bay to go ashore eager for action in the Cuban capital’s many celebrated casinos.

The crossing from Miami took him three days and three nights in a fog other masters in the area described afterwards as pretty near impenetrable. It played havoc with their instruments. It interfered with wireless transmission. Compass readings were inconsistent, inaccurate, useless. It would have been interesting, in the light of subsequent events, to know what was happening to Gubby Tench during this weird period of unnavigable weather. But, of course, the log had been destroyed, so nobody knew or would ever know what he had been up to, what he had been thinking.