Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  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 a
bout 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.

  ‘Unless my dad knows,’ I said. ‘He claims to have read every volume of the log.’

  Suzanne smiled and lit another cigarette. She was chain-smoking, well above her self-permitted ration of ten a day. ‘I doubt Gubby Tench committed a single line to the log during his voyage,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was much of a stickler for any sort of seagoing protocol. And I don’t get the impression he was much of a diarist.’

  He arrived in Havana running a high temperature. Epidemics were common in pre-war Cuba. The floor manager of one of the casinos, supervising the blackjack tables, thought that Gubby Tench looked like a man incubating cholera. He was sweating heavily and his breath was a shallow wheeze. But such diseases were generally confined to the slums and contagion rare among high-rolling American visitors. And this visitor had only just disembarked. Nevertheless, the comment was made later by more than one witness that Tench looked feverish and ill. But it didn’t affect his form at the tables. On his first night, he won big. On his second, he won even bigger. On his third evening, drawing a crowd by now, he turned from blackjack to roulette and took on the house, betting consistently on the black, taking close to one hundred thousand dollars in winnings by the time the spell broke at around four thirty in the morning.

  ‘By the time the spell broke?’

  ‘That was what the other gamblers and the table operators said it was like. They said it was as though Tench gambled in a trance. They said it was as though he could not lose.’

  ‘I’m surprised he was permitted to go on winning,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised he was permitted to go on playing. Weren’t all the Cuban casinos of the period owned by the Mafia?’

  ‘Some,’ Suzanne said. ‘The Cuban dictator, Batista, leased some casinos to the Mafia. The rest were run by his cronies and owned indirectly by him. But they were happy to ride out the odd big win. Nobody ever really beats the house if they keep coming back. And streaks like the one Tench enjoyed have always kept the serious punters coming.’

  Except that Gubby Tench did not exactly seem to be enjoying his own run of good fortune. On his fourth evening he was so ill, he was attended to at the roulette table by a doctor. He was running a fever of 105. His blood pressure was off the scale. He was soaked in sweat and breathing in shallow, alarming gasps. His speech was slurred when he spoke, though no one saw him so much as sip from the complimentary drinks lined up at his elbow. He drank only from a glass of iced water and the rocks in it chinked audibly with the tremor in his hand whenever he picked it up to sip from it.

  Yet still he won. By the conclusion of his fourth night at the tables, he had accrued enough chips to need a barrow to take them to the cashier. They sat in a gaudy hill of painted ivory in front of him on the baize. And he smiled and took a revolver from the pocket of his tuxedo. And he flicked out the cylinder over the baize and shook out six bullets. He blinked at the people around him through the six circular bores he’d made empty. He winked at a girl waiting tables with his tongue lolling and a look so emptily lascivious that she didn’t sleep afterwards for a week. Then he picked up a single bullet and loaded it into a chamber and gave th
e cylinder a spin. He cocked the hammer and put the barrel to his temple with a grin and pulled the trigger.

  ‘All the other players left the table,’ Suzanne said. ‘Nobody wanted to get spattered in Tench’s gore. But they all stayed to watch. These were very free and easy times in Havana, in the 1930s. And they were all gamblers present. And it was an arresting sight, to see a man take a happy punt on his own life.’

  Gubby Tench squeezed the trigger. And the revolver’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. And he blinked and a cloud of disappointment seemed to drift across his dazed features. He fumbled among the bullets on the baize in front of him. In total, he loaded five bullets into the six chambers of the revolver’s cylinder. He grinned and gave it a spin and brought the weapon up once more to his temple. Somebody screamed. He squeezed the trigger.

  ‘And the hammer clicked on the one empty chamber,’ I said.

  Suzanne nodded. ‘He did it five times. He did it once for every bullet that the gun possessed. Then he shook out the shells and gathered his chips in a tablecloth from the bar and cashed them as his stunned audience clapped him out of there.’

  ‘He was very lucky.’

  ‘He wasn’t lucky at all,’ Suzanne said. ‘Luck had nothing to do with it. Five to one is lucky. But five to one to the power of five? Nobody beats those odds.’

  ‘The only plausible explanation is that the ammunition in the pistol was dud.’

  ‘It wasn’t his pistol. He took it surreptitiously from the shoulder holster of a gangster working a security shift on the floor. He seemed to be capable of conjuring tricks, of any feat of dexterity or sleight of hand or legerdemain. He paid a half a dollar that evening for a ride back to his bunk aboard a tobacco boat working the bay as a water taxi. The pilot said the money was wasted. By that stage they believed he could have walked upon the ocean back to the Ace of Clubs.’

  Which was, of course, Spalding’s Dark Echo. It was merely masquerading as another craft.