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bought it only recently. It was a very modern little item and the sound leaking out of it seemed horribly incongruous. For a dreadful moment I was listening to Bricktop, her dead voice creaking forth seventy-odd years after the death of her failed suitor, on the very day my father had purchased the possession that suitor prized most greatly. The song ended. For once, I craved a spoken voice. And it came, the presenter crediting the performance I had just heard to Josephine Baker. I felt a surge of relief. Baker had been a Bricktop protégé, of course, even a Bricktop discovery. I’d just learned as much. But the long arm of coincidence was allowed to stretch that far. At least, to my tired mind it was. But it could stretch no further, so I switched off the radio before giving it the chance to.
    Back in bed, sleep still proved elusive. I breathed in the warm comfort of Suzanne’s improvised cashmere pillow and smiled at the irony of how I was behaving now, comparedto my behaviour in the circumstances in which the two of us had met. Was I afraid of the dark? Suzanne believed I was afraid of nothing. I’d given her reason, I suppose, to think it. It was an awfully long way from being the truth. But was I? Afraid of the dark?
    I don’t honestly think that I was. But I was afraid, I know, even then, of the malignant memory of the American called Harry Spalding.

 
Two
    There was at least some method in my father’s madness. Before buying Spalding’s boat, he had commissioned a precise estimate of what the craft would cost to restore, refit and make seaworthy. The estimate had been carried out by a boatyard on the Hamble with the best reputation for this kind of work in what was an exact, esoteric and quite exclusive business. The original specification of the boat was very high. Craftsmanship to equal it did still exist. But it was uncommon. And it was bought in the modern age only at great expense. Computer simulation could and had made the design of a modern boat a much cheaper proposition altogether. But restoration was a matter of painstaking artistry done with arcane tools and precious raw materials.
    Frank Hadley said his yard could do the job. But he told my father honestly that it would take six months if it were to be done properly and not botched. The timescale suited my dad. Six months would enable him to learn the necessary seamanship to sail the
Dark Echo
competently. The boat would be ready by the beginning of July. It was a benign time on the marine calendar to put out across the Atlantic. Benign and Atlantic were not words I thought sat easily in the same sentence. But everything was relative. July was going to be better than March and a damn sight gentler than October.
    Suzanne duly came home. She told me all about Bricktop. She told me what little she knew about Harry Spalding’s curious sojourn in the North-West of England. She had donea bit of research about a year earlier into hotels that were reputedly haunted. Spalding had been a celebrated guest at one of these, she remembered. The Palace Hotel in Birkdale, though, had long been demolished. The film never got beyond some preliminary outlines. I was so delighted to see Suzanne, and Spalding seemed such a distasteful subject even on the little I knew about him, that I swiftly lost any curiosity I had possessed, really, to know more. My father, caught up in the immediacies of learning about the sea and the disintegration of his latest marriage, forgot altogether his promise to himself to ask her about that curious name, the Jericho Crew. Later events made me bitterly regret the way his making that request of her was allowed so completely to slip his mind. But in the circumstances, at the time, it was a forgivable lapse.
    I signed up for the same courses in seamanship and navigation as my dad. I also joined a yacht club. We had already determined that we would not do the courses together. I suppose we knew enough about one another to know that doing so