Dark Echo

Six

I called my father as soon as I respectably could the following morning. My dad being by compulsive habit an early riser, that was just after 6 a.m. But he wasn’t there. His housekeeper came to the phone after it had rung for a while and bade me a cheery good morning. She seemed reluctant to discuss my father’s absence and then even more reluctant to discuss his whereabouts.

‘Do you think he might be in Chichester, Mrs Simms?’

There was a charged silence on the line.

‘Mrs Simms?’

‘He might be, Marty. It’s a fair assumption, since he did not discuss his destination on departure.’

She was an Irishwoman, was Mrs Simms. I’d known her since childhood. And I knew she liked a flutter.

‘Mrs Simms?’

‘Marty.’

‘Would you bet money on Chichester?’

‘Sure, I wouldn’t bet my house. But I’d have a few bob on it, Marty, so I would.’

So it was a tryst with his new-old flame. I smiled to myself. Chichester would never again for me be just a quaint and prosperous town founded after the Roman invasion. The word had taken on a new significance. And it had become a verb. Forever on, Chichestering would be the euphemism for my father’s energetic pursuit of sex. Or of romance. Or, most plausibly, his pursuit of romance through sex. He was an optimist, was my father, always reminding me of the fact through his outlook and behaviour. The glass for Magnus Stannard was never half-empty. With him, it was always full to brimming at the lip. The thought brought a fond, fearful surge of feeling for him. I felt, for the first time in my life, as though he really needed my love and protection. I realised in that moment, on the phone to Margaret Simms, that I had not had the remotest notion of how much I loved my dad before this sorry business began.

‘Did he take his mobile phone?’

‘He took the berry thing.’

‘The BlackBerry.’

‘The very item. He took that.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Simms.’

‘It won’t necessarily be switched on.’

‘What?’

‘He told me it wouldn’t necessarily be switched on. He said he might be off-message.’

I’ll bet he did. ‘Thanks, Mrs Simms.’ I hung up. I made tea and took a cup in to Suzanne and pondered on what to do. There was no point in trying to find my dad in Chichester. I could hang about until he was back on-message and try to establish exactly how much, if anything, he knew about Peitersen’s fraudulent identity and abrupt disappearance. That would have been the sensible thing to do. But I felt the need to do something more, the compulsion to do something immediate. I really couldn’t stand to wait. So I decided to drive to Lepe and see what I could find out there for myself. I kissed Suzanne and told her not to tell anyone where I was going. What I meant was, don’t tell my father, if he should call. Peitersen and my father were the only people to whom my arrival at the boatyard would be of any consequence. And Jack Peitersen had gone.

It was a lovely late April morning. I set off munching a piece of toast, sipping from a flask of coffee Suzanne had made me while I was in the shower. All the traffic was town-bound, coming in the opposite direction from the one in which I was travelling. I put on the radio and heard the opening bars of the Prefab Sprout song ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and almost scalded myself with coffee as the steel cup jumped in my hand against my lip. I switched off the radio. Maybe it had been sampled or something. That sort of thing happened now with old records all the time. Or it could have been used on the soundtrack of a hit movie or as the theme song for a hit TV series. It could have. And on the back of that, it could have been re-released as a single. Whatever, I made good time in the subsequent silence. But there should have been men working in the boatyard by the time I got there. I wasn’t so early as to have beaten the morning shift. Yet there was no one, not even someone at the gate to guard against vandalism or the petty theft of on-board computer hardware or valuable boatbuilders’ tools.

The breeze-block and corrugated-iron shed that had served Peitersen as an office offered no clues as to his whereabouts. There were some rough cost calculations for something or other on a desk blotter. Beside the columns of numbers there was a diagrammatic sketch of some kind of timber joint. It was exceptionally well drawn. But the quality of Peitersen’s draughtsmanship was really neither here nor there. There was a filing cabinet, the one occupied drawer neatly filled with invoices and receipts pertaining to the job in hand. But there was no desktop computer there with files for me to ransack. There wasn’t even a landline that I could see. Places like this always had a cheesy soft-porn calendar on the wall. It was an essential part of their fabric. But this one didn’t. Instead, Blue-tacked to the concrete, there was a chart delineating the schedule of progressive works aboard my father’s boat.

There wasn’t an ashtray full of stale dog-ends or a bin of Peperami and Snickers wrappers or a single empty beer can. He hadn’t left a scarf or a winter sweater on the rack of coat hooks by the door. There were no work gloves or over-boots. There was not one single personal item present there. People take pictures when they restore things. They take before and after pictures to amuse themselves with and take pride in and show off to people. It’s human nature. They tack them up or leave them on their desks. But there were no pictures. He had done his job with the fastidiousness of a monk and then he had disappeared before its completion. And he had left no note. And the note, of course, had been principally what I’d been looking for in his office.

There was no sign of the Dark Echo on the dock. She had been pulled up on runners into the refuge from rough weather of the one big boathouse at the yard. That said, there was no weather just then to shelter her from. The day was benign, the water beyond the dock a smooth emerald shimmer of darkening sea stretching out towards the Isle of Wight and the harbour at Cowes. I breathed in. I was dismayed, often, at how stagnant the edge of the sea could smell, with all the rotting detritus burdened on an incoming tide. But the smell of the sea on this particular day had a cleaving freshness. And there was no ravaging wind or rain to slap at and sully the sheen worn by my father’s precious acquisition. Nevertheless, in the boathouse she lay. It was as though Peitersen had finished his task on this quiet statement of neatness and precaution, I thought, approaching the building. He had signed off with the subdued flourish of a real craftsman.

She was a gorgeous sight when I unbolted and pulled open the double doors, revealing her to the bright spring light of morning. My father had said, when she was no more than a sullen wreck in the marine boneyard of Bullen and Clore, it was her lines that got to you. And I could see now what he’d already been so stricken by then. Even out of the water, the sweep of her hull made Captain Straub’s Andromeda seem frumpy and staid. They were the same gender, but different generations; the plump Clyde dowager dressed in widow’s weeds and the flapper heiress glittering at one of Gerald Murphy’s Riviera parties.

Except that she did not so much glitter as gleam. The Dark Echo was svelte and sumptuous in the gloss of her paintwork and the lustre of her polished brass. I climbed aboard. It was quiet in the boathouse. I was dimly aware of the hiss of small waves breaking down on the shore. And faintly, there was the cry of gulls, ubiquitous in the sky above the water. But the boathouse and the boat it harboured were entirely silent. So perfectly grooved was the planking on her deck that the teak beneath my feet didn’t so much as murmur under my weight. I ran my hand lightly along her rail on the port side close to the stern and sensed that the Dark Echo was poised, tensile, alive and awaiting her moment. It was not a forbidding feeling. There was nothing portentous or threatening about it. It was exhilaration, the promise of glamour and glory. It was, above all, a seductive sensation.

Amid the rusting and gigantic artefacts of marine engineering and salvage at Bullen and Clore, and again on those ramparts built against the storms of Hadley’s dock, I had been made aware of the elemental depth and sometimes even the fury of the sea. The voyage to Baltrum, with its blast of Arctic wind and its high and persistent swell, had only increased my feeling of wariness at the thought of crossing an ocean. But the Dark Echo had substance, as well as abundant style. She had pedigree. She seemed not so much adequate to the beckoning task, in her grace and strength, as eager for it.

My father had insisted that there was no such thing as an unlucky boat. There were only unlucky owners, he said. Aboard his glittering prize, in that boathouse at Lepe on that benign and gentle April day, it was an easier argument to believe than you might imagine.

Whatever atrocities the Jericho Crew had cooked up and conjured seemed to have damned them all. Two of the men whose fate Suzanne had discovered had at some time owned the boat. At least one, perhaps as many as three men had died aboard her. But the others had all met their violent, early deaths on land. Spalding himself had perished stretched across the counterpane of a bed in a New York hotel room with his veins full of Cutty Sark whisky and a pistol barrel at his temple. The boat had been icebound in the harbour, miles away and surely blameless. The chaplain, among the Jericho Crew, had died first, in a French barn. Of the rest, only Tench and perhaps the Waltrows had met their fates aboard the Dark Echo. With what really happened to the Waltrows an abiding mystery, Tench was the only certain casualty of the boat.

It was the Jericho Crew that were cursed. They had done something, entered into some devilish pact to determine their own immunity in battle, and paid a heavy and gruesome price once peace was restored to the world. They had dabbled in dark magic learned by Spalding from his occultist parents in his youth. And they had indulged in dark atrocities. It was nothing to do with the boat. It was to do with the war and the diabolical part they had played in it. The accidents at Hadley’s place had been unfortunate, but they had been just that. The washed-up dolphin, the gory omen of Hadley’s fraught imagination, had been exactly what my father said it was. Lost and disorientated, it had encountered a propeller blade and had become an unfortunate casualty of the busiest waterway in the world.

Peitersen – the mystery of Peitersen and the hope of solving it – was, of course, the whole of the reason for my visit to the boatyard at Lepe. But I was naturally interested in seeing the Dark Echo again. She had impressed me as a work in spectacular progress when last I’d visited, with Suzanne. I was curious to see whether the refurbishment had reached a stage where it would entirely dispel the threat I’d felt when first aboard her. That malevolent, terrifying vision had dimmed a little with time, I’ll admit. There was this natural temptation to place it in the Wagnerian winter endured by poor Frank Hadley. But Suzanne’s story of the barn used as a base in France by the Jericho Crew had brought the terror of the moment back pretty vividly. And I wanted to find out how I felt aboard the Dark Echo after a voyage on a similar craft that was, according to its master, truly haunted.

I climbed down the companionway at the stern of the vessel. To the rear of its descending steps was the master cabin. I took a deep breath and studied the door of what would be my father’s living quarters aboard. It was inlaid with a large central panel of polished walnut. It was possible to discern all kinds of fanciful patterns and themes in the rich and complex walnut burr. But wood was wood, however exactly carved and fashioned. It smelled like it had been lovingly oiled. It felt like velvet and glass combined in some clever alchemy under the caress of my fingertips.

I turned the burnished brass handle. The door was unlocked. I took another, deeper breath. I felt more nervous than on my last visit, the transformation of the Dark Echo no longer the happy novelty to me it had been then. And then, Suzanne had been at my side. Now, I was alone. I was aware of the blood pounding in my ears with my accelerated heart rate. I was not fearful exactly. I was nowhere near the state of hackle-raised fright I had been in on first setting foot aboard her. But I was apprehensive. It was easier to believe the curse on the owners rather than on the boat. It was much easier, now that the refurbishment had made the boat close to unrecognisable. But after all I had heard and experienced, after the disappearance of the fraudster masquerading as Jack Peitersen, I’d have been a fool not to feel a degree of trepidation.

The door opened on a magnificent room. I’d thought Captain Straub’s master cabin cosy. My father’s made it look squalid. He had paintings on the walls by Léger and Bonnard and Delaunay. There was a bookshelf, with first editions of Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. There was the original of the photograph I’d seen of the Dark Echo winning its race in the Arthur Mee encyclopedia, framed on my father’s magisterial oak desk among furled navigation charts and maps. There was a beautiful three-draw telescope and a teak humidor for his cigars. And there were his boxing trophies, those cheap and tarnished things of nickel and silver plate, mounted in a cabinet of glass that was subtly tinted, I suppose, to give the prizes within a lustre they had always lacked in the gritty impoverishment of life.

There was a gun cabinet, screwed to the rear wall. It was less a display case than a working rack for the placement of rifles and shotguns. My father was skilled in the use of both. Until the Dunblane tragedy and the ensuing legislation, he had also owned and practised with a variety of handguns. Firearms held a deadly glamour for him. Once, on my birthday, he had taken Suzanne and me to Las Vegas to see Ricky Hatton fight for a world title and we spent the morning after the fight at a desert shooting range. My dad got to blat off a few rounds with an M16 and a Kalashnikov, grinning like a kid as the brass jackets from the rounds chinked around his feet and a cardboard target in the shape of a man was obliterated in the near distance. Suzanne learned to load and fire a handgun and proved to be an excellent shot. I was hungover from the after-fight party and bored.

He had told me of his intention to bring a weapon or weapons aboard. He had mentioned what had happened a few years ago to the great Australian yachtsman Peter Blake on the Amazon. We weren’t going to the Amazon, but piracy had made a comeback in recent years on the Atlantic. Clearly, he had meant what he said. There were no guns in the cabinet yet. Looking at it, I was pretty certain that there would be by the time we embarked. It seemed fair enough. He had spent a fortune on the Dark Echo. When we left land, the vessel would be my father’s domain. He clearly felt he had the right and obligation to defend it.

I head a noise, then, a scurry that was explosively loud in the silence of the boat’s interior. It sounded furtive and aggressive at once, and it made me jump suddenly in my own skin. It had come from the galley, I decided. And, of course, it could only be a rat. The sound of it brought me back to myself, to the suspicion that the boat had been preternaturally quiet before the scurrying sound. Where the fuck was the yard security? Alright, it was a small yard leased for the commissioning of a single vessel. But this coastline was not immune to crime and the Dark Echo was a hell of a prize. An opportunistic thief could retire on the grey-market sale of the artwork alone on the boat I was aboard. And where the fuck was Peitersen? He’d overseen a lovely job. Had he even collected what he was owed for it, before he’d bolted?

I heard the rat again. It was large and scavenging and doing Christ knew what damage to the spotless wood and steelwork of the shining new galley. I was not afraid of rats. Nor, though, did I want to get bitten by one of the large seagoing examples. I looked for something to kill it with. There were knives displayed in a case on the wall of my father’s cabin. Their present purpose was ornamental. They were beautiful objects with hilts fashioned from ivory and bone and blades of engraved steel. But they had been tools once and appeared sharp. That said, I didn’t want to be swabbing rodent giblets from the galley floor. I swore under my breath and heard the bold and noisy fucker again, scrabbling a few feet beyond the master cabin door. I looked around. There was a polished mahogany billy club, clipped to the wall but not enclosed behind glass. It looked like the sort of evil weapon with which the Spice Island press gangs subdued reluctant sailors in the Pompey of the early nineteenth century. It was about twelve inches long and its grip was bound in twine, and it swelled at its business end to about the circumference of a tennis ball. I pulled the club free of its clips and hefted it. It was viciously well balanced. I felt a bite of pain, slapping the head of it into my palm, wondering that the pressed sailors ever came round after a blow from this thing. My antique weapon seemed ideal for dealing with vermin. I’d just have to make sure not to miss with it.

I stole out of the master cabin, ducked into the galley and shut the door behind me before snapping on the electric lights, grateful that the battery powering them was charged, grateful I’d remembered the location of the switches. I looked around the bright, polished surfaces. There was nothing there. I hefted the club and looked at the floor and work surfaces for telltale rat droppings. But the place was clean. It was also, once again, entirely silent. There wasn’t even ambient noise now. Outside, the gulls had gone. The sea had receded. I hefted the club in my hand, dropped to my haunches and searched the cupboards and the oven and the refrigerator. But they were empty. Empty, too, were the head-height cupboards flanking the galley above the shiny racks of copper pans and steel utensils. It would have been a very sterile environment in which to discover a rat. There was not a crumb of food aboard the Dark Echo for a rat to eat. If any of the workers had left a half-eaten sandwich from their lunchbox in the galley, I would have seen the cling film or greaseproof paper used to wrap it. And I would have smelled its stale residue. All I could smell was wax polish and a faint, lemony hint of disinfectant. The place was spotless. But I had heard what I had heard.

I progressed through the length of the boat to my own cabin. It was modest compared to my dad’s. But it was still better appointed than any living quarters I had ever spent time in aboard a boat. He’d had a picture of Suzanne and me, taken at one of his summer picnics, blown up and mounted in a rosewood frame and hung on the wall I’d be looking at if I ever used the desk he’d provided me with. My furniture was deeply upholstered in wine-coloured leather and I smiled, thinking I’d have to grow a moustache and wear a potent aftershave to achieve the necessary machismo to sit on any of it. I’d need one of his rifles across my lap. There was a combined radio and CD player and, beside this machine, a pile of CDs of the sort of music my father, or more likely Mrs Simms, knew I liked to listen to. There was the latest Apple laptop, dazzling in its whiteness at the centre of the desk. What there wasn’t, was a scurrying rodent about to have its back broken by my borrowed billy club.

I thought about the sail store. But there was nothing in there for a rat to chew on yet. The sails were not due to arrive until mid-May, a full fortnight distant. There could be items of rigging. But ropes these days were nylon, not hemp, weren’t they? Unless you were aboard the Andromeda. The only sort of rat I knew anything at all about was the sort you read about in tabloid newspapers. These cat-sized monsters would, allegedly, chew their way through anything. But I thought that even a tabloid rat would draw the line at rope spun out of some oil-based synthetic compound. There was no nourishment in nylon.

So I didn’t check the sail store. I checked the shower stall and the lavatory, which flanked the short corridor between my cabin and the door through which you entered it. And I stood very still and listened very carefully for a full minute, standing in the corridor. But I did not check the sail store because there seemed no point. My rodent stowaway had avoided our confrontation by scurrying out of an open porthole, I decided. Several of them were open; I noticed this backtracking for a last check before climbing back up to the deck. On my way through, I closed them all. Doing so would not hinder a determined thief. But it might prevent an adventurous rat from getting aboard and nibbling at the canvas of my father’s pictures. Lastly, before leaving, I slotted the billy club back into its brass display clips.

I vaulted down from the deck of the Dark Echo on to the boards of the boathouse, feeling really indignant about the way she seemed to have been abandoned. It was paradoxical, to say the least. She had been restored to the sort of specification demanded by an Arab sheikh. Yet here she was, at the mercy of any local vandal armed with a can of graffiti paint. It was more than paradoxical to abandon her like this. In fact, it was bloody odd.

There was a man at the gate when I walked out of the boathouse and back towards where I’d parked my car. He was wearing blue uniform trousers and a blue poly-cotton shirt with a flash above the breast pocket that read ‘Security’. He put his hands on his hips and rocked on his heels when he saw me approach, narrowing his eyes. The effect would have been more impressive had he kept his cap and tunic on. But they’d been surrendered already to the rising heat of the late April sun and were draped across his seat next to the gatepost. He was Job Centre security, not the swaggering nightclub sort who supplement pay of five pounds an hour by dealing gear. I felt a bit sorry for him. He was out of shape and the wrong side of forty. His trousers were too tight and shiny with wear at the pockets and crotch. He was the sort of security lippy adolescents give the run around in big supermarkets.

‘What are you doing here?’

Not thieving, obviously. I was carrying nothing, not even my mobile, which I’d left in the glove compartment of the car. He’d worked this out for himself, eventually. I saw it in the way his shoulders relaxed as I got closer to him.

‘My old man owns the boat.’ I looked at my watch. It was just before 10 a.m. ‘Where have you been?’

He looked sheepish, embarrassed. But he said, ‘I’m early. I’m not even properly on till ten.’

So I was overtime. Or I was undertime, if there were such a thing.

‘Prendergast is supposed to be here,’ he said.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Chesney.’

‘Where’s Prendergast?’

But Chesney said nothing. He looked down at his cheap shoes where the hem of his polyester trousers broke over them.

‘My father is a generous man, Mr Chesney. He appreciates a conscientious employee. Above all, though, my father values and rewards loyalty. Where’s Prendergast?’

‘He don’t like doing nights.’ The accent was very local. ‘No one does. So we toss for it. Prendergast called wrong. Got a week of nights. Couldn’t avoid it when Mr Peitersen was here all hours, he’d catch you out. But, well, with Peitersen gone, who wants to be here on his lonesome in the dark, eh?’

‘So you’d have done the same?’

Chesney looked churlish, now. He ground the sole of a shoe into the gravel at the gate like a toddler nailed for some nursery crime. I felt less sorry for him than I had. Stupidity and petulance are an ugly combination.

‘It’s the noises, see, Mr Stallard.’

‘Stannard.’

He nodded towards the boathouse.

‘The rats?’

‘The voices. The laughter. They carry, see. I tolerates it because I have a family to feed. But I don’t like the nights any more than Mickey Prendergast does.’

I nodded. There didn’t seem anything to say, not to Chesney, at least. But he had given me something to think about.

‘Sardonic, the laughter? The tone of it?’

He looked at me like I’d just opened my mouth and spoken Martian to him. I took out my wallet. I always carried cash. It was a habit inculcated in me by my father, who always carried cash because he could never forget the time when he’d had none to carry. I peeled off three twenties and stuffed them into Chesney’s pocket and walked past him through the gate to my car. I’d hinted at a reward when I’d asked him to tell me the truth. He’d done that. I meant to get him sacked and, as he’d said, he had a family to feed. Sixty quid did not seem overly generous compensation.

There were no messages on my mobile. I tried calling my father’s BlackBerry with no success and tossed the phone over my shoulder on to the back seat in exasperation. I was no fonder of my less attractive traits than anyone else. Intellectual snobbery had always been prominent among my long list of obnoxious characteristics. I had dismissed Chesney the timid sentinel as pond life because I hadn’t liked hearing what he said. But whether I liked it or I didn’t, it needed to be considered. My next port of call was the country hotel where my father had put Peitersen up. He was gone from there, too, of course. But at the hotel he might have left the explanatory note he had not left in his boatyard office or aboard the Dark Echo either.

Sardonic laughter. I had heard it myself on my own first terrifying exploration of the boat, in Wagnerian weather on Frank Hadley’s horribly luckless dock. But on the two visits since, at Lepe, I had felt entirely different. It wasn’t so much as though the baleful threat had receded, though. It was more that I was seduced by the Dark Echo herself into ignoring any danger. Suzanne had been so disconcerted by her first exposure to the boat, my second, that she had lied to me and gone to France in a bid to uncover the secrets of the man who’d had her built. Yet I’d been reassured, relieved in the aftermath of the visit we shared.

On the visit just concluded to the Dark Echo, I’d been dazzled by her. I had heard that loud and furtive scurrying aboard and not just rationalised, but trivialised it. This despite the fact that I’d found no trace of the rodent sane thinking insisted was responsible for the sound. It was as though the boat herself lulled and stroked me into a sort of sedated glee. Aboard her, my senses were happily stupefied.

She did not lure me to her. The contamination did not spread that far. Away from her, I felt no great yearning for her. But once I set foot on the Dark Echo, I seemed to fall under her strong and sensual spell.

I had Chesney, in his shiny, pantomime sentry outfit, to thank for this belated insight. As I pulled up outside Peitersen’s picturesque country hotel, it was not a comfortable thought.

Then I had another. What if I had looked in the sail store? I had a sudden and very confident intuition that I would have encountered not a rodent, but Spalding’s pet bull mastiff Toby, stinking and wormy and dead. And panting and eager in its grotesque parody of canine life for the return of his long-lost master. The dog had lurked in the sail store, had gnawed rope there in the cool and the quiet when the weather and swell had made the deck unsafe. I knew it now. I knew it suddenly and with the same absolute certainty insisting that night follows day.

I had no trouble at all in accessing Pietersen’s room. My driving licence established my surname. And there was no Chesneyesque confusion over it. The Stannard name had been the source of much guaranteed income for the duration of Peitersen’s stay in the hotel, because my father had put him up in the best-appointed room in the place. His meals and his room had been paid for in advance until the end of June, the Easter and early summer premiums effortlessly accommodated by my father’s happy largesse. So I was not surprised at the smiles and the opening doors and the all-round obsequiousness. In a microcosmic sort of way, they amounted to the story of my life.

The room, by contrast, offered me nothing. The windows were oppressively leaded and the walls punctuated by bucolic scenes of domestic country routine. The beamed ceiling was so low as to make the space seem cramped, despite its broad width and generous length. Logs sat in the grate of an authentic fire, but the bark was curling on them under a patina of dust. I patted the counterpane on the bed, sniffed at the plumped pillows. It was recently changed and made up, of course, but the bed had a cold, unslept-in look about it. Slowly, the details of the room revealed themselves. There was a TV and DVD combination, discreetly positioned and definitely not dating from the age of squires stretching before pewter jugs of porter after a hard day riding to hounds. There was a power shower in the adjoining bathroom. The bathroom was small. But its dove-white, downy towels were folded across heated rails. On a shelf under the mirror, there were little embossed bottles filled with creams and lotions, the sort hotel guests routinely steal to offset the pain of paying the bill.

Peitersen had paid no bill. And I was somehow sure he had stolen nothing either. I felt a strong certainty that he had never unscrewed the top from one of the pampering bottles on the bathroom shelf. Just as he had never taken a DVD to view from the small library of them under his television. Neither had he enjoyed a drink from the minibar tucked against the wall beside the television. His first-floor window looked out on to the budding leaves of a stately chestnut tree and, beyond it, a lush sweep of descending lawn. I doubted Peitersen had ever so much as noticed the view. I had a strengthening suspicion that he had never slept in the bed.

The fastidiousness of a monk.

Again I searched for a note, but found none.

I sat among the vases of wild flowers and the horse brasses and heavily framed pictures in a window seat in the hotel’s cluttered lobby to drink a cup of coffee. The sun warmed my back through the window. A Polish girl with pretty eyes fussed with her hair behind the reception desk. It was twelve o’clock. My mobile was still on the back seat of my car where I’d thrown it in exasperation earlier. I could hear the drone of a motor mower clipping the grass outside. Everything seemed perfectly normal but I knew that nothing was. I wondered if my father was still off-message in Chichester. I thought of the picture he had framed for me in my cabin aboard his blighted boat and felt like sinking to my knees and praying for his safety. Instead, I drained my cup and went over to where the Polish girl had been joined by a colleague similar enough to her for them to be sisters.

Yes, they had known the guest I described to them. The receptionist with the arresting eyes was called Magda. The other girl, her cousin Marjena, had given Mr Peitersen’s room its daily turn. Marjena’s English, while a hell of a lot better than my Polish, was nothing like as good as that spoken by Magda. I would ideally have liked to take Marjena for a walk in the hotel grounds for the sort of private chat that encourages people to recollect those careless details that can be significant. But Magda – who knew, of course, about the payment arrangements for Peitersen’s stay – did not seem to inhibit her cousin from speaking at all. And, of course, I needed help with translation.

It seemed Peitersen had certain idiosyncracies. Middle-aged and well heeled, most of the guests were yachties or golfers or couples enjoying a romantic break from their regular routine. The hotel was famous for its kitchen. There were two other restaurants, one Italian and one that sounded to me like the Kundan on the Hamble, that the hotel was happy to recommend. Peitersen never ate at any of them. Nor did he ever go to the gastropub a mile down the road.

‘And he did not eat in his room,’ Marjena said.

‘He must have eaten something.’

Marjena looked at the floor and said something incomprehensible.

I looked at Magda.

‘My cousin says Mr Peitersen was starving himself.’

‘Dieting?’

She shook her head. She narrowed her eyes, struggling for the English word. It came to her. ‘Fasting,’ she said.

When I got back to my car the message symbol was flashing on my phone.

‘Martin. You’ve been trying to reach me. Since it isn’t my birthday, and since I have not changed the terms of my will, I’m baffled by the attention. What can you possibly want?’

Under the humour, his voice was rich with contentment. Chichester agreed with him. Now I was going to deliver news that would ruin his day. I hesitated with my thumb over the redial button. How did I know that Peitersen had disappeared? I knew because Suzanne had told me the previous day. And how did I know that he wasn’t really Peitersen at all? I knew because Suzanne had done some digging, about which my father had never been consulted. What would I tell him? I would tell him the unvarnished truth. Killing the messenger was an injustice in which my father habitually indulged. And he might consider Suzanne’s digging a sort of betrayal. But there was no point in lying to him. She had acted out of concern for me. I was motivated only by concern for him. He could be bad-tempered, vindictive, capricious and cruel. He could out-sulk a spoiled four-year-old and he was breathtakingly vain. But he wasn’t stupid. I’d weather the verbal storm and wait for calm to return and, when it did, we would discuss the mysteries of the fraudulent boatbuilder and weigh their implications and try to solve them together.

Motive was the key to it, of course. I knew Suzanne’s and I knew mine right enough. But Peitersen’s motive was obscure and baffling. And my conversation with the Polish girls had thrown up as many questions about him as it had clues. I looked up through the Saab windscreen at the window of the room he had occupied. I could not see inside. Sunlight reflected back from the panes the dappled green of a chestnut tree against a pure blue sky. I took a deep breath and pushed the button on my phone.

He met me that evening in the West End of London at Sheekey’s restaurant after a performance at Covent Garden. His metaphor concerning Hadley’s yard and Wagner had been based on more than rhetoric. My father loved the opera and most particularly the leaden, myth-burdened Germanic stuff. He listened to it a lot at home on a hi-fi system that had cost roughly three times what I paid as the deposit on my Lambeth flat. But you couldn’t really begrudge him the luxuries he’d earned.

He looked tired over dinner, as though some of the glitter had come off him. Maybe his new-old flame had worked him hard between the sheets. But I thought there was a bit more to it than that. Regardless, I didn’t nurse him through what I had to say. I told him all of it. I told him last of all what I had learned from the Polish girls and from Marjena in particular.

‘She should have knocked, but she didn’t. He was almost never there. She doesn’t believe he slept in the bed in his room, just rumpled it from time to time for appearance’s sake. She should have knocked. Instead, she opened the door and surprised him.’

‘And herself.’

‘He was prostrate on the floor with a set of rosary beads in his hands. He was incanting, her cousin said. That was the translation.’

My father smiled at me. ‘America is a nation with more than its share of pious Christians.’

‘He was wearing a hair shirt, for Christ’s sake.’

‘And sometimes their piety knows no bounds.’

‘Magda found his passport.’

‘Disappointing. I thought the Poles were honest.’

‘They were suspicious of him. They had a duty of care to their other guests. The night manager ordered her to do it. The passport was made out in the name of Cardoza. No more his real name than Peitersen was.’

I had told him about Cardoza Associates. I had told him about Martens and Degrue. He had looked mildly intrigued. His volcanic temper had not produced the expected eruption. I had not been able through any of what I told him to shake him out of what seemed to me like a strange sort of detachment. In the end, I lost my own temper.

‘It would take more than Chris fucking Bonington to justify this stuff, Dad. And we haven’t even fucking embarked.’

‘I’d thank you not to use that language with me.’

‘You use it with me. All the time.’

‘Seniority, Martin. There’s a protocol.’

‘Aye, aye, Captain.’

I was frustrated and furious. I think he could tell I was. He raised his eyes for the bill and, as usual with him, that was all it took. A raising of eyebrows in the hurtle and hubbub of a crowded restaurant and the bill was on its way.

‘I’ll get this, Dad.’

He put his hand on mine. ‘Don’t be silly.’

I loved the touch of him. It was too rare between us. I felt my anger start to dissipate. I knew it would leak away from me in the grip of my father’s unexpected tenderness. But I couldn’t let it. The danger seemed too urgent and the portents too great.

‘Tomorrow, Martin,’ he said. He squeezed my hand under his. ‘Tomorrow I shall let you in on a shameful secret. And I expect my doing so might put your troubled mind at rest.’

I picked my father up at 9 a.m. There was no wind and the sky, apart from its criss-cross pattern of vapour trails, was an unsullied blue. It was perfect helicopter weather. So wherever we were going, he felt he needed to be with me, in the seat next to mine, on the journey back. The mood is always lighter in the morning and so, waiting for him, I thought of making a joke about how I should start charging him by the mile, or about how Scandinavian cars were clearly growing on him. But when I saw his face, I decided against it. He looked like he’d been crying. In the bright morning, he looked raw with grief. And for the first time in my life, I thought my father looked older than his years.

He tossed a bag and a topcoat on to the back seat and got in. Then he closed the door on himself and sniffed and sighed. ‘Sleep okay?’

‘Surprisingly well.’

He fastened his seatbelt and took a long breath that caught in his chest.

‘You alright, Dad?’

‘I loved your mother very much.’

True as this statement was, I neither wanted nor needed to hear it. There were other, pressing imperatives. Any mention of my mother and her premature death was hard to take. I had indulged my father’s lingering sense of loss at her passing for a long time, at the expense of my own feelings and unmet craving for comfort and consolation. But now was not the time, surely, for him to talk about the way that Mum was taken from us. Now was not the time.

He sniffed again. ‘Can you find your way to Southend?’

I released the handbrake, eased off the clutch. ‘If that’s where you need to get to.’

He turned to me. ‘Don’t be callous, son. It’s an effortless inclination in the young, I know. But please don’t be callous. Today is going to be difficult enough.’

Callous. In his business life he’d behaved as though he had a monopoly on the word. ‘Cutting the slack’ had been his mantra. Ruining reputations and livelihoods had sometimes been the consequence. He thought I was soft-hearted, and maybe I was. He thought it an advantageous tendency in the priesthood but disastrous in the cut and thrust of commerce, and maybe he was right. But at that moment, pulling away from the kerb, I thought he had a fucking cheek to call me callous. And I thought his bringing up the subject of Mum a cheap and unforgivable tactic of avoidance.

My mother was killed by lung cancer. She filled my thoughts on the drive to Southend. I could not think about her in life without thinking about her death. This was because the manner of her dying made an abject mockery of everything of her that preceded it. Diagnosis came too late for meaningful treatment and she declined rapidly, stupefied by the morphine made necessary by intolerable physical pain. Gaunt and seldom conscious, she slipped away from us four weeks after entering the hospice. The disease had made a frail stranger of her by the time the moment of her death arrived. She had never smoked. She never developed a cough. Persistent fatigue had been the only really serious symptom before the cancer was discovered. She was a writer and occasional broadcaster on the radio who lost the energy to write and, in what became her final broadcasts, sometimes suffered a slight breathlessness.

My mother was a beautiful American woman from San Francisco who filled our lives with light and ended her own in a confused darkness. There was no time to settle her affairs, nor to reconcile herself or those around her. Everything about the illness happened with bewildering speed. When I think of her I think of her laughter and her kindness and her grace. And then I think of her death. She was forty-four years old when death arrived without a shred of dignity in its hurry to claim her.

The blue promise of the London morning disappeared on the A13, about twelve miles from our intended destination not of Southend but of Westcliff-on-Sea, the picturesque little town just to the west of its garish neighbour on the coast. The cloud came and lowered and then the rain began to fall in big drops, splashing audibly on the Saab’s windscreen. My father had brooded throughout the whole journey. Neither of us had spoken much. He’d grunted that we actually wanted Westcliff, but that was it. The pleasantries were behind us. He seemed as lost in his own thoughts as I was in mine. The overcast sky and the rain suited the mood in the car better than the sunshine had. I thought about switching on the radio. But I did not particularly want to risk hearing Paddy McAloon singing about what happens when love breaks down.

He directed me through Westcliffe’s pretty streets. We stopped outside a vacant lot halfway along a row of suburban villas all with neat gardens dripping from precise hedgerows and pruned bushes in the persistent rain. It was odd, the empty space in the row of well-appointed little dwellings. It created an abrupt and somehow melancholy absence.

‘Ever heard of Victor Draper, Martin?’

My father was staring at the breach of soil and rubble between the houses. There were puddles there and the unrelenting rain splashed into them.

‘The name is vaguely familiar.’

‘A medium. He was a medium, a man who claimed to have a clairvoyant gift. He was very successful at about the time of your mother’s death. His column was syndicated in the middlebrow tabloids. He appeared sometimes on television. He wasn’t one of those breakfast TV cranks. He was a cut above the pulp. He was persuasive and respectable. If I remember rightly, he was even the subject once of a BBC Omnibus programme.’

I did remember him. He had been a familiar name until a decade or so ago. He had been the respectable face and fluent public voice of the paranormal. His books had been advertised in the back pages of the Sunday supplements. His pull had been sufficient to fill theatres on public tours. Then he had disappeared. I suppose I had just assumed he had died himself.

My father cleared his throat. ‘When your mother left us, I found it impossible to reconcile myself. My faith should have been strong enough to help me endure. But, God forgive me, it was not.’

‘You went to Victor Draper?’

‘He came to me. He was very convincing and I was half mad with the agony of my loss.’

Our loss, I thought. Her death did not just happen to my father. She was our loss. And she lost more than anyone.

In the seat next to me, in my car in the rain, my father was trembling. This was very difficult for him. He was exposing himself to his son as a fool. ‘When did you realise?’

‘After a couple of months. And around forty thousand pounds.’

‘What gave him away?’

‘Oh, he was very good. He had done his research. He had a formidable memory for trivia. And he was a most gifted mimic. He could modulate the tones of your mother’s voice with uncanny conviction. I really thought it was her words coming out of his mouth when he simulated his trance.’

‘But he made a mistake.’

‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘He made a mistake.’

I’d turned the wipers off when he had begun to speak because their noise was intrusive. Now rain bleared the windscreen. There was no other traffic on the road. There were no pedestrians braving the downpour. I could hear rain drum on the roof of the car. I felt sad and fearful of what was about to be revealed to me.

‘You were not an only child, Martin. You had a younger sister. She was born just before you reached your second birthday and she was very premature. She survived for only a few days.’

I nodded. I had not expected this. I was not prepared for a revelation of this sort. ‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘I’ve never possessed the strength to talk about your sister at all. And your mother kept silent on the subject, I think to spare me from the ordeal of being forced to do so.’

‘What was my sister’s name?’

‘Catherine Ann. Ann for your mother.’

‘And Victor Draper didn’t know.’

‘He lived there,’ my father said, nodding at the empty space between the villas to his left. ‘I had him exposed as a fraud by a team of private detectives. Ruined, I believe he skulked off to Australia. When he was forced to sell his house I bought it myself and had it razed to the ground.’

‘Why have you told me this now?’

‘I didn’t stop with Draper, Martin. I tried to reach your mother through other mediums with reputations just as exalted as Draper’s had been. All were charlatans. I’m telling you this because if it had been possible to contact your mother, I would have succeeded in doing so. There are no such things as ghosts. There is God—’

‘Then there is Satan.’

‘Perhaps. But there is no spectre of Harry Spalding to prowl the boat that used to belong to him. The dead do not mingle with the living. They don’t communicate with us. They live as they did only in our memories, which is where I should have had the good sense and moral courage to allow your mother to rest.’

Catherine Ann. There had been four of us. ‘It’s why you always light four candles. After Mass.’

But he did not reply to that. He did not need to.

Catherine Ann. She would have been thirty or thirty-one now. Roughly the same age as Suzanne.

‘What about Peitersen?’

My father smiled. It was a grim smile. Confession had exhausted him. ‘A crank, which was my first instinct when Hadley showed me his letter. He’s some boat enthusiast who read a stringer’s report on the auction of the Dark Echo, probably on the internet. You’ll remember I gave an interview to a press reporter at the sale. Working on a restoration project of that magnitude and pedigree was probably a dream come true for the man who called himself Jack Peitersen. It was just our good luck that he was competent as well as keen.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘I’m spending tonight aboard the boat, Martin. It’s why I packed an overnight bag. I’d be grateful now if you could take us on to Lepe. You can drive back to London afterwards if you wish. If Suzanne is amenable, you can stay on the boat with me. Or you can spend the night in a hotel. There’s a comfortable room in a very well-appointed hotel of your recent acquaintance that’s paid for until June.’

‘I wish you’d told me about my sister before now.’

‘I’ve arranged a little ceremony for tomorrow at the boatyard that it would be as well for you to attend. You can get down from London in time for it because it won’t take place until about midday. But it would be less arduous for you, travelwise, to stay.’

‘I wish you had told me about my sister, Dad.’

‘I do, too, son. I wish it with all my heart.’

We stayed that night aboard the Dark Echo. We ate dinner first at Peitersen’s hotel and I drank steadily throughout the meal. The kitchen there no doubt justified its excellent reputation. But the food I ate was ashes in my mouth after my father’s earlier revelations. I was tired, too. It took almost three hours to drive the 160-odd miles from Westcliff to Lepe. Altogether that day I had been behind the wheel for a total of around five hours. I was in no fit state to drive after dinner and we had to leave the car and take a minicab back to the boatyard. I think that my father also drank too much. Alcohol is less than ideal as an anaesthetic. It leaves you with a sore head and a dry mouth and it depresses you. But it’s easily accessible and doesn’t harbour any nasty surprises. I’d had enough of nasty surprises for one day and craved and indulged, over dinner, the easy numbness of drink.

I couldn’t have recalled what I ordered on surrendering the menu to our smiling waiter with the words just out of my mouth. And our conversation over dinner was a dim, inconsequential blur. My father prattled about navigation and communication systems and networks. He talked about patching through and piggybacking and other telecoms arcanery. I thought about the nursery my parents would have decorated and furnished for my lost sister, Catherine Ann. I thought about her painted crib. I pictured the toys they would have bought and the tiny items of clothing and the dreams for her they must have cherished together. I wondered how much the keeping of the secret of her death had contributed to the cancer that had grown and flourished in my mother’s chest and killed her. In the poignant secrecy between my parents of Catherine Ann, I thought I understood something of what had driven my mother to an early death. And I thought I understood something, too, of what had driven my father through his subsequent life. But perhaps these insights were owed only to the illusory clarity of drink.

I did not dream that night in my cabin aboard my father’s boat. Or if I did, I did not remember the dream. I slept soundly in a berth so comfortable it bordered on the luxurious. My quarters on the Dark Echo made a quaint joke of conditions aboard the Andromeda. I woke once in the night that I remember, just to take a swallow from the bottle of Hildon water by my bunk that I had scrounged from the hotel. We’d taken bottles of water and toothbrushes and fresh towels. The hotel treated my father in the way he was always treated; like some visiting potentate. And in the morning, when I knocked on his cabin door and he admitted me, that’s what he looked like, too. He looked glamorous again and vibrant. He had recovered himself. With a fresh surge of grief for the sister I had never known, I knew then standing in his cabin aboard his boat, that my dad would never address the subject of his daughter willingly again.

We left the yard for breakfast at the hotel at about a quarter to eight. As we got into the car I saw a pair of transit vans pull up at the gate. One was blue and had the name of a security firm stencilled on its side in yellow capitals with a logo underneath of a portcullis wreathed in barbed wire. Three men got out of it, two from the cab and one from the rear with a German shepherd on a short chain lead. The three men were all well built and unsmiling and dressed in smart black tunics.

‘Your Chesney anecdote alarmed me,’ my father said. ‘I’ve taken fresh precautions.’

The second van contained six men wearing a mixture of overalls or jeans with chambray shirts and puffa jackets. One among them, I assumed, was their foreman and showed some papers to the first group. They stood a little nervously while the dog was allowed to sniff at each man and learn his scent. Then the gate was opened and, carrying their boxes of tools, they approached the boatshed.

‘We need to be back here by noon,’ my father said. It gave us plenty of time. ‘From now on, Martin, the only sardonic laughter you will be hearing around the Dark Echo will be mine.’

An item of mail was brought to our table at breakfast. It was carried on a silver salver by Marjena, who gave a little bow of her head on delivering it to my father. It was a sealed A3-sized Manila envelope and his name and the address of the hotel were written on it in a careful hand. The writing reminded me of the column of figures I’d seen on the desk blotter in Peitersen’s office. Some of the letters had a similar character, as though described by the nib of the same ink pen. My father took the letter and thanked the girl and then held it out to me across the tabletop.

‘Open it, Martin.’

I used the knife from my side plate. Before I did so I examined the postmark. It was a bit blurred and indistinct, but the letter had been sorted at the big central office at Mount Pleasant in London. When I slit the envelope, a small collection of banker’s drafts slid out on to the tablecloth. I knew what they were. They were the monthly payments my father had been making to Peitersen. And they had remained uncashed. He had used the expenses account for the payment of other men and he had bought materials from that fund, too – I had seen the invoices at the yard. But he had taken nothing for himself. I opened the envelope with my thumb and saw that there was a note in it, still stuck at its edge to the gum that had closed the corner of the flap. I freed and unfolded the note and read it aloud.

She’s ready, Magnus. You could tinker and fret over her for ever, but she’s ready. Rig the sails when they arrive. It’s a job a vessel’s master should oversee himself. Give her a week’s sea trials off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. Or take her across the Irish Sea to Dublin and back. It will take a voyage of that nature to determine whether you and the boy are ready for her. But she’s ready for you, Magnus. And I wish you God Speed aboard her.

The note was not signed. My father raised his eyebrows and took it from me and read it himself. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket. He reached for the banker’s drafts and aligned them in his hands with a shuffle, then tore them in half and dropped them on to the table. He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and signalled by rising from his chair that it was time for us to leave.

His helicopter had arrived by the time we got back to the boatyard. It sat on the hard sand from which the early tide had retreated with Tom, my father’s regular pilot, smoking one of his little brown cheroots and lounging in his aviator glasses at its side. I did not have long to wonder why they were there. Monsignor Delaunay stood at the edge of the sea in his Mass robes, his bright stole flapping in the breeze, his biretta secured to his head by the finger of a raised hand as he looked out over the Solent towards Cowes. It had been better than a decade since I’d seen my favourite seminary Jesuit last, but I recognised immediately the huge neck, the incongruous power in his Olympian shoulders and back. He must have sensed our arrival, because he turned and then saw and approached us. And I saw that God, or Providence, had been good to him in the intervening years. He was greyer at the temples, thicker about the jowls, perhaps. But he had not really aged very much.

‘Martin!’ he said, and he opened his arms and embraced me, lifting me clean off the sand. ‘I’ve come to bless your father’s boat,’ he said.

But I had guessed that for myself.

‘Have you seen her, Monsignor?’

‘I have, Martin. And she is a work of art.’

‘Speaking of which, there is one of your ancestor’s paintings aboard her.’

He laughed. It was a real pleasure for me to see him. Much of my nineteen months in Northumberland had been purgatory. All the best bits, in my memory of that time, involved this formidable priest. ‘My claim to kinship with that particular Delaunay is a mite tenuous,’ he said.

He duly blessed the boat. This simple service passed without incident. He murmured the liturgy and sprayed the holy water with the flick of a brush. I assisted by holding the ornate silver vessel into which he dipped the bristles. He did it thoroughly. Even the sail store received a sprinkle. When I opened it, it contained no wormy canine odour, no trace of Spalding’s phantom dog. Afterwards, he went to the building I still thought of as Peitersen’s office and changed into the suit he must have worn on the outward journey from the seminary. He emerged with an old-fashioned canvas grip in his hand. It contained his vestments and his vial of holy water. It had been a long way to come and whatever my father’s powers of persuasion, the trip had been made at very short notice. I was touched.

My father suggested a pub along the coast that did an excellent lunch. They also kept a comprehensive, even esoteric range of single malts. He had remembered that Monsignor Delaunay was partial to a whisky. We should set off in a few minutes, he said. It would be the perfect preparation for the Monsignor’s return flight. Then he strode off across the sand to say something to Tom, whose own lunch lay in a refrigerated bag aboard the aircraft.

‘It’s very good to see you, Martin.’

‘And marvellous to see you, Monsignor.’

He studied me. He still had a smile on his face. But he knew me, knew the workings of my mind and conscience. For a year and a half, he had been my confessor. I doubted there was a living soul apart from Suzanne and my father who knew me better. And my father’s insight into my character was probably obscured somewhat by my almost constant efforts to impress him. Of all the men I’d met, perhaps Monsignor Delaunay knew my true nature best.

He gestured back towards the boathouse. ‘When you return from this adventure, you might think about marriage and a family, my lad.’

I blushed. I was living in sin. Evidently he knew I was.

‘It’ll be the making of you. It will fulfil the woman you love. And it will provide your father with more pleasure than anything, once he gets this Conradian adventure accomplished and out of his system.’

I said nothing to that. I looked down at the drying sand as the wind gently scoured the pattern of tidal retreat from its surface. Then I looked back up again. The monsignor was still smiling. In the unforgiving light on the beach, his teeth were tea-stained. He would play the whisky priest for an hour in the pub for my father. But what he really drank was tea. And what he was really about was faith and penance and conversion. He had never in his life held a woman to him in the dark part of the night for consolation. And he never would.

‘The boat is benign, Martin. She’s a gorgeous toy, fashioned from wood and brass and steel. She’s an extravagance, a rich man’s indulgence. But your father is a great and compassionate giver to good causes. And a boat is only a boat. Retain sufficient of your faith to know that such constructions cannot be cursed. And now she is blessed. Enjoy your voyage. Delight in your father’s company. I will pray you come home safe and sound.’

It was as much as he could say. We were going to try to cross the Atlantic in a vessel built ninety years ago. He could neither guarantee our success nor our safety. On the wilderness of the water, at the mercy of the tempest, that was God’s responsibility and choice. He said he would pray for us. He promised it.

I wonder now was he ever telling me the truth about anything.

The sails duly arrived during the following week. They were Lee sails from Hong Kong and they were made from Japanese Dacron. We could have gone for the purist approach, done an Andromeda by rigging her with authentic canvas. But canvas tears in storms and, unless you have someone aboard with the skills to repair sails, it isn’t worth the risk. The modern alternatives are easier to haul, altogether tougher, and they dry out quicker, too.

My father suffered no purist agonies over the Dacron sails in the way he had over the engine. But the sails were ordered after the engine and, I think, as the date of planned departure drew nearer, his natural pragmatism came more into play. He was a risk-taker, but not compulsively so. The demands and challenges of the voyage were daunting enough. There was no debate either over our auto-steer equipment. It was electronic and dependent for its intelligence on computer chips. You plotted your course and the boat followed it. In the event of strong currents or shifts in wind direction, it was self-correcting. Essentially, it meant that we could both sleep at night, at least for a few overlapping hours. It meant that we could eat dinner together. The alternative was for one of us to be a permanent slave to the wheel. Captain Straub might frown at the employment of such technology. But when his schooner took to the seas, it did so with a crew numbering a minimum of six, not two.

I still worried about Peitersen. With the boat snug in the fitting-out berth, her head rigger was moved to abseil down from the top of the mainmast and say to me that she was as punctilious a restoration job as he had ever seen. I’d no grounds to argue with his expert judgement. But it nagged at me that Peitersen had taken no payment for the job. Regardless of his bogus identity, if the work was honestly carried out, surely he had deserved some kind of recompense for doing it so well? Jack Peitersen’s taking no payment seemed to me to be every bit as symbolic as Frank Hadley’s superstitious refusal to say out loud the Dark Echo’s name. I did not know the significance of it. But I had an uneasy feeling that I might one day find out.

Our voyage, intended to take us to Dublin and back, was little short of a triumph. We caught the Celtic Sea in a calm and gentle disposition. So uneventful was the voyage generally, that when we anchored in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, my father suggested an ambitious extra leg to the trip. At dawn the following morning we swung north out of the harbour and set a north-easterly course. We hugged the Irish coast as far as the North Channel and continued north until we passed Rathlin Island, taking us out into the Atlantic, into the storm latitudes. Once out far enough we turned west, for Erris Head. And then we sailed a southerly course all the way along the West Coast of Ireland, swinging homeward only when we reached Mizen Head and Cape Clear.

We were gone five days rather than the two originally intended. I called Suzanne to warn her about the change in plan. She sounded strange, different. It could have been an atmospheric thing affecting my mobile. But I don’t think it was. I think it was frustration. I knew that she had come to loathe the whole Dark Echo enterprise.

The most noteworthy thing about that maiden voyage was a dream I had aboard. When we moored at Dun Laoghaire I went ashore and walked to Sandycove for a swim at the Forty Foot in the approaching twilight. My father stayed aboard. He and my mother had honeymooned in Dublin and I think going ashore would have reminded him too vividly and made him melancholy.

I dreamed of Harry Spalding and Michael Collins. They were both uniformed, resplendent in their respective uniforms, standing on the rocks at sun-up above the Forty Foot. Light, reflected off the water below the crag on which they stood, glimmered on their brass buttons and belt buckles and caressed the polished leather of their boots. Neither man had employed a second. And there was no arbiter there to officiate and no doctor with a black surgical bag. They were alone. But they were there, I knew, to fight a duel. I could see that the protocol was to be strictly observed. Collins whistled with nonchalant composure as he screwed the stock on to his Parabellum pistol. Spalding grinned at him as he loaded the big Colt pistol carried in the holster on his Sam Browne belt. Then they were ready. They cocked their respective weapons. I could see their breath on the frozen air as the pair of them stood in profile, facing one another. It was winter again in my dream of the Forty Foot. And ghosts breathed air like the living. The crash of their pistol reports woke me before I could see whose honour was satisfied, whose satisfaction gained in this strange, parodic conflict.

Suzanne turned down flat my suggestion of a romantic dinner at a good restaurant on the eve of my departure for America. She said that it was too formal a farewell altogether and might bring bad luck on the voyage. Better just to go to the Windmill for a drink after our usual supper, she said. And this surprised me. I had not appreciated that she had any serious faith in luck, good or bad. I had assumed she was not in the slightest superstitious. She always struck me as a black and white sort of person, drawn to certainty, repelled by any kind of ambiguity. But then, nobody really knows anyone as well as we like to think we do. It’s one of our human failings to assume we know a person intimately. It gives us the confidence and security with them that we naturally crave. And the more we value their presence in our lives, the more inclined we are, I think, to this venal little sin of self-deception.

Anyway, to the Windmill we went, where the conversation was stilted and the silences charged. I think she wanted to say something to me, but whatever it was remained unsaid. We stuck with the reassurance of platitudes. I complimented her on the Collins series. The second episode had been shown by then. The critical reaction had been overwhelmingly positive. But maybe that was the wrong thing to mention, because her freelance contract at the BBC would be up in a few weeks and she had just been told it was not going to be renewed. The producer of the Collins series was an unforgiving man when it came to a grudge and his contribution to her regular three-monthly review had been a spiteful assessment that clinched the outcome.

What we mainly did that night was sit in silence, occasionally sip at our drinks and listen to Marvin Gaye, Billy Paul and the like sing their maudlin 1970s soul ballads while I searched for the inspiration of something consolatory to say and, I suppose, she longed for the consolation of a cigarette.

We did not make love that night. And this is something that I very bitterly regret. I was always aroused at the tremble of the mattress springs when Suzanne slipped her lithe, lovely body under the duvet. That night was no exception. But there seemed some obstacle between us and it seemed both complex and impenetrable. To my shame and eternal disappointment with myself, I feigned sleep until sleep finally came, leaving me with the convenient rush of the morning and barely time for a kiss before departure. And the thing was, I loved her so much. And the thing is, I still do and will die loving her.

We set out, my father and I, aboard the Dark Echo from Southampton Harbour. There was no fanfare. There was no weeping at the quayside, and no scarves fluttered as we hauled anchor and cast off. Plymouth might have been a more appropriate point of departure, it occurred to me, since my father had once compared himself to Drake. Plymouth was nearer our destination. But the comparison had not really been very serious. I watched the quay shrink in our wake with my father at the wheel and our efficient little engine propelling us through the thick maritime traffic towards open water. Then I thought I saw someone standing, as though watching us. It was a diminishing and solitary figure with a pale, still face under a head of wind-blown, strawberry curls. Frowning, with my father fully occupied at the wheel, I turned from the stern and went to his cabin and took the telescope from his desk. I clattered back up the companionway, drew the telescope and trained it on the still, small figure on the dock. And he raised his head as though looking straight back at me. It was the man we had called Peitersen, a priest’s collar above the black of his soutane, his hair blowing, freed of its woolen watch cap, in the wind at the edge of the sea.

It’s said that human beings have no memory for pain. I think it might be similarly true that we have no memory for fear. My fear of the Dark Echo had become remote from me by the time we embarked upon our transatlantic voyage. It had been to do with the winter, in my mind. And it was the summer by the time we finally cast off and left land behind. It was the time in the world of light and warmth. There had been signs still that things were not altogether right with the boat and with our ambitions aboard her. There had been Peitersen’s enigma and Suzanne’s suspicion and hostility. But, as I say, I think our memory for fear is like our memory for pain. We progress from timid to bold without thought for survival or sanity in our greed to live and enjoy sensation and adventure to the full.