Dark Echo

Eight

The seminary was a vast neo-Gothic pile built from granite on the crags topping cliffs at the edge of the sea. Approaching it in her hire car along a road that twisted as it rose, Suzanne thought the place utterly forbidding. The weather did not help. It was late afternoon, but gloomy enough for her lights. Her headlamps picked out white and spectral bits of scrub and scree in a desolate landscape. Everything seemed contrived to diminish the scale of the merely human. The sky above the turrets of the building was wide and angry with cloud. She thought that Martin’s short-lived vocation must have been very powerful at its outset. This was the least inviting place to which she had ever come. You would need to be resolute in your choice of a life serving God to think of living here.

Cars were directed to an area at the left flank of the seminary, overlooking the sea. The ground here was flattened and surfaced with cinders. She got out and walked to the cliff edge. The sea was turbulent, wind-whipped, its white caps ominous as they shivered into being and then slid away to nothing again on the surface of the black water. There were no ordinary cars parked alongside hers. The three other vehicles in the car park were all of a utilitarian character. There was an old Jeep and two Land Rovers. They had seen a lot of mileage. One of the Land Rovers had a trailer attached with a tarpaulin over it.

Lights dotted the building as she approached. But most of its windows were dark in the gloom. Some of the lights flickered, as though from candle flames. Most of them were yellow. But the effect was remote rather than cosy, lights in narrow arches and window slits doing nothing to illuminate or brighten generally the huge warren of stone. Suzanne glanced at her watch. It was still only just before five. She was punctual. The calendar was approaching the longest day. It would not get dark for almost five more hours. But it felt like dusk. As she got to the main entrance, rain began to splash from the sky in cold and heavy drops.

Delaunay received her in his office. It was far less austere a place than she had expected, passing though the grim corridors and along the enclosed stone staircases that led to it. And she herself was led. She would never have got there if she’d been merely directed to where she was eventually taken. The seminary was a labyrinth. In its chilly vaults, she thought she understood better one or two of the aspects of Martin’s character that had remained locked away throughout their relationship. This place would have appealed to the side of him given to melancholy and silence. And his secrecy, too. The part of Martin that was closed to her would find something attractive about this great Catholic tomb hewn for the living.

But Delaunay’s room was panelled in wood and enjoyed plush upholstery. There were paintings on his walls far too handsomely framed to be mere reproductions. There was a rich smell of leather from the bindings of the many books on his shelves. There was a laptop computer at the centre of his desk and he had a laser printer and a hands-free phone there, too. But the impression was still overwhelmingly of the past. Images of Christ crucified and dying under his crown of thorns had once been common throughout the Christian world. In the early twenty-first century, that was no longer the case. But there were several such stark reminders of God’s sacrifice of his son for mankind in Delaunay’s place of work and, Suzanne supposed, his place of prayer and contemplation. Altogether, it looked like a chamber from a more august and pious time.

He thanked the pale novice who had brought her there and then shook her formally by the hand. He was, as Martin had said, enormous. Her hand was completely enveloped in the grip of his, and his arms inside his soutane were as broad and dense-looking as those of a shot-putter or a power-lifter. He had not acquired muscles like these in the gym. She was certain of that. He was one of those men born strong, his future muscular power determined even as he grew from something tiny in his mother’s womb. The word for what he possessed physically was almost archaic, Suzanne thought. But it was accurate. And it was ‘might’. Monsignor Delaunay was mighty. His handshake, though, was gentle. And in his demeanour he seemed almost abashed.

There was a leather sofa at the opposite end of his room from where his desk was placed, and it was to this that he guided her. He took her coat and hung it on a corner stand. He gestured for her to sit. But he did not sit himself. He offered to have tea or coffee fetched, but she declined both. He offered water and, when she nodded acceptance, poured her a glass from a carafe on a small circular table. Then he stood before her with his hands clasped behind his back. She sipped from her glass. The water was very cold. She wondered was it drawn from a well – they might have their own. It had not come from a bottle left to stagnate for a month under fluorescents.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’

‘When I tell you what I have to tell you, you’ll agree it was the very least I could do.’

She sipped water, wondering how bad this could be. She had left her cigarettes in the glove compartment of the car. Then again, you weren’t allowed to smoke in church. And she was unacquainted with the protocol. Everything here might be a church, the way that embassies shared the status of sovereign states.

‘May I call you Suzanne?’

‘Of course you may, Monsignor Delaunay. I’d like you to. And I’d like you to tell me the truth about the man who masqueraded as Peitersen.’

‘He is one of us, Suzanne.’

‘A representative of the Catholic Church?’

‘A priest.’

‘He did not seem very much like a priest.’

‘Nor was he meant to.’

‘For example, he really does know about boats.’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘I might take that cup of coffee off you.’

‘You must feel free to smoke.’

‘Damn. I mean, darn. I left them in the car.’

Delaunay smiled. ‘It may shock you to learn that there are priests who indulge that vice, Suzanne. What I mean is, I can probably cadge you a pack of Marlboro Lights.’

Peitersen, whose real name was Sean McIntyre, was a Boston Irishman who never knowingly entertained a religious thought until he was forty-five years old. His family business was building fishing boats. The business went back five generations. He broke with tradition and began building racing yachts after racing them himself as a teenager and realising that his own makeshift improvements to the basic design made any yacht he raced both significantly faster and easier to handle, too.

McIntyre Marine prospered. Sean celebrated two decades of business success by buying a cruiser as a fortieth birthday present for himself. When the cruiser foundered a week later on a reef off the Bahamas, Sean’s wife and fourteen-year-old son were aboard and Sean, piloting, had drunk the best part of a pint of white rum. His wife and boy drowned. Sean was picked up alive. He’d been in the water eighteen hours and was delirious but, by that time, sober. He began his training for the priesthood a month later.

‘Why did he pretend to be Peitersen?’ Suzanne said.

‘Because we told him he should,’ Delaunay said, who was still meeting her eyes, she thought, only from supreme effort of will.

‘Because we told him he should. As penance.’

‘I think you had better explain, Monsignor.’

Delaunay was at the window. Its shape was arched and its glass heavily leaded. It did not let in much light. It was one of a row of four that embellished the exterior wall of the chamber. Even collectively they did not admit much light. But then the weather outside was foul. Though the windows were all tightly closed against it, Suzanne could hear the rain hurled against the panes.

‘Early in the winter of 1918 an infantry captain called Harry Spalding looted something very valuable from Rouen cathedral. We know this because one of the men charged to protect this object survived the raid.’

‘What did he take?’

‘Something brought out of Palestine in the First Crusade. An item taken to France lest it be sold by Rome for influence with kings during the great Papal Schism. This artefact is among the most important relics in the entire history of the Church. And Spalding was successful in stealing it.’

‘For profit?’

‘For power. For the power its desecration would give him with the great adversary we have faced since the Fall. That was why he stole it.’

‘And you thought McIntyre, masquerading as Peitersen, might find it aboard the Dark Echo?’

Delaunay smiled. ‘You’re very bright, Suzanne.’

‘No, I’m not. Because actually, I’m very confused. If it was that valuable to you, Cardoza Associates would have won their pissing contest at Bullen and Clore with Magnus Stannard.’

Delaunay turned to the window and the rain.

‘I’m sorry, Monsignor. I’m sorry for the profanity.’

He spoke with his back to her. His voice was grave. ‘We did win the pissing contest. With respect to Magnus Stannard, the Vatican has very deep pockets. But the auctioneer was incompetent, or he was drunk. And the gavel came down early.’

‘Who are Martens and Degrue?’

‘You’ve heard of the Jericho Club?’

‘Recently, yes.’

‘They are the continuation of the Jericho Club by other means. Or, perhaps more accurately, under another name, because the means remain the same.’

‘Why are you choosing to tell me all this now?’

He turned back to her. ‘None of this was known to me until a few days ago. None of it. Martin told me about Peitersen over lunch on the day that I blessed the Dark Echo at Magnus Stannard’s request. Magnus was convinced he was merely some kind of crank. Then Martin mentioned Spalding and I remembered only that the name had vague, uncomfortable associations. I made some enquiries of my own among knowledgeable people in Rome. And I was told what I have told you.’

‘Weren’t you sworn to secrecy?’ Suzanne had considered that the sort of question she would never have asked without her tongue firmly in her cheek. She had been wrong.

‘I was pledged to silence on the subject. I have chosen to break that pledge.’

‘Why?’

‘Father McIntyre did not find what he was looking for aboard Harry Spalding’s boat. He is convinced it is not there. But Martens and Degrue may think it is. These people are not beyond an act of piracy.’

Suzanne thought about what she was hearing. ‘When you blessed the boat, Monsignor, did you think it benign?’

Delaunay smiled, looking at the floor. Then he looked at her. He raised an arm and tapped at the window with his knuckles. His fist was enormous. The impact thudded dully in the silence of his chamber. ‘The sea down on the shore outside our refuge here is sometimes benign. And sometimes it rages. Its power waxes and wanes. At the time I was aboard her, at least, the Dark Echo was no threat to anyone.’

‘I cannot believe you let them go.’

‘I knew about none of this until after their departure. I had not set eyes on Martin for a decade. Magnus called me out of the blue.’

Suzanne smiled. ‘Come, Monsignor. Does anybody ever really do anything entirely out of the blue?’

‘Now is not the time for theological debate,’ Delaunay said. ‘We are not here to discuss predestination. I have broken a vow in order to tell you what I have.’

‘Because I called you. Out of the blue.’

‘I was concerned for them on their departure. My concern for them has only increased since learning what I have since then. I would have called you, Suzanne. I was resolved to. I would have called you, had you not called me first.’

And this, she believed.

She did the calculation in her mind. They would be three, perhaps four hundred miles beyond the West Coast of Ireland. And they would be heading directly west, if they were on their charted course. And Delaunay had told her nothing that would make Magnus Stannard turn back. Quite the opposite, since McIntyre had established that Spalding’s desecrated relic was not aboard the Dark Echo. Good luck to them, she thought Magnus might remark, warned of Martens and Degrue’s potential piracy. He had guns aboard, Martin had told her. And he was expert in their use. He was a man capable of such hard-headed belligerence that he would probably relish the action if pirates tried to board.

She rose to go.

‘I don’t think it wise for you to leave here tonight.’

‘You have facilities for female guests?’

‘We have facilities for any guest of our choosing.’

Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just after seven in the evening. Outside, the rain fell unrelentingly from a sky sullen with cloud. She had booked a room at an inn just outside the village of Holburn. It was a drive of around eight miles. It had looked very cosy in the pictures on the website. She had travelled most of the day to get here and was tired. She wanted an early night and an early start.

‘Why don’t you think it wise for me to leave?’

‘An intuition,’ Delaunay said. ‘It might be more circumspect to wait until morning. You will be comfortable here.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ she said.

‘As you please.’ He got her coat from the stand and helped her into it. Then he guided her out the way she had come. They were both silent on the walk back through the dim, stone-flagged corridors and staircases of the seminary. But, to Suzanne’s mind at least, the silence was a comfortable one. Everything necessary had been said between them. She found herself liking Monsignor Delaunay despite the disturbing implications of the things he had told her. He had broken a vow in order to impart the information. He had chosen to sin out of friendship and loyalty and the instinct to protect. She suspected that he loved Martin. She thought that if it were not for his vocation, he would have made a very different kind of father than the one Magnus Stannard was. His strength, his might, was the key to him. He was mighty, so he could express his tenderness without fear of being considered weak. As a priest, of course, he should not have cared about whether or not his character impressed people. But she suspected that he did. He was possessed of enormous strength. His great weakness was his vanity.

She ran from the shelter of the seminary doorway, using her coat above her head as a hood. The rain sang a shrill note through the cinders under her feet in the car park. It felt more like October than June on the cliff top, in the exposure to the sea. She shivered, unlocking the car door, reminded of the capricious nature of the sea by its fury now, boiling on the rocks beneath her. And she wondered, as she kept on wondering, how Martin and his father were doing aboard the boat. She did not think the Dark Echo intrinsically evil. But her first master had been. Harry Spalding had been evil and corrupt and had practised dark magic since his boyhood. Was evil contagious? Could malevolence seep into the timbers of an old racing vessel?

Despite knowing what she did about the Waltrow brothers’ mystery and the death of Gubby Tench, Suzanne did not think that it could. But there was danger. She’d felt it in the barn in France. She had been warned about it by her ghost. With her car door unlocked, staring at tussocks of grass on the cliff edge at the brink of the void, she realised where her logic led. The baleful influence of Harry Spalding persisted because the stolen relic remained an object of desecration.

It made her wonder if Spalding had ever really died.

It was 7.20 p.m. when she turned the key in the ignition. That was still early in England on a June evening. But the weather on the Northumberland coast was so bleak and gloomy that she felt obliged out of caution to switch on her lights. She drove carefully, but saw no oncoming traffic on the road that led to the village and to her hot date with a lamb casserole and a decent glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. At some point, as it travelled inland, the road became tree-lined. A gust of wind soughed through branches and leaves and dumped rain from trees on the windscreen. Reflexively, Suzanne switched on the wipers. And switched on the radio.

The volume was so great that Paddy McAloon’s croon was a bellowing roar as ‘When Love Breaks Down’ burst out of the speakers. She leant forward against the restraint of her seatbelt to switch it off and the windscreen imploded in stinging fragments of shatterproof glass as the car halted and the roof bulged inward. Suzanne looked up at the thick shape of the fallen trunk in the thin steel above her. She heard the rasping strain of metal and knew she would be crushed and die here.

She snapped the seatbelt off and slithered down to the footwell to try to hide and make herself small and safe as the interior of the car continued to diminish under the weight of the tree trunk crushing it. Suddenly she heard the rent of metal on the passenger side. She glanced over and saw two huge hands pulling at the jammed door through foliage over the lower edge of the window. Blood spilled blackly down the door interior from the palms as glass still embedded in the sill bit into them. The thick fingers whitened with strain and the door was torn from its hinges and lock as Delaunay’s head intruded, wide-eyed. He reached for her and she was jerked like a strung puppet out of the car as it folded in on itself like something deflating under the burden of the fallen tree.

Delaunay half dragged and half carried Suzanne through the pelting rain back along the road. He lifted her into the passenger seat of his Land Rover as she tried to regain her breath and composure. He unscrewed the lid from a spirits flask and offered it to her. She was alert enough to notice that he held the flask by the tips of his fingers so the blood from his palms would not smear it. She took the flask and drank. It was whisky and its warmth and strength were very welcome.

‘You followed me.’

‘A precaution.’ His eyes were looking down the road, where the cabin of her hire car was now flat to its axle with the weight of the fallen tree. One of the rear tyres had punctured. Oil or petrol was leaking out of the vehicle in a rainbow stain on the road. The colours were subdued in the absence of real summer light.

‘You tried to warn me.’

‘An intuition.’

‘I think that Harry Spalding never died.’

Delaunay stopped. After offering her the drink, he had torn a cloth fetched from the back of the Land Rover into strips and was bandaging his hands with them. He leaned forward, plucked the flask from her grip and took a couple of hefty swallows before giving it back. He was wearing a cagoule over his soutane. The hood was down. His hair was plastered to his dripping head. When he had thrust that head through the branches and leaves of the fallen tree at the car window, he had reminded her of one of those pagan pub signs depicting the Green Man. She had thought he was a demon, not a priest.

‘I owe you my life.’

She was saying everything, she knew. And she knew it was the shock making her do so. Delaunay merely nodded and blinked. He got behind the wheel of the Land Rover and turned it, spraying through the surface water on the road, back towards the seminary.

Because she was trying to avoid the implications of what had just occurred, Suzanne spent the short journey back wondering what the seminary’s facilities to suit every guest were going to be like. The women’s were bound to be different from the men’s. She imagined a bed chamber built for one of those wan Pre-Raphaelite beauties from the paintings of Millais and Arthur Hughes. There would be tapestries and stained glass and the bed would be heavily canopied. Her well water would reside in a silver chalice. Should she require the diversion of music, she would have to learn the harp and play the one standing in the corner. Or she could take the lute down from the wall.

The shock and the giddiness it provoked did not subside in Suzanne until she had eaten the really excellent beef stew they provided her with in what amounted to a comfortably furnished, self-contained flat. There was wine with the food, along with bread so good she assumed it had been baked in the seminary kitchens that morning. Her sitting room was equipped with satellite TV and a desktop computer with internet access. There was only one clue as to her actual location. A large crucifix hung on the sitting-room wall. A bronze Christ writhed, nailed through his hands and feet to a hardwood cross.

But she was glad of that. As calm and normality returned to her, she was glad of the fact of where she was and the potent reminder of it up there on the wall. When she went to bed and turned out the lights, she knew she would be grateful for the reassurance of the holy fortress surrounding her.

‘You’ll lose nothing by leaving in the morning, in the daylight,’ Delaunay had said.

‘I owe you my life,’ she repeated.

‘It’s to God you owe your life,’ he said. ‘But thank you anyway, Suzanne. I’m a vain enough man to accept any compliment going.’

She laughed. But she had known that about him.

‘Where do you intend to go? You’re going after Spalding, aren’t you? You’re undeterred.’

Suzanne nodded.

‘I tried telephoning them. I wanted to appeal to their good sense and urge them to return.’

‘They won’t,’ she said.

‘I couldn’t get through. We’ve a satellite phone, but I could not get through on that either.’

‘I’m going to Southport, Monsignor Delaunay. He settled there for a while. He must have had a reason. Like you, I sometimes have intuitions. You’re right. I’m going after him. I can’t just do nothing. I’d go mad.’

‘Then for God’s sake take the train.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve no choice. My hire care isn’t up to the journey.’

Delaunay waved an imaginary irritant away. His hands were still bandaged, blood in dried clots and stains on the fabric. ‘I’ll talk to the hire car people. They’ll believe a priest. They might call you for confirmation and send you papers to sign, but I’ll deal with it here. And I’ll have one of the lads drive you to the station in the morning.’

‘My travel bag is still in the boot. My laptop’s in the bag.’

‘I’ll have one of the lads go and fetch it now. Novices live for the opportunity to do someone a good turn.’ He winked.

She hugged him. She had not known she was going to do it until it was done. ‘There,’ she said.

He held her head between his hands and kissed her forehead. ‘There,’ he said.

In the flat in the seminary, Suzanne turned the computer on in the drowsy preamble to going to bed. She logged on to the web and accessed the BBC news homepage and saw an item about storms raging across the North-East of England. It was only then, with a start, that she realised neither she nor Delaunay had even for a moment indulged the notion that what had happened to her earlier had been an accident. But trees fell in tempests, didn’t they? And some of them fell on cars. She, of course, had heard the song on the radio immediately prior to the impact. But he had not. She had switched off the radio in the fraction of time before it occurred.

She went to her email. There were no messages for her she had not read. She pulled up Martin’s email address. And she tapped in the sentence: I’ve been researching Harry Spalding.

Aboard Dark Echo

We were three full days out. We had made about nine hundred miles at an average of twelve knots since departing Southampton. We were in the middle of the North Atlantic and the sea was running high and the wind was gusting at around thirty knots. Every fourth or fifth wave was breaking over the bow. The sun was going down and the ocean was a lurid, foaming crimson where the last of it glimmered and sank. I was cold and wet and needed a break and something hot to drink and there was no sign above deck of my father. I had not seen him for what seemed like hours.

He had taken to spending more time in his cabin over the past couple of days. I thought this reasonable enough. Sailing becomes a chore when there is nothing to look at except an endless expanse of churning sea. His cabin was warm and dry and handsomely appointed, and if he chose to take refuge there when he wasn’t at the wheel or the galley stove, that was a captain’s privilege. But I had a suspicion that he locked the door. And when I listened outside his door, I could hear something beyond the groan of the hull beneath me and the sound of straining rigging and the whip in the wind of the sails above. The opera was played, when it was played at all, very quietly, as a backdrop. Above it, I could hear my father conversing quietly and earnestly with himself.

Wet through and more than slightly pissed off, I engaged the auto-steer and went below, stripped off my wet weather gear, towelled down and then went to make myself a cup of cocoa. I took it into my cabin. And I saw that I had new email and the source of the message was Suzanne.

Sometimes the email connection on the little white laptop worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was supposed to function wherever you were in the world but in the middle of the ocean there seemed to be voids or black spots that stopped it from doing so. Maybe it was something to do with electromagnetic fields or something. Possibly it was a consequence of atmospheric conditions. Maybe it was deliberate interference, jamming from a submarine or a warship somewhere in our proximity. The Cold War was long over, of course. But beyond their own borders, it was no secret to anyone that the superpowers still played out their hostile psychological games.

I sat down at my desk and sipped cocoa. She had only just sent the email. She should be online right now, I thought. I opened the message, which comprised a single line.

I’ve been researching Harry Spalding.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Outside, I heard the wind shriek and caterwaul. It was going to be a testing night, our roughest yet by far.

Oh? What have you found out?

I pressed ‘Send’ and waited for a moment. My cocoa was not as good as I’d imagined it would be in the half-hour I’d deliberated about leaving the wheel and making it. A drink is never that good when you have to prepare it yourself. It’s never as good as when someone else makes it for you.

He spent the summer of 1927 in England. He rented a mansion on Rotten Row in Southport while his boat was laid up for repair in Liverpool. He joined the flying club run by a pilot war veteran on Southport sands. He played golf at Birkdale. And he partied hard.

Suzanne was very skilled at her occupation. She was clever and tenacious. But nobody was going to pay her for this particular job of research. I wondered why she was wasting her time with it.

Sounds like an Anglophile Jay Gatsby.

I pressed ‘Send’. A moment later, a reply came back.

Not really. Gatsby was only a bootlegger. Harry Spalding was the Devil himself.

And then the screen on my laptop froze. I switched off the power button and drained my cup. What the hell was my father doing? I went and stood outside his cabin door with my knuckles raised to knock. And I hesitated. I thought I could hear music, very faintly, from within. And I felt incredulous and cold when I thought I recognised the tune as ‘When Love Breaks Down’.

‘Come in.’

But I had not knocked. My knuckles were still poised an inch from the walnut burr of his door.

‘I said, come in, Martin.’

He was seated at his desk with his back to me. The room smelled curious. It smelled of smoke. It was not the plump whiff of one of my father’s Havanas, though. It was the thin, strong odour of Turkish tobacco. The music had stopped. There was some effect in the cabin, some dulling of the acoustic that made the rising sea outside distant and numb. And in the haze of smoke, objects seemed to ripple slightly before settling, subtly out of focus. The barrels seemed bloated, swollen and belligerent on the shotguns and rifles where they gleamed in his gun cabinet. The handles of the knives in their case on the opposite wall of the cabin looked yellowy. The pale bone and ivory hilts seemed tainted and nicotined. I did not want my father to turn round. I felt very strongly for a moment that I did not want to see the expression on his face. Then this sensation of dread passed and he did turn round. He looked frayed, distracted, as though dragged reluctantly from some refuge of the mind where he vastly preferred to be.

‘What do you want, Martin?’

‘What are you doing, Dad?’

‘I’m composing a letter I’ll never write and shall never send, Martin.’

‘To my mother?’

‘Not on this occasion to your mother, no. This one is to your sister. To Catherine Ann.’

I nodded. I was not surprised. His mood was that of a man dwelling among the dead. I turned and closed the door behind me and, in my own cabin, climbed back into my foul weather gear and went up on the deck to take my place at the wheel in the gathering fury of the night storm.

For nine straight hours, I battled the sea. The sun was well up by the time the cloud cleared and calm returned the following morning. I took a bearing. We were twelve hundred miles from home. The storm had propelled us further into the wilderness of the Atlantic. I stayed at the wheel, dazed with fatigue, as the salt dried in crystals in my beard stubble and my eyes began to play the tricks they will when everything they try to fix on is in turbulent motion. I retched, not with seasickness but with exhaustion. There was nothing by then in my stomach for me to part company with but bile. I thought about Suzanne, wondering what she had meant by what she had said in our cut-short email conversation. In my mind I saw Harry Spalding in his golden, Southport summer. The only thing I knew about Southport was the story of the long-demolished Palace Hotel. A huge neo-Gothic pile built near the sands at Birkdale, it had been haunted, so it was said. The men who demolished it had heard the lifts ascending and coming down again long after the electricity that powered them had been cut. Had Spalding dined at the Palace Hotel? Had he sipped cocktails on one of the sun-drenched terraces there? He had probably danced in the great ballroom at the Palace in his white tie, charming the local beauties with his murderous smile. Almost certainly, in his Southport summer, he would have done that.

I woke with a start over the wheel. I was dozing, which was dangerous. Where was my father? Was he still grieving and remembering below, wreathed in old tunes and bitter tobacco smoke? I engaged the auto-steer. I was desperate for sleep, close to hallucinating with tiredness. What had awoken me? Of all things, I had been brought back to full alertness by what had sounded like a baby crying. It must have been a gull, I thought. But the sky when I glanced about was empty. And there were no gulls perched on the rail or the rigging of the boat. Below deck, I paused outside my father’s cabin door. He was talking to himself again. It sounded like a grim and antagonistic monologue. His tone lacked any tenderness. He was no longer communicating, I thought, with his lost, precious daughter. I was beyond tired. I limped to my cabin. My mind engaged in a numb debate over which was more disturbing – the howl of a phantom dog or the crying of a ghostly baby. It was the baby, I decided. It was the distressed, invisible child. I was no great lover of dogs, and I thought the crying baby might be my little sister, conjured back to be among us. It was a sinister and disturbing thought. I wrestled my way out of my clothes and took to my berth and oblivion.