Dark Echo

Two

There was at least some method in my father’s madness. Before buying Spalding’s boat, he had commissioned a precise estimate of what the craft would cost to restore, refit and make seaworthy. The estimate had been carried out by a boatyard on the Hamble with the best reputation for this kind of work in what was an exact, esoteric and quite exclusive business. The original specification of the boat was very high. Craftsmanship to equal it did still exist. But it was uncommon. And it was bought in the modern age only at great expense. Computer simulation could and had made the design of a modern boat a much cheaper proposition altogether. But restoration was a matter of painstaking artistry done with arcane tools and precious raw materials.

Frank Hadley said his yard could do the job. But he told my father honestly that it would take six months if it were to be done properly and not botched. The timescale suited my dad. Six months would enable him to learn the necessary seamanship to sail the Dark Echo competently. The boat would be ready by the beginning of July. It was a benign time on the marine calendar to put out across the Atlantic. Benign and Atlantic were not words I thought sat easily in the same sentence. But everything was relative. July was going to be better than March and a damn sight gentler than October.

Suzanne duly came home. She told me all about Bricktop. She told me what little she knew about Harry Spalding’s curious sojourn in the North-West of England. She had done a bit of research about a year earlier into hotels that were reputedly haunted. Spalding had been a celebrated guest at one of these, she remembered. The Palace Hotel in Birkdale, though, had long been demolished. The film never got beyond some preliminary outlines. I was so delighted to see Suzanne, and Spalding seemed such a distasteful subject even on the little I knew about him, that I swiftly lost any curiosity I had possessed, really, to know more. My father, caught up in the immediacies of learning about the sea and the disintegration of his latest marriage, forgot altogether his promise to himself to ask her about that curious name, the Jericho Crew. Later events made me bitterly regret the way his making that request of her was allowed so completely to slip his mind. But in the circumstances, at the time, it was a forgivable lapse.

I signed up for the same courses in seamanship and navigation as my dad. I also joined a yacht club. We had already determined that we would not do the courses together. I suppose we knew enough about one another to know that doing so would have scuppered our intended voyage before departure from dry land. What we needed afloat was competence from one another, not first-hand evidence of its comic opposite. So we did the courses separately and, on top of this, I joined a yacht club in Whitstable where, at least in the volatile winter weather of February, I could sail in safe approximation of ocean-going conditions.

What Suzanne thought about all this, I honestly don’t know. I think she thought the rapprochement between myself and my father a good thing. I think she thought six months hence too long a distance away, at least at the outset, to fret unduly over. I suppose she assumed that we would possess at least a basic competence between the two of us when we finally embarked. The Dark Echo was a racing schooner, more than capable of covering the distance between Southampton and New York in three weeks. And when all was said and done, the sea was a great deal safer in the age of satellite phones and sonic distress buoys than it had been eighty years before, in Spalding’s Roaring Twenties. She busied herself with research into the groundbreaking documentary series centred on Michael Collins and the Irish struggle for independence. And she kept any reservations she might have had about the venture to herself.

You might wonder where I found the time to indulge in this little jaunt with all the preparation it required and the money that was needed to fund the training. A generous allowance from my father would be any stranger’s fair assumption. But it would not be the truth. My dad was always generous with me. But I was always independent, particularly so after my mother’s sudden death. At both of the universities I attended, I worked for the college radio station, organising guest interviews and fund-raising drives and on-air competitions and so on. After my eventual graduation, I got a similar job working with a regional station in Kent, only now there was a salary involved. Next, I got a job at a London commercial station. If there was any career plan, it was probably to wind up working in radio programming for the BBC. I’ve always loved the power and potency of the spoken word and have always preferred radio to television because it frees the listener’s imagination somehow in a way that television, with its reliance on pictures and its terror of dead time, can never really replicate.

So there I was, fully intending to evolve over time into some Reithian figure of the twenty-first century. Except that fate intervened when I and a colleague at the London station dreamed up a game-show format we had the wit to copyright. The game became a huge airtime hit. The format translated effortlessly to television. And the game became a hit all over the world. It didn’t earn me the sort of wealth my father had generated through business. But it did bring me enough money not to have to worry about where the mortgage payments were coming from for the flat for a couple of years.

I finally gave up full-time work two years ago. Retirement at thirty would, to be honest, have been a depressing prospect. But I had an ambition to write. In the last two years I’ve written and had published two children’s books. Sales have been modest, but they’ve earned a bit of praise. I like the challenge of writing for enigmatic little people with minds that are difficult to unlock. I can think of little more worthwhile for a writer of fiction than firing the imagination of a child. One not too distant day, I hope that Suzanne and I will have children of our own. Or perhaps, now, better altogether to say that one day I hoped we would. I hoped we would have children of our own. It’s only realistic, in the current circumstances, to put everything into the past tense. Harry Spalding’s baleful curse has imposed that necessity.

The Dark Echo’s reputation as an unlucky boat was vague to all of us. I’d heard something from my father when he’d first mentioned his interest in the vessel, but couldn’t even recall exactly what. When I challenged him on it, admittedly not very aggressively, he’d reclined in his club chair and said something about sailors and superstition, and had then gone back to the more compelling business of reviving his dead cigar. Even Suzanne was really no more forthcoming. She had heard of the boat, she said, in connection with some act of violence at some gathering in the late 1930s of casino gamblers off the coast of Cuba. But, gently pressed, she could not remember the name or the nationalities of the people involved, or even the port concerned. ‘Maybe that’s the curse of the Dark Echo,’ she said, joking. ‘Maybe it afflicts its victims with amnesia and they keep coming back for more.’ She pulled a ghoulish face and shook her hair like a banshee. And incredible though it now seems to me, we both of us laughed.

The first mishap at Frank Hadley’s boatyard was mundane enough. The surviving portholes had been carefully removed. Those not beyond restoration were to be bathed in acid to remove the corrosive stains and then brought back by polishing to their original lustre. But first, the shattered fragments of glass needed to be chiselled out of them. Even this job was done fastidiously, though, because the porthole glass, each individual circular pane, would have to be moulded and cut and polished by a craftsman. It was important not to damage the soft brass housing while removing the tough glass chips and shards.

An apprentice glazier cut himself chiselling out porthole glass. Nobody thought anything of it. But the wound became infected. The boy developed a high temperature and was taken to hospital where his condition swiftly worsened. He was admitted. And then he was moved to a critical bed with a vicious case of septicaemia. He was young and strong, a Sunday footballer on the brink of a semi-professional career. But he did not look any kind of athlete when the ventilator was required for him in his hospital bed, his gashed hand a grotesque, swollen thing suspended above a body so stricken with paralysis that it could not breathe for itself.

The boy recovered. The swelling subsided and the infection receded. After a week, he was allowed home. But he did not return to his work on the portholes of the Dark Echo in the workshop of a glazier’s business subcontracted to Hadley’s boatyard. He telephoned his old boss and said that he would never cut glass again. Nor, he swore vehemently, would he ever again allow glass to cut him.

The second accident took place at the boatyard itself and was much more serious. A carpenter was planing a length of replacement deck planking. It was hardwood, of course, high-grade teak sourced at great expense by my publicity-conscious father from a sustainable source. Either the wood hadn’t quite been seasoned properly and had retained sufficient moisture to stick under the blade, or there was a knot in the burr that had gone unnoticed. But the carpenter, of course, was using original tools. And fashioning hardwood, however skilled you are and however honed your tools, requires a degree of physical force. Either way, the blade of the plane shattered and a steel splinter pierced the carpenter’s eye. It was a nasty injury, an agonising disfiguration that cost him fifty per cent of his sight and would impair his ability to do high-spec work for the rest of his professional life.

So far, so unfortunate. But the third accident, a shocking tragedy, sort of put the seal on things. And this one happened with my father actually present at Frank Hadley’s boatyard.

They were pulling the root of the old main mast from its foundation at the centre of the hull, raising it clear of the superstructure through the deck. It was an operation a little akin to removing a rotten tooth. The mast itself was not rotten. But it was broken and beyond repair and had to be replaced. A crane had been positioned to pull the root cleanly out of the boat. Hawsers had been lashed to the mast laterally to keep it steady and stop it swinging dangerously once free of the hull. The last thing that was wanted was for it to become a sort of battering ram, smashing the craft it had so staunchly served for so long.

Somehow one of the hawsers was allowed to slacken and it looped around the arm of one of the men on the deck, severing the limb when it came under tension and tightened again as cleanly as a wire will cut cheese, just above the top of his biceps. Work was stopped immediately, of course. The emergency services were called and first aid was swiftly administered by those present. Frank Hadley was a model employer and two of his people on the scene knew all about first aid and the recovery position. But the man with the severed arm writhed on the deck of my father’s boat until he died of shock after four or five terrible, gory minutes.

Work stopped. And it did not restart. My father was paying Frank Hadley very handsomely. And Hadley, a scrupulous employer as I’ve said, was paying his craftspeople very competitive rates. But nobody wanted to work on the Dark Echo after the fatality. Even when Hadley had personally swabbed her deck of the dead rigger’s blood, and police accident investigators had put away their biros after taking statements, even after the burial a full eight days later, there was no general desire to return to the project. It was the fourth week in February. All over the South of England, we were enduring record rainfall. There was a pump to keep the dock dry under the Dark Echo’s supine shape. She was wearing her shroud again, as if in solemn and dignified mourning for the most recent man to die aboard her. For something told me there had been predecessors – male and female, too – all mourned with the same measured, counterfeit decorum. But perhaps it was just the weather, making me gloomy, turning my own aspect as gloomy as that of the leaking sky.

I sat with my father in Frank Hadley’s office. Through the window behind him you could see the tarpaulin bulk of the boat in the rain. His yard was on an estuary, as they tended to be, a deep water channel scoured by a dredger through the silt to give the boats he worked on access to open water. In some senses everything was the same as at Bullen and Clore. There was the same pervasive salt smell and the same faint luminescence about the light, even in heavy cloud, that you only encounter on the coast. There were the briny cobbles and the great tow ropes and chains and mooring rings. And, of course, there was the presence of the Dark Echo.

But, in significant ways, everything was in complete contrast to Bullen and Clore. The spacious office was a minimalist tribute to good taste and modernity. A cappuccino machine gurgled softly in the far corner. On the wall to our left, and Hadley’s right as he faced us from behind his desk, was a bank of LCD screens. They all showed the same series of images. Computer simulations of the hull of a Norse longship appeared in complex three-dimensional patterns. The whorls and ribs of its geometry, after a few moments of viewing, could have passed for an installation of abstract art.

‘We’re building a fleet of ships for a feature film,’ Hadley explained. ‘Well, what the audience will finally see will be a fleet. We’ll in fact build only one full and exact seaworthy replica. The rest will be interiors, odd detailed sections and CGI.’

Neither my father nor I offered a comment.

‘Still damned expensive.’

Again, neither of us replied to him.

Hadley stared at the simulations for a moment. ‘We can’t better what their engineers did a thousand years ago. Not with the materials available to them, we can’t, for all our microchips and megabytes. Form and function perfectly combined, the longship. It was a staggering feat of design and execution.’

Frank Hadley wore chinos and a pale-blue cotton shirt on a tall and youthfully slender frame. His iron-grey hair was finger-combed back carelessly from a side parting. He had a sparkly look, the twinkle of a ladies’ man. In that, he wasn’t so dissimilar from my father. But his face lacked the strength of character, the firmness of jaw, the star quality, if you will, that my father’s face had always possessed in such apparent depth. In isolation he would have carried a certain male glamour. In the same room as my father, this was outshone. Comparing the two of them was like comparing Peter Lawford to Cary Grant.

My father said, ‘An unlucky vessel to a boatbuilder such as yourself is surely as the concept of a haunted house to a modern architect. It isn’t just an anachronism. It’s worse even than an absurdity. It’s an affront. An insult.’

Hadley dragged his eyes away from his bank of screens. But he would not meet my father’s gaze. He looked down at his hands, linked on the desk. ‘My thoughts on the matter are immaterial, Mr Stannard.’

‘Magnus, please,’ my father said.

‘Magnus, then. My thoughts on the subject of unlucky boats are really neither here nor there if I can’t get the men to come through the gate for their shift.’

‘Get different men.’

Hadley stood. He turned his back on us and looked out of the window at the view through the rain-bleared window, at the lowering sky and the sullen outline of my father’s prize, under its tarpaulin. ‘You were here when the fatality occurred, Magnus. You were watching the operation. I cannot find either engineer or accident investigator who can justify or explain to me why there should have been a fraction of slack in that rogue hawser.’

‘Rogue,’ my father repeated. He said the word in a neutral voice, as thought it were foreign and he was merely trying out the sound of it.

‘Yet despite the consistent and enormous tension it was under, it discovered the length and elasticity to loop around a man’s arm and severe it.’

‘Heavy engineering is dangerous work,’ my father said. ‘I understand a fund has been established at the yard for the poor fellow.’

‘It has.’

‘And I will contribute to it,’ my father said. ‘Generously.’

‘You saw his feet thrum on the deck, his dance of death in his own spreading pool of blood.’

‘It will be interesting to see how a man of your professional reputation deals with the tabloid press interpretation of this peasant witchcraft revival.’

‘Witchcraft,’ Hadley said. I think he chuckled. But I could not be sure. ‘This is not witchcraft.’

My father said nothing.

‘Did you ever think to examine the history of the boat?’ Hadley had still not turned back to face us.

‘I was familiar with the history of the Dark Echo long before I acquired the craft,’ my father said. By his standards, his self-control here was extraordinary. Anger was one of his talents. Fury was one of his most potent weapons.

‘Where is the log?’

‘In a strongbox. All five volumes of it. The log is safe and intact.’

‘It’s customary for the log to accompany the craft to which it belongs.’

‘The log is safe,’ my father repeated.

‘Then I suggest you read it,’ Hadley said.

‘I have.’

‘And I must insist that you let me read it, too.’ Finally, he turned. I had misjudged him. He was much more Martin Sheen than Peter Lawford. He did not quite possess the raw charisma on which my father so heavily traded. But he had weight and substance. He was clearly a man of principle where the well-being of his workforce was concerned. Principle was more important to Frank Hadley than tabloid credibility.

My father stood. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘The press have yet to deride me as a figure of fun. But they have not been slow to tag your acquisition an unlucky boat.’

‘Cursed, I believe, is the appellation of choice,’ my father said.

‘Well. I have received a letter from a Jack Peitersen of Newport in Rhode Island, where I know she was constructed. He has offered to come and work on the restoration. His great-grandfather worked on the original construction of the boat, he says.’ Hadley opened a desk drawer and took an airmail letter from it. I hadn’t known they still existed in the age of cyberspace. ‘He says that if we employ him to supervise the work, the restoration will be entirely successful.’

‘A crank,’ my father said, buttoning his coat, patting his pocket, I knew, for his cigar case. ‘An opportunistic blackmail attempt by some freak from New England.’

‘Except that I had him checked out,’ Hadley said. ‘He’s not a crank. Not according to his references.’

‘Then bring him over, Hadley. I’ll bankroll the exercise. But on your name and reputation be it.’ He paused. ‘I’m going outside for a smoke. Please feel free in my absence, gentlemen, to talk among yourselves.’

Frank Hadley sat back down after my father had closed the door behind him. ‘The irony is, Martin, that I greatly like and admire your dad. He is a bully and a prima donna. But as bullying prima donnas go, he’s fair-minded and generous.’

‘You never referred just now to the boat he has commissioned you to restore and refurbish by its name.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘And God help me, I never will.’

‘You really believe the vessel cursed?’

He smiled. ‘Haven’t been aboard her, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Despite our setbacks, we’ve accomplished a lot, physically. We worked hard on her for six weeks prior to the fatality. She’s sound enough for a tour. Perhaps you ought to treat yourself to one. Maybe you could get your father to act as guide.’

‘Because you won’t put a foot aboard her, will you, Mr Hadley?’

It was the second question I’d posed him that was really no question at all.

He looked at his bank of computer images morphing, bloodless, nothing but geometric elegance in black lines on white screens. ‘I just hope that this fellow Peitersen can accomplish what he claims he can, Martin. I pray for that.’

I looked beyond him out of the window. The glass was strong and thick and soundless. But it was rain-lashed. The weather was worsening. The wind was strengthening. I could see it in the ragged flights of gulls failing to find the paths they sought to cleave through the grey, turbulent sky. I could see it in the rising swell out beyond the estuary shallows, where whitecaps curled now in the unsteady, rising rhythm of an oncoming storm. For a moment, I found myself wishing with all my heart that the storm would gather and rise to breach the sea defences of Hadley’s boatyard and smash the Dark Echo to matchwood at her moorings. It was a momentary thought, but it surprised me with its vehemence and the vindictive pleasure I took at seeing teak splinters, hemp braids and tattered fragments of tarpaulin on the tideline in my mind’s eye as the old boat’s final remains washed up, innocuous at last, when calm returned.

‘You’re in awe of your father.’

That made me laugh out loud. ‘As are most people.’

‘Not Harry Spalding.’

‘Who has been dead for better than seventy years. Unless, of course, you believe in witchcraft.’

An impatient smile twitched on Hadley’s face. He looked at me. He held my eyes with his, which were pale blue and slightly bloodshot. ‘I’ve no interest in verbal debate with the son of a lucrative client. I’ve even less interest in allowing myself to be demeaned. But I’ve a son of my own about your age. And whatever else, I would implore you to read the log before you embark on any voyage aboard that boat. Don’t suggest your father show it to you, Martin. Insist upon it.’

My father came back in a moment later, entering on a silence so awkward it must have seemed palpable. He agreed some expenses and countersigned a few cheques. Hadley rose and shook hands with each of us and we were out and into the gathering storm.

My father accepted a lift to Chichester. I didn’t ask what business it was he had there. He had retired from the business of making money and, with his marriage already consigned to the past tense, I imagined Chichester was the location for a romantic encounter. It was a place redolent in my own mind of pretty antique shops and quaint, half-timbered pubs. Its narrow Georgian streets would provide a cosy refuge from the elements. I pictured logs in the grate of a saloon bar, horse brasses glimmering on the wall and brandy burnishing in balloon-shaped glasses as warmth and alcohol and the expensive gift on the table between them kindled a seductive mood. My father was the sort of man who stayed friendly with his ex-mistresses. The arctic aftermath was reserved for those he persuaded up the aisle. The old flames were nurtured and cherished in the belief that one day they might flare again in the heat of rekindled passion.

I reckoned he’d had half a dozen girlfriends in the twelve years since my mother’s death. The quantity and the variety inevitably begged questions about his extra-curricular activities prior to it. But they were not questions I felt anywhere near strong enough to face. All I had in the way of a parent, my father was nevertheless sometimes a difficult man to love. The knowledge that he had been a serial cheat during his marriage to Mum would, I think, have meant final estrangement between us. I said earlier I was not a physical coward. And I really don’t believe I am. But the thought of being cut adrift from family has frightened me since Mum so abruptly left us. There were questions I simply did not dare ask my father. The answers might lead to consequences I was not brave enough to face.

‘I’d like to read the Dark Echo’s log,’ I said.

‘By all means. I’ll arrange it after the weekend.’

It was now a Thursday. And it was approaching lunchtime.

Chichester had announced itself in a dripping road sign. It was a city virtually without suburbs. In a moment or two he would get out of the car. ‘And I’d like to borrow the swipe key Hadley gave you to the yard. I’ll return it to you tomorrow.’

He turned to me. ‘What on earth do you want that for?’

‘I want a look at the boat.’

My father laughed. ‘In weather like this?’

‘In precisely this weather. I want to know if Hadley was telling the truth about the extent of the work he says they have accomplished.’

‘They have done quite a bit.’

‘I’d like to see it for myself.’

‘Very well.’ He took the swipe key from his pocket. Stubbornness was one of the few traits I think he really admired in me. But then, I’d inherited it from him.

The key wouldn’t get me into Hadley’s inner sanctum. That did not matter. I had no interest in stealing computer files or tinkering with his cappuccino machine. I felt an urgent need to get aboard the boat and experience for myself the baleful atmosphere I believed he’d hinted at. My earlier desire to see her wrecked suggested I disliked the Dark Echo more than she disliked me. But that antipathy was itself a mystery I wanted solved. A surreptitious visit, under cover of the storm, seemed just the thing. Suzanne was back in Dublin on the trail of the Big Feller. And I had no other pressing engagements. I dropped my father, who made his way quickly through the torrent to the shelter of an awning over one of Chichester’s narrow pavements. I saw him reach into his overcoat pocket for his mobile phone as he nimbly took the kerb. I was reminded afresh that he neither moved nor looked like a man of fifty-five. But then, nor did he act like one, either. Then, through the rainwashed windscreen, I struggled to find a route to take me back to where I’d come from.

The boatyard looked deserted when I arrived back there at just after two thirty. Even if Hadley had hired a fresh team of craftsmen with every inclination to work on the Dark Echo’s restoration, it would hardly have been possible in the prevailing conditions. The wind was whipping in from the Solent in savage, briny gusts somewhere approaching gale force. The rain it brought was incessant and heavy, a driving thrum of water on the roof of the car and the surrounding earth. It danced in deepening puddles, giving the yard a depressed and derelict appearance. In the neat cluster of sheds in the distance to landward, I looked for signs of industry; for the blue brightness of blow torches or the white brilliance of welding rods, flickering through their windows, cleaving the gloom. But there was nothing. There were no signs of life either in the boatsheds on the wharf or at the broad slipway where they launched. I was aware of wind singing through the taut security wire strung between concrete fence posts as I used the key to release the electric gate. It slammed again behind me. I looked over to Hadley’s office suite, which occupied the second floor of a smart, pale wooden building a hundred yards to my right. His blinds were down. But there were comforting chinks of warm yellow brightness from within between their slats. He, at least, was at work.

The tarp protecting my father’s boat had torn in places in the violence of the day’s weather. It was very heavy canvas cloth and was criss-crossed with strengthening seams and thick, reinforced stitching. So there was no chance of it sundering entirely and pulling free of the craft. Or at least, I did not think there was. But in places it had snagged and sheared and torn. Wind whistled through it like a wild jeer. The cloth capered and trembled in the wind. It shook and howled like a living thing, in protest.

I reached the boat soaked. I’d dressed for a meeting rather than a tempest. I paused and looked to my left, out to where the Hamble ran out to the Solent, awed by the anger and scale of the pitching sea. My feet slithered on the big cobbles of the wharf and I understood for the first time the giant solidity and scale of the stonework there, the reason for it. Those walls were defences, ramparts. Their immensity was only a pragmatic measure against the elements they defied.

I slithered towards the Dark Echo on treacherous shoe leather, cursing my own ineptitude. I’d proven a dab hand at the maths needed to pass exams in navigation. Yet here I was, in danger of falling thirty-five feet on to the concrete where the keel of our boat lay, only for the want of a pair of rubber-soled shoes. I steadied myself. The tarp roared and flapped incessantly, where it was newly torn, the looming shape of it huge around the bulk of the long hull now I’d got this close. I looked up, wincing through needles of rain. The sky, which had glowered earlier, was now just a scudding roof of gloom over the world. I fingered the small Maglite in my pocket. Thank God I’d had the wit to remember to take that from the Saab’s glove compartment before entering the yard. I took it out and shone the thin beam of the torch on to canvas. At least I would have no trouble getting aboard. There was a rent in the heavy fabric right in front of me about eighteen inches long. I switched off the Maglite and clamped it between my teeth and hauled myself through on to the Dark Echo’s deck.

My first impression was one of cosiness. I felt the childhood comfort of my camping days as a boy in the Cubs and later as a young teenager in the Scouts. The rain drummed, a nostalgic sound on stiff cloth, but couldn’t get to me any more. There was the smell of damp, but I was dry in my snug and musty refuge from the downpour.

Nevertheless, this was business. I used the torch to orientate myself. In doing so, I saw the new timber with which they had expertly patched the deck. It had not been treated and varnished yet, but even in the Maglite’s beam I could see that the work had been done with faultless expertise. I ran my fingers over it and could not feel the joins. The specification my father had demanded was astonishingly high. But they had worked to it. I looked down along the smooth lines of the deck for the companionway. It was a dark, rectangular maw leading below. All around me, canvas screamed and shuddered. I smiled. It had been a tonic already to see my father’s money well spent rather than cynically squandered.

The steps of the companionway were tricky. I could not hear them creak in the noise of the storm, but could tell from their spongy feel under my feet that they had not yet been replaced. I was descending on old and perished wood and did so gingerly. And there was something else. As I descended into the dark interior of the vessel, I began to feel an irrational instinct of fear and even of incipient panic. The boat roared with the exterior life of the storm and the smell of must strengthened and grew in complexity and character as I continued to descend the short flight to the cabins and galley area. The descent took much longer than it should have. Too many steps, I thought. Too great a distance down, it seemed.

At the bottom of the companionway it was very dark. And there was the complexity of smells. The smells were so strong that I was reluctant to turn on the torch in the blackness for fear of what I might see. I could smell a feral, canine smell, like the hair and spoor of a wild dog, that made my balls shrink and the hair on the nape of my neck prickle and chill. The roar of the storm, the buck and ripple of canvas under assault, had receded. It was quiet down here and so oppressively fearful that I struggled to control my bladder.

‘Relax, old chum,’ a voice said.

I switched on the torch. There was nothing there. I was in the master cabin. There was nothing to see except the gutted, dripping interior of an old boat undergoing restoration. Except that there was a small brass-bound mirror screwed to the right of the door leading to the smaller cabin beyond. I frowned at the mirror. The Maglite beam played in my shaking hand beneath it. And then I looked at what it reflected.

There was an impression of red leather and purple plush tassled in gold; of cigarette smoke and a man’s buttoned boot moving out of sight with the speed of a cobra recoiling. And there was a woman’s face – the make-up Jazz Age pale, the hair raven and geometric, the mouth crimson – and the rictus of terror so real and raw in the eyes and drawn-back lips that I bolted before this awful vision had even clarified in my mind. I fled. I pounded up splintering stairs and tore the nails from my fingers scrabbling for a breach in the stiff, unyielding weight of the tarp securing the boat. And when I found one, I scrambled through it. And despite the hurl and havoc of the storm, behind me I heard laughter, male and laconic. I lay on the quay. I recovered my breath and composure. I stood finally and looked towards Hadley’s office for reassurance. But the yellow bars of brightness between his blinds had been extinguished. In Frank Hadley’s boatyard, it seemed now that all the lights were out.

At the wheel of the Saab, I saw that my hands were dripping blood from my torn nails. Gradually, my fingertips began to throb and then to sing with pain in the aftermath of the shock of what I’d seen and felt. In my seat, soaked and shivering, I found the presence of mind to fumble on the heater switch. I concentrated on driving. The rain cascaded down the windscreen, making driving difficult in the fierce strength of the shifting gusts once I was back on the exposed open road. I tried not to think about the scene in the cabin. The thing was, it was not the first time I believed I had been in the presence of ghosts. But I believed it was the first time I had been in the presence of spectral malevolence. And my raw nerves and the jumping muscles under my skin told me that the ghost of Harry Spalding was a spirit of pure spite and bottomless hatred. I drove. Eventually, London grew closer. Lambeth approached. I parked the car and wiped the caked blood from my hands with a rag from the boot and, with my clothes still drying on me, walked the short distance to the Windmill pub and ordered a double rum that I drank in a single swallow. But even at home, after a scalding shower, changed into fresh clothes, warm and with the weather diminished to just a feeble drizzle against the windows, it was hours before I felt even remotely safe.

There was no point texting Suzanne for reassurance on this occasion. I lay in our bed and wondered how much to tell the woman I loved about what had happened. Secrets have a way of festering, and sharing my most private thoughts and feelings with her was an important aspect of the intimacy that I knew gave our relationship much of its worth. There were lots of things I did not tell her. But I felt no guilt at keeping the boring and trivial stuff to myself. That was just a way of preventing her from thinking me boring and trivial.

What would she make of my experience aboard the boat? Would she think me mad? She would believe it had happened. She would be sympathetic to how shaken the experience had left me. But she was too practical and pragmatic a woman to believe in the supernatural herself. She would rationalise it, somehow. She would see it as the consequence of fatigue and an over-vigorous imagination. Then I remembered what she had said, speaking from Dublin, when I had told her about the auction. She knew already that the Dark Echo bore the reputation of an unlucky boat. She had made reference to the fact before the catalogue of apparent accidents at Frank Hadley’s yard. I would have to ask her about that. It was important, just as reading the log was important.

The phone rang.

‘Hi. What’s happening?’ asked Suzanne.

‘Not a lot.’

‘How was your trip to Hampshire?’

‘My father’s expensively assembled team of craftsmen are sharing a serious case of cold feet.’

‘I don’t blame them.’

‘Why do you say that?’ I had not told her about the fatality at Hadley’s boatyard. It was one of my boring, trivial omissions.

‘I’ll tell you when I get back,’ she said.

‘How’s Big Mick?’ I’d almost forgotten to ask.

‘I honestly don’t think I’ve ever admired a man more.’

‘Blimey.’

‘Your good self excepted.’

‘Of course.’

Sleep came eventually that night. But it was shallow and dream-ridden when it finally arrived.

I met my father at his Mayfair house to give him back the swipe key the following afternoon. I made no mention of what had occurred aboard the Dark Echo. I had retreated furtively from Hadley’s domain, reasonably sure that no one there had seen me. No one there with a right to be there, no one living, had seen me, at any rate. Harry Spalding had seen me, I felt. And I had heard Harry Spalding. I’d caught only the merest glimpse of him in the snakelike recoil of his reflection. But I had heard him speak in the decades-dead voice he still possessed.

Hearing him was enough. But I did not really want to dwell on that. Nor did I want to think about his companion, the woman I’d seen. My father would have believed none of it, which is why I did not tell him. Events earlier in my life had put paid entirely to his faith in me where matters spiritual were concerned. And for good or bad, Harry Spalding was a spiritual matter. I was already reasonably sure of that.

‘You look like hell,’ my father said. He didn’t. He looked rumpled and sated and smug.

‘Find Chichester congenial?’

He ignored the question. He poured me coffee from a silver pot. It always surprised me that he remembered how I took it. He hadn’t made the coffee, of course. The pot had been wheeled in on its trolley by his housekeeper.

‘Why the Dark Echo, Dad? Why that damned boat in particular?’

He smiled. But the smile was entirely for himself. ‘My own childhood, Martin, was very different from that which I was able to provide for you.’

This was not promising. I sipped my coffee. I would take solace in the coffee, which was excellent. ‘I know that, Dad.’

‘Please. Don’t interrupt.’ He stood and walked over to one of the tall windows. ‘My mother, your grandmother, did her best. But they were tough times, unforgiving decades in which to be a working-class widow with an infant child to provide for.’ He paused, over by the stately windows of his extravagant home. And he allowed his impoverished and sometimes humiliating childhood to return and haunt him afresh. ‘Christmases were particularly grim. I was a bright boy and that tormented my mother. I believe she suffered agonies of guilt over all the things her poverty denied me. They were austere times, of course. But my schoolmates were a privileged lot. The comparisons were inevitable, and the privation stark and obvious and sometimes, I’ll admit it, shaming.’ He cleared his throat.

‘There were junk shops, second-hand shops, pawn shops all over the neighbourhood of Manchester in which we lived then. For people like ourselves these places functioned, in a way, as banks. The shoes you sold them were security against the money they gave you for the shoes until you could afford to buy the shoes back. And the difference between what you received and what you paid was the interest. And the interest was marginal, a compassionate matter, usually, of just a few pennies added to the principal sum.’

He paused again, head bowed, remembering. My father still grieved for his mother almost with the raw pain with which he grieved for mine. And she was in his heart and memory now, I could tell.

‘Of course, these shops did sell things. Zinc bathtubs would hang from pegs. There would be racks of second-hand bicycles. And in those days, perhaps surprisingly, most coveted among their stock were books. It would have been 1963. I would have been eleven years old. The wireless meant the BBC and a universe alien to the one I inhabited. Television was vastly beyond my mother’s means. But I loved books. I was a religious attendee at the local lending library. I thirsted for knowledge and sensation. And lending libraries were free.’

He turned to me. He was a silhouette at the window. My father, the self-made millionaire, a nimbus of light around his greying head, stood remembering.

‘There was an educator in the 1930s. A man named Arthur Mee?’

I shook my head. The name meant nothing.

‘Mee compiled a children’s encyclopedia. By the time I encountered it, it was already thirty years out of date. But its volumes were packed nevertheless for the child I was with exotic and spellbinding vistas of a world for which I was not just eager, but greedy. There was a picture of a giant redwood in one volume, a tunnel bored through its immense trunk big enough to accommodate a car. In another volume, some brave soul had pictured a brown bear, twelve feet high as it reared up in the posture of a man. There were giant marlin and power station turbines and tidal waves and the electronic microscope and the maelstrom and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And I awoke on Christmas morning at the end of 1963 and my mother had bought me eleven volumes of the set of twelve from a barrow outside a Piccadilly junk shop with the money she’d scrimped and saved for me.’

It was guilt that made him talk like this, that prompted this bathos to which he was inclined. His mother, worn out, had died before he’d made the money that would have made her dotage comfortable.

‘Come, Martin.’

I followed him. He led me to the library where he took a key from a bureau drawer and opened a locked display case. Behind its carved-oak and scrolled-glass doors I saw Arthur Mee’s encyclopedias on their shelf, his name on their worn, blue cloth spines.

‘There are twelve volumes here, Dad.’

Beside me, he nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was providing me with the human touch he needed for comfort at the mention of his mother. ‘I sourced the twelfth. It’s the same edition, printed in the same year. I wanted the full set, with full integrity.’

I looked up at my father’s education in the wider world, his bookbound travels, his dreams and aspirations bound in blue cloth. There wasn’t a lot to say.

He reached for a volume, thumbed out a spine. Volume six, it was. He held the spine of the heavy book in the palm of his hand and it fell open. I took a step back and looked at the open pages.

And I saw a picture of Harry Spalding’s schooner rounding a buoy in brilliant sunshine on sun-dappled water at an angle dictated by taut sails that seemed to threaten disaster and promise triumph at the same exultant moment.

‘Dark Echo,’ my father said. There was an inset picture on the page of text facing the full plate of the racing boat. It was a grinning Harry Spalding in whites and blazer with a trophy in his grip and his blond hair a halo of gold on his head. He possessed none of the lupine menance of his Jericho Crew snapshot. He looked elegant and boyish and almost bashful at the attention accorded his win. He aped the style and character of the personality people wished him to be, almost to perfection. It was all I could do not to recoil.

‘When I saw these pictures, Martin, I swore that I would own and sail this boat. And I do and I will. And nothing will stop me. And I hope to God you have the compassion to indulge an old man’s vanity in fulfilling that dream.’

I said nothing.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I sipped from my cup. The coffee it contained was cold.

I could hear the faint hum in the library of the humidor that kept my father’s cigars fresh. In the parking garage twenty feet beneath our feet, some fellow from Cracow or Kiev would be waxing the bodywork of the Bentley and the Aston Martin. But later in the afternoon, his old boxing trophies would be taken from their place of pride and faithfully buffed. And suddenly, I understood my father’s retirement. At fifty-five, he had capitulated to the dreams of his childhood. He would indulge and fulfil them now, because he had the time and the means. He would not be deterred, either. He would act on these infantile whims with an iron will.

‘Could I see the log today?’

‘In what demeanour did you find my boat?’

‘Demeanour?’

‘Condition. Aspect. Boats have each of them a character, son. Did you find her defiant in the onslaught of yesterday’s storm?’

I struggled to remember the boat’s specifications. She was 121 feet in length, with a beam of nineteen feet and an eleven-foot draught. She weighed seventy tons. She was a two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner with a total sail area of just over 5,000 square feet. She was the Dark Echo and she was haunted by the ghost of her first master. And every bone in my body, every ounce of any instinct for danger I possessed, told me he was a murderous ghost. ‘What they’ve done so far has been punctiliously accomplished, from what I could see,’ I said. ‘They’re using long-length, quarter-sawn teak, caulked with cotton and stopped with black rubber, on her deck.’

‘Good. Plugs?’

‘I didn’t see any. Butt joints are minimal and the planks are fastened from below.’

‘Hadley told me the spars are laminated Alaskan spruce.’

‘I’d happily take his word for it. It was gloomy yesterday afternoon and dark under her tarpaulin. But they looked very handsome, very well finished. Can I see the log today?’

‘Of course you can. But it’s more than a day’s reading, I think.’ He took some keys from a drawer in an antique bureau and tossed them at me. I caught them deftly enough. ‘There’s a storage facility I use.’

I nodded. I knew about the storage facility. I had been there. It was the place in which he secreted stuff he did not want to part with when a divorce negotiation deteriorated into a tug of war or a smash and grab. My father owned a substantial number of valuable modern paintings mostly picked up in the 1980s and early 90s when the painters had still been students struggling to pay their rent. It was over a decade since I’d seen a single one of them hanging in his house. They were stacked in darkness and secrecy in the storage facility in South Wimbledon. Everything of my mother’s was there, too, in a room a person with a morbid turn of mind might term a shrine.

It took me an hour to get to Wimbledon and then another forty-five minutes to travel the half-mile distance to the storage facility car park. When I did finally arrive, I could see what had gridlocked the road. There were two fire tenders, as well as an accident investigation vehicle and a Met police car together blocking half its width. There was foam and surface water all over the road and the fire crews were still damping down. It was odd, because I’d seen no column of smoke nor heard the whoop of sirens waiting impatiently in the crawling column of traffic.

Most of the steel-framed, breeze-block storage buildings looked intact. I felt fairly sure that my father’s precious modern art collection and my mother’s gathered keepsakes would be undamaged and undisturbed. I knew with the certainty of a sinking heart what had been destroyed by the blaze.

A garrulous fire-fighter confirmed it for me. I asked him what had started the fire.

‘A strongbox full of old books was the seat of it,’ he said, chewing gum, his face black with soot from the smoke. ‘Burned with unbelievable intensity, it did. Wonder the fire didn’t spread, but it didn’t, thankfully. Took us ages to put it out, though. We’ve been through two shifts just damping down.’

‘Someone used an accelerant?’

He raised an eyebrow and looked down and rocked on his booted feet. ‘Not for me to say, mate. Out of order for me to speculate. But paper doesn’t burn like that. No way. Not at those temperatures. Not without a bit of encouragement.’

I nodded. I smelled the air. It was acrid, still. Foam from fire hoses gathered as brown and yellow scum in the street gutters, seeking drains. I’d hang about, of course. I’d verify facts with the people who ran the storage facility. I’d wait in a grey afternoon in this dismal bit of South-West London’s suburbs and establish facts. But I knew with certainty that it was the Dark Echo’s five-volume log that had burned, before I could read it, before Frank Hadley could get his judicious hands on it. The fire had been started in the night, in the small hours, when I’d been enduring my wretched, dream-ridden sleep. I didn’t know where it left our restoration schedule with Hadley’s yard. I didn’t even know how long it would take for them to inventory the damage and break the news of the loss to my father. In fact, only one thing was certain any longer in my mind. I would tell Suzanne. I would tell her everything, the moment she got back from Dublin. I did not believe that a problem shared was a problem halved. I did not believe in any platitudes with regard to this particular matter. But I did think that continued secrecy could be dangerous. And I was too scared at the momentum with which events seemed to be progressing to keep matters any longer to myself.