Dark Echo (6 page)

‘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.