Dark Echo (7 page)

‘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.