by F. G. Cottam
‘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 leath
er, 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.