by F. G. Cottam
Gubby Tench did not return the next night to the casinos, or the night after that. After four days, the smell was noticed coming from his anchored boat in the bay. Havana was hot and the corruption of death quick and almost overpowering. Police and militia boarded the vessel, assuming that they would find a dead victim of robbery. And they duly found a corpse. But Tench had not been murdered by thieves. Nobody had been aboard the boat but its master. Or nobody had been aboard, at least, who had left any trace of themselves behind.
Tench had sat at the chart table in the master cabin and put the barrel of a Very pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Dollars and gold and silver ingots and promissory notes and even some casino chips lay before him in a bright hoard on the tabletop. He was still attired in his dress shirt and tuxedo. They were sweat-stained, yellow, the garments stretched over his bloating corpse, the fabric of his shirt pulled to reveal a pale torso in elliptical glimpses of flesh between the buttons. The flare had not gone off when Tench had fired the pistol. But the release of the flare had been of sufficient force to blow off the top of his skull. Skull fragments and bits of brain matter were painted across the ceiling and rear wall of the cabin. It was a death as inexplicable as it was messy. There were, of course, no witnesses. And there was no note to cast light on the suicide’s motive. He had sought to destroy everything of himself in an inferno in Havana harbour amid his riches, aboard his little floating domain. He had succeeded only in self-murder of a particularly messy kind.
‘It’s why I didn’t laugh earlier,’ Suzanne said, ‘when you shared your vision or dream or whatever it was concerning the blaze that destroyed the Dark Echo logs. The mention of a distress flare reminded me of the awful fate of Gubby Tench.’
I was silent. There was nothing to say. It was very late, now. Cigarette smoke had crept around the little room despite the efforts of the electric fan, and the air in there felt stale and dead.
‘I wonder whether they knew one another,’ Suzanne said.
‘Who?’
‘Spalding. Waltrow. Tench.’
‘Where was Gubby Tench from?’
‘New Orleans.’
‘Then it’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘Boston and New York are fairly far apart. Distances were much greater in those days before regular domestic airline flights. New Orleans is positively remote from both of those places, even now. You could argue that banking and financial speculation are sister occupations. But Tench was a professional gambler. He’s not only geographically distant from Spalding and Waltrow. Culturally, he’s in a different universe.’
But she wasn’t really listening to me. ‘They were all three the same age,’ she said, ‘give or take a year or two. I wonder if they met in the war.’ She looked at me and I sensed a complication coming. ‘War makes a nonsense of demographics, Martin. It has no respect for barriers of class or culture. I’d very much like to see your father’s photograph of the Jericho Crew.’
I did not answer her.
‘That’s funny.’
‘What is?’
Suzanne had turned to the radio. ‘They’ve just played this. They’re playing the same song again. They’re repeating it.’
I recognised the song myself. It didn’t sound like jazz. She had the radio permanently tuned to a jazz station. The song was ‘When Love Breaks Down’, by Prefab Sprout. The failed priest, Paddy McAloon, was singing it. According to Suzanne, he was reprising it. It did seem strange. But it was a small strangeness, a domestic oddity, after the tale of Gubby Tench. I walked over to the radio and switched it off. ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ I said. I put my arms around Suzanne for the comfort of her. Her hair smelled of smoke and her skin of stale perfume and the recycled air you’re obliged to breathe aboard aircraft. But her body was warm and yielding and wonderful against mine. I closed my eyes and thanked God again for her. It was God, not the Shadwell Posse, I believed I had to thank for Suzanne. And I thought I heard a single, plangent chord of McAloon balladry from the radio on its shelf. But I must have imagined that because Suzanne stayed softly pressed against me with her hands linked in the small of my back.
I did not want her going anywhere near the Jericho Crew. They were long dead, as my father had pointed out. But to me they were feral ghosts that could maraud across the decades, given the right encouragement. They were malevolent and restless and waiting in an impatient pack behind their hungry leader. No, the Jericho Crew were best left to history and themselves. All my instincts told me so. I untangled myself from Suzanne and went and brushed my teeth and then got into bed and listened to her shower. We finally fell asleep, thankfully dreamless, wrapped in one another’s arms in the Lambeth night.
I was awoken the following morning by an agitated phone call from my father. I looked at my watch and at Suzanne’s sleeping head, her hair raven black on the crumpled white of the pillow. It was just before six thirty.
‘Appreciate it if you’d get round here, Martin. Pronto, if you’ve no engagement more pressing. Bring your under-achieving Scandinavian motor car with you. Once again, we face a day apparently beyond the capabilities of rotorblades.’
Groggily, I opened the curtains a chink. I did not want to awaken Suzanne after her trying day and exhausting evening. The weather was foul, our little glimpse of river grey and turbulent in the wind, the cloud low and the rain splattering on the panes and thrumming on the road outside in big, percussive drops. What a dismal month March was turning out to be.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Frank Hadley seems to be in the throes of some sort of breakdown.’
I cleared my throat. I still wasn’t fully awake. ‘I take it you know about the fire, Dad?’
‘I know about it. Hadley doesn’t. The charred log is not the problem.’
‘What is?’
‘Just get over here, Martin.’ As was his perennial habit, he then hung up on me.
Without telling him anything of what I had experienced for myself or recently learned, I tried on the drive to the Hamble to sow doubts in my father’s mind. I told him that it was fair from what we both knew to call the Dark Echo accident-prone. Our prospective voyage seemed foolhardy.
He pondered what I’d said without immediate comment. He took out his cigar case, chose a cigar and smoked for a while. I did not get the explosion from him with which he usually blustered his way out of a corner. This was not out of respect for me, I knew. It was because the evidence was compelling and seemed despite his wishes to be mounting all the time.
‘A thing is only ever cursed in retrospect,’ he said eventually. ‘And bad reputation is always a matter more than anything of interpretation. If mountaineers are killed attempting to climb a Himalayan peak, and the attempt fails, the expedition is cursed. They’ve crossed the yeti, or antagonised the mountain gods, or some other similar nonsense impossible to substantiate or refute. If, by contrast, the attempt to scale the peak is a success, it doesn’t much matter what happens to the team on the way down. The expedition is judged a success. The objective was achieved. Nothing was cursed. Do you see my point?’
‘Not really.’
‘In 1970 an expedition organised by Chris Bonington was successful in climbing the South Face of a Himalayan peak called Annapurna. It was the last great unconquered mountain challenge the roof of the world had to offer. Annapurna had always possessed the reputation of an unlucky mountain. One morning, a thousand feet from the top, the climbers Don Whillans and Doug Scott, leading the ascent, left their tent and achieved the summit. On the way down to base camp, two of the party were killed in separate accidents. Was the expedition cursed? Was the mountain unlucky?’
The road to our destination on the Hamble was clear but the driving hard in atrocious visibility and streaming surface water. ‘You tell me, Dad.’
‘Bonington was a skilled enough climber in his own right. He climbed the North Face of the Eiger. With Whillans, he shared the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney. But his chief talents were as an organ
iser and a manipulator of the media. Annapurna was not cursed. The expedition was a triumph, because that’s how Bonington was able to present it.’
I wasn’t convinced. My father knew I wasn’t. ‘A boat is a repository of human thought and feeling, Martin. Within its fragile hull, our dreams and aspirations of adventure and achievement can be nurtured. But a boat is also a place where our fears and insecurities can become magnified and distorted to a point that can threaten sanity. I can only tell you that the Mary Celeste would not have met that enigmatic and disastrous fate with a Columbus or a Drake at the helm.’
I laughed. I had to. ‘You’re not Columbus, Dad. You’re certainly not Drake. I don’t even think you’re a Bonington.’
He laughed himself. ‘I’m not. Not for a moment, I’m not. I’m no more a mountaineer than the Dark Echo is cursed.’
Frank Hadley was waiting for us amid a crowd of his men on the quay when we got to his boatyard. The Solent was a gunmetal hue with white topping its waves and ugly yellow foam billowing at the tideline. Some large creature had been winched by its tail out of the water and was suspended by a loop of hawser from a crane boom over the wet dock adjacent to where the Dark Echo lay wrapped and silent and blind. There was a strong smell of blood and secretion. The animal carcass was of a porpoise or a dolphin and it was missing its head. The butchered creature turned on its steel rope slowly in the ferocious wind. It looked like something huge but half-finished, like some clumsy joke played against nature. It was bitterly cold on the dock. But the headless creature lashed from the crane was beyond any kind of feeling.
‘Washed up this morning before first light,’ Hadley said to my father. He looked gaunt under his wind-whipped hair. I had seen the very same expression he wore, the night before, on the face of Patrick Boyte. ‘It’s a portent, Mr Stannard. It’s an omen as plain as I ever wish to see. I don’t need superstitious men to explain it to me. I want your abomination of a boat gone from my yard. I’ll reimburse you for any extraneous expenses incurred as a consequence. And I’m happy to compensate you for any delay to the original work timetable.’
My father laughed. He looked incredulous. He looked at the turning corpse of the dead creature. ‘Because of this? Because a porpoise is injured by a boat propeller in the busiest stretch of water in the world? What kind of fucking joke is this, Hadley? What kind of fucking witchcraft are we discussing now?’
‘It isn’t a porpoise, Mr Stannard. It’s much too big to be that, you see. And it’s a long way from home. It’s a species of dolphin only usually found in tropical waters.’
A shiver gripped me. It was nothing to do with the cold. I was thinking of Gubby Tench, his relentless luck and terror, and his boat bobbing in the fog in the Gulf Stream. I looked over towards the shrouded Dark Echo. That boat.
‘And it wasn’t a propeller,’ Hadley was saying, in the here and now in the rain on the quay. ‘It was a fish did that damage. It was a shark.’
But my father would not look at the dolphin’s remains. ‘I’ll sue you,’ he said to Hadley. ‘I’ll fucking ruin you if you do this.’
But Hadley did not look flustered by my father. He was too disturbed already by the deteriorating pattern of events for that. ‘I’ll be ruined if I don’t,’ he said, proving the point. He smiled a bitter smile.
There was the movement of a figure at the edge of my vision and I saw that someone was actually aboard the Dark Echo, about to clamber off her wrapped deck on to the quayside. Whoever it was moved with ease and practised agility between the ropes binding the tarp and leapt lightly down on to the cobbles, rubbing his palms together. He had on canvas trousers, a buttoned-up reefer jacket and a watch cap, and his hair was reddish-blond and unruly under the cap. His skin was ruddy, wind-tanned. His appearance made me realise how pale with apprehension were Frank Hadley’s little cluster of helpers.
‘Who’s that?’ my father asked.
‘That’s Peitersen. From America. And he might be your saviour,’ Hadley said. ‘And if he can persuade you of what he has in mind, I think he might also turn out to be mine.’
Four
My father treated Peitersen to breakfast at a café a mile or so along the road. His intentions concerning the Dark Echo announced to the owner of the boat, Hadley seemed much more relaxed. The cliché about weight and shoulders visibly applied to him as he grew and straightened on his dock. Whatever malign forces he thought ranged against him, he clearly felt mollified once his decision had been voiced publicly. Obviously we would have to wait for a window in the appalling weather before the craft could be towed away. But not another minute’s work would be done on her there.
As Peitersen approached and Hadley did the introductions, my father retreated from indignant fury back into his usual mode of old-school courtesy. It was a tactical retreat, rather than a capitulation. He could have ruined Hadley in the courts, of course he could. He could have carried out his threat. But it would have delayed his real purpose and defining mission, which was the restoration and relaunching of the boat. I rocked in the wind on the greasy cobbles paving that stone rampart at the edge of the sea. The smell of brine assaulted my nostrils and cruel mutilation hung from a steel rope in front of my eyes. And I was suddenly aware, for the first time, of the depth of the delusion which had overcome my dad. From what he had said on the road to the Hamble, all the Dark Echo really lacked was competent PR. She needed a maritime Chis Bonington to talk up her seagoing strengths and racing achievements and perhaps the aesthetic merits of her design. There was no such thing as an unlucky boat. There were only the unlucky and sometimes tragic individuals occasionally to be found on board. Busy boatyards were places where accidents would inevitably occur. Storage facilities were sites in which bored security staff would sneak a smoke and leave a burning stub to spark a blaze. Sea mammals did not have the wit to avoid the churning screws of a Wight ferry, particularly when their skewed sonar had sent them hundreds or even thousands of miles off their true course.
Nothing would deter him. Everything was explicable. Faith in his stern and almighty God was the only mystery my father allowed into his life. He was not about to see it challenged now by the fear in others of what he sneered at as witchcraft. He would restore Dark Echo at whatever terrible cost she claimed. And he would embark aboard her on his transatlantic voyage. And I would have to go with him, not because I was any longer flattered by the invitation, but because I loved him so much and sensed the slippery, brooding danger and could not let him face it on his own. If I did that, I would lose him, I was sure. I did not want my father confounded by terror and madness. And I did not dare to face the loss of him.
These were my thoughts on the quay at Hadley’s boatyard. And they seemed perfectly fitting to the circumstances. The headless dolphin swayed and dripped some viscous stuff on to the cobbles. Out on the Solent a ship’s horn sounded, withered and deformed by the wind. Hadley’s men were grey and pinched and flapping at the extremities of their clothing under a grey sky. My father, magisterial under his mane of silvery hair, looked doomed. And the boat he had bought brooded like a secret under its ragged canvas wrapping.
But Peitersen entirely changed the mood, once we got to the café. He was buoyant and energetic and focused. His eyes were as bright with enthusiasm as the double row of brass buttons on his pea coat. He had, for want of a better word, a style about him. He talked only in terms of sunny practicalities. We would tow Dark Echo aboard a flat-decked, seagoing barge as soon as we could charter the vessel and the tug to pull it, and got our weather window. He had a provisional berth for her already in mind. There was a small boatyard we could lease short-term about five miles along the coast. It was not state of the art, like Hadley’s place. It was not resourced to create Viking longships for the directors of epic films. But it possessed all the necessary facilities to make Dark Echo seaworthy once again. And, he said, tucking into his full English breakfast, to make her once more proud and beautiful.
Talk like this would, I knew, ha
ve no trouble in seducing my father simply because it voiced his most ardent dreams in the kind of phraseology he would have chosen to use himself. But I was unconvinced. I studied Peitersen. He was not so young as his lithe movement had promised from a distance aboard the boat. There were lines around his eyes and a suggestion of scragginess at the neck. His tumbling curls of strawberry-blond hair were youthful enough with his watch cap taken off at the table to eat. And he had a tan that suggested the tropics and took a few years off him as well. But the man I had first thought to be about thirty-five was probably in reality more like fifty years old.
‘You don’t believe she’s an unlucky boat, Mr Peitersen?’
‘Jack will do,’ he said to me, smiling. His teeth were very white against the unseasonal depth of his tan. ‘And no, I don’t, son. I think she’s a boat has had more than her fair share of unlucky owners. But that’s been her misfortune. And her fortunes are about to change.’
I looked at my father. The smile he now wore was broad, almost beatific. Peitersen could play him, alright. And the two of them had only just met.
‘How do you explain the dolphin, Jack?’
He looked at me. His eyes were blue-grey and as bright as his grin. He was very alert. I thought that if his hands were as quick as his mind, the restoration of my father’s boat would take no time at all.
‘I wouldn’t presume to,’ he said. ‘It’s arrogant for a man to try to justify the mysteries of the sea. I can tell you that, to my mind, the dead creature signifies nothing beyond itself. I wouldn’t speculate on why it swam here or how it perished. I prefer to deal in nails and timber and tar and rope. I can make Dark Echo respond to the lightest touch of her tiller. I can squeeze eighteen knots out of her under full sail. I prefer to deal in practicalities rather than to dwell on superstition, son.’
I nodded. I really didn’t like him calling me son.
‘I don’t believe in curses. I stick to what I know.’