by F. G. Cottam
She was a gorgeous sight when I unbolted and pulled open the double doors, revealing her to the bright spring light of morning. My father had said, when she was no more than a sullen wreck in the marine boneyard of Bullen and Clore, it was her lines that got to you. And I could see now what he’d already been so stricken by then. Even out of the water, the sweep of her hull made Captain Straub’s Andromeda seem frumpy and staid. They were the same gender, but different generations; the plump Clyde dowager dressed in widow’s weeds and the flapper heiress glittering at one of Gerald Murphy’s Riviera parties.
Except that she did not so much glitter as gleam. The Dark Echo was svelte and sumptuous in the gloss of her paintwork and the lustre of her polished brass. I climbed aboard. It was quiet in the boathouse. I was dimly aware of the hiss of small waves breaking down on the shore. And faintly, there was the cry of gulls, ubiquitous in the sky above the water. But the boathouse and the boat it harboured were entirely silent. So perfectly grooved was the planking on her deck that the teak beneath my feet didn’t so much as murmur under my weight. I ran my hand lightly along her rail on the port side close to the stern and sensed that the Dark Echo was poised, tensile, alive and awaiting her moment. It was not a forbidding feeling. There was nothing portentous or threatening about it. It was exhilaration, the promise of glamour and glory. It was, above all, a seductive sensation.
Amid the rusting and gigantic artefacts of marine engineering and salvage at Bullen and Clore, and again on those ramparts built against the storms of Hadley’s dock, I had been made aware of the elemental depth and sometimes even the fury of the sea. The voyage to Baltrum, with its blast of Arctic wind and its high and persistent swell, had only increased my feeling of wariness at the thought of crossing an ocean. But the Dark Echo had substance, as well as abundant style. She had pedigree. She seemed not so much adequate to the beckoning task, in her grace and strength, as eager for it.
My father had insisted that there was no such thing as an unlucky boat. There were only unlucky owners, he said. Aboard his glittering prize, in that boathouse at Lepe on that benign and gentle April day, it was an easier argument to believe than you might imagine.
Whatever atrocities the Jericho Crew had cooked up and conjured seemed to have damned them all. Two of the men whose fate Suzanne had discovered had at some time owned the boat. At least one, perhaps as many as three men had died aboard her. But the others had all met their violent, early deaths on land. Spalding himself had perished stretched across the counterpane of a bed in a New York hotel room with his veins full of Cutty Sark whisky and a pistol barrel at his temple. The boat had been icebound in the harbour, miles away and surely blameless. The chaplain, among the Jericho Crew, had died first, in a French barn. Of the rest, only Tench and perhaps the Waltrows had met their fates aboard the Dark Echo. With what really happened to the Waltrows an abiding mystery, Tench was the only certain casualty of the boat.
It was the Jericho Crew that were cursed. They had done something, entered into some devilish pact to determine their own immunity in battle, and paid a heavy and gruesome price once peace was restored to the world. They had dabbled in dark magic learned by Spalding from his occultist parents in his youth. And they had indulged in dark atrocities. It was nothing to do with the boat. It was to do with the war and the diabolical part they had played in it. The accidents at Hadley’s place had been unfortunate, but they had been just that. The washed-up dolphin, the gory omen of Hadley’s fraught imagination, had been exactly what my father said it was. Lost and disorientated, it had encountered a propeller blade and had become an unfortunate casualty of the busiest waterway in the world.
Peitersen – the mystery of Peitersen and the hope of solving it – was, of course, the whole of the reason for my visit to the boatyard at Lepe. But I was naturally interested in seeing the Dark Echo again. She had impressed me as a work in spectacular progress when last I’d visited, with Suzanne. I was curious to see whether the refurbishment had reached a stage where it would entirely dispel the threat I’d felt when first aboard her. That malevolent, terrifying vision had dimmed a little with time, I’ll admit. There was this natural temptation to place it in the Wagnerian winter endured by poor Frank Hadley. But Suzanne’s story of the barn used as a base in France by the Jericho Crew had brought the terror of the moment back pretty vividly. And I wanted to find out how I felt aboard the Dark Echo after a voyage on a similar craft that was, according to its master, truly haunted.
I climbed down the companionway at the stern of the vessel. To the rear of its descending steps was the master cabin. I took a deep breath and studied the door of what would be my father’s living quarters aboard. It was inlaid with a large central panel of polished walnut. It was possible to discern all kinds of fanciful patterns and themes in the rich and complex walnut burr. But wood was wood, however exactly carved and fashioned. It smelled like it had been lovingly oiled. It felt like velvet and glass combined in some clever alchemy under the caress of my fingertips.
I turned the burnished brass handle. The door was unlocked. I took another, deeper breath. I felt more nervous than on my last visit, the transformation of the Dark Echo no longer the happy novelty to me it had been then. And then, Suzanne had been at my side. Now, I was alone. I was aware of the blood pounding in my ears with my accelerated heart rate. I was not fearful exactly. I was nowhere near the state of hackle-raised fright I had been in on first setting foot aboard her. But I was apprehensive. It was easier to believe the curse on the owners rather than on the boat. It was much easier, now that the refurbishment had made the boat close to unrecognisable. But after all I had heard and experienced, after the disappearance of the fraudster masquerading as Jack Peitersen, I’d have been a fool not to feel a degree of trepidation.
The door opened on a magnificent room. I’d thought Captain Straub’s master cabin cosy. My father’s made it look squalid. He had paintings on the walls by Léger and Bonnard and Delaunay. There was a bookshelf, with first editions of Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. There was the original of the photograph I’d seen of the Dark Echo winning its race in the Arthur Mee encyclopedia, framed on my father’s magisterial oak desk among furled navigation charts and maps. There was a beautiful three-draw telescope and a teak humidor for his cigars. And there were his boxing trophies, those cheap and tarnished things of nickel and silver plate, mounted in a cabinet of glass that was subtly tinted, I suppose, to give the prizes within a lustre they had always lacked in the gritty impoverishment of life.
There was a gun cabinet, screwed to the rear wall. It was less a display case than a working rack for the placement of rifles and shotguns. My father was skilled in the use of both. Until the Dunblane tragedy and the ensuing legislation, he had also owned and practised with a variety of handguns. Firearms held a deadly glamour for him. Once, on my birthday, he had taken Suzanne and me to Las Vegas to see Ricky Hatton fight for a world title and we spent the morning after the fight at a desert shooting range. My dad got to blat off a few rounds with an M16 and a Kalashnikov, grinning like a kid as the brass jackets from the rounds chinked around his feet and a cardboard target in the shape of a man was obliterated in the near distance. Suzanne learned to load and fire a handgun and proved to be an excellent shot. I was hungover from the after-fight party and bored.
He had told me of his intention to bring a weapon or weapons aboard. He had mentioned what had happened a few years ago to the great Australian yachtsman Peter Blake on the Amazon. We weren’t going to the Amazon, but piracy had made a comeback in recent years on the Atlantic. Clearly, he had meant what he said. There were no guns in the cabinet yet. Looking at it, I was pretty certain that there would be by the time we embarked. It seemed fair enough. He had spent a fortune on the Dark Echo. When we left land, the vessel would be my father’s domain. He clearly felt he had the right and obligation to defend it.
I head a noise, then, a scurry that was explosively loud in the silence
of the boat’s interior. It sounded furtive and aggressive at once, and it made me jump suddenly in my own skin. It had come from the galley, I decided. And, of course, it could only be a rat. The sound of it brought me back to myself, to the suspicion that the boat had been preternaturally quiet before the scurrying sound. Where the fuck was the yard security? Alright, it was a small yard leased for the commissioning of a single vessel. But this coastline was not immune to crime and the Dark Echo was a hell of a prize. An opportunistic thief could retire on the grey-market sale of the artwork alone on the boat I was aboard. And where the fuck was Peitersen? He’d overseen a lovely job. Had he even collected what he was owed for it, before he’d bolted?
I heard the rat again. It was large and scavenging and doing Christ knew what damage to the spotless wood and steelwork of the shining new galley. I was not afraid of rats. Nor, though, did I want to get bitten by one of the large seagoing examples. I looked for something to kill it with. There were knives displayed in a case on the wall of my father’s cabin. Their present purpose was ornamental. They were beautiful objects with hilts fashioned from ivory and bone and blades of engraved steel. But they had been tools once and appeared sharp. That said, I didn’t want to be swabbing rodent giblets from the galley floor. I swore under my breath and heard the bold and noisy fucker again, scrabbling a few feet beyond the master cabin door. I looked around. There was a polished mahogany billy club, clipped to the wall but not enclosed behind glass. It looked like the sort of evil weapon with which the Spice Island press gangs subdued reluctant sailors in the Pompey of the early nineteenth century. It was about twelve inches long and its grip was bound in twine, and it swelled at its business end to about the circumference of a tennis ball. I pulled the club free of its clips and hefted it. It was viciously well balanced. I felt a bite of pain, slapping the head of it into my palm, wondering that the pressed sailors ever came round after a blow from this thing. My antique weapon seemed ideal for dealing with vermin. I’d just have to make sure not to miss with it.
I stole out of the master cabin, ducked into the galley and shut the door behind me before snapping on the electric lights, grateful that the battery powering them was charged, grateful I’d remembered the location of the switches. I looked around the bright, polished surfaces. There was nothing there. I hefted the club and looked at the floor and work surfaces for telltale rat droppings. But the place was clean. It was also, once again, entirely silent. There wasn’t even ambient noise now. Outside, the gulls had gone. The sea had receded. I hefted the club in my hand, dropped to my haunches and searched the cupboards and the oven and the refrigerator. But they were empty. Empty, too, were the head-height cupboards flanking the galley above the shiny racks of copper pans and steel utensils. It would have been a very sterile environment in which to discover a rat. There was not a crumb of food aboard the Dark Echo for a rat to eat. If any of the workers had left a half-eaten sandwich from their lunchbox in the galley, I would have seen the cling film or greaseproof paper used to wrap it. And I would have smelled its stale residue. All I could smell was wax polish and a faint, lemony hint of disinfectant. The place was spotless. But I had heard what I had heard.
I progressed through the length of the boat to my own cabin. It was modest compared to my dad’s. But it was still better appointed than any living quarters I had ever spent time in aboard a boat. He’d had a picture of Suzanne and me, taken at one of his summer picnics, blown up and mounted in a rosewood frame and hung on the wall I’d be looking at if I ever used the desk he’d provided me with. My furniture was deeply upholstered in wine-coloured leather and I smiled, thinking I’d have to grow a moustache and wear a potent aftershave to achieve the necessary machismo to sit on any of it. I’d need one of his rifles across my lap. There was a combined radio and CD player and, beside this machine, a pile of CDs of the sort of music my father, or more likely Mrs Simms, knew I liked to listen to. There was the latest Apple laptop, dazzling in its whiteness at the centre of the desk. What there wasn’t, was a scurrying rodent about to have its back broken by my borrowed billy club.
I thought about the sail store. But there was nothing in there for a rat to chew on yet. The sails were not due to arrive until mid-May, a full fortnight distant. There could be items of rigging. But ropes these days were nylon, not hemp, weren’t they? Unless you were aboard the Andromeda. The only sort of rat I knew anything at all about was the sort you read about in tabloid newspapers. These cat-sized monsters would, allegedly, chew their way through anything. But I thought that even a tabloid rat would draw the line at rope spun out of some oil-based synthetic compound. There was no nourishment in nylon.
So I didn’t check the sail store. I checked the shower stall and the lavatory, which flanked the short corridor between my cabin and the door through which you entered it. And I stood very still and listened very carefully for a full minute, standing in the corridor. But I did not check the sail store because there seemed no point. My rodent stowaway had avoided our confrontation by scurrying out of an open porthole, I decided. Several of them were open; I noticed this backtracking for a last check before climbing back up to the deck. On my way through, I closed them all. Doing so would not hinder a determined thief. But it might prevent an adventurous rat from getting aboard and nibbling at the canvas of my father’s pictures. Lastly, before leaving, I slotted the billy club back into its brass display clips.
I vaulted down from the deck of the Dark Echo on to the boards of the boathouse, feeling really indignant about the way she seemed to have been abandoned. It was paradoxical, to say the least. She had been restored to the sort of specification demanded by an Arab sheikh. Yet here she was, at the mercy of any local vandal armed with a can of graffiti paint. It was more than paradoxical to abandon her like this. In fact, it was bloody odd.
There was a man at the gate when I walked out of the boathouse and back towards where I’d parked my car. He was wearing blue uniform trousers and a blue poly-cotton shirt with a flash above the breast pocket that read ‘Security’. He put his hands on his hips and rocked on his heels when he saw me approach, narrowing his eyes. The effect would have been more impressive had he kept his cap and tunic on. But they’d been surrendered already to the rising heat of the late April sun and were draped across his seat next to the gatepost. He was Job Centre security, not the swaggering nightclub sort who supplement pay of five pounds an hour by dealing gear. I felt a bit sorry for him. He was out of shape and the wrong side of forty. His trousers were too tight and shiny with wear at the pockets and crotch. He was the sort of security lippy adolescents give the run around in big supermarkets.
‘What are you doing here?’
Not thieving, obviously. I was carrying nothing, not even my mobile, which I’d left in the glove compartment of the car. He’d worked this out for himself, eventually. I saw it in the way his shoulders relaxed as I got closer to him.
‘My old man owns the boat.’ I looked at my watch. It was just before 10 a.m. ‘Where have you been?’
He looked sheepish, embarrassed. But he said, ‘I’m early. I’m not even properly on till ten.’
So I was overtime. Or I was undertime, if there were such a thing.
‘Prendergast is supposed to be here,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Chesney.’
‘Where’s Prendergast?’
But Chesney said nothing. He looked down at his cheap shoes where the hem of his polyester trousers broke over them.
‘My father is a generous man, Mr Chesney. He appreciates a conscientious employee. Above all, though, my father values and rewards loyalty. Where’s Prendergast?’
‘He don’t like doing nights.’ The accent was very local. ‘No one does. So we toss for it. Prendergast called wrong. Got a week of nights. Couldn’t avoid it when Mr Peitersen was here all hours, he’d catch you out. But, well, with Peitersen gone, who wants to be here on his lonesome in the dark, eh?’
‘So you’d have done
the same?’
Chesney looked churlish, now. He ground the sole of a shoe into the gravel at the gate like a toddler nailed for some nursery crime. I felt less sorry for him than I had. Stupidity and petulance are an ugly combination.
‘It’s the noises, see, Mr Stallard.’
‘Stannard.’
He nodded towards the boathouse.
‘The rats?’
‘The voices. The laughter. They carry, see. I tolerates it because I have a family to feed. But I don’t like the nights any more than Mickey Prendergast does.’
I nodded. There didn’t seem anything to say, not to Chesney, at least. But he had given me something to think about.
‘Sardonic, the laughter? The tone of it?’
He looked at me like I’d just opened my mouth and spoken Martian to him. I took out my wallet. I always carried cash. It was a habit inculcated in me by my father, who always carried cash because he could never forget the time when he’d had none to carry. I peeled off three twenties and stuffed them into Chesney’s pocket and walked past him through the gate to my car. I’d hinted at a reward when I’d asked him to tell me the truth. He’d done that. I meant to get him sacked and, as he’d said, he had a family to feed. Sixty quid did not seem overly generous compensation.
There were no messages on my mobile. I tried calling my father’s BlackBerry with no success and tossed the phone over my shoulder on to the back seat in exasperation. I was no fonder of my less attractive traits than anyone else. Intellectual snobbery had always been prominent among my long list of obnoxious characteristics. I had dismissed Chesney the timid sentinel as pond life because I hadn’t liked hearing what he said. But whether I liked it or I didn’t, it needed to be considered. My next port of call was the country hotel where my father had put Peitersen up. He was gone from there, too, of course. But at the hotel he might have left the explanatory note he had not left in his boatyard office or aboard the Dark Echo either.