by F. G. Cottam
Sardonic laughter. I had heard it myself on my own first terrifying exploration of the boat, in Wagnerian weather on Frank Hadley’s horribly luckless dock. But on the two visits since, at Lepe, I had felt entirely different. It wasn’t so much as though the baleful threat had receded, though. It was more that I was seduced by the Dark Echo herself into ignoring any danger. Suzanne had been so disconcerted by her first exposure to the boat, my second, that she had lied to me and gone to France in a bid to uncover the secrets of the man who’d had her built. Yet I’d been reassured, relieved in the aftermath of the visit we shared.
On the visit just concluded to the Dark Echo, I’d been dazzled by her. I had heard that loud and furtive scurrying aboard and not just rationalised, but trivialised it. This despite the fact that I’d found no trace of the rodent sane thinking insisted was responsible for the sound. It was as though the boat herself lulled and stroked me into a sort of sedated glee. Aboard her, my senses were happily stupefied.
She did not lure me to her. The contamination did not spread that far. Away from her, I felt no great yearning for her. But once I set foot on the Dark Echo, I seemed to fall under her strong and sensual spell.
I had Chesney, in his shiny, pantomime sentry outfit, to thank for this belated insight. As I pulled up outside Peitersen’s picturesque country hotel, it was not a comfortable thought.
Then I had another. What if I had looked in the sail store? I had a sudden and very confident intuition that I would have encountered not a rodent, but Spalding’s pet bull mastiff Toby, stinking and wormy and dead. And panting and eager in its grotesque parody of canine life for the return of his long-lost master. The dog had lurked in the sail store, had gnawed rope there in the cool and the quiet when the weather and swell had made the deck unsafe. I knew it now. I knew it suddenly and with the same absolute certainty insisting that night follows day.
I had no trouble at all in accessing Pietersen’s room. My driving licence established my surname. And there was no Chesneyesque confusion over it. The Stannard name had been the source of much guaranteed income for the duration of Peitersen’s stay in the hotel, because my father had put him up in the best-appointed room in the place. His meals and his room had been paid for in advance until the end of June, the Easter and early summer premiums effortlessly accommodated by my father’s happy largesse. So I was not surprised at the smiles and the opening doors and the all-round obsequiousness. In a microcosmic sort of way, they amounted to the story of my life.
The room, by contrast, offered me nothing. The windows were oppressively leaded and the walls punctuated by bucolic scenes of domestic country routine. The beamed ceiling was so low as to make the space seem cramped, despite its broad width and generous length. Logs sat in the grate of an authentic fire, but the bark was curling on them under a patina of dust. I patted the counterpane on the bed, sniffed at the plumped pillows. It was recently changed and made up, of course, but the bed had a cold, unslept-in look about it. Slowly, the details of the room revealed themselves. There was a TV and DVD combination, discreetly positioned and definitely not dating from the age of squires stretching before pewter jugs of porter after a hard day riding to hounds. There was a power shower in the adjoining bathroom. The bathroom was small. But its dove-white, downy towels were folded across heated rails. On a shelf under the mirror, there were little embossed bottles filled with creams and lotions, the sort hotel guests routinely steal to offset the pain of paying the bill.
Peitersen had paid no bill. And I was somehow sure he had stolen nothing either. I felt a strong certainty that he had never unscrewed the top from one of the pampering bottles on the bathroom shelf. Just as he had never taken a DVD to view from the small library of them under his television. Neither had he enjoyed a drink from the minibar tucked against the wall beside the television. His first-floor window looked out on to the budding leaves of a stately chestnut tree and, beyond it, a lush sweep of descending lawn. I doubted Peitersen had ever so much as noticed the view. I had a strengthening suspicion that he had never slept in the bed.
The fastidiousness of a monk.
Again I searched for a note, but found none.
I sat among the vases of wild flowers and the horse brasses and heavily framed pictures in a window seat in the hotel’s cluttered lobby to drink a cup of coffee. The sun warmed my back through the window. A Polish girl with pretty eyes fussed with her hair behind the reception desk. It was twelve o’clock. My mobile was still on the back seat of my car where I’d thrown it in exasperation earlier. I could hear the drone of a motor mower clipping the grass outside. Everything seemed perfectly normal but I knew that nothing was. I wondered if my father was still off-message in Chichester. I thought of the picture he had framed for me in my cabin aboard his blighted boat and felt like sinking to my knees and praying for his safety. Instead, I drained my cup and went over to where the Polish girl had been joined by a colleague similar enough to her for them to be sisters.
Yes, they had known the guest I described to them. The receptionist with the arresting eyes was called Magda. The other girl, her cousin Marjena, had given Mr Peitersen’s room its daily turn. Marjena’s English, while a hell of a lot better than my Polish, was nothing like as good as that spoken by Magda. I would ideally have liked to take Marjena for a walk in the hotel grounds for the sort of private chat that encourages people to recollect those careless details that can be significant. But Magda – who knew, of course, about the payment arrangements for Peitersen’s stay – did not seem to inhibit her cousin from speaking at all. And, of course, I needed help with translation.
It seemed Peitersen had certain idiosyncracies. Middle-aged and well heeled, most of the guests were yachties or golfers or couples enjoying a romantic break from their regular routine. The hotel was famous for its kitchen. There were two other restaurants, one Italian and one that sounded to me like the Kundan on the Hamble, that the hotel was happy to recommend. Peitersen never ate at any of them. Nor did he ever go to the gastropub a mile down the road.
‘And he did not eat in his room,’ Marjena said.
‘He must have eaten something.’
Marjena looked at the floor and said something incomprehensible.
I looked at Magda.
‘My cousin says Mr Peitersen was starving himself.’
‘Dieting?’
She shook her head. She narrowed her eyes, struggling for the English word. It came to her. ‘Fasting,’ she said.
When I got back to my car the message symbol was flashing on my phone.
‘Martin. You’ve been trying to reach me. Since it isn’t my birthday, and since I have not changed the terms of my will, I’m baffled by the attention. What can you possibly want?’
Under the humour, his voice was rich with contentment. Chichester agreed with him. Now I was going to deliver news that would ruin his day. I hesitated with my thumb over the redial button. How did I know that Peitersen had disappeared? I knew because Suzanne had told me the previous day. And how did I know that he wasn’t really Peitersen at all? I knew because Suzanne had done some digging, about which my father had never been consulted. What would I tell him? I would tell him the unvarnished truth. Killing the messenger was an injustice in which my father habitually indulged. And he might consider Suzanne’s digging a sort of betrayal. But there was no point in lying to him. She had acted out of concern for me. I was motivated only by concern for him. He could be bad-tempered, vindictive, capricious and cruel. He could out-sulk a spoiled four-year-old and he was breathtakingly vain. But he wasn’t stupid. I’d weather the verbal storm and wait for calm to return and, when it did, we would discuss the mysteries of the fraudulent boatbuilder and weigh their implications and try to solve them together.
Motive was the key to it, of course. I knew Suzanne’s and I knew mine right enough. But Peitersen’s motive was obscure and baffling. And my conversation with the Polish girls had thrown up as many questions about him as it had clues. I looked up through
the Saab windscreen at the window of the room he had occupied. I could not see inside. Sunlight reflected back from the panes the dappled green of a chestnut tree against a pure blue sky. I took a deep breath and pushed the button on my phone.
He met me that evening in the West End of London at Sheekey’s restaurant after a performance at Covent Garden. His metaphor concerning Hadley’s yard and Wagner had been based on more than rhetoric. My father loved the opera and most particularly the leaden, myth-burdened Germanic stuff. He listened to it a lot at home on a hi-fi system that had cost roughly three times what I paid as the deposit on my Lambeth flat. But you couldn’t really begrudge him the luxuries he’d earned.
He looked tired over dinner, as though some of the glitter had come off him. Maybe his new-old flame had worked him hard between the sheets. But I thought there was a bit more to it than that. Regardless, I didn’t nurse him through what I had to say. I told him all of it. I told him last of all what I had learned from the Polish girls and from Marjena in particular.
‘She should have knocked, but she didn’t. He was almost never there. She doesn’t believe he slept in the bed in his room, just rumpled it from time to time for appearance’s sake. She should have knocked. Instead, she opened the door and surprised him.’
‘And herself.’
‘He was prostrate on the floor with a set of rosary beads in his hands. He was incanting, her cousin said. That was the translation.’
My father smiled at me. ‘America is a nation with more than its share of pious Christians.’
‘He was wearing a hair shirt, for Christ’s sake.’
‘And sometimes their piety knows no bounds.’
‘Magda found his passport.’
‘Disappointing. I thought the Poles were honest.’
‘They were suspicious of him. They had a duty of care to their other guests. The night manager ordered her to do it. The passport was made out in the name of Cardoza. No more his real name than Peitersen was.’
I had told him about Cardoza Associates. I had told him about Martens and Degrue. He had looked mildly intrigued. His volcanic temper had not produced the expected eruption. I had not been able through any of what I told him to shake him out of what seemed to me like a strange sort of detachment. In the end, I lost my own temper.
‘It would take more than Chris fucking Bonington to justify this stuff, Dad. And we haven’t even fucking embarked.’
‘I’d thank you not to use that language with me.’
‘You use it with me. All the time.’
‘Seniority, Martin. There’s a protocol.’
‘Aye, aye, Captain.’
I was frustrated and furious. I think he could tell I was. He raised his eyes for the bill and, as usual with him, that was all it took. A raising of eyebrows in the hurtle and hubbub of a crowded restaurant and the bill was on its way.
‘I’ll get this, Dad.’
He put his hand on mine. ‘Don’t be silly.’
I loved the touch of him. It was too rare between us. I felt my anger start to dissipate. I knew it would leak away from me in the grip of my father’s unexpected tenderness. But I couldn’t let it. The danger seemed too urgent and the portents too great.
‘Tomorrow, Martin,’ he said. He squeezed my hand under his. ‘Tomorrow I shall let you in on a shameful secret. And I expect my doing so might put your troubled mind at rest.’
I picked my father up at 9 a.m. There was no wind and the sky, apart from its criss-cross pattern of vapour trails, was an unsullied blue. It was perfect helicopter weather. So wherever we were going, he felt he needed to be with me, in the seat next to mine, on the journey back. The mood is always lighter in the morning and so, waiting for him, I thought of making a joke about how I should start charging him by the mile, or about how Scandinavian cars were clearly growing on him. But when I saw his face, I decided against it. He looked like he’d been crying. In the bright morning, he looked raw with grief. And for the first time in my life, I thought my father looked older than his years.
He tossed a bag and a topcoat on to the back seat and got in. Then he closed the door on himself and sniffed and sighed. ‘Sleep okay?’
‘Surprisingly well.’
He fastened his seatbelt and took a long breath that caught in his chest.
‘You alright, Dad?’
‘I loved your mother very much.’
True as this statement was, I neither wanted nor needed to hear it. There were other, pressing imperatives. Any mention of my mother and her premature death was hard to take. I had indulged my father’s lingering sense of loss at her passing for a long time, at the expense of my own feelings and unmet craving for comfort and consolation. But now was not the time, surely, for him to talk about the way that Mum was taken from us. Now was not the time.
He sniffed again. ‘Can you find your way to Southend?’
I released the handbrake, eased off the clutch. ‘If that’s where you need to get to.’
He turned to me. ‘Don’t be callous, son. It’s an effortless inclination in the young, I know. But please don’t be callous. Today is going to be difficult enough.’
Callous. In his business life he’d behaved as though he had a monopoly on the word. ‘Cutting the slack’ had been his mantra. Ruining reputations and livelihoods had sometimes been the consequence. He thought I was soft-hearted, and maybe I was. He thought it an advantageous tendency in the priesthood but disastrous in the cut and thrust of commerce, and maybe he was right. But at that moment, pulling away from the kerb, I thought he had a fucking cheek to call me callous. And I thought his bringing up the subject of Mum a cheap and unforgivable tactic of avoidance.
My mother was killed by lung cancer. She filled my thoughts on the drive to Southend. I could not think about her in life without thinking about her death. This was because the manner of her dying made an abject mockery of everything of her that preceded it. Diagnosis came too late for meaningful treatment and she declined rapidly, stupefied by the morphine made necessary by intolerable physical pain. Gaunt and seldom conscious, she slipped away from us four weeks after entering the hospice. The disease had made a frail stranger of her by the time the moment of her death arrived. She had never smoked. She never developed a cough. Persistent fatigue had been the only really serious symptom before the cancer was discovered. She was a writer and occasional broadcaster on the radio who lost the energy to write and, in what became her final broadcasts, sometimes suffered a slight breathlessness.
My mother was a beautiful American woman from San Francisco who filled our lives with light and ended her own in a confused darkness. There was no time to settle her affairs, nor to reconcile herself or those around her. Everything about the illness happened with bewildering speed. When I think of her I think of her laughter and her kindness and her grace. And then I think of her death. She was forty-four years old when death arrived without a shred of dignity in its hurry to claim her.
The blue promise of the London morning disappeared on the A13, about twelve miles from our intended destination not of Southend but of Westcliff-on-Sea, the picturesque little town just to the west of its garish neighbour on the coast. The cloud came and lowered and then the rain began to fall in big drops, splashing audibly on the Saab’s windscreen. My father had brooded throughout the whole journey. Neither of us had spoken much. He’d grunted that we actually wanted Westcliff, but that was it. The pleasantries were behind us. He seemed as lost in his own thoughts as I was in mine. The overcast sky and the rain suited the mood in the car better than the sunshine had. I thought about switching on the radio. But I did not particularly want to risk hearing Paddy McAloon singing about what happens when love breaks down.
He directed me through Westcliffe’s pretty streets. We stopped outside a vacant lot halfway along a row of suburban villas all with neat gardens dripping from precise hedgerows and pruned bushes in the persistent rain. It was odd, the empty space in the row of well-appointed little dwellings. It created
an abrupt and somehow melancholy absence.
‘Ever heard of Victor Draper, Martin?’
My father was staring at the breach of soil and rubble between the houses. There were puddles there and the unrelenting rain splashed into them.
‘The name is vaguely familiar.’
‘A medium. He was a medium, a man who claimed to have a clairvoyant gift. He was very successful at about the time of your mother’s death. His column was syndicated in the middlebrow tabloids. He appeared sometimes on television. He wasn’t one of those breakfast TV cranks. He was a cut above the pulp. He was persuasive and respectable. If I remember rightly, he was even the subject once of a BBC Omnibus programme.’
I did remember him. He had been a familiar name until a decade or so ago. He had been the respectable face and fluent public voice of the paranormal. His books had been advertised in the back pages of the Sunday supplements. His pull had been sufficient to fill theatres on public tours. Then he had disappeared. I suppose I had just assumed he had died himself.
My father cleared his throat. ‘When your mother left us, I found it impossible to reconcile myself. My faith should have been strong enough to help me endure. But, God forgive me, it was not.’
‘You went to Victor Draper?’
‘He came to me. He was very convincing and I was half mad with the agony of my loss.’
Our loss, I thought. Her death did not just happen to my father. She was our loss. And she lost more than anyone.
In the seat next to me, in my car in the rain, my father was trembling. This was very difficult for him. He was exposing himself to his son as a fool. ‘When did you realise?’
‘After a couple of months. And around forty thousand pounds.’
‘What gave him away?’
‘Oh, he was very good. He had done his research. He had a formidable memory for trivia. And he was a most gifted mimic. He could modulate the tones of your mother’s voice with uncanny conviction. I really thought it was her words coming out of his mouth when he simulated his trance.’