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, have 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.’
‘I can see that.’
The grin hadn’t left his face. ‘How?’
‘Because you’ve eaten every scrap of your eggs and bacon and sausage. But you’ve left your black pudding intact.’
He looked at his plate. ‘You’re telling me that stuff’s edible, Martin, then I’m obliged to take your word for it. But only because you seem such an honest boy.’
My father slapped the table in a show of mirth. It occurred to me that his optimism was probably the reason he’d made such a success of his life. It seemed unsinkable.
‘Don’t like him, do you?’
We were in the Saab, on the way back to London.
‘He’s supercilious. He’s patronising. And I think there’s more to him than meets the eye.’
‘I hope there’s more to him than there was to Frank Hadley,’ my father said.
The new boatyard was on the other side of Southampton Water, between Calshot and Lepe, just beyond the point and the old Calshot lifeboat station. My father had agreed to pay for Peitersen to stay for the duration at a country hotel in Exbury. The hotel was old but very comfortable, with an excellent restaurant. But Peitersen had said he expected to bed down most nights in the yard. He said with the coming of the spring and warmer evenings, it would be comfortable enough and the most practical way of making sure we did not slip behind the schedule agreed. Of course, such talk was music to my father’s ears.
‘You know, Martin, you don’t have to share this voyage.’ His voice was gentle.
‘I know.’
‘You might not wish to come. Suzanne might not wish you to go. I’d understand totally if you pulled out now. It would give me three months to find someone to help me crew and three months is ample time.’
‘I’m coming, Dad. Nothing would stop me.’
‘Good,’ he said. He reached across and gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘I’m delighted that’s how you feel.’
We got our window in the weather the following day. I did not go down to witness the events. It was bright and balmy, helicopter weather, so my services as a chauffeur were not required. Peitersen chartered the tug and a barge he’d put on standby, and the Dark Echo was winched aboard the barge and secured there without incident. She was unloaded, again without incident, at the new yard after a short journey over innocent blue water. My father told me over the phone that evening that the conditions had made the turbulent grey weather of the preceding weeks seem like some weird Wagnerian dream. Frank Hadley hadn’t been present for the extrication of the vessel from his dock. ‘Didn’t ask where he was,’ my father said. ‘Probably busy having his dolphin stuffed.’
‘Peitersen?’
‘Competence personified. He’s a boatman to the soles of his sea boots, Martin. And he has the gift of leadership. Men do as he asks, almost before he has to ask them.’
I nodded, which is a pretty stupid thing to do on the telephone, where only words and vocal expression count. But I did not like Jack Peitersen and did not think that I ever would.
But he was true to what he had said in his airmail letter to Hadley. There were no more gruesome accidents. April brought a prolonged spell of warm spring weather and the small team of craftsmen he assembled made solid progress. There was debate over whether to fit an engine and, if so, what type to fit. I did not participate in this. My father was reluctant to have the boat powered by anything but wind. Peitersen thought it was only a matter of practicality that would have no real impact on the aesthetics of the boat and would make it far easier for inexperienced sailors like my father and myself to get her in and out of harbour without mishap. He said the engine was only one of a number of innovations that would improve the boat’s performance without compromising her integrity. The others were a state-of-the-art land to sea communications system, a satellite navigation system and sonar as a precaution to prevent us running aground or tearing the hull on submerged rocks or coral banks. All of these would be battery powered.
My father pondered at length on the merits or otherwise of the engine. It would be an exaggeration to say that he agonised, but not so very much of one. Spalding, the war hero and racing champion, had not required an engine. Peitersen apparently laughed when this point was made and said that if the small clean marine turbines of today had existed then, his great-grandfather would have fitted one to the Dark Echo as a matter of course. My dad told me the clincher in eventually agreeing to the engine was that it did not prevent the boat from qualifying for official status as a genuine vintage schooner. But I think the clincher was the weight he accorded Peitersen’s opinion, as the man’s influence grew as a consequence of his obvious expertise and the impressive progress he was making generally with the boat.
There were two big set-pieces in the restoration my father was very keen for me to attend. These were the fitting of the replacement main mast and the attachment to the fore-deck of the capstan, chain and anchor. Both were scheduled to be fitted early in May. My theoretical seamanship was impressive enough by now and I knew my way out of Whitstable and around the Isle of Sheppey on an actual yacht under sail. But I began to believe that I really needed first-hand experience aboard a schooner of similar vintage to the Dark Echo. It was a prerequisite if I was going to get aboard my father’s boat with any genuine sense of competence.
I did an internet search and found a holiday company that allowed you to masquerade as a nineteenth-century seafarer aboard a variety of restored boats. Theirs were all far more spartan than my father intended the refurbished Dark Echo to be. You slept in a hammock and bathed in a barrel of rainwater on the deck, and oil lamps provided the only illumination in the cabins once the sun dipped below the horizon. Even the rations approximated authentic provisions of the period. It was mostly biscuits and beef jerky and dried fruit. You ate fresh only what you could catch on a line. It all sounded very Joseph Conrad. And it sounded exactly the type of immersion in the culture of pure sailing I required.
There was a schooner voyage planned for the end of April. Maybe it wasn’t so much Conrad as Erskine Childers, in the detail. The vessel embarked from Rotterdam and journeyed through the North Sea to East Friesland and its belt of islands off the coast of Lower Saxony. It was a dank, windswept, even desolate part of the world. That said, I knew it only from Childers’ description in his novel, The Riddle of the Sands. We were to anchor off the island of Baltrum and stay there for a couple of nights to enable the birdwatchers among the makeshift crew to indulge their masochistic habit. Then it was back to Rotterdam and a hop along the coast to Antwerp, where the vessel was due a refit. She was called Andromeda, and she had originally been registered as a British boat, her keel having been laid on the Clyde in 1878. Winston Churchill had been a mewling toddler. The telephone had not been invented. I was to trust my life in the North Sea to a boat built a full ten years before Jack the Ripper began his short season of atrocities.
It seemed a very good idea. Navigation in the tricky shallows off the string of islands where we were headed was notoriously difficult. The tides were swift and the currents strong. Sudden and overwhelming fogs often descended. And there was the elemental force of the North Sea itself. I would learn a lot.
‘Will you bring me something back?’ Suzanne said.
‘Scurvy, probably,’ I said, ‘given the diet we’ll be living on.’
And she laughed. She did not mind me going. The trip coincided with what would probably be her last Michael Collins-inspired journey to Ireland. The previous week, curiosity had overcome her and she had asked if she could visit the Lepe boatyard and see the Dark Echo for herself. We drove down and deliberately surprised Jack Peitersen. I didn’t want him having the time to prepare anything phoney in the way of a reception for Suzanne.
He seemed genuinely delighted to see us. Where Suzanne was concerned he was full of a courtly New England charm that bordered on flirtatiousness and that she seemed to enjoy. The wraps were off the Dark Echo on a sun-dappled day and her brasses gleamed and her portholes twinkled and dazzled in the brightness. She smelled of freshly planed wood and paint and varnish newly applied. And in the spacious master cabin, there was the rich, rising aroma of wax polish and oiled hide from the luxurious upholstery my father had specified.
She seemed a completely different boat from the one aboard which I had endured my earlier moments of terror. Everything was clean and sound and new. Climbing aboard her in plain daylight, in the company of Suzanne and Peitersen, made the earlier experience seem hallucinatory and unreal. I knew suddenly what my father meant, calling the whole weird interval at Hadley’s boatyard Wagnerian. But now the portentous gloom had gone. The steps on the companionway had been replaced. They were firm and well sprung under my feet. And descending them, I felt no fear or trepidation whatsoever. My one anxious glance went to where the mirror had hung on the wall of the master cabin. But there was no sign of it now. I saw Suzanne sneak one or two quizzical looks my way, but any anxiety she may have felt on my behalf was unnecessary. The physical reality of what I was seeing aboard the Dark Echo, the bright splendour of her, forced the earlier experience to recede in my mind like a bad dream eventually does.
Since our surprise visit to the Lepe yard, Suzanne and I had barely discussed the matter of my father’s voyage. She had asked a couple of questions about Peitersen. I’d responded to the second of these by asking if she fancied him or something. Then I’d had to dodge the book she’d thrown at me. And she hadn’t asked again. But it was as though for her, too, the Lepe trip had provided a sort of assurance. We did not talk about it. But the experience, the reality of the refurbished Dark Echo, just seemed so wholesomely far removed from the vision of Harry Spalding I’d described to her, endured aboard a canvas shrouded wreck. It seemed even more remote from the lurid mysteries of the brothers Waltrow and the gambler, Gubby Tench. In the aftermath of the Lepe visit, those events seemed far more symptomatic of their morbid and hysterical time in history than of the boat itself.
She had her bag over her shoulder, her coat over her arm. A strand of hair had fallen over her face when she had bent down to pick up her bag. She blew it away with a puff of breath. She stood there – slender, resolute and gorgeous.
‘Will it be emotional? Saying goodbye to Michael Collins?’
She smiled, looking at the floor. The smile seemed wistful. ‘There’s no room in my life for ghosts.’
I crossed the distance between us and embraced her and kissed her goodbye.
‘There’s no room in either of our lives for ghosts.’
She grazed my cheek with her fingers. ‘I love you, Martin.’
‘Thank God you do.’
The weather on the Eastern Friesland voyage was dismal. The Andromeda stank of fish oil and rotting hemp rope and brine-sodden wood. Her sails were mildew-splotched and she had a stew of ancient filth in her bilges too thick for any pump to remove that made her sluggish in the water even under full sail. She had a tendency to wallow and creaked alarmingly when subjected to the conflicting pressures of wind and current.
There were eight of us aboard, so she was overmanned. I spent a lot of time at first being superfluous to requirements, watching the sea over the ship’s rail at the stern for want of anything better or more instructive to do. But it was instructive, watching the waters of the North Sea. They were restless, churning, never still. I’d always considered the sea supine, except in a storm. But that was because I was almost wholly ignorant of it. It was a living element, debating with itself, seemingly in turmoil over what to do with its profound depth and awesome energy. At night it seemed calmer. But the night traffic on the surface of the sea made it dangerous if you were not alert.
Vomit was added to the horrible cocktail of smells about two hours after dawn on the second day out when we hit a heavy squall that brought with it a four-foot swell. We roped in the sails. The boat bucketed through the waves and I could feel the old timbers judder with impact under my feet. I knew it would take a lot more than we were heading into for the Andromeda to break up and founder. She’d been built for this weather, and worse. On the other hand, she was a venerable craft. And though authenticity was all very well, she did not seem to have been very well cared for.
The sea was a sullen green colour under a pewter sky. The wind blowing from Arctic Norway was a needling blast that numbed any flesh not covered. The deck was awash with rain and sea spray. I was wearing oilskins over trousers and a sweater woven from oiled wool. My sou’wester flapped, trying to tear itself from my head. And I found myself grinning. I was enjoying this, the being out and exposed to something so elemental. Elsewhere, men were out in this trying to catch fish, or deliver cargos, or rehearse for wars. I had no such responsibility and could just revel in the moment.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned. It was Captain Straub, the Andromeda’s master. Out of my reverie, I looked around. We were the only two people above the deck. ‘I see you’ve got your sea legs,’ he shouted. He grinned at me through his beard, which was grey and waterflecked. He was Dutch and his accent was very strong.
‘I think I was born with them, Captain.’
‘Then you’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Would you care to take the wheel, Mr Stannard?’
‘I’d be delighted, Captain.’
‘Just keep her on a straight course.’
Straub probably fancied a smoke or needed a pee or something. We were too far out from land for me to run her aground and it takes two to orchestrate a collision at sea and the bloke at the wheel of the other vessel would be competent. Nevertheless, I felt a grown-up thrill of accomplishment at being entrusted with the wheel. It meant the boat was in my hands; I was responsible for the other seven souls aboard her. The pleasure I felt brought home to me how little I had actually accomplished in my life. But that realisation did not spoil the pleasure itself. It was hardly a surprise, a revelation. We live in an age of diminished accomplishment. For the moment, I thought that steering a seventy-ton schooner through a storm would do pretty well for me. It was physical work. Despite the gearing between the wheel and the rudder, I could feel the force of the swell and the weight of the boat through my arms. There was a binnacle compass on a column next to the wheel. I wiped droplets of water from its domed glass cover and took a reading. I knew where we were and I knew where we were going.
Land announced itself the following afternoon in ragged grey humps on the grey horizon. Grey, too, were the faces of our birdwatchers, gaunt with retching, glad to get into the rowing boat lowered from the side into the choppy sea, heading for something firm under their feet when we anchored off Baltrum. I watched them go but had volunteered to stay aboard. I would have a cabin to myself. The wilderness of sand and reeds and rare birds where my shipmates were headed offered no real attractions.
Captain Straub stayed aboard, too. That evening, we dined together at his table. He was a resourceful cook. He made a sort of casserole from barley and boiled bacon and shallots. We washed it down with Weissbier and afterwards had some truly delicious Dutch cheese and his excellent brandy. It was a long way from weevil-ridden ship’s biscuits and salted herring. It was altogether a very civilised route to scurvy.
When we had finished eating, the captain rolled a cigarette from a large pouch of tobacco and sat back in his chair and I looked around me, from where I sat, at his cabin. Hunger and conversation had prevented me from properly examining my surroundings any sooner. Straub’s cabin was not as large as my father’s aboard the Dark Echo. Nor was it anything like so sumptuously well appointed. But the really remarkable thing about it was that there was nothing present in it that could not have come from the late nineteeth century. We had dined by the light of candles. An oil lamp hung from a hook above a small table under the starboard portholes. He had navigation charts rolled on a table where his sextant also reposed. He had a slide rule for his calculations, the ivory from which it had been made yellowing from decades of secretions from human hands. We had taken our depth soundings on approaching the island with a plumb line at the bow. Straub had a berth rather than a hammock and the cabin was warm from a wood-burning fire. It was a cosy enough refuge from the elements. But it seemed out of its time and would have unnerved me had I been there alone and not in company.
Straub stood and put a coffee pot on a paraffin burner on the table under the lamp. He lit the burner with a wooden match. I noticed that the boat was still beneath us. The sea had calmed. I saw that there were tendrils of fog drifting now beyond the glass of the portholes.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Captain?’
He had his back to me still. I saw him stiffen almost imperceptibly and then I heard him chuckle thickly. ‘I knew that question was coming. And yet I let it surprise me.’ He turned. Straub, too, could have been an artefact from the nineteenth century; a human artefact, with his hewn features and his powerful shoulders and the iron-grey bristle of his beard. He raised his arm and the tip glowed in the gloom of the cabin as he drew heavily on his cigarette. He nodded towards the warming pot. ‘We shall wait for our coffee, Mr Stannard. And then I shall tell you a story about a ghost.’
We settled into our chairs with the coffee and the brandy bottle on the table between us. Against the portholes, the fog now pressed in a pale and solid blanket. The boat rested at anchor, entirely still. There was no wind and the sea outside was motionless and silent. He had been captain of the Andromeda, he told me, for twelve years. He had been her master for a year when he first saw her phantom.
‘We were in the Atlantic Ocean, Mr Stannard. The Americans are, some of them, great and fastidious sailors of yachts. I had a party of five aboard, all of them skilled and hardy.’ He chuckled again. ‘None of them birdwatchers, I fancy.’
I smiled to encourage him to continue and sipped his strong, good coffee.
‘We were about four hundred miles east of Nantucket Island and steering an easterly course, though the location hardly signifies. It was September and darkness had descended an hour since. I was over there,’ he gestured towards his chart table, ‘calculating our average speed because one of the fellows on board had made a query about it. And I looked up and he was sitting where you are now.’
I had gone cold. The coffee was hot in my cup and the fire still warm in the captain’s grate. But I had gone cold under my heavy sweater, with my belly full in that cosy refuge. ‘Who was?’
‘A man in a brown uniform and a steel helmet with a bandage covering the lower half of his face. I say a man. A boy, really. Fright in his young, tormented eyes. A soldier of eighteen or so with mud on his puttees and a rifle that looked too big for him resting across his lap.’
‘He didn’t do anything. He just looked at me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone.’
I felt only relief that Straub’s spectre had not been Harry Spalding. There was no reason, of course, why it should have been. But ghosts and logic were not easy companions in my mind and what I felt was relief, pure and unadulterated. Spalding had been a soldier. But Straub’s visitor had been innocent. And Spalding had never been that. Straub had seen someone else.
He did all the usual things, he told me, made all the usual excuses for himself. He was tired. He was sleep-deprived. He was suffering from stress and probably slightly drunk. He was too imaginative for his own good.
‘The truth was, of course, that I was none of those things.’
‘Did you see the ghost again?’
He nodded. ‘Very occasionally. And very sporadically. I’d say no more than once a year and sometimes the interval has been as long as eighteen months.’
‘And the manner of the sightings?’
‘They never differed.’
‘So you don’t know who he is.’
‘About five years ago I did some research into the history of the Andromeda. This had nothing to do with the question of my ghost. People come aboard the vessel and ask questions and my knowledge of her history was not as complete as it could and should have been. She’s a venerable old lady of the sea, Mr Stannard.’ He picked up his brandy glass and took a swallow and then refilled both our glasses and took out his tobacco pouch again. ‘She has a colourful past.’
I’ve met some garrulous storytellers in my time, compulsive raconteurs. My father is chief among the men I’ve known enthralled by the sound of their own voices holding an audience. But Captain Straub was not one of them. Sitting at his table in his cabin on that fogbound sea, I felt he was telling me this story not because he wanted to, but because he felt compelled.
‘I learned that she was commandeered after one of the enormous, catastrophic Allied offences launched during the latter stages of the Great War. Her home port at that time was Whitstable, on the eastern coast of Kent in England.’
‘I know Whitstable.’
‘She sailed to Calais. She raced to Calais. But the effort was to prove in vain. The battle casualties she picked up had been gassed. None of them could breathe properly. All of them suffered in agony.’ He lit his cigarette and gestured to the portholes. ‘On the return voyage a fog descended. It was a thick fog, impenetrable, much like this. I suppose the fog impeded the breathing of those poor wounded boys even further. Not one of the young soldiers survived the trip.’
I nodded. ‘How did you know I would ask you about your ghost?’
Captain Straub drained his glass of brandy. It was late, now. Between the two of us, we had almost finished the bottle. I don’t think I had ever felt more sober in my life.
‘I saw him last night. It was the first time in almost two years. And I think he tried to speak to me.’
I did not know what to say. There was nothing I could say.
‘Are you familiar with the cruel and wonderful poem about a gas attack, Mr Stannard? I mean the one by the greatest of all war poets, the Englishman?’
‘We all read Wilfred Owen at school.’
‘Then you will know it. You will know the line about the froth-corrupted lungs. Last night, as I lay in darkness in my bunk, my ghost tried to use his froth-corrupted lungs to speak to me. As long as God permits me to live, it is not a sound I would wish to hear again.’
‘Why the change?’
Straub exhaled smoke and smiled and extended a finger. ‘You, Mr Stannard. I have racked my brains and can only think you the reason. It cannot be one of the Baltrum twitchers.’
‘I take your point, Captain.’
‘My ghost is trying to warn me of something, I think. And I think I am intended to pass the warning on to you.’
I did not say anything. I could quite see why he had drunk with such ponderous deliberation throughout and after our meal. The Dutch coined that kind of courage after all, and he evidently thought he might require it if summoned from his slumbers by a visitor in the night. But when we took a turn around the deck before retiring, his footing seemed as sure as it could have been and he seemed fully alert to every detail and aspect of the anchored boat he commanded.
If his ghost came back, the captain did not mention it to me. But I don’t think it did. The fog cleared the following morning and we were rejoined by our maligned but oblivious band of Baltrum twitchers. I hope they got to see lots of rare breeds of birds up very close. I hope they were able to take wonderful photographs. Because the weather worsened on the return leg and with it returned the seasickness. I was sympathetic at seeing their suffering, but it was advantageous for me. A schooner in storm conditions is a real task for two men and though her master was a consummate sailor, there was plenty of opportunity for me to improve on my basic seamanship with the rest of the crew laid up and puking.
I did not disembark at Rotterdam. I’d grown fond of the Andromeda by the end of the voyage and wanted to see her into Antwerp and the promise of her refit. I was glad I did.
‘Take the wheel, Mr Stannard,’ Captain Straub said as we approached the harbour. And I did. And I berthed her very competently in the busy port, in the choppy water.
We shook hands on the quay. I had grown fond of the Andromeda’s master, too. ‘I think you have seen the last of your ghost,’ I said to him. He nodded, slowly. He glanced back at the boat I knew now he loved. She looked tired and anachronistic and tiny amid the tanker and freighter traffic of the bustling harbour. But she would be alright. There was life left in her yet.
‘You need to take care, Martin,’ Straub said. I had not even known that he was aware of my Christian name. My bag was in my hand. It was time to go. I nodded to acknowledge what he’d said and turned and walked away.
I had not been allowed to use my mobile phone at all on the Andromeda. The on-board rules, of course, forbade the use of mobiles. It had stayed in its compartment in my bag, switched off. And, of course, I had not been able to charge it. But there was just enough battery life left to be able to send Suzanne a text telling her roughly what time I would be home that evening. Was she back from Dublin?
Yes, she replied. She would meet me in the Windmill at 8 p.m.
That seemed a bit odd. I’m as partial to the pub as most men, but after a week before the mast, what I really fancied was an evening in front of the television wrapped around Suzanne after a scalding shower, and then an hour or so catching up on the world via the internet.
It wasn’t until my flight from Antwerp was airborne that the implications of what had happened between Captain Straub and his ghost began really to resonate seriously with me. Straub had thought the ghost was trying to warn him. He had thought the warning intended for me. Any warning for me from beyond the grave had to concern Harry Spalding. The link between Spalding and the English soldier was the war in which they had both fought and in which the English boy been mortally wounded. He had died aboard the Andromeda. I’d been crewing the Andromeda for only a few days when, after more than a decade of spectral silence, the soldier apparition had attempted to speak.
The worst of it was that the whole Harry Spalding business had receded so far in my mind, since the trip to Lepe with Suzanne. The Enid Blyton wholesomeness of an English spring day had conspired with Peitersen’s gallantry and the potent glamour of the transformed Dark Echo to bury Spalding almost altogether in my memory. But Straub’s ghost had brought him back again into the forefront. I could see his feral grin and his frame, poised and limber under the civilised concealment of his clothes. I dozed on the flight and dreamed my father and I were aboard his prize, becalmed in a gaseous mist on a sea of blood.
When I got to the pub, Suzanne was seated where we’d sat on our earlier evening of revelation. She looked pale even by her standards and there were shadows as sullen as bruises under her eyes. She smiled at me but the smile was wan under sharp cheekbones. Her hands were linked and rested in her lap. I sneaked a look at them and saw that the right thumbnail had been bitten almost to the quick. She rose and we kissed, and under my hands she felt insubstantial with weight loss. She had that vacant look you see on catwalk models. It had only been a week. She had shed maybe half a stone in seven days. I put down my bag, went to the bar for a drink and looked at her in the mirror that backed the bar. I wondered if she was about to dump me. She looked listless with trepidation. I knew with a horrible certainty that I was about to be dispensed with.
‘How was East Friesland?’
‘Never bothered to go ashore. So the riddle of the sands remains exactly that.’ I sipped beer. I did not know what to say. It was all about what she needed to announce. But she stayed silent and it was a silence I felt obliged to fill. ‘Did you know Erskine Childers and Michael Collins were friends?’
She frowned. Her eyes were on the table. ‘I think more colleagues than friends.’
‘Really?’
‘Collins was pretty insular about his friendships.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It helped if you were Irish, Catholic, and born in County Cork.’
‘They had something in common, though. They were both killed in the Irish Civil War.’
Suzanne said nothing. Her head was bowed.
‘Weren’t they?’
She looked at me. ‘I didn’t go to Dublin, Martin. I’m sorry, but I lied to you.’
I sipped beer reflexively. I smiled. I don’t know why I smiled. I felt gut-punched. ‘Oh?’
‘I went to France.’
‘He’s a Frenchman, is he? He’s a fucking Frog. You’ve gone and got yourself a French boyfriend. Jesus Christ.’
‘I went there because of the Jericho Crew.’
She was crying now, blinking back the tears.
‘I went there because I was frightened for you.’
I’d felt relief when Captain Straub’s ghost had not been Harry Spalding. But that was as nothing to the relief I felt now. Suzanne had not lied to deceive me. She had lied out of concern over whatever danger she thought I was in. Behind my back, she had done some investigating. And she had apparently discovered something troubling and scary. But I knew in my heart that no predicament could be so desolate as Suzanne leaving me. Nothing could be as bad as that. I had just seen it proven to myself in the crushing numbness overcoming me when her departure from my life had seemed an imminent prospect.
‘You had better tell me what you’ve learned,’ I said. ‘You have learned something, haven’t you?’ There was music playing in the pub. Billy Paul was lamenting his love for Mrs Jones again. The setting and the song were very familiar. We were sitting at a favourite table in our local. But nothing felt entirely familiar. I could see from her expression how badly Suzanne craved a cigarette. But she did not suggest going home. Instead, she cleared her throat with a cough and began to explain what she had been doing while I’d been playing sailor on the sea.
It was the circumstances of the auction at Bullen and Clore that had intrigued her. I had told her about it, about how my father had paid far too much for the boat. After her research into the Waltrow mystery and the lurid death of Gubby Tench, it had nagged at her. She could not understand why anyone would bid over the telephone for what was no more really than a large item of maritime scrap.
There had been two telephone bidders, not one, she discovered. Bullen and Clore, having assessed the unexpected level of interest in the Dark Echo, had invested in the services of a proper auctioneer. He was a fine art and antiques specialist from Chichester. He would have been past retirement age in any regular profession. David Preston was crusty, snobbish, vain and, as Suzanne discovered, wonderfully indiscreet. She visited him in the guise of a collector of Meissen figurines thinking about selling some of her collection off. She yachted, she told him. It was an expensive pastime and her boat required refurbishment for which she needed funds. From there it was a gentle conversational nudge to what he called the ‘ghastly’ business of the recent boat auction he had conducted at the premises of Bullen and Clore.
It was ghastly because Bullen and Clore were a pair of greedy philistines who operated in a shabby and run-down premises and had paid him his commission tardily. It was unpleasant, because one of the telephone bidders had taken their defeat in the auction very badly. They were a Brussels-based company called Martens and Degrue. They blamed poor communication for their being outbid. Strictly speaking, they had a point. There should have been two telephone lines for two telephone bidders, not one over which both were obliged to compete. Dark threats were muttered in the aftermath of the gavel going down. It was all most acrimonious.
Who was the other bidder? Suzanne asked, as casually as she was able.
A Naples-based firm called Cardoza Associates, she was told. They, too, were unhappy about the circumstances of the auction. But it was David Preston’s opinion that the auction at Bullen and Clore had been won by the right party. Magnus Stannard, who was surely long overdue his knighthood, was a real English gentleman with suitably deep pockets and a properly generous regard for the custom of tipping. Martens and Degrue and Cardoza Associates could go to hell as far as David Preston was concerned. Hell was probably where they belonged.
But despite the bravado, Suzanne thought the whole experience had shaken David Preston. She left with the feeling that her conversation with him had been less indiscretion on his part than a sort of catharsis. Whatever threats had been barked at him down the telephone line from Brussels had taken their toll. When she left him, it was four thirty in the afternoon in his showroom and he was on his third quite large gin and tonic. And the alcohol inside him did not yet have the tremor in his drinking hand under control.
An internet search revealed nothing about Martens and Degrue beyond what she had already assumed she would find. It was a fronting company, basically an alias for an enterprise that was publicity-shy about whatever business it was really up to.
‘I had more success with Cardoza Associates,’ she told me. ‘They bid at auctions all the time, all over the world. Mostly what they buy is religious art.’
‘It’s a fair hop from religious art to the wreck of a dubious boat,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Particularly when you consider the source of their funding. Everything Cardoza Associates successfully bid for is paid for by the Vatican Bank.’
‘So you went to France to find out about Martens and Degrue?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been listening properly. I told you, I went to France on the trail of Harry Spalding, to find out what I could about the Jericho Crew.’
‘A cold trail,’ I said.
Suzanne sipped from her drink and smiled. ‘You’ve no idea how cold,’ she said.
Spalding’s family had been in Rhode Island for generations. They had been among the original settlers of the colony. They were wealthy by the time of Harry’s birth. But they were very quiet and discreet. Just about the only club or organisation they belonged to, according to Suzanne’s research, was a debating society. Several prominent Rhode Island families belonged to this society. Its character seemed not just exclusive, but to have some sort of dynastic element to it. The builder of Harry’s boat, Josiah Peitersen, was among its members.
‘There were initiation rites,’ Suzanne said. ‘There were elaborate rituals. And even in the heyday of the clandestine gathering and the exclusive members’ club and the elite sorority in Eastern Seaboard America, which this was, there was an incredible degree of secrecy surrounding this society.’
‘It sounds like a cult,’ I said. ‘What was it called?’
‘If it had a name, and I think it almost certainly did, it was kept a very great secret. When it was referred to, it was referred to only as The Membership.’
‘Does it still exist?’
She shook her head. ‘No. It was destroyed in the time of Prohibition, its premises torn down and gasoline poured over the wreckage to burn it where it lay. Bulldozers trundled in afterwards to eradicate all trace of it from the earth.’
‘So it was a drinking club.’
‘No, Martin, it was not. The Prohibition legislation was the flimsiest of pretexts for its destruction. There were G-men present. There were also two Jesuit priests. One of them was a powerful exorcist from the Diocese of New York. You said cult just now. I think occult would be truer to history. I think that Harry Spalding’s family were Satanists, practitioners of black magic going back perhaps to the time of the New England witch trials and the burnings. The report I read said nothing about sowing the ground with salt in the wake of the bulldozers. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.’
‘So Frank Hadley was right with his talk of witchcraft.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘There’s one good way to find out,’ I said. ‘We ask Peitersen. He’s the self-elected expert on the Dark Echo. We ask him what his great-grandfather was up to when he debated with the Spalding clan.’
If Suzanne’s smile had been unconvincing earlier, now it was sickly. And her face was as pale as bone. ‘We could ask him. But there would be no point. Because Jack Peitersen is not who he says he is. Jack Peitersen does not exist.’
I groaned. ‘You’d better tell me what you’ve learned about Peitersen.’
‘I’ll get to Peitersen,’ she said. ‘First, I have to tell you about the Jericho Crew.’
‘Can I take it Waltrow and Tench were members?’
‘To Harry Spalding, they would have been Second Lieutenant Waltrow and Corporal Tench. And they were in it, alright, Martin. They were in it to the bitter end.’