‘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.’
‘What did he do?’
‘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.