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.
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.