Dark Echo (21 page)

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.’

‘But he made a mistake.’

‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘He made a mistake.’

I’d turned the wipers off when he had begun to speak because their noise was intrusive. Now rain bleared the windscreen. There was no other traffic on the road. There were no pedestrians braving the downpour. I could hear rain drum on the roof of the car. I felt sad and fearful of what was about to be revealed to me.

‘You were not an only child, Martin. You had a younger sister. She was born just before you reached your second birthday and she was very premature. She survived for only a few days.’

I nodded. I had not expected this. I was not prepared for a revelation of this sort. ‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘I’ve never possessed the strength to talk about your sister at all. And your mother kept silent on the subject, I think to spare me from the ordeal of being forced to do so.’

‘What was my sister’s name?’

‘Catherine Ann. Ann for your mother.’

‘And Victor Draper didn’t know.’

‘He lived there,’ my father said, nodding at the empty space between the villas to his left. ‘I had him exposed as a fraud by a team of private detectives. Ruined, I believe he
skulked off to Australia. When he was forced to sell his house I bought it myself and had it razed to the ground.’

‘Why have you told me this now?’

‘I didn’t stop with Draper, Martin. I tried to reach your mother through other mediums with reputations just as exalted as Draper’s had been. All were charlatans. I’m telling you this because if it had been possible to contact your mother, I would have succeeded in doing so. There are no such things as ghosts. There is God—’

‘Then there is Satan.’

‘Perhaps. But there is no spectre of Harry Spalding to prowl the boat that used to belong to him. The dead do not mingle with the living. They don’t communicate with us. They live as they did only in our memories, which is where I should have had the good sense and moral courage to allow your mother to rest.’

Catherine Ann. There had been four of us. ‘It’s why you always light four candles. After Mass.’

But he did not reply to that. He did not need to.

Catherine Ann. She would have been thirty or thirty-one now. Roughly the same age as Suzanne.

‘What about Peitersen?’

My father smiled. It was a grim smile. Confession had exhausted him. ‘A crank, which was my first instinct when Hadley showed me his letter. He’s some boat enthusiast who read a stringer’s report on the auction of the
Dark Echo
, probably on the internet. You’ll remember I gave an interview to a press reporter at the sale. Working on a restoration project of that magnitude and pedigree was probably a dream come true for the man who called himself Jack Peitersen. It was just our good luck that he was competent as well as keen.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘I’m spending tonight aboard the boat, Martin. It’s why I
packed an overnight bag. I’d be grateful now if you could take us on to Lepe. You can drive back to London afterwards if you wish. If Suzanne is amenable, you can stay on the boat with me. Or you can spend the night in a hotel. There’s a comfortable room in a very well-appointed hotel of your recent acquaintance that’s paid for until June.’

‘I wish you’d told me about my sister before now.’

‘I’ve arranged a little ceremony for tomorrow at the boatyard that it would be as well for you to attend. You can get down from London in time for it because it won’t take place until about midday. But it would be less arduous for you, travelwise, to stay.’

‘I wish you had told me about my sister, Dad.’

‘I do, too, son. I wish it with all my heart.’

We stayed that night aboard the
Dark Echo
. We ate dinner first at Peitersen’s hotel and I drank steadily throughout the meal. The kitchen there no doubt justified its excellent reputation. But the food I ate was ashes in my mouth after my father’s earlier revelations. I was tired, too. It took almost three hours to drive the 160-odd miles from Westcliff to Lepe. Altogether that day I had been behind the wheel for a total of around five hours. I was in no fit state to drive after dinner and we had to leave the car and take a minicab back to the boatyard. I think that my father also drank too much. Alcohol is less than ideal as an anaesthetic. It leaves you with a sore head and a dry mouth and it depresses you. But it’s easily accessible and doesn’t harbour any nasty surprises. I’d had enough of nasty surprises for one day and craved and indulged, over dinner, the easy numbness of drink.