F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘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.