F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘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.

I couldn’t have recalled what I ordered on surrendering the menu to our smiling waiter with the words just out of my mouth. And our conversation over dinner was a dim, inconsequential blur. My father prattled about navigation and communication systems and networks. He talked about patching through and piggybacking and other telecoms arcanery. I thought about the nursery my parents would have decorated and furnished for my lost sister, Catherine Ann. I thought about her painted crib. I pictured the toys they would have bought and the tiny items of clothing and the dreams for her they must have cherished together. I wondered how much the keeping of the secret of her death had contributed to the cancer that had grown and flourished in my mother’s chest and killed her. In the poignant secrecy between my parents of Catherine Ann, I thought I understood something of what had driven my mother to an early death. And I thought I understood something, too, of what had driven my father through his subsequent life. But perhaps these insights were owed only to the illusory clarity of drink.

I did not dream that night in my cabin aboard my father’s boat. Or if I did, I did not remember the dream. I slept soundly in a berth so comfortable it bordered on the luxurious. My quarters on the Dark Echo made a quaint joke of conditions aboard the Andromeda . I woke once in the night that I remember, just to take a swallow from the bottle of Hildon water by my bunk that I had scrounged from the hotel. We’d taken bottles of water and toothbrushes and fresh towels. The hotel treated my father in the way he was always treated; like some visiting potentate. And in the morning, when I knocked on his cabin door and he admitted me, that’s what he looked like, too. He looked glamorous again and vibrant. He had recovered himself. With a fresh surge of grief for the sister I had never known, I knew then standing in his cabin aboard his boat, that my dad would never address the subject of his daughter willingly again.