The tarp protecting my father’s boat had torn in places in the violence of the day’s weather. It was very heavy canvas cloth and was criss-crossed with strengthening seams and thick, reinforced stitching. So there was no chance of it sundering entirely and pulling free of the craft. Or at least, I did not think there was. But in places it had snagged and sheared and torn. Wind whistled through it like a wild jeer. The cloth capered and trembled in the wind. It shook and howled like a living thing, in protest.
I reached the boat soaked. I’d dressed for a meeting rather than a tempest. I paused and looked to my left, out to where the Hamble ran out to the Solent, awed by the anger and scale of the pitching sea. My feet slithered on the big cobbles of the wharf and I understood for the first time the giant solidity and scale of the stonework there, the reason for it. Those walls were defences, ramparts. Their immensity was only a pragmatic measure against the elements they defied.
I slithered towards the Dark Echo on treacherous shoe leather, cursing my own ineptitude. I’d proven a dab hand at the maths needed to pass exams in navigation. Yet here I was, in danger of falling thirty-five feet on to the concrete where the keel of our boat lay, only for the want of a pair of rubber-soled shoes. I steadied myself. The tarp roared and flapped incessantly, where it was newly torn, the looming shape of it huge around the bulk of the long hull now I’d got this close. I looked up, wincing through needles of rain. The sky, which had glowered earlier, was now just a scudding roof of gloom over the world. I fingered the small Maglite in my pocket. Thank God I’d had the wit to remember to take that from the Saab’s glove compartment before entering the yard. I took it out and shone the thin beam of the torch on to canvas. At least I would have no trouble getting aboard. There was a rent in the heavy fabric right in front of me about eighteen inches long. I switched off the Maglite and clamped it between my teeth and hauled myself through on to the Dark Echo’s deck.
My first impression was one of cosiness. I felt the childhood comfort of my camping days as a boy in the Cubs and later as a young teenager in the Scouts. The rain drummed, a nostalgic sound on stiff cloth, but couldn’t get to me any more. There was the smell of damp, but I was dry in my snug and musty refuge from the downpour.
Nevertheless, this was business. I used the torch to orientate myself. In doing so, I saw the new timber with which they had expertly patched the deck. It had not been treated and varnished yet, but even in the Maglite’s beam I could see that the work had been done with faultless expertise. I ran my fingers over it and could not feel the joins. The specification my father had demanded was astonishingly high. But they had worked to it. I looked down along the smooth lines of the deck for the companionway. It was a dark, rectangular maw leading below. All around me, canvas screamed and shuddered. I smiled. It had been a tonic already to see my father’s money well spent rather than cynically squandered.
The steps of the companionway were tricky. I could not hear them creak in the noise of the storm, but could tell from their spongy feel under my feet that they had not yet been replaced. I was descending on old and perished wood and did so gingerly. And there was something else. As I descended into the dark interior of the vessel, I began to feel an irrational instinct of fear and even of incipient panic. The boat roared with the exterior life of the storm and the smell of must strengthened and grew in complexity and character as I continued to descend the short flight to the cabins and galley area. The descent took much longer than it should have. Too many steps, I thought. Too great a distance down, it seemed.
At the bottom of the companionway it was very dark. And there was the complexity of smells. The smells were so strong that I was reluctant to turn on the torch in the blackness for fear of what I might see. I could smell a feral, canine smell, like the hair and spoor of a wild dog, that made my balls shrink and the hair on the nape of my neck prickle and chill. The roar of the storm, the buck and ripple of canvas under assault, had receded. It was quiet down here and so oppressively fearful that I struggled to control my bladder.
‘Relax, old chum,’ a voice said.
I switched on the torch. There was nothing there. I was in the master cabin. There was nothing to see except the gutted, dripping interior of an old boat undergoing restoration. Except that there was a small brass-bound mirror screwed to the right of the door leading to the smaller cabin beyond. I frowned at the mirror. The Maglite beam played in my shaking hand beneath it. And then I looked at what it reflected.
There was an impression of red leather and purple plush tassled in gold; of cigarette smoke and a man’s buttoned boot moving out of sight with the speed of a cobra recoiling. And there was a woman’s face – the make-up Jazz Age pale, the hair raven and geometric, the mouth crimson – and the rictus of terror so real and raw in the eyes and drawn-back lips that I bolted before this awful vision had even clarified in my mind. I fled. I pounded up splintering stairs and tore the nails from my fingers scrabbling for a breach in the stiff, unyielding weight of the tarp securing the boat. And when I found one, I scrambled through it. And despite the hurl and havoc of the storm, behind me I heard laughter, male and laconic. I lay on the quay. I recovered my breath and composure. I stood finally and looked towards Hadley’s office for reassurance. But the yellow bars of brightness between his blinds had been extinguished. In Frank Hadley’s boatyard, it seemed now that all the lights were out.
At the wheel of the Saab, I saw that my hands were dripping blood from my torn nails. Gradually, my fingertips began to throb and then to sing with pain in the aftermath of the shock of what I’d seen and felt. In my seat, soaked and shivering, I found the presence of mind to fumble on the heater switch. I concentrated on driving. The rain cascaded down the windscreen, making driving difficult in the fierce strength of the shifting gusts once I was back on the exposed open road. I tried not to think about the scene in the cabin. The thing was, it was not the first time I believed I had been in the presence of ghosts. But I believed it was the first time I had been in the presence of spectral malevolence. And my raw nerves and the jumping muscles under my skin told me that the ghost of Harry Spalding was a spirit of pure spite and bottomless hatred. I drove. Eventually, London grew closer. Lambeth approached. I parked the car and wiped the caked blood from my hands with a rag from the boot and, with my clothes still drying on me, walked the short distance to the Windmill pub and ordered a double rum that I drank in a single swallow. But even at home, after a scalding shower, changed into fresh clothes, warm and with the weather diminished to just a feeble drizzle against the windows, it was hours before I felt even remotely safe.
There was no point texting Suzanne for reassurance on this occasion. I lay in our bed and wondered how much to tell the woman I loved about what had happened. Secrets have a way of festering, and sharing my most private thoughts and feelings with her was an important aspect of the intimacy that I knew gave our relationship much of its worth. There were lots of things I did not tell her. But I felt no guilt at keeping the boring and trivial stuff to myself. That was just a way of preventing her from thinking me boring and trivial.