I did not answer her.
‘That’s funny.’
‘What is?’
Suzanne had turned to the radio. ‘They’ve just played this. They’re playing the same song again. They’re repeating it.’
I recognised the song myself. It didn’t sound like jazz. She had the radio permanently tuned to a jazz station. The song was ‘When Love Breaks Down’, by Prefab Sprout. The failed priest, Paddy McAloon, was singing it. According to Suzanne, he was reprising it. It did seem strange. But it was a small strangeness, a domestic oddity, after the tale of Gubby Tench. I walked over to the radio and switched it off. ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ I said. I put my arms around Suzanne for the comfort of her. Her hair smelled of smoke and her skin of stale perfume and the recycled air you’re obliged to breathe aboard aircraft. But her body was warm and yielding and wonderful against mine. I closed my eyes and thanked God again for her. It was God, not the Shadwell Posse, I believed I had to thank for Suzanne. And I thought I heard a single, plangent chord of McAloon balladry from the radio on its shelf. But I must have imagined that because Suzanne stayed softly pressed against me with her hands linked in the small of my back.
I did not want her going anywhere near the Jericho Crew. They were long dead, as my father had pointed out. But to me they were feral ghosts that could maraud across the decades, given the right encouragement. They were malevolent and restless and waiting in an impatient pack behind their hungry leader. No, the Jericho Crew were best left to history and themselves. All my instincts told me so. I untangled myself from Suzanne and went and brushed my teeth and then got into bed and listened to her shower. We finally fell asleep, thankfully dreamless, wrapped in one another’s arms in the Lambeth night.
I was awoken the following morning by an agitated phone call from my father. I looked at my watch and at Suzanne’s sleeping head, her hair raven black on the crumpled white of the pillow. It was just before six thirty.
‘Appreciate it if you’d get round here, Martin. Pronto, if you’ve no engagement more pressing. Bring your under-achieving Scandinavian motor car with you. Once again, we face a day apparently beyond the capabilities of rotorblades.’
Groggily, I opened the curtains a chink. I did not want to awaken Suzanne after her trying day and exhausting evening. The weather was foul, our little glimpse of river grey and turbulent in the wind, the cloud low and the rain splattering on the panes and thrumming on the road outside in big, percussive drops. What a dismal month March was turning out to be.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Frank Hadley seems to be in the throes of some sort of breakdown.’
I cleared my throat. I still wasn’t fully awake. ‘I take it you know about the fire, Dad?’
‘I know about it. Hadley doesn’t. The charred log is not the problem.’
‘What is?’
‘Just get over here, Martin.’ As was his perennial habit, he then hung up on me.
Without telling him anything of what I had experienced for myself or recently learned, I tried on the drive to the Hamble to sow doubts in my father’s mind. I told him that it was fair from what we both knew to call the Dark Echo accident-prone. Our prospective voyage seemed foolhardy.
He pondered what I’d said without immediate comment. He took out his cigar case, chose a cigar and smoked for a while. I did not get the explosion from him with which he usually blustered his way out of a corner. This was not out of respect for me, I knew. It was because the evidence was compelling and seemed despite his wishes to be mounting all the time.
‘A thing is only ever cursed in retrospect,’ he said eventually. ‘And bad reputation is always a matter more than anything of interpretation. If mountaineers are killed attempting to climb a Himalayan peak, and the attempt fails, the expedition is cursed. They’ve crossed the yeti, or antagonised the mountain gods, or some other similar nonsense impossible to substantiate or refute. If, by contrast, the attempt to scale the peak is a success, it doesn’t much matter what happens to the team on the way down. The expedition is judged a success. The objective was achieved. Nothing was cursed. Do you see my point?’
‘Not really.’
‘In 1970 an expedition organised by Chris Bonington was successful in climbing the South Face of a Himalayan peak called Annapurna. It was the last great unconquered mountain challenge the roof of the world had to offer. Annapurna had always possessed the reputation of an unlucky mountain. One morning, a thousand feet from the top, the climbers Don Whillans and Doug Scott, leading the ascent, left their tent and achieved the summit. On the way down to base camp, two of the party were killed in separate accidents. Was the expedition cursed? Was the mountain unlucky?’
The road to our destination on the Hamble was clear but the driving hard in atrocious visibility and streaming surface water. ‘You tell me, Dad.’
‘Bonington was a skilled enough climber in his own right. He climbed the North Face of the Eiger. With Whillans, he shared the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney. But his chief talents were as an organiser and a manipulator of the media. Annapurna was not cursed. The expedition was a triumph, because that’s how Bonington was able to present it.’
I wasn’t convinced. My father knew I wasn’t. ‘A boat is a repository of human thought and feeling, Martin. Within its fragile hull, our dreams and aspirations of adventure and achievement can be nurtured. But a boat is also a place where our fears and insecurities can become magnified and distorted to a point that can threaten sanity. I can only tell you that the Mary Celeste would not have met that enigmatic and disastrous fate with a Columbus or a Drake at the helm.’
I laughed. I had to. ‘You’re not Columbus, Dad. You’re certainly not Drake. I don’t even think you’re a Bonington.’
He laughed himself. ‘I’m not. Not for a moment, I’m not. I’m no more a mountaineer than the Dark Echo is cursed.’
Frank Hadley was waiting for us amid a crowd of his men on the quay when we got to his boatyard. The Solent was a gunmetal hue with white topping its waves and ugly yellow foam billowing at the tideline. Some large creature had been winched by its tail out of the water and was suspended by a loop of hawser from a crane boom over the wet dock adjacent to where the Dark Echo lay wrapped and silent and blind. There was a strong smell of blood and secretion. The animal carcass was of a porpoise or a dolphin and it was missing its head. The butchered creature turned on its steel rope slowly in the ferocious wind. It looked like something huge but half-finished, like some clumsy joke played against nature. It was bitterly cold on the dock. But the headless creature lashed from the crane was beyond any kind of feeling.
‘Washed up this morning before first light,’ Hadley said to my father. He looked gaunt under his wind-whipped hair. I had seen the very same expression he wore, the night before, on the face of Patrick Boyte. ‘It’s a portent, Mr Stannard. It’s an omen as plain as I ever wish to see. I don’t need superstitious men to explain it to me. I want your abomination of a boat gone from my yard. I’ll reimburse you for any extraneous expenses incurred as a consequence. And I’m happy to compensate you for any delay to the original work timetable.’
My father laughed. He looked incredulous. He looked at the turning corpse of the dead creature. ‘Because of this? Because a porpoise is injured by a boat propeller in the busiest stretch of water in the world? What kind of fucking joke is this, Hadley? What kind of fucking witchcraft are we discussing now?’
‘It isn’t a porpoise, Mr Stannard. It’s much too big to be that, you see. And it’s a long way from home. It’s a species of dolphin only usually found in tropical waters.’