‘Good luck,’ Suzanne said. ‘I tried myself, this morning, after having what I’d found out about him confirmed in the States late last night. I only saw the confirmation when I switched on the computer this morning. I called the yard at Lepe straight away. And then I called the hotel. But he was at neither place. He seems to have departed as abruptly as he arrived. Whoever he was, he’s vanished.’
Six
I called my father as soon as I respectably could the following morning. My dad being by compulsive habit an early riser, that was just after 6 a.m. But he wasn’t there. His housekeeper came to the phone after it had rung for a while and bade me a cheery good morning. She seemed reluctant to discuss my father’s absence and then even more reluctant to discuss his whereabouts.
‘Do you think he might be in Chichester, Mrs Simms?’
There was a charged silence on the line.
‘Mrs Simms?’
‘He might be, Marty. It’s a fair assumption, since he did not discuss his destination on departure.’
She was an Irishwoman, was Mrs Simms. I’d known her since childhood. And I knew she liked a flutter.
‘Mrs Simms?’
‘Marty.’
‘Would you bet money on Chichester?’
‘Sure, I wouldn’t bet my house. But I’d have a few bob on it, Marty, so I would.’
So it was a tryst with his new-old flame. I smiled to myself. Chichester would never again for me be just a quaint and prosperous town founded after the Roman invasion. The word had taken on a new significance. And it had become a verb. Forever on, Chichestering would be the euphemism for my father’s energetic pursuit of sex. Or of romance. Or, most plausibly, his pursuit of romance through sex. He was an optimist, was my father, always reminding me of the fact through his outlook and behaviour. The glass for Magnus Stannard was never half-empty. With him, it was always full to brimming at the lip. The thought brought a fond, fearful surge of feeling for him. I felt, for the first time in my life, as though he really needed my love and protection. I realised in that moment, on the phone to Margaret Simms, that I had not had the remotest notion of how much I loved my dad before this sorry business began.
‘Did he take his mobile phone?’
‘He took the berry thing.’
‘The BlackBerry.’
‘The very item. He took that.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Simms.’
‘It won’t necessarily be switched on.’
‘What?’
‘He told me it wouldn’t necessarily be switched on. He said he might be off-message.’
I’ll bet he did. ‘Thanks, Mrs Simms.’ I hung up. I made tea and took a cup in to Suzanne and pondered on what to do. There was no point in trying to find my dad in Chichester. I could hang about until he was back on-message and try to establish exactly how much, if anything, he knew about Peitersen’s fraudulent identity and abrupt disappearance. That would have been the sensible thing to do. But I felt the need to do something more, the compulsion to do something immediate. I really couldn’t stand to wait. So I decided to drive to Lepe and see what I could find out there for myself. I kissed Suzanne and told her not to tell anyone where I was going. What I meant was, don’t tell my father, if he should call. Peitersen and my father were the only people to whom my arrival at the boatyard would be of any consequence. And Jack Peitersen had gone.
It was a lovely late April morning. I set off munching a piece of toast, sipping from a flask of coffee Suzanne had made me while I was in the shower. All the traffic was town-bound, coming in the opposite direction from the one in which I was travelling. I put on the radio and heard the opening bars of the Prefab Sprout song ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and almost scalded myself with coffee as the steel cup jumped in my hand against my lip. I switched off the radio. Maybe it had been sampled or something. That sort of thing happened now with old records all the time. Or it could have been used on the soundtrack of a hit movie or as the theme song for a hit TV series. It could have. And on the back of that, it could have been re-released as a single. Whatever, I made good time in the subsequent silence. But there should have been men working in the boatyard by the time I got there. I wasn’t so early as to have beaten the morning shift. Yet there was no one, not even someone at the gate to guard against vandalism or the petty theft of on-board computer hardware or valuable boatbuilders’ tools.
The breeze-block and corrugated-iron shed that had served Peitersen as an office offered no clues as to his whereabouts. There were some rough cost calculations for something or other on a desk blotter. Beside the columns of numbers there was a diagrammatic sketch of some kind of timber joint. It was exceptionally well drawn. But the quality of Peitersen’s draughtsmanship was really neither here nor there. There was a filing cabinet, the one occupied drawer neatly filled with invoices and receipts pertaining to the job in hand. But there was no desktop computer there with files for me to ransack. There wasn’t even a landline that I could see. Places like this always had a cheesy soft-porn calendar on the wall. It was an essential part of their fabric. But this one didn’t. Instead, Blue-tacked to the concrete, there was a chart delineating the schedule of progressive works aboard my father’s boat.
There wasn’t an ashtray full of stale dog-ends or a bin of Peperami and Snickers wrappers or a single empty beer can. He hadn’t left a scarf or a winter sweater on the rack of coat hooks by the door. There were no work gloves or over-boots. There was not one single personal item present there. People take pictures when they restore things. They take before and after pictures to amuse themselves with and take pride in and show off to people. It’s human nature. They tack them up or leave them on their desks. But there were no pictures. He had done his job with the fastidiousness of a monk and then he had disappeared before its completion. And he had left no note. And the note, of course, had been principally what I’d been looking for in his office.
There was no sign of the Dark Echo on the dock. She had been pulled up on runners into the refuge from rough weather of the one big boathouse at the yard. That said, there was no weather just then to shelter her from. The day was benign, the water beyond the dock a smooth emerald shimmer of darkening sea stretching out towards the Isle of Wight and the harbour at Cowes. I breathed in. I was dismayed, often, at how stagnant the edge of the sea could smell, with all the rotting detritus burdened on an incoming tide. But the smell of the sea on this particular day had a cleaving freshness. And there was no ravaging wind or rain to slap at and sully the sheen worn by my father’s precious acquisition. Nevertheless, in the boathouse she lay. It was as though Peitersen had finished his task on this quiet statement of neatness and precaution, I thought, approaching the building. He had signed off with the subdued flourish of a real craftsman.
She was a gorgeous sight when I unbolted and pulled open the double doors, revealing her to the bright spring light of morning. My father had said, when she was no more than a sullen wreck in the marine boneyard of Bullen and Clore, it was her lines that got to you. And I could see now what he’d already been so stricken by then. Even out of the water, the sweep of her hull made Captain Straub’s Andromeda seem frumpy and staid. They were the same gender, but different generations; the plump Clyde dowager dressed in widow’s weeds and the flapper heiress glittering at one of Gerald Murphy’s Riviera parties.
Except that she did not so much glitter as gleam. The Dark Echo was svelte and sumptuous in the gloss of her paintwork and the lustre of her polished brass. I climbed aboard. It was quiet in the boathouse. I was dimly aware of the hiss of small waves breaking down on the shore. And faintly, there was the cry of gulls, ubiquitous in the sky above the water. But the boathouse and the boat it harboured were entirely silent. So perfectly grooved was the planking on her deck that the teak beneath my feet didn’t so much as murmur under my weight. I ran my hand lightly along her rail on the port side close to the stern and sensed that the Dark Echo was poised, tensile, alive and awaiting her moment. It was not a forbidding feeling. There was nothing portentous or threatening about it. It was exhilaration, the promise of glamour and glory. It was, above all, a seductive sensation.