‘So you’d have done the same?’
Chesney looked churlish, now. He ground the sole of a shoe into the gravel at the gate like a toddler nailed for some nursery crime. I felt less sorry for him than I had. Stupidity and petulance are an ugly combination.
‘It’s the noises, see, Mr Stallard.’
‘Stannard.’
He nodded towards the boathouse.
‘The rats?’
‘The voices. The laughter. They carry, see. I tolerates it because I have a family to feed. But I don’t like the nights any more than Mickey Prendergast does.’
I nodded. There didn’t seem anything to say, not to Chesney, at least. But he had given me something to think about.
‘Sardonic, the laughter? The tone of it?’
He looked at me like I’d just opened my mouth and spoken Martian to him. I took out my wallet. I always carried cash. It was a habit inculcated in me by my father, who always carried cash because he could never forget the time when he’d had none to carry. I peeled off three twenties and stuffed them into Chesney’s pocket and walked past him through the gate to my car. I’d hinted at a reward when I’d asked him to tell me the truth. He’d done that. I meant to get him sacked and, as he’d said, he had a family to feed. Sixty quid did not seem overly generous compensation.
There were no messages on my mobile. I tried calling my father’s BlackBerry with no success and tossed the phone over my shoulder on to the back seat in exasperation. I was no fonder of my less attractive traits than anyone else. Intellectual snobbery had always been prominent among my long list of obnoxious characteristics. I had dismissed Chesney the timid sentinel as pond life because I hadn’t liked hearing what he said. But whether I liked it or I didn’t, it needed to be considered. My next port of call was the country hotel where my father had put Peitersen up. He was gone from there, too, of course. But at the hotel he might have left the explanatory note he had not left in his boatyard office or aboard the Dark Echo either.
Sardonic laughter. I had heard it myself on my own first terrifying exploration of the boat, in Wagnerian weather on Frank Hadley’s horribly luckless dock. But on the two visits since, at Lepe, I had felt entirely different. It wasn’t so much as though the baleful threat had receded, though. It was more that I was seduced by the Dark Echo herself into ignoring any danger. Suzanne had been so disconcerted by her first exposure to the boat, my second, that she had lied to me and gone to France in a bid to uncover the secrets of the man who’d had her built. Yet I’d been reassured, relieved in the aftermath of the visit we shared.
On the visit just concluded to the Dark Echo, I’d been dazzled by her. I had heard that loud and furtive scurrying aboard and not just rationalised, but trivialised it. This despite the fact that I’d found no trace of the rodent sane thinking insisted was responsible for the sound. It was as though the boat herself lulled and stroked me into a sort of sedated glee. Aboard her, my senses were happily stupefied.
She did not lure me to her. The contamination did not spread that far. Away from her, I felt no great yearning for her. But once I set foot on the Dark Echo, I seemed to fall under her strong and sensual spell.
I had Chesney, in his shiny, pantomime sentry outfit, to thank for this belated insight. As I pulled up outside Peitersen’s picturesque country hotel, it was not a comfortable thought.
Then I had another. What if I had looked in the sail store? I had a sudden and very confident intuition that I would have encountered not a rodent, but Spalding’s pet bull mastiff Toby, stinking and wormy and dead. And panting and eager in its grotesque parody of canine life for the return of his long-lost master. The dog had lurked in the sail store, had gnawed rope there in the cool and the quiet when the weather and swell had made the deck unsafe. I knew it now. I knew it suddenly and with the same absolute certainty insisting that night follows day.
I had no trouble at all in accessing Pietersen’s room. My driving licence established my surname. And there was no Chesneyesque confusion over it. The Stannard name had been the source of much guaranteed income for the duration of Peitersen’s stay in the hotel, because my father had put him up in the best-appointed room in the place. His meals and his room had been paid for in advance until the end of June, the Easter and early summer premiums effortlessly accommodated by my father’s happy largesse. So I was not surprised at the smiles and the opening doors and the all-round obsequiousness. In a microcosmic sort of way, they amounted to the story of my life.
The room, by contrast, offered me nothing. The windows were oppressively leaded and the walls punctuated by bucolic scenes of domestic country routine. The beamed ceiling was so low as to make the space seem cramped, despite its broad width and generous length. Logs sat in the grate of an authentic fire, but the bark was curling on them under a patina of dust. I patted the counterpane on the bed, sniffed at the plumped pillows. It was recently changed and made up, of course, but the bed had a cold, unslept-in look about it. Slowly, the details of the room revealed themselves. There was a TV and DVD combination, discreetly positioned and definitely not dating from the age of squires stretching before pewter jugs of porter after a hard day riding to hounds. There was a power shower in the adjoining bathroom. The bathroom was small. But its dove-white, downy towels were folded across heated rails. On a shelf under the mirror, there were little embossed bottles filled with creams and lotions, the sort hotel guests routinely steal to offset the pain of paying the bill.
Peitersen had paid no bill. And I was somehow sure he had stolen nothing either. I felt a strong certainty that he had never unscrewed the top from one of the pampering bottles on the bathroom shelf. Just as he had never taken a DVD to view from the small library of them under his television. Neither had he enjoyed a drink from the minibar tucked against the wall beside the television. His first-floor window looked out on to the budding leaves of a stately chestnut tree and, beyond it, a lush sweep of descending lawn. I doubted Peitersen had ever so much as noticed the view. I had a strengthening suspicion that he had never slept in the bed.
The fastidiousness of a monk.
Again I searched for a note, but found none.
I sat among the vases of wild flowers and the horse brasses and heavily framed pictures in a window seat in the hotel’s cluttered lobby to drink a cup of coffee. The sun warmed my back through the window. A Polish girl with pretty eyes fussed with her hair behind the reception desk. It was twelve o’clock. My mobile was still on the back seat of my car where I’d thrown it in exasperation earlier. I could hear the drone of a motor mower clipping the grass outside. Everything seemed perfectly normal but I knew that nothing was. I wondered if my father was still off-message in Chichester. I thought of the picture he had framed for me in my cabin aboard his blighted boat and felt like sinking to my knees and praying for his safety. Instead, I drained my cup and went over to where the Polish girl had been joined by a colleague similar enough to her for them to be sisters.
Yes, they had known the guest I described to them. The receptionist with the arresting eyes was called Magda. The other girl, her cousin Marjena, had given Mr Peitersen’s room its daily turn. Marjena’s English, while a hell of a lot better than my Polish, was nothing like as good as that spoken by Magda. I would ideally have liked to take Marjena for a walk in the hotel grounds for the sort of private chat that encourages people to recollect those careless details that can be significant. But Magda – who knew, of course, about the payment arrangements for Peitersen’s stay – did not seem to inhibit her cousin from speaking at all. And, of course, I needed help with translation.