‘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.
We left the yard for breakfast at the hotel at about a quarter to eight. As we got into the car I saw a pair of transit vans pull up at the gate. One was blue and had the name of a security firm stencilled on its side in yellow capitals with a logo underneath of a portcullis wreathed in barbed wire. Three men got out of it, two from the cab and one from the rear with a German shepherd on a short chain lead. The three men were all well built and unsmiling and dressed in smart black tunics.
‘Your Chesney anecdote alarmed me,’ my father said. ‘I’ve taken fresh precautions.’
The second van contained six men wearing a mixture of overalls or jeans with chambray shirts and puffa jackets. One among them, I assumed, was their foreman and showed some papers to the first group. They stood a little nervously while the dog was allowed to sniff at each man and learn his scent. Then the gate was opened and, carrying their boxes of tools, they approached the boatshed.
‘We need to be back here by noon,’ my father said. It gave us plenty of time. ‘From now on, Martin, the only sardonic laughter you will be hearing around the Dark Echo will be mine.’
An item of mail was brought to our table at breakfast. It was carried on a silver salver by Marjena, who gave a little bow of her head on delivering it to my father. It was a sealed A3-sized Manila envelope and his name and the address of the hotel were written on it in a careful hand. The writing reminded me of the column of figures I’d seen on the desk blotter in Peitersen’s office. Some of the letters had a similar character, as though described by the nib of the same ink pen. My father took the letter and thanked the girl and then held it out to me across the tabletop.
‘Open it, Martin.’
I used the knife from my side plate. Before I did so I examined the postmark. It was a bit blurred and indistinct, but the letter had been sorted at the big central office at Mount Pleasant in London. When I slit the envelope, a small collection of banker’s drafts slid out on to the tablecloth. I knew what they were. They were the monthly payments my father had been making to Peitersen. And they had remained uncashed. He had used the expenses account for the payment of other men and he had bought materials from that fund, too – I had seen the invoices at the yard. But he had taken nothing for himself. I opened the envelope with my thumb and saw that there was a note in it, still stuck at its edge to the gum that had closed the corner of the flap. I freed and unfolded the note and read it aloud.
She’s ready, Magnus. You could tinker and fret over her for ever, but she’s ready. Rig the sails when they arrive. It’s a job a vessel’s master should oversee himself. Give her a week’s sea trials off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. Or take her across the Irish Sea to Dublin and back. It will take a voyage of that nature to determine whether you and the boy are ready for her. But she’s ready for you, Magnus. And I wish you God Speed aboard her.
The note was not signed. My father raised his eyebrows and took it from me and read it himself. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket. He reached for the banker’s drafts and aligned them in his hands with a shuffle, then tore them in half and dropped them on to the table. He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and signalled by rising from his chair that it was time for us to leave.
His helicopter had arrived by the time we got back to the boatyard. It sat on the hard sand from which the early tide had retreated with Tom, my father’s regular pilot, smoking one of his little brown cheroots and lounging in his aviator glasses at its side. I did not have long to wonder why they were there. Monsignor Delaunay stood at the edge of the sea in his Mass robes, his bright stole flapping in the breeze, his biretta secured to his head by the finger of a raised hand as he looked out over the Solent towards Cowes. It had been better than a decade since I’d seen my favourite seminary Jesuit last, but I recognised immediately the huge neck, the incongruous power in his Olympian shoulders and back. He must have sensed our arrival, because he turned and then saw and approached us. And I saw that God, or Providence, had been good to him in the intervening years. He was greyer at the temples, thicker about the jowls, perhaps. But he had not really aged very much.