Dark Echo

He laughed, but it was bitter laughter. ‘On the contrary, madame. The dogs are here not because I am alone. They are here because I have the suspicion that, sometimes, I am not.’

She thanked the farmer and, without another word passing between them, he walked her back to her car and saw her off his land.

She became aware of the vehicle in her rear-view mirror about twenty minutes after exiting the lane that led to the farm. It was a black van. It was quite large and, after a couple of miles, she was pretty sure that it was following her. This was because although she drove with the slow caution of a stranger to the area obliged to drive on the wrong side of the road, the van did not close the distance and attempt to overtake. It just sat in her rear- view mirror. She tried to dismiss her nervousness concerning the van as paranoia. But when, to ascertain the truth of the situation, she reduced her speed, the black bulk of it simply stayed, in relation to her, precisely where it was. She could not avoid the conclusion that it was waiting, deliberately lurking in her wake.

All Suzanne could do was continue to drive. Every kilometre she travelled brought the bright, commercial bustle of Calais and the ferry terminal incrementally closer. Brightness, though, was becoming a problem. More precisely, the lack of brightness was becoming a complication as a mist rose or a fog descended and the ribbon of road in front of her grew pale and spectral in the full, enfeebled beam of her headlights. She groaned. She tapped a tattoo with her fingers on the wheel. She switched off the wipers. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that at least the rain had finally stopped falling. But when she looked in the rear-view mirror, all she could see behind her was an opaque blanket of grey. Her squat black pursuer had slipped from sight altogether.

And then the van flashed past her. It was as sleek and sudden alongside as a shark beside a swimmer in the water. Except that this shark had steel flanks and something was etched and glittered on them in gold. In the dead lustre of the mist, the legend read, ‘Martens & Degrue’. And Suzanne, who did not share her boyfriend’s sometimes charitable belief in coincidence, wondered just how deeply, in what awful sort of trouble, Martin and his father were allowing themselves to become engulfed.

A kilometre or two on, the mist began to lift. She saw a sign at the roadside for Calais. Her numb fear receded enough for her to realise just how badly she was craving the comfort of normality. She looked at her watch and, having the time to do so, pulled in to a roadside cafe and went inside and ordered hot chocolate. The cafe was warm and light. Indifferent people with mundane routines sipped beverages around her. The Police played ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ through wall-mounted speakers. The tables were Formica-topped. There were the smells of roasting beans and toasting cheese and ham baguettes and the faint aniseed whiff of Ricard, served from a sticky optic behind the bar. If there was a smoking ban in the cafe, its patrons were ignoring it.

Sipping her drink, normality beckoned for Suzanne, and it was seductive. But it came only at the price of a sort of willing amnesia concerning the past few hours and their events and revelations. She could forget about them, which would be the painless route back to the certainties of yesterday. Or she could subject them to a clever, sceptical reinterpretation, which would take longer, but would eventually deliver the same comforting effect.

Comfortably numb. There was a song by someone, wasn’t there, called ‘Comfortably Numb’?

And there was a song called ‘When Love Breaks Down’ written by a failed priest called Paddy McAloon. She had heard it playing in a manner it very definitely should not have on the radio of the rental car as she journeyed to the farm near Bethune owned by the brave and cautious Frenchman, Pierre Duval.

Despite the temptation, Suzanne would not allow normality to settle its illusory claim on her. She had seen what she had seen and she had felt what she had felt and she had listened to what she had been told. Given time, she was sure that she could unravel the whole disquieting truth about Harry Spalding. But she hoped that it would not be necessary for her to have to do so. She hoped that what she had learned so far would be enough to deter Martin and more particularly his headstrong father from their planned voyage aboard Spalding’s refurbished boat.

It was late by the time Suzanne wound up this account of her little journey to the old and bloody battleground of the Great War. And with the adventure of the Andromeda not yet a full day behind me, I was bone tired by the time she completed it. I felt pretty numb myself. And I felt pretty comfortably numb, to tell the truth. Nothing she had discovered seemed as bad as the hours-earlier prospect of being abandoned by Suzanne. That had been my fear at the outset of the night. And it had been terrible. In reality, I felt more flattered by her efforts on my behalf than disconcerted by their results.

The lurid atrocities of a conflict fought ninety years ago seemed very distant. The weirdness of the barn near Bethune seemed far more ominous for the stoical Frenchman farming the land around it than for my father or myself in contemplating a voyage aboard a vintage schooner.

Suzanne had gone behind my back, obviously, to discover what she had. Strictly speaking, as I’ve already acknowledged, she had deceived me. Relationships are built on intimacy and none of the ingredients that go to conjure intimacy is so important as trust. But Suzanne had acted with noble intentions. And my own sin, committed after her revelations that night, was simpler but considerably worse than hers. Mine was the sin, of course, of omission.

I know now what I should have done. The truth be told, I knew then. Regardless of my fatigue, regardless of hers, I should have told her about Straub’s ghost. I should have told her that story and allowed the sharp mind behind that lovely face of hers to ponder on the place of it in the emerging pattern of things. But I did not. I dozed instead. She dozed next to me, the two of us close beside one another on our bed. And then, as the clock on the bedside table clicked towards one in the morning, I stirred and stroked the smooth flesh of her shoulder and, remembering, said, ‘Tell me about Peitersen, Suzanne.’

Her eyes opened, dark and slightly bleary with sleep in the night gloom in our flat near the river. She went and made herself some tea, then came back to bed and sipped it as she lay down, alert again.

‘Josiah Peitersen did indeed build the Dark Echo. By any measure, Spalding was still a youth when her keel was laid. So the boat was a tremendous indulgence on the part of his parents, regardless of their wealth. And they were prodigiously wealthy. She was a fabulous prize for someone barely out of his adolescence when she began her sea trials.’

‘Unless she was something else,’ I said, not really knowing why I said it, or where my thoughts were taking me. My mind was voyaging back to the dank waters of East Friesland, to Baltrum and the intrigue of Childers’ Riddle of the Sands.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Only that she might not have been merely a gift. She might have been built with some purpose beyond the frivolity of regattas in mind. Perhaps Spalding was groomed to be her master for a reason we haven’t discovered.’

Suzanne pondered. She twisted her neck to face me on the pillow. I could smell the scent of Earl Grey tea warm on her breath.

‘From birth, you mean?’

‘It’s just a thought,’ I said. And a terrifying one. ‘What were they called? The debating society to which the Spaldings and the Peitersens and the rest of them belonged?’

‘I haven’t been able to find out,’ she said. ‘They referred to themselves as The Membership, but they were the membership of something, obviously. It must have been some clan or brotherhood or cabal. There was some secret, ritualistic name I haven’t been able to discover. It’s there in some FBI file compiled when the Feds went after them during Prohibition. But the file is classified or lost.’

‘Or stolen,’ I said. ‘Filched by someone working for a Brussels-based firm called Martens and Degrue. Or lifted by the man masquerading as Peitersen, masquerading as someone else.’

‘Josiah Peitersen and his wife had no offspring,’ Suzanne said. ‘That was an easy thing to discover. Both of them predeceased Harry Spalding. And they left no grieving son behind to carry on their bloodline.’

‘Hadley said that Peitersen’s references checked out.’

But that contradiction was an easy one, even for me. Peitersen was sent ‘from above’, so far as the beleaguered Hadley had been concerned in his storm-bound, curse-prone boatyard. Surrounded by his high-tech toys, with my father’s baleful wreck lashed to the stanchions of the quay through his office window, he must have read the words in the airmail letter and thought Peitersen heaven-sent. Any check on the man’s references would have been cursory at most, if it was ever carried out at all. In the circumstances, most people would have forgiven the desperate Frank Hadley a convenient lie. With the threat of ruin the alternative, he’d certainly have forgiven himself the telling of it.

My father was not usually easily fooled. He was a man only ever willingly gullible. But Jack Peitersen had