back wondering what the seminary’s facilities to suit every guest were going to be like. The women’s were bound to be different from the men’s. She imagined a bed chamber built for one of those wan Pre-Raphaelite beauties from the paintings of Millais and Arthur Hughes. There would be tapestries and stained glass and the bed would be heavily canopied. Her well water would reside in a silver chalice. Should she require the diversion of music, she would have to learn the harp and play the one standing in the corner. Or she could take the lute down from the wall.
The shock and the giddiness it provoked did not subside in Suzanne until she had eaten the really excellent beef stew they provided her with in what amounted to a comfortably furnished, self-contained flat. There was wine with the food, along with bread so good she assumed it had been baked in the seminary kitchens that morning. Her sitting room was equipped with satellite TV and a desktop computer with internet access. There was only one clue as to her actual location. A large crucifix hung on the sitting-room wall. A bronze Christ writhed, nailed through his hands and feet to a hardwood cross.
But she was glad of that. As calm and normality returned to her, she was glad of the fact of where she was and the potent reminder of it up there on the wall. When she went to bed and turned out the lights, she knew she would be grateful for the reassurance of the holy fortress surrounding her.
‘You’ll lose nothing by leaving in the morning, in the daylight,’ Delaunay had said.
‘I owe you my life,’ she repeated.
‘It’s to God you owe your life,’ he said. ‘But thank you anyway, Suzanne. I’m a vain enough man to accept any compliment going.’
She laughed. But she had known that about him.
‘Where do you intend to go? You’re going after Spalding, aren’t you? You’re undeterred.’
Suzanne nodded.
‘I tried telephoning them. I wanted to appeal to their good sense and urge them to return.’
‘They won’t,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t get through. We’ve a satellite phone, but I could not get through on that either.’
‘I’m going to Southport, Monsignor Delaunay. He settled there for a while. He must have had a reason. Like you, I sometimes have intuitions. You’re right. I’m going after him. I can’t just do nothing. I’d go mad.’
‘Then for God’s sake take the train.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve no choice. My hire care isn’t up to the journey.’
Delaunay waved an imaginary irritant away. His hands were still bandaged, blood in dried clots and stains on the fabric. ‘I’ll talk to the hire car people. They’ll believe a priest. They might call you for confirmation and send you papers to sign, but I’ll deal with it here. And I’ll have one of the lads drive you to the station in the morning.’
‘My travel bag is still in the boot. My laptop’s in the bag.’
‘I’ll have one of the lads go and fetch it now. Novices live for the opportunity to do someone a good turn.’ He winked.
She hugged him. She had not known she was going to do it until it was done. ‘There,’ she said.
He held her head between his hands and kissed her forehead. ‘There,’ he said.
In the flat in the seminary, Suzanne turned the computer on in the drowsy preamble to going to bed. She logged on to the web and accessed the BBC news homepage and saw an item about storms raging across the North-East of England. It was only then, with a start, that she realised neither she nor Delaunay had even for a moment indulged the notion that what had happened to her earlier had been an accident. But trees fell in tempests, didn’t they? And some of them fell on cars. She, of course, had heard the song on the radio immediately prior to the impact. But he had not. She had switched off the radio in the fraction of time before it occurred.
She went to her email. There were no messages for her she had not read. She pulled up Martin’s email address. And she tapped in the sentence:
We were three full days out. We had made about nine hundred miles at an average of twelve knots since departing Southampton. We were in the middle of the North Atlantic and the sea was running high and the wind was gusting at around thirty knots. Every fourth or fifth wave was breaking over the bow. The sun was going down and the ocean was a lurid, foaming crimson where the last of it glimmered and sank. I was cold and wet and needed a break and something hot to drink and there was no sign above deck of my father. I had not seen him for what seemed like hours.
He had taken to spending more time in his cabin over the past couple of days. I thought this reasonable enough. Sailing becomes a chore when there is nothing to look at except an endless expanse of churning sea. His cabin was warm and dry and handsomely appointed, and if he chose to take refuge there when he wasn’t at the wheel or the galley stove, that was a captain’s privilege. But I had a suspicion that he locked the door. And when I listened outside his door, I could hear something beyond the groan of the hull beneath me and the sound of straining rigging and the whip in the wind of the sails above. The opera was played, when it was played at all, very quietly, as a backdrop. Above it, I could hear my father conversing quietly and earnestly with himself.
Wet through and more than slightly pissed off, I engaged the auto-steer and went below, stripped off my wet weather gear, towelled down and then went to make myself a cup of cocoa. I took it into my cabin. And I saw that I had new email and the source of the message was Suzanne.
Sometimes the email connection on the little white laptop worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was supposed to function wherever you were in the world but in the middle of the ocean there seemed to be voids or black spots that stopped it from doing so. Maybe it was something to do with electromagnetic fields or something. Possibly it was a consequence of atmospheric conditions. Maybe it was deliberate interference, jamming from a submarine or a warship somewhere in our proximity. The Cold War was long over, of course. But beyond their own borders, it was no secret to anyone that the superpowers still played out their hostile psychological games.
I sat down at my desk and sipped cocoa. She had only just sent the email. She should be online right now, I thought. I opened the message, which comprised a single line.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Outside, I heard the wind shriek and caterwaul. It was going to be a testing night, our roughest yet by far.
I pressed ‘Send’ and waited for a moment. My cocoa was not as good as I’d imagined it would be in the half-hour I’d deliberated about leaving the wheel and making it. A drink is never that good when you have to prepare it yourself. It’s never as good as when someone else makes it for you.
Suzanne was very skilled at her occupation. She was clever and tenacious. But nobody was going to pay her for this particular job of research. I wondered why she was wasting her time with it.
I pressed ‘Send’. A moment later, a reply came back.
And then the screen on my laptop froze. I switched off the power button and drained my cup. What the hell was my father doing? I went and stood outside his cabin door with my knuckles raised to knock. And I hesitated. I thought I could hear music, very faintly, from within. And I felt incredulous and cold when I thought I recognised the tune as ‘When Love Breaks Down’.
‘Come in.’
But I had not knocked. My knuckles were still poised an inch from the walnut burr of his door.
‘I said, come in, Martin.’
He was seated at his desk with his back to me. The room smelled curious. It smelled of smoke. It was not the plump whiff of one of my father’s Havanas, though. It was the thin, strong odour of Turkish tobacco. The music had stopped. There was some effect in the cabin, some dulling of the acoustic that made the rising sea outside distant and numb. And in the haze of smoke, objects seemed to ripple slightly before settling, subtly out of focus. The barrels seemed bloated, swollen and belligerent on the shotguns and rifles where they gleamed in his gun cabinet. The handles of the knives in their case on the opposite wall of the cabin looked yellowy. The pale bone and
