A Ghost at the Door

by Michael Dobbs

  Always rushing ahead of others, that was Harry. One day it would kill him. But not today, thanks to Jemma.

  ‘Harry!’ she screamed, lunging after him, dragging him back just in time from the path of the taxi bearing down on him as he tried to cross Temple Avenue not far from Tallon’s office. He was somewhere else in his head. The wing mirror brushed Harry’s shirtsleeve, leaving a graze of dirt. The taxi driver waved a fist of rebuke through the open window.‘Arsehole!’ Harry barked, but not so much at the cab driver as at himself. Damn it, this wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. Just that morning he’d noticed that the strand of summer-bleached hair on his head had been joined by others. The conclusion was inevitable: it wasn’t so much sun-scorch as middle age. No denying it, no matter how stubborn he got. Tempus fugit, waits for no man, all that shit. Perhaps that was why he was in so much of a screaming hurry. He brushed at his bruised arm and pushed ahead.

  The heat of the day was rising, the crawl of traffic thickening the air. Harry headed into the cobbled alleyways and cloisters of the Inner Temple that made up the heart of legal London. Barristers occupied shady corners, stripped to their white shirts, sweltering in their starched collars, mobile phones clamped to their ears, while around them tourists wandered and motorcycle couriers weaved. Harry ignored it all, his heels smacking into the old paving stones as he strode on.

  Jemma struggled to keep pace. She was beginning to wonder what she had unleashed. She’d been the one to push him into this chase, yet she was no longer sure it was sensible: she’d watched him tossing in his sleep, his lips moving but making no sound as he tussled with his dreams. The previous night they’d made love – except, unusually, there had been little sign of affection about it. Harry was an experienced lover, a man of many previous berths, but that side of his past didn’t bother her – use it, enjoy it, she’d always told herself – and they’d developed an especially intense physical relationship that sometimes didn’t make it to the bedroom but instead upturned tables and flooded the bathroom floor. Yet last night wasn’t Harry. It was as though someone else had thrown himself on her, demanding, impatient, intensely inconsiderate. Punishing her. Bruising her, too. When he’d finished he’d rolled over on his side, hadn’t said a word. A stranger.

  ‘Slow down, you idiot!’ she found herself shouting once again as he paced ahead, head down, leaving her behind.

  He turned, surprised, shocked at himself. There was sweat on his forehead. They were in a small courtyard outside a pub that claimed on its frontage to have been built in 1615 but was clearly Victorian. Old metal-hooped beer barrels stood on the pavement serving as tables. ‘Stay!’ she commanded, and he did so while she went inside and soon reappeared with two beers.

  ‘Why not let’s forget it?’ she suggested, putting a glass down in front of him and throwing two packets of dry-roasted onto the barrel top.

  He took a sip of his beer, pulled a face at the sourness and slowly shook his head. ‘Can’t,’ he said quietly. ‘Not now.’

  He’d spent his life leaving people in his wake: his first wife, Julia, swept away as she tried to follow him through off-piste snow; Mel, the second, lost along with a considerable chunk of his fortune way back in some divorce court; Martha, the American woman who’d taken the emotional wreckage that had been Harry Jones and blown the spark back to life. Martha had saved his life; in return he’d left her buried back on an ice-smothered mountainside in central Asia. Not his fault, but it kept happening. ‘I love you, Harry, I so do, it’s just that I can’t keep up with you,’ one of his lovers had said. He didn’t want to remember which one: it hurt too much to look back. But in the case of his father he couldn’t avoid it. He leaned on the barrel, sipping, not tasting, his father’s file in front of him.

  ‘OK, Batman, what’s our next move?’ Jemma asked.

  He flipped open the file and slowly extracted his father’s death certificate. It was in Greek, but he knew enough of the script to decipher it. ‘We start digging,’ he said, a cold light in his eye. He reached for his phone.

  ‘Taps, you busy?’ Harry asked when his call was answered. Simon St John Tappersley had been a fellow officer in the Parachute Regiment and was now a maritime insurance broker at Lloyd’s.

  ‘Of course,’ came the dry reply.

  ‘Good. You always operated better under a little pressure. There’s something I need you to do. Kapetanios Marios Kouropoulos. Master of the SS Adriana back in 2001.’ It was the name on the death certificate, the man who had reported his father’s death. ‘I need to know where he is. Want to talk to him.’

  ‘How quickly?’

  ‘By the time I’ve finished my beer.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You haven’t changed, Harry.’

  ‘I’m hoping you haven’t, either.’

  ‘Screw you.’ Tappersley hung up.

  Twenty minutes later the screen on Harry’s phone flashed into life.

  ‘What kept you, Taps? I’ve had to go get a second beer.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because you called in the middle of my lunch.’

  ‘I owe you.’

  ‘You most certainly bloody do. Your Captain Crapulous. According to the records of the Greek Masters and Mates Union, he was born in some place called Mastichochoria in Chios in 1952. Earned his Master’s Certificate in 1980. Left the service in 2004.’

  ‘You mean he retired?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘What sort of manner?’

  ‘He died, didn’t he? On his ship.’

  ‘In his sleep or on the sun deck?’

  ‘Neither. His propeller got snared in some old fishing net, so he went over the side to cut it away. Some idiot restarted the engine just as he’d finished and was still underwater. Like a scene from Jaws, so the chap at the Masters and Mates said. Cleaved in two. I can think of better ways to go.’

  ‘So could my father,’ Harry muttered, before adding, ‘Thanks, Taps. I owe you that lunch.’

  Tappersley sighed in resignation. ‘In all honesty, it was nothing but a little lobster salad. I suspect it will have kept.’

  Harry’s lips twitched as he put his phone away. It was his father who had shown him how to dive for lobster in the Med, how to cook and shell them, too. Suddenly everything in his life seemed to be coming back to the same point: Johnnie. That morning, as Harry had shaved, he’d wiped the mirror with a towel only to find the bloody man staring back at him through the porthole of mist. He was everywhere. A man walks in his father’s footsteps knowing that at some point he will overtake the father and leave him behind, that was the given order. But even though Johnnie was dead, Harry had never caught up with him.

  ‘Harry?’

  His eyes came back to her. Gentle lines of concern were scribbled above Jemma’s nose.

  ‘You seem angry,’ she said.

  He crushed the empty packet of nuts in his fist. ‘Just thinking that lobster salad sounds a hell of a lot better than a packet of dry-roasted for lunch.’

  ‘Yes, you sure know how to treat a girl.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘How?’

  Before he could reply, his phone beeped again. A text message. Details of an address from the electoral register. Harry brushed the screen to examine it and began to smile in satisfaction.

  ‘Can I suggest a little trip?’

  ‘Where?’ she asked, intrigued.

  He checked the screen once more. ‘How about the Lake District?’ he said, gathering up the file and setting off once more.

  They found the cottage up a short, grass-tufted lane that cut off from the road leading into Braithwaite, an unpretentious Cumbrian village in the lee of Barrow fell. Harry parked the Volvo beside an uncertain stone wall that seemed to be held together by little more than lichen and moss. They had found their man and it was clear why he wanted to live here: on a clear day the view from this spot would stretch all the wa
y to the peaks of Catbells. But this was the Lakes, and clear days came at a premium. Harry turned off the windscreen wipers and they clambered out. The cottage was small, with a roof of old slate and faded whitewashed walls. The garden gate swung in the breeze, creaking on a lazy, unoiled hinge. The paintwork was peeling, the garden unkempt; so was the ruddy-cheeked man in a crumpled shirt who answered the door. The rims of the eyes were of much the same hue as the cheeks, and he had a lick of thinning grey hair stuck to his forehead.

  ‘Hello, Mr Smith? My name’s Harry Jones. I telephoned yesterday.’

  ‘I remember. I also remember telling you to go to hell.’ The man had opened the door but a fraction, using his body to hide the clutter that was spilling from inside. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it bloody does,’ he snapped, staring defiantly though his one good eye; the other was clouded, full of cataract, and downcast, like the rest of him.

  ‘OK, you tell me how many other Euripides Smiths I’m likely to find on the electoral register.’

  Harry kept a straight face but he wasn’t being entirely honest. He’d also called the former honorary consul in Bari, a man with whom he’d got enjoyably hammered during an official afternoon that drifted into an alcohol-fuelled evening until they’d found themselves watching the sun come up across the Adriatic.

  ‘Smithie? Our man in Patras?’ the former honorary consul had responded when Harry telephoned to enquire about his colleague. ‘Scarcely knew him. Ran across him on a training course in Malta a while back, rather a waste of time – the course, not Smithie. Seem to remember he left not long after that under a bit of a cloud – well, plenty of us did back then. Cuts, of course. But it was more than just a cloud: in his case he left with a distinct clap of thunder, too. Yes, the brain re-engages, it’s coming back to me . . . That’s right, some whining backbencher had sailed into port and expected a ten-gun salute. Not old Smithie’s style. Gave him nothing but a ripe raspberry. Good for him, too. We were volunteers, not slave labour. But I guess Smithie had been in post just a little too long, took things for granted, perhaps. Took an occasional liberty, too.’

  ‘What sort of liberty?’

  ‘Oh, of the alcoholic kind. Nothing many of us didn’t do occasionally.’

  ‘As I remember.’

  ‘Yes, that was a good evening, wasn’t it? But Smithie didn’t choose his timing well. The politician complained, made a hell of a fuss, so, when the great god Austerity struck, Smithie had already laid himself out on the altar. Sacrificial lamb – or goat in his case. Made it easy for them. There was a wondrously rude valedictory e-mail to his bosses in which he kept misspelling the word “cuts”, and off he went into the wide blue yonder.’

  ‘In which direction?’

  ‘God knows, it’s not like we were close. But, hang on, something stirs. There’s a weasel running round inside my head whispering – Lake District. Can’t be positive, mind . . .’

  ‘Thanks, old friend.’

  And now, as Euripides Smith defended his doorstep, Harry reckoned that the suspicions about the man were right. He could see the wash of alcohol as well as anger in the other man’s eyes.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Smith demanded.

  ‘In a way, yes. You once wrote to me. Look, er, can we discuss it?’

  ‘You can’t come in,’ Smith snapped, suddenly defensive. ‘I’m in the middle of clearing up.’

  That was the moment Jemma chose to step forward. She was wearing tight-waisted jeans and a thin cotton blouse that, in the cool drizzle, was leaving less than usual to a man’s imagination. She allowed Smith’s good eye a second or so to grow distracted. ‘Over a drink, perhaps, Mr Smith? We passed a pub a mile or so back. I’ll drive while you two chat.’ She guessed that was why the lane had so much grass on it: there was no sign of a car, Smith didn’t drive, had probably lost his licence to the local magistrate and got most of his exercise walking to the nearest pub.

  Smith eyed Jemma for every second she allowed before making up his mind. ‘Well, I suppose, seeing as you’ve driven all this way . . .’ he muttered, closing his front door behind him.

  Smith said almost nothing in the car, trying to smarten himself up, buttoning his shirt a little higher, rerolling his sleeves more neatly, scratching away at a glob of breakfast that had stuck to the lap of his trousers. Harry reckoned he was late fifties but looked older, greyer. A few minutes later they were sitting around an old varnished table beneath the low beams and brass bric-a-brac at the Royal Oak. The beer was local, better than in London. When they had taken the head off it, Harry produced the letter of regret about Johnnie’s death that the former consul had written all those years ago.

  ‘Oh, so it’s you, is it?’ Smith said, looking more keenly at Harry.

  ‘Can you tell me about what happened to my father?’

  ‘Yes, remember it. Didn’t get too many bodies to deal with,’ Smith began, reflecting into his glass, ‘not that I really dealt with your father’s body at all.’

  ‘You didn’t see it?’

  ‘Good God, no. Honorary vice consuls have no power, no authority. We’re little more than glorified messenger boys. Corpses are way above our pay grade. Not that we got paid, of course. Did you know that, Mr Jones?’ His tone betrayed an edge of bitterness. ‘Got no expenses, no training, either, absolutely nothing, apart from a manual of procedures with an oversized crest on its front, and it took them two years before they even gave me one of those. I had to make much of it up as I went along.’

  ‘How wonderfully reassuring.’

  The other man shrugged and drank.

  ‘So you didn’t arrange for my father’s burial?’

  Smith shook his head. ‘All I could have done was suggest the names of a couple of funeral directors. But nobody asked.It’s usually the family, but apart from you there didn’t seem to be any family. And you didn’t ask.’

  ‘You were satisfied that everything was . . .’ Harry suddenly hesitated. A note of discord began to flutter through his thoughts. ‘You satisfied yourself that everything was in order. Due process, or whatever they call it.’

  ‘Satisfied myself? To be honest, not particularly. Wasn’t my job. As I said, I was a messenger boy. Inform the embassy in Athens and the next of kin, that was all. The rest was up to others.’

  ‘Who, precisely?’

  ‘The Greek authorities. And you know what they can be like, particularly in a place like Patras.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, you know where your father is buried.’

  The statement was left hanging, as a question. Harry didn’t respond, seemed suddenly embarrassed. He hadn’t even visited the grave. Not once.

  The old consul sighed, recognized Harry’s guilt, and a layer of aggression seemed to peel away from him. He understood the pain that raking the embers of a past life could bring. ‘I lived there twelve years, should love the place but . . . Patras is what it is. A port, a crossroads, it’s sprawling, sometimes mucky, not particularly glamorous. I remember your father – his case, I mean. Yachts like that have their autopilots stuck on places like Venice and Cannes and Santorini. They didn’t stop off in Patras, and certainly not with bodies on board.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Jemma encouraged.

  ‘Well . . . Mrs Jones?’ he enquired, raising his eyes at Jemma.

  ‘No, not quite yet.’

  He nodded softly. ‘Wish you well, young lady. As much luck as I had with my wife. She died in Patras, too.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  He blinked in gratitude, was elsewhere for a moment before he returned to his tale. ‘Anyway, I got a call from the chief of the port police. About your father, Mr Jones. Courtesy call, nothing for me to do, but I wandered down nonetheless.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno. No need, not as a consul. But my wife . . . Anyway, it was a fine day. I needed the exercise.’

  ‘The consulate is near the port?’


  ‘The consulate? What sort of operation do you think Her Majesty still runs? The consulate didn’t exist, not beyond me and my mobile phone. I’m half Greek, Mr Jones, named Euripides after my grandfather. We’d been living in Patras for a few years, my wife and I, living off a bit of business here and a bit more there – you know what it’s like in the Med. One of those bits was a restaurant; I ran the consulate from one of its back rooms. Suited me, you see. Brought in the punters. Did some of the consulate stuff up at the bar, encouraged them to buy a round of drinks for my pains; often they’d hang on for a meal, too. Yes, suited me well, right up to the time some pompous little prick of a politician turned up and started throwing his weight around. Don’t you just hate politicians?’

  ‘What was his name, this politician?’ Harry asked, ducking the question.

  ‘Madrigan. Peter Madrigan.’ He spat out the name, but as quickly as his anger burst forth it was overtaken by bewilderment and a fresh row of furrows erupted across his brow as fragments began to coalesce. He picked up the letter once again, studied it. ‘Henry Jones,’ he read out, then looked up. ‘Are you the . . .?’