Dark Echo by F. G. Cottam Read Free Book Online

of the boat. Hawsers had been lashed to the mast laterally to keep it steady and stop it swinging dangerously once free of the hull. The last thing that was wanted was for it to become a sort of battering ram, smashing the craft it had so staunchly served for so long.
    Somehow one of the hawsers was allowed to slacken and it looped around the arm of one of the men on the deck, severing the limb when it came under tension and tightened again as cleanly as a wire will cut cheese, just above the top of his biceps. Work was stopped immediately, of course. The emergency services were called and first aidwas swiftly administered by those present. Frank Hadley was a model employer and two of his people on the scene knew all about first aid and the recovery position. But the man with the severed arm writhed on the deck of my father’s boat until he died of shock after four or five terrible, gory minutes.
    Work stopped. And it did not restart. My father was paying Frank Hadley very handsomely. And Hadley, a scrupulous employer as I’ve said, was paying his craftspeople very competitive rates. But nobody wanted to work on the
Dark Echo
after the fatality. Even when Hadley had personally swabbed her deck of the dead rigger’s blood, and police accident investigators had put away their biros after taking statements, even after the burial a full eight days later, there was no general desire to return to the project. It was the fourth week in February. All over the South of England, we were enduring record rainfall. There was a pump to keep the dock dry under the
Dark Echo
’s supine shape. She was wearing her shroud again, as if in solemn and dignified mourning for the most recent man to die aboard her. For something told me there had been predecessors – male and female, too – all mourned with the same measured, counterfeit decorum. But perhaps it was just the weather, making me gloomy, turning my own aspect as gloomy as that of the leaking sky.
    I sat with my father in Frank Hadley’s office. Through the window behind him you could see the tarpaulin bulk of the boat in the rain. His yard was on an estuary, as they tended to be, a deep water channel scoured by a dredger through the silt to give the boats he worked on access to open water. In some senses everything was the same as at Bullen and Clore. There was the same pervasive salt smell and the same faint luminescence about the light, even in heavy cloud, that you only encounter on the coast. Therewere the briny cobbles and the great tow ropes and chains and mooring rings. And, of course, there was the presence of the
Dark Echo
.
    But, in significant ways, everything was in complete contrast to Bullen and Clore. The spacious office was a minimalist tribute to good taste and modernity. A cappuccino machine gurgled softly in the far corner. On the wall to our left, and Hadley’s right as he faced us from behind his desk, was a bank of LCD screens. They all showed the same series of images. Computer simulations of the hull of a Norse longship appeared in complex three-dimensional patterns. The whorls and ribs of its geometry, after a few moments of viewing, could have passed for an installation of abstract art.
    ‘We’re building a fleet of ships for a feature film,’ Hadley explained. ‘Well, what the audience will finally see will be a fleet. We’ll in fact build only one full and exact seaworthy replica. The rest will be interiors, odd detailed sections and CGI.’
    Neither my father nor I offered a comment.
    ‘Still damned expensive.’
    Again, neither of us replied to him.
    Hadley stared at the simulations for a moment. ‘We can’t better what their engineers did a thousand years ago. Not with the materials available to them, we can’t, for all our microchips and megabytes. Form and function perfectly combined, the longship. It was a staggering feat of design and execution.’
    Frank Hadley wore chinos and a pale-blue cotton shirt on a tall and youthfully slender