The Brighton Mermaid

by Dorothy Koomson

  Mr Okorie stood as though he had a heavy burden on his shoulders. ‘I will have to leave you in Newhaven to be sure to be back before the girls wake up if I am not going to tell anyone you were here,’ he said before he left the room.

  I got up and washed up my cup. I rinsed it out, dried it and put it away. No one could know I’d been here.

  ‘Judana, we will miss you,’ Nell’s dad said in the car. We’d stopped off at his shop to get the takings that he hadn’t banked and now he was driving us to Newhaven.

  I was crying. I’d started the second he turned on his car engine and I couldn’t stop. I would miss Brighton. I loved the place so much. It was where I belonged, where I would always belong, but I probably wouldn’t see it again.

  ‘If it does not work out with your mother’s cousin, always know that you can come home to us. The Okories will always have a place for you.’

  He kept talking, telling me how much they cared about me, how he wanted me to stay, and for me to come back if I ever had any doubts. Or to call him and he would come and get me.

  At Newhaven Ferry Port we got out of the car. It was a large white building that I thought looked like a giant four-storey shed with windows.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Judana,’ Nell’s dad said. My life would have gone so differently if he’d been my dad.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Okorie,’ I said through my tears.

  Nell’s dad did something I would never have expected him to do – he hugged me. Put his arms around me, held me close, kissed the top of my head. ‘I’m proud of you, my daughter,’ he said before he let me go.

  That made it all right, suddenly. He was proud of me and I knew that meant I could do this.

  ‘Send me a postcard to let me know you are safe,’ Mr Okorie said before he left. ‘Do not write on it and do not post it from where you live. I would simply like to know that you are safe.’

  I nodded.

  And I watched him drive away knowing he would do everything in his power to keep me safe.

  Now

  Nell

  Sunday, 3 June

  ‘Judana was like my daughter,’ Dad says to us. ‘I wanted her to be safe. When the police were looking for Judana and her mother didn’t mention a cousin in France, I realised that Judana had lied to me. But I would still do the same. She needed to be away from Mr Dalton.

  ‘I have never like Mr Dalton,’ he continues. ‘That was why I very rarely allowed you to stay at their house, Enelle. And why I encouraged Judana to spend so much time at our house. I noticed how he looked at you girls in unguarded moments. I did not like the way he was with girls at all. I knew Judana’s father would have wanted me to do the best for her.’

  ‘But you could have told them at any time that Jude was alive and that you had helped her to get away to keep her safe,’ Macy blurts out. Sometimes I forget that she was so very young when all this began. That she sometimes still sees the world like that.

  Over the years, with what I’ve seen going into and during adulthood, I look back and I realise why we were treated like that. I suspected it at the time, and Pope skewed what was actually happening, but the reality is, as two black girls, we were suspects until all the evidence proved otherwise. We were not automatically witnesses or automatically victims: we were suspects from the moment those police officers arrived at the beach and saw what we looked like. John Pope wasn’t the worst of them, he was simply more upfront about how everyone else was treating us and thinking of us.

  ‘They would not have listened to me, Macenna,’ Dad says. ‘Not without evidence of what he was doing.’

  ‘They wouldn’t, Macy. Not against someone as respected as Jude’s stepfather. You didn’t see how that policeman changed when Mr Dalton walked into the room when he was interrogating us. Daddy had already told him to leave us alone, but it was only when Mr Dalton walked in that he stopped. There’s no way they would have believed Jude against him. Not without iron-clad evidence. And you know what? From all the stuff I read in the police files, no one ever even looked at Dalton as a suspect in Jude’s disappearance – that’s how convincing he was at playing Mr Respectable.’ We haven’t even told Dad everything that has happened in the last twenty-four hours. That will devastate him. That Jude probably knew what her stepfather was up to and hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him.

  Macy’s eyes are filled with tears; I can barely see for the tears swimming in my own eyes. She nods in understanding. ‘Oh Daddy,’ she says, sounding like she is that eleven-year-old watching from her bedroom window. She throws her arms around him. He went through so much, endured all of that for a young girl. For us.

  My poor dad. My poor, poor dad. I move forwards, towards him. Macy has always been one for throwing herself onto him, hugging him, not giving him a chance to be naturally resistant to physical contact. I could always see his discomfort and I always respected that. But today I think it’s allowed. Today he doesn’t hesitate before he wraps an arm around Macy and another one around me.

  Holding us close like I hope he held Jude before she left all those years ago.

  Nell

  Monday, 3 September

  Dear Jude

  I’m going old school here and writing you a letter with good old-fashioned pen and paper.

  Your mum said you’d been in touch and that she was going to visit you so I could give her a letter to pass on, if I wanted. I did very much want. I know she’s not coming back, by the way. I could tell by the way she was talking that the visit is going to be permanent. Good on you both and I hope it’s nice having her with you after all this time. She’s going to need a bit of looking after, now she knows what her husband was really like. We’re all still reeling with everything so I can only imagine what she must feel.

  I’ve told your mum a lot of what has happened, so I’m updating you here, if that’s all right? Well, tough really if it isn’t!!!

  Firstly, the Brighton Mermaid is called Sirene Greene. She was there on Sadie’s family tree and once I had her name, it was easy to find her family who live in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham. They’d been looking for her for many years, and had been to Brighton more than once, before she was found, because she was obsessed with the place. They didn’t know about her tattoo, though. She’d run away to become a pop star after her mum and dad said she should forget all such nonsense and concentrate on her studies. She was seventeen when she ran away. She saw an advert for a singing contest in north London and had asked her parents for the money to get the bus. When they said no and to stop all of those ideas while living under their roof, Sirene had decided not to live under their roof any more.

  They thought she would come back. The police weren’t too interested as she was seventeen and had run away a couple of times before, so they too assumed she would be back. By the time her family realised she wasn’t coming home, the police said she was eighteen, an adult, and therefore allowed to disappear if she wanted. I’m guessing she ran into Mr Dalton somewhere along the way.

  Her story is so sad. I spend a lot of time thinking about her. Her mum showed me lots of photos of her and we talked a lot about her. It was nice to hear about her and I think her mum was comforted to know that someone out there was interested in who she was beyond the lurid headlines about how she was found and the men responsible for her death. I felt awful for her, but she did say she and Sirene’s brothers were relieved in a way to have finally found her. And that they could now take her home. Her name ‘Sirene’ means ‘mermaid’, you know? I never thought to search that in all those years.

  I’m guessing you saw some of the press coverage, which is why you got in touch with your mum? They couldn’t have loved it more that the mystery was solved just in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary. It took some doing, but my family managed to stay well away from all of that despite some of the journalists’ best efforts.

  Sadie is slowly recovering. They were actually talking about turning off the machines at one point but she pulled through. She’s a
bsolutely thrilled that it was her information that cracked the mystery. You’d love her if you met her, she’s hilarious and so generous-spirited. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that she’s OK. What’s nice is that she now has Sirene’s family to be in touch with.

  Shane, Craig Ackerman and Mr Dalton have all been remanded into custody without bail. I think you know that? Once they were arrested, Shane sang like the proverbial canary. I suspect it was his revenge for them plotting to kill him but they couldn’t shut him up. He confessed to anything and everything; told all about the other two. After Shane had stolen their jewellery, Ackerman had killed all those women and left them in places where Ralph Knowles, the man originally charged with the murders, had been, to basically stitch him up. Dalton was the mastermind who concentrated on breaking the young women he lured into his world. The CPS person I spoke to reckons it won’t come to court in the end – she thinks they’ll all plead guilty, especially because they’re going to start looking for the girls Ackerman didn’t kill. The ones they held and broke down to be playthings for other men.

  I have to confess I feel sick every time I think about it. I’m still freaked out that I had Shane so wrong. As I keep reminding myself, though, no one is all evil. Sometimes I do have to go and shower, just to get the memory of my time with him off me. I think Macy’s the same.

  Speaking of evil, remember that awful policeman? John Pope was his name. Lots of things have happened to him over the last few months. First of all, he was arrested for perverting the course of justice. His son, Aaron, shopped him. It probably won’t stick, but the fact he was brought in for questioning where he used to work was mortifying for him. When I asked Aaron why, he said that he blamed his dad for all those other mermaids dying. He said if his dad hadn’t been so terrible to you and me, you might have felt safe enough to go to the police with what you saw. As well as that report, he’s also reported his father for historic child abuse. There are hospital records and the like for that, so either way, Pope is going down. Something has switched in Aaron, and it’s been incredible to witness. I was so pleased for him that he’s finally unshackled himself from his father in such a decisive way, but he has a long journey ahead of him. He’s not going to be all right overnight, no abused child ever is once they free themselves of their abuser, but he’s on the right track. And I applaud him for it. I love him for it.

  Oh yes, one last note about John Pope. When it was revealed that Dalton was one of the men responsible, John Pope remembered what it was that he had found that led to him being run over. He had discovered – through the misappropriated files – that Ralph Knowles, the man they originally arrested for and charged with the Mermaid Murders, had been represented years ago by Dalton. He’d thought it was too much of a coincidence, especially since there’d been an anonymous tip-off about Knowles in the first place. But rather than tell anyone in the police force and get them to investigate it, he’d wanted the glory for himself – he called Dalton and started asking him seemingly innocuous questions. Dalton twigged that he was onto something, so sent Ackerman after him. That was the problem all along – Pope could have been a good policeman if he wasn’t such a vile human being.

  Macy says hi. She’s moved in with our parents in Herstmonceux. She just refused to go back to the house or let her children go back to the house. I had to pack up everything for them (Zach and Aaron helped), although a lot of it she wanted to trash because they were reminders of Shane. The house is now for sale because, for her, the Brighton dream is over. You know what, though? After their week living there, I don’t think she’d have got her children to come back to the city anyway. They love Mum and Dad’s huge garden and they spend loads of time running around in the countryside. She’s told them that Shane did something very wrong and against the law so he had to go to prison. It was that or keep trying to hide newspapers and news from them. She’s also getting divorced. She sat me down and explained she’d got married in secret and how sorry she was that she didn’t tell me before, and asked if I would be able to forgive her. ‘’Course,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you look more surprised?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I already knew,’ I replied. ‘Macy, I spend a lot of time searching through official records. I saw your marriage notice form and I saw your wedding certificate.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘Because you didn’t want me to know. Can’t wait till you tell Mummy and Daddy about it though.’

  The upshot is, Clyde is giving her the divorce she wants and she’s moved to the middle of nowhere and they’re all loving it.

  Zach, my ex-sort-of-boyfriend, has gone back to London, back to his wife and kids. Joke! He has gone back to London but there is no sign of a wife or kids! He is waiting to hear if he still has a job. What he did, unofficially accessing those files on Shane, is usually grounds for instant dismissal. The CPS are still considering his case and we’re hoping that given the result of what he did (solving lots of murders), it would not be in the public interest (the official term) to pursue a conviction at this time. In other words, do it again, matey boy, and you’re out. I think they’re being particularly harsh on him and keeping him waiting because he refused and continues to refuse to name the people who actually went into the files for him. I didn’t realise what he did was so serious and I love him for doing that for me.

  Who else do I need to update on? Well, me, I suppose. I have a new job. Sort of. I’m an official consultant to the police on unidentified people. I’m basically working on the other four mermaids that were found along the coast. Primrose, Maia, Celia and Jody. Shane gave the police their first names, so I’m following it all up with going through records, building family trees using all the DNA databases, including the police one. Primrose, Maia, Celia and Jody. I want to find out who they are so their families can finally know where they are and they can be more than just ‘mermaids’.

  I’ve mostly recovered from what happened at the farmhouse. I get scared sometimes, especially when I’m in my flat alone, but I’m dealing with it. I have a friend stay over whenever it gets really bad. I’m hoping the CPS lady is right, though, and I don’t have to testify. But you know, that aside, I’m happy.

  Well done if you’ve got to this point, Jude!

  I just want to finish by saying I missed you all these years. I sort of understand why you don’t want to be in touch directly. But I missed you. And I think about you. And I hope you have love and happiness and joy in your life.

  With all my love,

  Nell x

  Macy

  Sunday, 21 October

  Nell said she was bringing someone to Sunday lunch, but she wouldn’t tell me who it was. ‘Is it your boyfriend?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘I’m not answering that question, Macy,’ she replied. And I knew it was her boyfriend.

  I’ve been asking her who out of Aaron or Zach she’s going to choose for weeks now. And she won’t answer. She’s been to stay with Zach a few times in London and they’re ‘just friends’, apparently, but when I ask her where she sleeps she says in his bed – ‘it makes talking all night easier’. And since Aaron moved out of his dad’s house, he’s apparently stayed a few times at Nell’s place. Again, just as friends, even though I’m pretty sure he sleeps in her bed, too. I’ve told her more than once that she needs to decide who she wants because it’s not fair on them – they need to be free to find other people. She always says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Until today, when I think she’s bringing whoever she’s chosen to lunch.

  Which is why I’m standing here at the living room window, waiting for them to arrive. I don’t know which one of them I’d prefer because they are both decent guys. Aaron did an amazing job finding Nell, and it was a real act of bravery reporting his dad for perverting the course of justice and for what he did to him in the past. Zach did an amazing job finding Nell, too, and he did take me in when I had nowhere to go. So, possibly, Zach has the edge with me.

&nbs
p; I see Nell’s red mini with its chequered roof turning into the street and then slowing down until she pulls into Mummy and Daddy’s driveway. After she turns off the engine, she opens the door and climbs out, still wearing her driving glasses. In the passenger seat is what looks like a large basket of flowers. She pulls the lever on her seat and folds the seat forwards so the person in the back can get out. Then she moves to the other side of the car, opens the front door and retrieves the flowers.

  I grin when I see who has climbed out of her car. Zach. She chose Zach. I’m pleased. Rather than shut the passenger-side door, though, Nell balances the flowers on one arm and pulls forward the car seat on that side, too. Seconds later, Aaron climbs out.

  Ah, I see. I see who she’s chosen now. Nell. She’s chosen Nell.

  Aaron says something and the three of them laugh.

  I’m pleased. I’m pleased my sister has chosen herself. I’m doing the same by starting the process of getting proper help to heal myself. I’m doing all I can to be kind to myself, I’m learning to forgive myself for allowing Shane into my life, and I’m dealing with my anxieties in a clear and upfront way.

  I watch the three of them talking in the driveway. Zach says something that makes Nell scowl comically and Aaron crack up some more.

  It’s lovely to see. It’s lovely to see that after twenty-five years of carrying the burden of the Brighton Mermaid’s legacy, my sister is finally happy.

  Nell

  Sunday, 28 October

  Dear Nell

  Thank you .

  J x

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