Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  The dead odour of the sea was there, of course. But the cormorant dream had made her so inured to the smell that it no longer shocked or sickened her. What did was the thin, vindictive meanness of him. His malevolence lingered, as acrid and chilly as the smoke in the room. Absurdly, Peter Cushing came into her mind, the Hammer horror actor rumoured to live in Whitstable, the film star she’d never seen there. In her mind, Cushing was attired in the reassuring tweeds that signalled a Hammer gent. He was carrying a doctor’s bag and telling a pale, soon-to-be vampire that the dead could rest only if they possessed a soul. Hammer theology. She couldn’t put a name to the film containing the scene she’d recalled. But she could almost smile at that phrase, Hammer theology.

  Johnny Compton didn’t possess a soul. She shuddered. The cold and the dread were almost overwhelming. Her panic was what someone might feel waist-deep in quicksand, far out on a baleful shore, aware of an incoming tide.

  Be brave, she told herself. Be brave like Bobby, her dead brother.

  Be brave. Like her dad, killed by a carefully sited bullet, the barrel of his own pistol pressed against his head.

  Opening the curtains meant walking to the window, which meant passing the dressing table mirror and the message she had not yet dared to read. Downstairs, she heard the front door slam emphatically shut. But that was her imagination. Come on, girl, she said to herself. Come on.

  Every spool of film had been destroyed. She had shot five rolls in total. Four left on the dressing table had been stripped and exposed to the light. The fifth, three or four frames short of fully used, had been taken from the camera too. The ruined rolls had been strung across her bed. The camera, though, was intact. It sat innocent on the bedside table, where she had left it.

  She saw something else in the room, then.

  Rory Carnegie had put a cocktail stick with a sliver of skewered lemon in her glass when he had delivered her a drink. She had eaten the lemon, blunted and frayed the point of the stick, nervously chewing on it.

  Now she saw the same type of stick, half-chewed, in the water glass on the table by her bed. It skewered a maggot, dead but lately swollen in its development, blue with the press against pupa of urgent legs.

  Alice gave in. She ran down the stairs and vomited hard into the lavatory. She puked and heaved, saliva spooling into the glossy green reaches of the toilet bowl. For a while she just gripped the bowl and groaned. She ran a thumb across her forehead as if to rill beads of nauseous sweat. But there were none. When she stopped retching, she hauled herself up and looked at her face in the mirror above the sink. One of her eyes had become bloodshot.

  With her breath still barely under control, she found the note left by her absentee landlady before the woman’s helter-skelter flight to some apparent London emergency involving her student daughter. Alice picked up the nail-polish-coloured receiver and rang the number left on the note.

  ‘Hello?’

  On the second ring. ‘Mrs Chantry?’

  Nothing.

  ‘It’s Alice Bourne.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Why do I think you’ve been expecting this call?’

  ‘You shouldn’t stay there, Miss Bourne.’ Stolid, middle-aged, Mrs Chantry’s was the already familiar voice of the rural English west.

  ‘Is that why you aren’t staying here?’

  A silence. ‘I’ve arranged for a service. But the priest has to come all the way from Chichester. There’s a presence.’

  Alice didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m sensitive.’

  So am I, Alice thought, her mouth still sour with puke. She swallowed. ‘A service?’

  ‘An exorcism.’

  ‘When did you first notice this presence?’

  ‘The day you confirmed your booking.’

  ‘And you just ran away?’

  Silence. Not quite silence: Alice could hear her landlady’s breathing. ‘It isn’t to do with me, is it, Miss Bourne?’

  It was warm down here, and bright. The hall carpet had a jaunty, abstract pattern of yellow geometric shapes on blue. Pale wallpaper had been precisely hung. There was a round, stained-glass window set at head height in the wooden front door. St Peter, Christ’s fisher of men, was depicted in a halo aboard a boat, hauling in a plump net. Everything was normal, if you ignored the conversation she was having and the clammy legacy of the thing that had been upstairs.

  ‘Mrs Chantry? When will you come home?’

  ‘When it is home, dear. After the priest has come from Chichester and gone again.’

  There was a pause, as though the woman intended to say something else. But she replaced her daughter’s telephone receiver and Alice got instead the burr of an English dialling tone. She walked back upstairs. The second flight was hard and opening the door to her room harder still. She walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains and struggled with the window catch. Her fingers were slick with sweat on the metal catch and shaking, anyway, so it was difficult. She got the window open and looked through space towards the beach. She expected to see a gaunt, grey-haired figure staring up at her with a look of vacant malice from the sand. But there was nobody. The beach was empty. She breathed in clean salt air and turned back to the room. Her Chanel Red lipstick was crimson across the glass.

  Compton had written ‘Git Home Bitch’ in the hand of someone as poorly schooled at writing as he was at grammar. She wasn’t dead. He was. But he was not at rest.

  She had taken notes as Rory Carnegie had told her his story. Now she took her notebook and put it with a ring-bound A4 refill pad in her bookbag. She would walk to the pub on the coast road at the far end of Slapton Sands and transcribe the notes she had taken as the old fisherman had murmured his grim recollection of events. She had intended to do it here but could not now stay in this house. She looked at her watch. It was just after five. English licensing laws were still something of a mystery to her, but there was a slate sign by the front porch of the pub saying that in summer they opened at five-thirty. It was certainly summer. It would take her half an hour at least to walk the distance, walking as she intended to on the high, shingle and sand curve of the bay. She would come back tonight and make up a bed in the sitting room and leave on all the house lights like that mawkish drunk, Richard, who married the figure skater in the Joni Mitchell song. Mrs Chantry was hardly in a position to complain. Right now, Alice could not imagine coming back and staying another night here in the darkness. It was brief, the night, in this bright, burning summer. It was light until ten, and dawn broke shortly after four. But it was still in the night, and silent then, and she was alone. The previous night had tested her resolve. The night to come would test it further. She was angry at this series of squalid and destructive violations. She wanted the mystery solved, the ghost put to rest, the objective achieved, the whole project triumphantly vindicated in a blaze of academic glory. But she did not want to stare back into the eyeless sockets of a dead man with no soul, confronted by him in the dark part of the night, come to make good his threat. She dreaded that, almost as much as she dreaded the phone call from Sally Emerson to say that they were dragging Bembridge harbour for a drowned diver’s corpse.

  Alice wiped the stain from the mirror with Kleenex from her bag until it was just a waxy smear on the glass. She shouldered her bookbag and set off for Slapton Sands.

  In the early hours of 28 April 1944, Rory Carnegie, thirty-six years old and already in his own mind too comfortably off for this sort of shite, was drinking coffee laced with a good slug of Johnny Walker whisky in the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel Skylark. Rory was not in the best of tempers. He seldom was when obliged to embark at midnight. Setting a skipper’s example interfered with his private life. Much of what he did in his recreational time was necessarily clandestine. Fishing forbidden waters was immensely profitable, but it had to be accomplished while others in civilian occupations were inclined to be either asleep or enjoying themselves. All work and no play, Rory thought.

  Ther
e was another reason for his foul mood. It was the way Rory masked his growing fear of what they were doing. Capture meant imprisonment, if the crew’s story that they were doing this for profit were even believed. The length and conditions of incarceration were determined by the seriousness of the apparent crime. If they were suspected of spying, they could kiss their liberty goodbye for the duration. No alleged traitors were being tried until the war ended. But as war profiteers they would face stiff sentences for flaunting government regulations barring them from this part of the coast. They would be disgraced, ostracized, his small fleet sequestered and sold at public auction with whatever nominal proceeds there were going towards the prosecution of the war.

  What really frightened Rory, though, were mines. Defensive mines had been laid along the coast. They were thickly strewn, their positions marked only on charts given to Royal Navy vessels with a specific course that risked encountering them. Rory didn’t possess such a chart. Even if he’d managed to appropriate one, the charts were far from foolproof. Heavy weather sheared mines free of their moorings all the time. Many of them were washed up, like giant, featureless porcupines, on Britain’s beaches. But many more lurked under the water in snags of kelp and flotsam, awaiting the bump of an unsuspecting hull.

  A mine would certainly destroy the Skylark. It was a wooden-hulled, Clyde-built forty-footer. Planking and caulk were no barrier to high explosives. If Rory and his crew were unlucky, their mine wouldn’t kill them outright. They would go into the sea with burns and blast injuries and bleed to death or die of shock and exposure there, choking on the fuel from their own diesel tanks. When Rory thought about mines, about their lurking surfaces of febrile, explosive spikes, he grew angry at his greedy pursuit of hake and flounder. Fish and profit seemed nowhere near worth the horrible exposure to risk. Such thoughts darkened his mood, so his crew kept away from their scowling, foul-mouthed skipper. And Rory kept the hip flask handy to sweeten both beverage and temperament.

  He worried about U-boats slightly less. He fished the westerly English coastal water of Lyme, Babbacombe, Tor and Start Bays. The sea was relatively shallow and the tides notoriously tricky. Submarines risked being stranded on sandbanks, or having to negotiate shallows half-submerged and vulnerable to detection from the air. Exposed U-boats offered patrolling fighter planes wonderful target practice. They were still a concern for Rory and his crews, though. On several trips he had heard the lurking grind of submarine engines. The Skylark would be nothing more than a smallish blip on their sonar. But a U-boat, starved of a kill for a week, might consider it a target worth the cost of a torpedo.

  In the early hours of this particular April morning, Carnegie had a more immediate concern. The weather was dirty. There was a substantial swell, a chill, fitful wind and drifting fogbanks, some of them heavy. The atmospheric conditions were afflicting the Skylark’s radio with squalls and bursts of loud, impenetrable static. Carnegie was listening in, as he always did, to the unscrambled frequency used by the Americans for their ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications. And something was very definitely up. The level of their corns traffic was much higher than it should have been. Several craft were communicating in what seemed to be a convoy or flotilla of boats.

  After listening intently for about twenty minutes, he heard a position given. Carnegie rolled heavy canvas blinds down over his ship’s windows and, by the feeble red bulb of a hooded electric torch, consulted his charts. They were in Lyme Bay, heading towards his own position. There were a dozen nautical miles or so between him and them. The headland of Hope’s Nose lay between them. But Carnegie doubted that even the most vigilant lookout would see more than a couple of hundred yards in daylight between fogbanks if this weather kept up. They were on a course, he guessed, for Slapton Sands. The vessels were LSTs (Landing Ships, Tank), and they were moving slowly. They wouldn’t reach their destination at their present speed for between four and five hours. It would be more than two hours, even if he dropped anchor and stayed put, before the American flotilla chanced upon the Skylark. But in two hours Rory Carnegie and his vessel would be long gone, hold heaving with illicit fish.

  Their voyage had been delayed. That was the gist of all the angry traffic he had heard from the flotilla on his radio between bursts of interference. They had waited for an escort that hadn’t arrived. A Royal Navy destroyer designated to watch their tail had failed to turn up. Their schedule was urgent and eventually they’d had to leave without any escort at all. They were tank and troop carriers, essentially, unarmed cargo craft. They were sailing, unprotected, towards what Carnegie assumed was to be an exercise on the beach at Slapton. He felt the hair at the nape of his neck prick the wool of his sweater as he considered what was happening. He felt the same dank sense of foreboding he felt when the Skylark pitched through floating debris and he allowed himself to speculate that the spikes of a mine might lie bobbing beneath its oil-slick slurry of seaweed and sodden timber fragments.

  Rory Carnegie knew what the exercises were for. He was neither spy nor traitor, but the powerful, delicate radio sets aboard his seagoing boats had given him enough solid information for espionage over the months he’d been using the equipment to evade American shipping. The Yanks were preparing for invasion. The flotilla of LSTs would be packed with infantry soldiers and those Higgins boats they lowered from davits on their decks for a beach assault. The men would be fully laden with weaponry, kit-heavy with the pouches of live ammo they always used for their rehearsals. Their heavy-weapons units would be armed with light machine guns. Every man would be hung about with grenades. But the boats themselves, the boats that carried them, were unarmed. And unescorted. ‘Jesus,’ Carnegie said, in the pitch dark of his shuttered wheelhouse. His coffee mug was still in his hand. He swilled its cold contents and drank. The grounds of his coffee were bitter and the whisky residue did nothing to sweeten the taste. He rolled back the blinds. There was no horizon in the mist, and the foul night was blind to stars. If anything, the swell was increasing. They were four hours away from the breaking of dawn.

  ‘The sea is always dangerous,’ Carnegie told Alice Bourne. ‘It’s powerful, treacherous. Its violence is elemental and vast, and no sailor worthy of the name ever feels fully at home on the water, whatever skills we flatter ourselves we possess. But all that’s in peacetime. In war, the sea becomes a truly terrible place.’

  Alice knew that most of the men aboard the ships in Carnegie’s flotilla would have been seeing salt water for the first time when they embarked from New York for Belfast or Liverpool. They’d have travelled in convoys, harried by chasing U-boats. Some believed the happy fallacy that the quicker troopships, the converted transatlantic liners like the Queen Mary, could outrun pursuit. But it wasn’t true, because the U-boats hunted in ambushing packs. Their first impression of the sea had been for those Americans a place where they were targets, preyed on and vulnerable. Alice didn’t suppose that impression had ever greatly changed. Certainly it would have been no different as they wallowed in darkness and fog, packed in a procession of LSTs, with the invisible Devon coast some miles to the right of where they travelled and the shifting Atlantic wilderness to their left.

  The mist had lifted, the flotilla had come around the headland and they were about six miles away when Rory Carnegie saw the first explosion flicker just over the horizon on his port bow. His radio was suddenly alive with snarls of cogent sound amid the static as boat crews tried desperately to coordinate their flight from an attack. Smoke formed a ragged column in the lightning sky as a boat burned. Carnegie’s American radio was so good that he could hear a captain giving the calm order to abandon ship, telling the men aboard to go into the water in their Mae West life jackets, telling them there was no time to lower the Higgins boats, telling them to jump and swim clear before the engine room blew.

  The second explosion provided a double flash and then a boom that reached the ears of those aboard the Skylark across six miles of open water. It wasn’t naval guns inflicting
the devastation; Carnegie would have heard the scream and whistle of shells over the open channel. It was torpedoes. A torpedo had hit the second boat and detonated something volatile, something like full ammunition boxes or, more likely, crates of mortar or anti-tank shells. There was a plume of smoke now over the horizon. It billowed black and greasy above the sinking wreckage, Carnegie knew, of at least two ships.

  He heard a mayday on the radio. The Yanks were under attack from a squadron of German E-Boats. He could hear the brave, pitiful sound of small arms fire as the Yanks aboard the surviving LSTs attempted to fend off the assault. Evidently Rory Carnegie had not been the only one to hear them give their position as they waited forlornly for their British escort to Slapton Sands. Someone had been alert enough on the French coast to translate what he was monitoring and to realize its significance in time to scramble the E-boat squadron.

  The screams of men in the water were clear over the Skylark’s radio as a third explosion ripped the sky where it met the sea away over the port bow in a jagged orange streak. Carnegie looked up. It was fully dawn now, and his crew had clustered around the wheelhouse and were listening to what he was.

  The E-boats sank two flotilla vessels and badly damaged a third before making a swift retreat from their hit-and-run raid. The American convoy carried doggedly on towards Slapton Sands and whatever part it was still to play in the exercise there.

  ‘The troops aboard the LSTs were 4th Infantry Division,’ Carnegie said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘By their insignia. Dead boys washed up all along the coast. There was no word about it, not publicly, but that’s who they were. The Division recovered from this particular mishap, obviously.’

  Alice nodded. The 4th Infantry Division had performed the successful assault on Omaha Beach. They had landed there six weeks after the events the fisherman was describing.

  ‘Didn’t you go and see if you could help?’

  ‘Aye, we did. By the time we got to the spot, the surviving Yank ships were about four miles on. We could have put out, legitimately, from Teignmouth or Brixham and got to the spot by then. It doesn’t take a minute to make a lying entry on to an empty page in a ship’s log. We had a plausible story. But there was no one around to listen to it.’