Death of a Mermaid

by Lesley Thomson

  Freddy lost her balance as the vessel tipped. She grabbed Andy’s overhead pipe. Her face up close.

  ‘Where is Mags?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ Andy lost his confident look. It was as if she’d slapped him. ‘Mags meddled in business that wasn’t hers. She stole Mum’s will and she texted you.’

  ‘The solicitor has Mum’s will – what are you talking about?’ Ricky protested.

  ‘There was a later one. Mum wasn’t herself. She needed me to sort it for her.’

  ‘What did it say?’ Freddy asked.

  ‘She left every goddam thing to you: the house, the fishery, the lot. She told me she was righting Dad’s wrong. She said she’d given Mags the will to take to the solicitor.’ He swapped hands on the pipe. ‘It was the meds, they messed with her head.’

  ‘The solicitor never said,’ Ricky said.

  ‘You said that Mags hid the will?’ Freddy said.

  ‘Mags claimed she destroyed it. Said it wouldn’t bring you back, it would upset the family. But I knew she was biding her time. First, she texted you. Next, she’d have given you the will.’ Andy sounded sorrowful. ‘I never meant anything bad to happen. A little scare to make her destroy the will, that was all. I saw her in the battery; she’d gone to meet you. I had to stop her.’

  While Andy had almost boasted of killing Karen, he appeared actually upset about Mags.

  ‘Where is Mags?’ Freddy felt herself grow faint. She gripped the edge of the saloon table, her fingers sliding as a wave smashed into the hull.

  Andy was silent. Freddy saw realisation dawn on Ricky’s face.

  ‘No.’ Ricky barrelled into Andy, his head down like a bull. The boat heaved and, gathering momentum, the brothers hurtled into the passage. Ricky pushed Andy to the floor and dived for the stairs.

  The boat listed violently to starboard. Water splashed into the galley, washing around Andy. The secret fish-hold was inches deep. There was an ear-splitting grinding, then a tremendous jolt. Freddy whacked into the table, and pain shot down her leg. She felt it as if it was a concept, distant. Automatically, she put out a hand and helped Andy to his feet. The roll of the boat flung them into an embrace. Freddy’s instinct was to cling to Andy. She threw him off.

  Ricky was halfway up the steps; he snatched for the handrail and stopped himself pitching backwards.

  Andy’s fingers slipped free of her hand. He was flung back. His head hit an iron strut. The crack of bone. He lay crumpled outside the secret hold.

  Freddy clambered up after Ricky. On the deck she fastened the hatch.

  ‘…foul ground, it’s… fastener caught net… tangled.’ Ricky’s shout was whipped away by the wind as he battled up the ladder to the wheelhouse. Freddy got the gist. The starboard net had become tangled with something – discarded fishing gear, a rock – on the seabed some fifty metres below. It had whiplashed the trawler back, snapping it around. Every fisherman’s dread.

  Freddy’s marine training in Scotland kicked in. Too much water was sluicing across the deck through the freeing ports. The boat heeling caused to the deck to be almost vertical. The trawler was tossed up on a wave and then flung down.

  Freddy heard another shout. Ricky was a blurred sketch at the door of the wheelhouse. In a nanosecond pause in the clamour, Freddy heard him clearly.

  ‘There’s nothing more I can do.’

  The engine had cut. They were drifting.

  Andy lurched across the deck. His hair and face plastered with blood and seawater. He was screaming but, over the wind and waves, Freddy couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  The secret hold. The tarpaulin. Freddy knew what had happened to Mags.

  Andy hung over the towing drum. He was fighting gravity and the elements to release the winch attached to the drum. He would try to save the thousands of pounds’ worth of fish by hauling in the net.

  If he raised the net, the boat would capsize.

  She struggled against the gale-force wind, slipped and fell. She choked on ice-cold salty water. Coughing, Freddy was dimly aware that the rim of the trawler was close to the sea. The boat was sinking. She strove towards Andy, but she was too late.

  She felt her way around the engine housing to the starboard side. The other derrick was topped, but there was no sign of the net. She clung to the rail as the boat listed to the other side.

  Ricky had seen it. He flung himself down the wheelhouse ladder and stumbled across ropes; slamming into the loose kits and buoys, he skidded, legs scissoring.

  Andy released the winch. The drum spun like a roulette wheel. Without the engine, the drum worked hydraulically. It yanked the warp like a spring-loaded tape measure. The cable thrashed, cutting into the dark water. The boat jerked starboard.

  Freddy watched as a massive wave emerged from the surf. Suspended from the derrick, the net bulged with fish thrashing and wriggling as they fought to live. The net began to swing like a pendulum, the arc increasing.

  The trawler tipped with the weight. Water streamed over the lip down the nearly upright deck like a waterfall. Freddy prayed. While the net remained outside the boat they had a chance, but not at that angle. Add a tonne of fish to the trawler and the balance would be compromised beyond correction. It was why Ricky had wanted her and Andy to bring up one net while he did the other. Andy would know this.

  Andy swung the beam across. More water gushed across the deck. Ricky reached him and they were caught in a ghastly dance. They careered away from the drum and hit the port rail like boxers between bouts. Ricky pushed off. He was making for the aft derrick to raise the other net and achieve a balance. The boat was a giant weighing scale. Andy went after him.

  Andy had left the galley door open. Freddy made to shut it. The boat was tossed upwards. She clung to a bollard, her arms wrapped around it. Through rain and spray she saw the portside beam fly across the deck. It hit Andy and Ricky as if they were skittles. Freddy was ripped from the bollard and lifted on a raft of water across the deck.

  A wave rose up, metres above her. She grabbed for something solid and found a plastic kit. Useless. The wave plummeted down. Before Freddy was dragged underwater, she saw her brothers washed into the sea. Neither wore a life jacket.

  56

  FREDDY

  Freddy saw the ferry, vast as a skyscraper, looming over her against the mauve sky, streaks of dawn casting the slightest light. Not a ferry. It was the upturned hull of the trawler. Hampered by her life jacket, clinging to a crate, Freddy flailed against the burgeoning swell, gasping for air. Infinite cold seeped into her bones. Every attempt was futile. Miles out, she had no chance of getting to the coast.

  She was hit by something hard. A wall. The current had carried her to the hull. Desperate, betting her all on it, Freddy let go of the box and swept her hands over the freezing metal. She caught something.

  A trail of netting. Summoning the last of her strength. Freddy wrapped it around her wrist. The meagre purchase it gave her allowed her to feel for a footing. She found a hole. A freeing port. Everything was upside down. Or inside out. One of several holes in the hull for allowing water to escape, it was an ironic saviour.

  Freddy resisted the tug of the undertow. It invited her, the lure of the sea-witch, to let go and float to the unfathomable depths. Let go. Something cut into her calves, unyielding, thin like a blade. The warp. One of the towing wires for the net. The net itself would be on the seabed. The cable, attached between the net and the drum, was taut. Using it as a brace, with the determination of a woman who does not want to die, Freddy hauled herself upward. Half clear of the water, each wave hit her with the force of a solid object. Each time, her tenuous hold on the freeing port and the warp weakened.

  She saw an object. A life raft? Freddy blinked. Not a life raft.

  A body floated along the line of the hull. Serene, in the eye of the storm.

  Illuminated by the merest hint of dawn, Andy’s face might be carved of stone, his expression impassive. He looked asleep. Please God, make him only
asleep. His body bobbed and tipped on the waves. Desperate, Freddy caught at his oilskin jacket. She tugged. The movement made her slip. A sudden swell snatched Andy away. Freddy scrabbled with her life-jacket fastenings. She worked them loose and, twisting one leg around the warp like a tightrope acrobat, she ducked out of the jacket.

  ‘I’ll keep you warm. I’ll keep you warm. It’s all all right. I’ll keep you warm. I’ll keep you warm.’

  She grasped the jacket in one hand and, letting go of the warp, reached further out. She grabbed at Andy’s shirt collar. It tore. She lost him again. She stretched further and grabbed his upper arm. The warp was suddenly limp. It dropped away. She knew what had happened. It had become detached from the net. She clung to Andy.

  The sea toyed with her, one moment rolling her closer to the hull then bouncing her away with a flick of spume. Freddy pushed Andy’s arm through the neck of the life jacket and then shoved her own arm through. It was like when they’d arm-wrestled as kids. Was she to see her life pass before her? A gallery of faces and voices.

  They were back at the hull. She kicked with her feet, feeling for a freeing port. The surface of the metal was smooth. It was like trying to climb a sheer glacier.

  Above the roar of the waves, with Andy an inert weight, Freddy heard banging. The hatch door. The bangs were too frequent. It was a signal. Ricky was trapped inside the wheelhouse.

  Freddy had no time to feel a semblance of relief. She was hit by another wave. The life jacket was snatched from her. She swallowed salt water and retched, and swallowed more. She surfaced, cramp crippling her. Andy had come to. He fought the jacket as if it was an enemy. He pushed Freddy back under the water. Distantly, fighting for breath, it occurred that Andy would kill her to ensure that his murders were never revealed. He would risk his own life to end hers.

  As she surfaced, his hand clamped onto her ankle. He let go and grabbed for her again. His eyes were wild. He was scared.

  ‘Andy, please.’ Her throat was raw; no sound came out. Andy was grappling with her, not to kill, but to survive.

  They both went under. Freddy felt herself give into the caressing swell. The fight had gone from her.

  She swooped through the encrusted grotto, dipping and swirling until, with a swish of her fishtail, she came to rest on a seaweed leaf. She relaxed, warmed by ribbons of refracted sunlight from fathoms above. A flicker. Here was Mags, with Flounder too. Freddy was home.

  57

  TONI

  ‘What’s that?’ Malcolm craned over her. ‘There, down there.’

  The helicopter dropped metres and swung around. Light caught a patch where the water was smooth. Something jutted from the waves, Toni saw lettering on the side. ‘…sa-Mary’. A snatch of a window. The wheelhouse. If Ricky had become trapped in there, he would not have got out.

  ‘It’s the trawler,’ she whispered. ‘Andy’s scuppered it.’

  ‘Possibly not. In this weather, it’s as likely it capsized.’ Malcolm was strangely calm.

  The helicopter hovered, the clatter of the propeller lost in the crashes and bangs of the elements. Ricky’s boat was paltry, insubstantial, no match for the contemptuous sea. The undertow would drag it down. What lay beneath was not the idyll of King Triton’s palace and his mermaid daughters. It was fathoms of dark silence. Toni was numb, her eyes staring at the scene below with a terrible detachment.

  ‘Oh God.’ Malcolm tensed beside her.

  The body was floating face down, arms outstretched.

  Toni felt a scream fill all of herself.

  ‘Freddy.’

  58

  TONI

  Pentecost, 9th June 2019

  ‘I solved my cases, Dad.’ Toni felt the sun warm her back. A breeze flapped her hair. The sensation of contrasting temperatures was soporific; she was tempted to move to the bench a few metres from the grave and bask in the spring sunshine, but she had a pile of paperwork on her desk.

  ‘Two girls I was at school with. Women now.’ Both murdered. Toni faltered. She couldn’t speak those words. If Dad could hear her, he’d know anyway.

  A big solve. Three murders and one drowning. Terrific for the monthly stats, though Worricker had tempered his glee because Toni had known the victims. Two murder investigations running parallel were, he’d reminded her in a solemn tone, highly unusual for a medium-sized town on the south coast of England.

  Toni had booked the pub in Tarring Neville again. This time she’d only stayed for one drink. The team understood. They had got justice for Mags and for Karen and her son, but Toni got no satisfaction from the outcome.

  Andy Power had created multiple tragedies and shattered lives out of greed and avarice. Andy had told Ricky fraud was a victimless crime. But it had escalated, it opened them to blackmail and to murder. She could have told Ricky there are always victims. There are always consequences.

  Toni knew that Freddy and Ricky were heartbroken over Andy’s death. Freddy didn’t begin to condone Andy. She was in no doubt he’d have killed her when she refused to go along with his plan. But Andy was their brother and they loved him. Perhaps they were also missing the brother that Andy had never been.

  For her part Toni was angry that Andy had escaped justice. Drowning didn’t match his torture of Mags. Those moments when he had apparently struggled for his life in the sea were few. Toni wanted Andy to have suffered for longer. Mags would have forgiven him.

  Toni would suffer the loss of Mags until the day she died. Freddy would never recover.

  God goes up with shouts of joy

  The Lord goes up with trumpet blast

  That morning she had gone to Mass with Freddy. Apart from weddings and funerals, Toni had not been in a church since she’d left Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart. The responsorial psalm remained an earworm, lending rhythm to her thoughts.

  Toni’s brief flurry of prayer as she’d watched the lifeboat launch had not lasted. Surrounded by the dead of Newhaven, she remained rooted in the earth. She wanted to believe, like Freddy, that Mags was in Heaven, but the idea was on a par with The Little Mermaid, a fairy tale.

  Freddy, however, had rediscovered God. She consulted Julian’s Revelations and regularly saw Father Pete. The Power family had been destroyed. Ricky was on remand in Lewes Prison, charged as an accessory to fraud. He faced at least five years, but his cooperation with the police and his obvious repentance might shave off a couple.

  Freddy was running the fishery and the fish round. Kirsty Power had moved out of the townhouse on the river in Lewes and was living with her parents in Ringmer, a village on Freddy’s fish round. She was changing back to her maiden name. The kids would not be Powers. When Toni had told Freddy, she’d said she was tempted get a new name too but, as God knew who she really was, names were irrelevant.

  Toni envied Freddy her newly re-found faith. She was alone.

  A Marine Accident Investigation was under way. The police had been shown preliminary findings. Watertight doors left open, freeing ports blocked by boxes, insufficient freeboard space and mishandling of derricks, resulting in significant reduction of the vessel’s stability. An experienced fisherman, but exhausted by the increased hours at sea, Ricky had got sloppy. Toni didn’t know if she could forgive Ricky for what he’d done. She told her dad that when Ricky got released she’d perhaps be there to meet him. Perhaps.

  Toni had forced herself to contemplate the agonies Mags must have suffered in the battery and in the shipping container. She would suffer with her. If she had listened to Freddy that night at the pub when she insisted that Mags was missing, the search would have started sooner. She might have saved Mags. They had no body so she couldn’t know exactly when she died. Freddy thought it was on Ricky’s trawler. Toni suspected she hadn’t made it out of the fishery alive.

  Watching a glider cross the sky towards the sea, Toni ruminated that Mags had hidden the will and deprived Freddy of her inheritance because she feared that Andy would kill Freddy if she got her mum’s whole estate. The boys go
t half each on Freddy’s death. Toni guessed that Mags had felt guilty because she was also thinking of herself. She couldn’t bear to have Freddy back in Newhaven. Mags had played God.

  Andy had known Mags all his life. When it came to it, he’d been unable to kill her until, when Mags had tried to escape, he’d had no choice.

  Andy’s bloodied fingerprints were on the shipping container. The futon belonged to him. The pillow was traced to Kirsty’s card. The container was on his property. He could have dumped the mattress in there. Desperate, Andy returned to Karen’s after the police had finished and left Ricky’s belt. With Daniel dead and therefore already harmless, it was a clumsy move to frame Ricky. With him out of the way – and eventually Freddy too – Andy would have had the business. Despite his crass effort, Toni wondered if Andy might still have got off. There were two witnesses to his confession on the trawler, but little else linked him to the crimes. With an adroit defence lawyer – like Sarah Wood – Andy could have walked.

  Regardless of the warmth of the sun, Toni shivered. The shadow of a cloud crept across the headstones. Andy would not be buried in consecrated ground. Thank God for small mercies. Or thank someone.

  In the month since Andy had drowned, Toni had become convinced that, had they met at the battery, Mags would have told Freddy she loved her. Freddy thought otherwise – she believed Mags had overheard details of the fishing scam from either Ricky or Andy and planned to tell her. But Toni had seen it in Mags’s eyes when they bumped into each other outside the church. She loved Freddy. Mags would have told Freddy why she had hidden the will. She would have put it right. Fresh from confession, Mags had intended to absolve herself of sin.

  Freddy cried when she saw the will: Reenie had left her everything. She’d never cared about the money; she wanted The Little Mermaid DVD, the fish and the animal hotel. She would share the estate with Ricky and with Andy’s family.