Black Waters (Strong Winds Series Book 5)

by Julia Jones

  Madrigal ignored him. She was shaking with anger as she appealed to the Commander of the Saxon Shore.

  “She took no notice when I called for water. I protested her several times. She could have taken penalty turns at least. She ought to be disqualified.”

  “But that still won’t make you the winner,” said the boy who was holding out his hand for the trophy. “Because I was here first.”

  “Did you want to make a formal presentation, sir?” he asked politely. “If not, my friends and I’ll be heading back. The tide’s on the turn now. It’s been an excellent afternoon and I hope you’ll invite us again.”

  Commander Gold muttered something and shook his hand. A cameraman took a single, unenthusiastic photo. The club racers began walking back to their dinghies.

  “Hi, sis,” said Maggi to Xanthe. “You took your time.”

  “Hi, yourself. Why aren’t you in exams? It was maths today.”

  Maggi rolled her eyes. “Because Anna and I already took maths at Christmas. All the top set did. Have you no memory?”

  “Obviously not! It’s good to see you, sis. Gimme high fives!”

  But they didn’t bother slapping palms: they gave each other a huge sisterly hug.

  Madrigal had not left with the other racers.

  “Your sister is a deceitful little cheat. She should be ashamed.”

  “Are you ashamed, sis?”

  “No, I don’t believe I am. Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I watch the video that my friend Anna’s just uploading to YouTube and Facebook. She recorded the entire final section as she walked along the river wall. Though obviously it wasn’t quite as good as using high powered surveillance cameras from the top of Daddeh’s construction site like some people.”

  Madrigal rushed at her, nails ready to claw. Stopped abruptly when she noticed Griselda. Took a huge, shuddering breath and pasted a smile onto her ravaged face.

  Xanthe almost admired her. She searched for something neutral to say.

  “It was impressive how you found that current round the top of Oveseye. Have you got one of those new GPS watches?” she began, but she never got a chance to finish.

  “Uncle Arthur! Where’s the peace camp? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!!”

  Martha appeared, breathless, from the secluded wood beyond the wall. She had Siri and Kelly-Jane with her but not Iris.

  The Commander of the Saxon Shore put on that smug look that Xanthe really, really loathed.

  “We’ve helped them move away, since you ask, little Martha Farran. They were never going to be happy here once we begin rebuilding the Othona boot camp. And when all the Little Ships and our distinguished visitors began arriving, my workmen had nothing else to do. We decided an assisted evacuation was in order.”

  He wouldn’t give you the phlegm from his cough – except as a distraction while he siphons off your heart’s blood.

  So this was what it had all been about. Diverting public attention while a non-violent community was evicted and their homes flattened. And his own son’s lightship removed. Godwyn was still in view being towed implacably towards the horizon. Where was she going?

  “I’ll never speak to you again.”

  He smiled. “No need, my dear, no need. You stay on your side of the river and I’ll stay on mine. I’ve offered your aunt Iris an apartment in my new St Peter’s Saxon Shore complex in exchange for that poky little cottage of hers. She’ll be lodging with me on Oveseye until it’s ready for her to move in.”

  “You’re not planning to accommodate her with your WIFE then? In the asylum.”

  Martha had squared her shoulders now. Her brown eyes blazed.

  The Viking stood very still. No one else dared move. Except that Xanthe noticed her mother and Anna arriving quietly from behind the chapel. She signalled to Anna that she should record what was happening, if she could.

  “I’ve no idea what you mean.”

  He tried to turn away but there were enough of them to block him.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” she said, articulating every word. “You may have forgotten that I’m more than ‘little Martha Farran’, your dead half-brother’s younger child, I’m also an Essex Special Constable. You may not realise how often our work in the community requires us to call at sad, secluded places like the private clinic at the top of Broad Marsh Creek.”

  The top of Broad Marsh Creek! The house behind the landing stage where Eli had hurled away the walking stick on his last desperate night!

  “I know that you placed your wife there many years ago, when she suffered permanent damage working as your drug mule. Nothing could be proved against you – or done to help her. I’ve been watching ever since but I promised Dominic that I wouldn’t mention her existence for as long as she remained safe – AND AS LONG AS THIS SITE STAYED SACRED!”

  This was Dominic’s secret, his mother – a drug mule. Now Martha had pressed the red button.

  “I don’t think my son will thank you…” the Commander began.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Martha. “We understand each other. We always have done.”

  The Commander wasn’t listening. “The poor woman was already an addict when I met her,” he carried on, pulling his walrus moustache as if he was sad. “I’ve been supporting her these forty years.”

  “Using Iris’s childhood home.” Martha wasn’t wasting any sympathy on him. “I’ve always wished I knew how you ended up with all Augustus Gold’s money and property while his only daughter was left in Rebow Cottage, married to your brother Eli and taking in lodgers.”

  “Oh!” said Xanthe. “I think I can tell you that.”

  Everyone turned to look at her.

  “I’ve been studying local history while I’ve been living

  in Flinthammock. It’s not the sort of history that’s going

  to help me write my extended essay for Mrs Oakenheart – but it is a Dunkirk story. It was on the last night of Operation Dynamo, that everything changed for Iris Augustine Gold.”

  “You were not there.” The plummy voice was angry.

  “I realise that. And I’m an outsider here, as I’ve been reminded often enough, but outsiders sometimes get a clearer view. I’ve interviewed Iris Farran and recorded her answers and I’ve thought about the moments where she wouldn’t answer and where she got upset and insulting. I’ve come to believe that the reason she behaves like a disturbed and spoiled child is that she was so badly let down by everyone around her on the night her father died. And that was June 3rd 1940, the last night of the evacuation.”

  “YOU WERE NOT THERE!” Suddenly he was shouting.

  “But you were. You were ‘Artie’ in those days and Artie was in the middle with the light. And Artie saw…”

  “Artie didn’t see anything at all, ignorant, barbarian girl. We were showing no light. You have no conception what we were enduring. Artie heard.”

  “Okay, set me straight. What did Artie hear? You were on a lightship in the middle of the English Channel. Possibly it was Godwyn herself, the lightship you have just stolen from your son. What did you hear? Exactly. And by the way, my friend’s recording this.”

  He didn’t seem to care. He stood beside the chapel he had desecrated, looking outwards. The rainbow was fading from the tranquil afternoon sky but they could tell he wasn’t seeing it.

  “I heard something bumping alongside in the dark. We were rattled by then. Stuck there in the middle of the carnage – defenceless and almost useless. There had been bodies – burned, drowned, mutilated bodies – but bodies don’t make that kind of noise. Our first thought was E-boat – and what could we have done against armed raiders? It wasn’t the enemy, however; it was a little Calais fishing boat escaping before the surrender. She’d been strafed by a Messerschmitt and it was a wonder she was floating. They were mainly French on board. Exhausted, wounded, end of their
tether. But the man at the wheel wasn’t French and he wasn’t a fisherman either. He was the Major from the big house, Miss Iris’s father, Augustus Gold – the man who paid my mother her wages. It was obvious he wouldn’t be doing that for much longer. He’d one leg shot off at the knee and an arm gone. He’d tied himself to the wheel but he wasn’t going to make it into Ramsgate. There wasn’t anyone else fit to take over so he’d run alongside our lightship for help. Specifically he wanted…me.”

  He wasn’t the Commander of the Saxon Shore any longer – or the Chief Executive of Saxon Holdings plc – he was teenage Artie Farran, the boy who’d grown up, unhappily, in a fisherman’s family and had escaped from home by joining the lightship service as soon as he left school.

  “The Major knew that he was dying and it wasn’t long before he did. And before he went he told me something that changed my life.”

  Everyone stood completely quiet.

  “He told me that Fisherman Farran wasn’t my father.” His voice grew harsh and strong. “The Major was my father. He didn’t pretend it was a mistake – or a love affair. I was the cuckoo in the Rebow Cottage nest. He’d forced her. Planted me on the Farrans as a revenge from them turning us in all those years before.”

  Xanthe could have felt sorry for him – for this ex-teenager, learning the callous truth about his birth in such terrible circumstances. But she didn’t.

  “So you chose to behave like one. That’s what cuckoo chicks do – they chuck out all the others from the nest so they get everything. You never went back to your real mother in Flinthammock. She had lost her husband as well, don’t forget, when the Igraine hit the mine on her journey home. Both the fathers of her children in a single day. You didn’t go to comfort Iris, the little girl who loved you and who you now knew was your secret half-sister. You went straight to the big house and confronted Mrs Gold. I don’t know whether you bullied or charmed or blackmailed her – in the shock of her grief – but I’m quite certain you were the reason that she didn’t take Iris when she left for Scotland. She took you.”

  “I was a boy. I was the oldest. She was glad of me.”

  “And even if she hadn’t been, I don’t imagine you would have given her any choice.”

  He smiled. Strong and triumphant. The Survivor.

  “It weren’t enough though,” A new voice joined in unexpectedly. “She were a spender, that Mrs Gold. Your little crock at the rainbow’s end weren’t as full as you’d ha’ liked and there were some of it that had, in law, to go to Iris. So you turned smuggler.”

  “God save us, it’s the oyster-grubber. Who invited you?”

  “This foreshore wasn’t private property last time I heard. And I ain’t been grubbing oysters; I’ve been lifting lobster-pots. I reckon there’s plenty of folk who’ll be interested in what I found.”

  “Sounds as if the salt has finally turned your brain.” The white-haired Commander stood stocky and proud.

  “Reckon my little bit of lifting might have landed me the Goldfish,” Gareth answered. “You see, when old Eli left me Igraine’s red pennant, tangled around my racks, not so far from the low water mark, I realised that he’d had a bit of time to spare. He’d left Broad Marsh around high water – we know that as he left his wife’s stick high up in the creek where you can only reach at the top of the flood. That left at least six hours before he were fixing the pennant at the bottom edge of the oyster racks. An’ I guessed how he might have spent ’em.”

  “Swilling, I’d imagine.”

  “He’d had his last pint by then and he’d sat in the snug at the Plough and Sail an’ he’d written his confession.”

  “Knowing that you’d come swilling there later?”

  Gareth ignored him. “Then he’d returned home one last time with some little bits of business to attend to there and he’d made sure his paper were wrapped up watertight. And once he’d done all that he needed – to settle his accounts with his wife, like – then he got hisself into that little flat boat at the top of Broad Marsh, which was to be his ferry to his death and he took his package to the black flag. That’s the flag above the lobster pot off the end of Colne Point that marks where my dad died. And, as I now know, it’s one of them places where Eli used to haul up smuggled goods for you.”

  “I’d stop there if I were you, oyster-grubber.”

  “I’ll let my uncle Eli speak in that case. Before I hand his letter to the police. Or even to my sister.”

  Gareth pulled a well-wrapped package from inside his oilskin trousers, took out a letter and began to read. Everyone else stood close by. They believed that they had the Viking surrounded.

  This is the last will and confession of me, Elijah Farran, written Sunday May 26th in the Plough and Sail pub, Flinthammock. It may also be the last pint of Blackwater Brewery mild-and-bitter that I will ever savour unless my nephew Gareth Farran arrives before I leave and can be persuaded to stand me another. He’s a good lad, is Gareth, and I hereby leave him all that I have to leave, which is the Truth.

  My house is no longer mine and the woman I married (who has never truly been my wife) invites strangers there without informing me. I was once the keeper of the prettiest and most generous-natured sailing smack on the whole of the East Coast but she was taken from me and sunk. I took that to be our just deserts for the killing of my brother Joe but I have mourned her every day for nigh on thirty year.

  I dreamed of the Igraine last night. I dreamed that she had been raised from her watery grave and was sailing back to me. I woke up in that stable, blubbing like a girl. Then, when I saw my half-brother, Arthur Farran Gold, declare on TV that he would be welcoming the Little Ships of Dunkirk with dirty money I knew this must be the end.

  The money that my half-brother Arthur Farran Gold is offering today is money that has been earned from criminal acts over many years and I can no longer be a party.

  This is what I have to say.

  To whom it may concern. I hereby state that since the bad winter of ’63, which destroyed the whole year’s oyster harvest, I have been an accomplice in my half-brother’s smuggling operations. When I began doing runs and lifting pots for Artie I believed that all that was involved was continental spirits and tobacco. I knew it were risky but it didn’t feel wrong, not exactly.

  I would like to say that when I stopped believing that it were spirits and tobacco I stopped doing the runs but that would be false and this document is my last truth. Artie had loaned me more money than I could afford to repay. When he said he would take the Igraine if I refused to continue, I should have let him but I could not bear it.

  I confess that I also involved my brother Joe after he had lost his job. This led him directly to his death when I were lifting stuff. I would like my nephew to know that his dad were innocent until that moment. And also that it were an accident. Her boom came across with a wallop an it hefted him straight in. Then she ran, and it were a full cable afore I could turn her back to search in them black waters.

  I have done many wrong things in my life and I am sorry for some of them. I find I need another final pint and I thank my nephew Gareth in advance for picking up the tab and for the many times he has overlooked that I can no longer stand my round.

  Signed by Elijah Farran and witnessed by the Landlord of the Plough and Sail.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The End of the Rainbow

  Monday June 3, lw 0900 hw 1508 lw 2108 hw 0330

  “Arthur Farran Gold, you are under arrest for…”

  But the old man didn’t wait to hear what Martha was charging him with. He had Madrigal clamped against him and he had a well-maintained World War Two revolver that he knew how to use.

  “Don’t struggle,” he told the terrified girl, backing away from the chapel down the long, flat foreshore, with his arm round her neck and his gun at her head. “Your father’s as deep in this as I am. Come along with me nicel
y and you’ve a chance to survive. Although our sponsorship of your Olympic bid may have come to an end.”

  He was pulling her with him all the time he was talking. Her big blue eyes were horrified and her pretty face skull-like with shock.

  She wasn’t resisting. She was walking backwards on legs that were apart and as rigid as a doll’s. Xanthe remembered someone telling her that people automatically lost continence when they realised they’d been taken hostage. Had Madrigal wet herself – or worse?

  Already they were halfway to Miranda.

  Gareth made a sudden direct dash forwards but a bullet caught him and he went down. Griselda was on her stomach and elbows swarming after Madrigal when a second bullet landed inches ahead of her, splashing black mud up into her face and temporarily blinding her.

  “Don’t!” Madrigal screamed, though it wasn’t clear who she was trying to halt.

  Xanthe was bent double and jinking as she ran. She wasn’t going for the abductor; she was looping round and sideways and heading for Gareth. Martha couldn’t move as she had Siri and Kelly-Jane on the ground and had positioned herself protectively in front of them. Maggi was there with her, also lying flat, murmuring reassurance to the younger girls.

  June was phoning. Anna was videoing. When the Viking had tried a shot at her, she took cover beside the chapel and carried on. This was evidence and they would need it.

  “He’ll be out of range in a moment,” Martha said. “I’ve called 999. They’re alerting the coastguard as well as the police. I’ve asked them for a helicopter.”

  “I’ve called an ambulance,” said June. “For the man who went down.”

  “He’s my brother,” Martha thanked her. “I have to concentrate on the criminal situation. My colleagues will get to Sir Hubert and Lady Shryke as urgently as possible. Whatever the accusations, that’s their daughter out there.”

  “You okay?” Xanthe asked, as she flung herself down beside Gareth. Fool question, obviously.

  “Might not make the Fishling mud race this year but you didn’t oughta worry about that. You get after Artie Gold – and that poor young girl.”