The Drowning Pool

by Syd Moore

  But I reckoned that I had sent Sharon to her end. My description of the phantom apparition in the doctor’s garden must have got poor Shazza thinking, going over his involvement, adding things up. She must have had too much to drink, got emotional, then my text must have got her concluding things that no one else had put together. Of course I wasn’t referring to Doctor Cook but as Marie once told me – ‘You start going down certain paths and you start waking ghosts. Sometimes you set in motion things you have no idea about.’ And I woke ghosts all right.

  I can picture Sharon now, rummaging through drawers, pulling out chests, searching for who knows what evidence. The coroner’s report? A local newspaper cutting? We’ll never know. But the conclusion she came to had her practically destroying her house with anger and frustration. Then when she was done she set off on her last fatal journey to confront Cook.

  I should never have sent that text.

  It was my fault.

  Although, on that, Corinne and I disagreed.

  Whatever, both of us could see that we going to be haunted for the rest of our lives. ‘But we’ve got to make sure we remember her well,’ I told her, and on that we both agreed.

  Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do.

  The Fitches must have got wind of the dramatic finale. I received two letters, a card from Tobias and a package from Claudia. Inside it was a translation of the journal. At the end of the document she had scribbled a note: ‘Let us hope we can all rest in peace now.’

  We’re burying Sarah’s head with her body next week, in a ceremony as quiet as we can keep it. It’s an odd feeling knowing and not ‘knowing’ as I do. And I’m not sure how I’ll react. I know she’s at peace as I’ve not felt her since.

  I’ve not felt Sharon either. Nor have I felt Josh.

  They’ve both flown away into the ever-after. And I reckon that’s OK. See, Andrew says it was he who felled Cook as the bastard was strangling the life out of me. That Corinne was arriving in her car up the sideway, that the headlights caught the scene as she turned into the garden, bathing him in their dazzling light. But I know what I saw and it was Josh.

  He came back.

  They do that, you know.

  He wanted me to live and he brought me back to life on so many levels that I can’t list them all here.

  You see, the dead are all around us: in names, places and sometimes in person. But it’s just not healthy to live in the past.

  And my new love has been doting: attentive if not overly so. Helping round the house, running errands and keeping me warm in my bed at night. Lately he’s been paving my way to return to college. The old crowd, of course, are a bit baffled but oozing with sympathy and, I think, genuine concern. John and his wife, Glenda, came to see me in hospital when I was still swollen and bruised. She was lovely and demure. Not what I expected at all. He, of course, bounded in and jumped on my bed. ‘So what did you do over the holidays then?’

  It hurt too much to smile.

  He brought in his laptop with a message from Marie, and also his digital camera so I could send a message to her. I told her I’d be in touch, that things were resolved and I thanked her for her guidance. I said she’d done a good job.

  John’s been good in taking Alfie out a couple of times or so. He’s enjoyed that a lot, my son. The only one completely oblivious to the whole strange end of the affair.

  When they finally discharged me Sue came to visit. She’d given birth to a gorgeous baby girl.

  We sat in the garden while the little one slept and Andrew played with Alfie as she had a word with me.

  ‘Sarah,’ she said. ‘I know what’s happened and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. But we’d planned to call her “Sharon”. It was Steve’s mum’s name.’

  She sat back and blew a satisfied plume of smoke from her mouth. ‘Would you be all right with that? I know you’ve lost your friend and I know I didn’t know her myself but I thought it could be sort of commemorative.’

  ‘It would be brilliant. Sharon would like that,’ I told her.

  ‘Bloody good Essex name,’ she said.

  ‘She was a bloody good Essex girl,’ I answered back.

  ‘This one will be too. Just wanted to check you were all right with it. I don’t want no histrionics at the christening,’ she said and winked.

  Sharon’s christening is tomorrow.

  Life goes on.

  We’re edging into autumn now. I don’t mind the season at all. Though the leaves fall and rot they speak more to me of cycles: death, birth, rebirth, tradition, legacy. The only end I feel coming is the last part of my story.

  I’m not sure of what conclusions I can make. Andrew keeps telling me ‘Life is for living,’ and that’s what I’m focusing on doing.

  I’m moving on in lots of ways and I tell him that too. Allowing myself to get intimate. Allowing myself to be reassured that what I saw will fade with time. That ghosts don’t exist and my experience is just the result of an overactive imagination, combined with some chemical hallucinogens courtesy of Doctor Cook and his syringe.

  ‘You’re right, I know,’ I assure Andrew, as we lock up the house tonight.

  But I leave the French doors open, should my dead friends wander by.

  A Note to the Reader

  While Sarah Grey is a fictionalized character she has been based on Sarah Moore, the sea-witch of Leigh, who lived in the nineteenth century and who died in 1867. The legends surrounding her have been replicated here as they are spoken of in the town and indeed Sarah Moore does have a pub named after her. Although much of Sarah Grey’s biographical data has been drawn from my research into the real sea-witch, of course a great deal has been fictionalized: Leigh-on-Sea has never had a mayor; Doctor Cook, his line of ancestors and house were plucked from my imagination; as are many of the Leigh society figures that feature in the Reverend Robert Eden’s letters and journals including the effervescent Mr John Snewin and, sadly, the wronged but noble Tobias Fitch. Whilst the Reverend himself once lived here and did go on to become Primus of the Church of Scotland, leaving behind a wealth of published sermons and pamphlets, the words within these pages are mine not his.

  Although Lady Olivia Bernard Sparrow’s Leigh Hall did at one time sit just north of Leigh Broadway, it was demolished, like so many elegant buildings of the town, sacrificed by the greed of the few to the detriment of the thousands who live amongst the landscape. It now lies under the new houses on the road to which it gave its name.

  Disregard for the past will never do us any good. Without it we cannot know truly who we are.

  Read on for an exclusive extract of Syd Moore’s new book,

  to be published by Avon in Autumn 2012.

  Chapter One

  I used to think nothing of significance could ever happen on a Wednesday. It’s too mediocre: neither at the beginning of the week’s uphill climb, nor over the hump, looking to the weekend. Not like Thursdays, which loosen you up for the weekend, nor Tuesday, with its blues.

  Wednesday, well, my Wednesdays had always seemed rather bland.

  But I bet you don’t know that Wednesday is dedicated to Woden (Wodensday) – the ancient god of the Anglo-Saxons, ruler of the Wild Hunt and Wind and, allegedly, conductor of the dead leading souls through to the afterlife? Well, me neither. But it is. So with that in mind, I guess it was fitting that The Powers That Be chose the Wind God’s day to put in motion the chain of events which would, in a relatively short space of time, terminate my life.

  That particular Wednesday seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

  Or so I thought.

  The weather was, perhaps, a little gloomier than one might expect of a March afternoon.

  Someone more sensitive to these things might have sniffed out foreboding in the shrill north-easterly wind that had everybody buttoned up, faces down, slanting diagonally into its oncoming draughts.

  Or maybe they would have sussed that the very same wind that was screeching through the bare b
ranches of the sycamores could be trying, with all its might, to halt my progress through the wide Georgian avenues of Southend’s conservation area.

  But me? Well, as ever, I was clueless to the warnings. And anyway, somehow I know I would have made it to West Street where the offices of Mercurial, a quarterly arts magazine, nestled between an ancient accountancy firm and a design agency. You try harder to get somewhere that you really want to go, don’t you? If it had been a visit to the doctor’s or an appointment at the bank, I might have pulled back the curtains and thought, ‘Bugger that.’ But that Wednesday afternoon, five months ago, I knew Maggie Haines was waiting for me with a large mug of fresh coffee and the possibility of a commissioned article.

  To be honest, I don’t think a hurricane would have stopped me getting there: it’d been a while since I’d managed to net a commission from anyone and Maggie was hinting that there might be a healthy fee involved. Besides, I liked working for Mercurial: as a freelance writer who specialised in Essex affairs, kudos was rather thin on the ground. The magazine’s cachet rubbed off on me.

  In the couple of years that I’d been living in Southend I had grown very fond of the staff at the office. For a bunch of artistic individuals they were all pretty down to earth.

  I’d known Maggie, the editor, for nigh on twenty-five years, as we’d attended the same high school. Though far more rebellious than me, Maggie and I had shared a couple of boyfriends and cigarettes at the bottom of the sports field, promptly losing touch when we left school and went on to different universities. Bumping into each other a year ago, she invited me for lunch and we soon ping-ponged into regular friends again.

  I think it was on our third or fourth lunch date, as we knocked back a few bottles of plonk, that Maggie suggested I wrote a small piece for her mag. I leapt at the chance and once she had worked out that I was as good as I said I was she began feeding me more assignments. Though our friendship developed a more professional edge and lost a smidgen of its social intimacy, the deal proved both lucrative and enjoyable, catapulting me into a frighteningly dynamic arts scene. I saw Maggie from time to time at launches and events, but the demands on both our lives meant that I hadn’t seen her privately for quite a while.

  She was sucking on the end of a biro, squinting at a document in the small box room she called her office. The Victorian sash window was a couple of inches open but the air was thick with the stink of cigarettes.

  ‘You’ll have to get an air freshener,’ I said as I cantered in and threw my satchel on the floor. ‘It’s against the law now, you know.’

  Maggie’s wild tangle of pillarbox red hair jerked up. She dropped the pen on the mound of paper. ‘Shit, Mercedes! Can’t you knock before you come in?’

  Blessed with piercing green, intensely beguiling, almond-shaped eyes and a cute button nose Maggie’s face had a distinctly kittenish look to it – which was thoroughly misleading. The pretty feline exterior concealed a steely determination and unsettling intelligence that had notched up two degrees, an MA and a doctorate, and which had far more in common with panthers than domestic cats.

  ‘Everyone else has to go outside for a fag,’ I laughed.

  She shrugged, relaxing now and held her hands up in mock surrender. ‘Fair point. I know I shouldn’t. Just got really into this submission – new writer. Very good. Looking at the Internet: facebook, myspace, blah blah, as Generation Z’s youthful rebellion.’

  I sauntered over to a filing cabinet that stood by the window. It was sprayed gold and decorated in what was probably radical art works but to my uninformed eye looked like bog-standard graffiti. It was very Mercurial. The gurgles from the coffee maker on top indicated it was ready to pour.

  ‘Interesting spin,’ I said and took two mugs from the shelf above. ‘I’m presuming this is for me? Mags, would you like one too?’

  She grunted an affirmation and grudgingly gathered up the sheaf of paper, stapling the top right-hand corner and dumping it on an in-tray already several centimetres high. ‘Might as well close that window too,’ she shivered and pulled her fluffy purple cardigan tight over her shoulders. ‘I thought it’d be warmer this week.’

  I placed the mugs on her desk, and brought the window down with more force than I intended, resulting in a loud bang. ‘No such luck. They reckon we’ve got at least another three weeks of this before it turns.’

  Maggie cast her eyes through the windowpane at the fluttering leaves of the sycamores. A plastic bag whipped up from the street and caught a branch directly outside. ‘If only the wind would drop.’ She grimaced and turned back to me. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Fire.’

  I took a sip of my coffee and removed my notebook from my bag. ‘You mentioned another Essex Girls piece?’

  I’d been fascinated with our regional stereotype for a long time. Firstly because, as a raven-haired, olive-skinned Essex chick, I adored the leggy, booby, blonde ideal. Surrounded by Barbies and Pippas from an early age, I’d cottoned on to the fact that this was the generally accepted notion of beauty. I couldn’t believe it when, as I made more excursions beyond the county’s limits, I started to discover that this was considered vulgar and stupid – and a lot lot worse.

  Later, as I left the borough I’d lived in all my life to venture North for Uni, I realised that far from being a joke, mentioning my home county often resulted in humiliation and embarrassment. My surname, Asquith, did little to temper the constant barrage of wisecracks that I faced, as an Essex Girl called Mercedes. It was both frustrating and extremely formative: as a consequence of this constant battle I went on into journalism ‘to get my voice heard without shouting’ as my mum used to put it. Although I didn’t relate my pieces to my county or my gender, there was always an edgy, working-class feel to my tirades. Luckily, people liked them and I was able to make a living from my rants.

  Returning to my roots, the good Maggie indulged me and published a series of articles in which I challenged the bullshit. ‘Essex isn’t like other counties. Its daughter isn’t like those of Hertfordshire, Herefordshire or Surrey,’ I wrote. ‘She isn’t demure, self-effacing or seeking a husband. She’s audacious, loud, drops her vowels and has fun. Like Essex itself, the Girl is unique. It’s about time we showed some filial pride.’ Got a good reception, that one. Circulation went up. Maggie commissioned another one, and another, then another.

  In an attempt to trace the etymology of the Essex Girl, my last feature looked back across the centuries to the dark days of the Witch Hunts and examined whether there was a link between Essex’s reputation as ‘Witch County’ and the genesis of the Essex Girl. I concluded that there was – and readers and commentators alike had not stopped filling up the web forum ever since. Many comments spilt over into other sites, forums, newspapers and magazines.

  Positive or intensely outraged, Maggie didn’t care how they reacted, just that they did. ‘This is the kind of thing the Mercurial needs. It’s getting our name out there into a broader market. We need more, and I’ll up your rate. Just give me something good and meaty,’ she’d said on the phone last night.

  So here I was, with something I thought if not meaty as such, certainly spicy.

  Maggie took a tentative sip of her coffee then blew on it. ‘Go on then – spill it. What you got for Mama?’

  ‘Okay,’ I flicked open my notepad and traced my notes to the relevant entry. ‘I’m delving deeper into the Witch Hunts.’ I glanced up to catch a reaction. Maggie was nodding, so I ploughed on.

  ‘Something is pulling me back to it. I mean, why did Essex lose so many women to the Witch Hunts?’

  Maggie snorted. ‘Did we? So what?’

  I leant in to her. ‘No seriously, Maggie. The combined total of indictments for witchcraft in Hereford, Kent, Surrey and Sussex put together was 222. In Essex alone over the same amount of time it was 492. More than any other county in the UK by a long stretch. You’ve got to wonder why.’

  Maggie let out a low whistle. ‘Okay, now you’ve got me. You didn’t go
into that in your last article did you?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, it was more about the witches themselves and the qualities they shared with the contemporary Essex Girl …’

  Maggie cut in. ‘Yep, yep. They “were poor, dumb and ‘loose’ as in not controlled by, or protected by men”.’ She was quoting my article. ‘So why exactly did it happen to the extent it did here? I assumed that Essex and its inhabitants already had a reputation for being thick, flat and uninteresting?’

  I coughed. ‘No, not at all. Up until the Witch Hunts, Essex was seen as the “English Goshen”’.

  ‘I last heard that word in Sunday School. Something to do with fertile land the Israelites had in Egypt or something? Now don’t go all religious on me. It doesn’t sell, Mercedes.’

  ‘I’m not. Goshen also means place of plenty. Essex has an interesting geology. Sits at the southernmost point of the ice sheet that covered the rest of the island. Soil’s full of rich mineral deposits brought down from up north via the glacier.’

  Maggie pulled a face.

  ‘I’ll get to the point. It’s perfect for farming, for cattle, for livestock. It’s surrounded by rivers and the North Sea for fishing. Until the 1600s it was seen as a pretty cool place to be. After that point it changed.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Well, this is where I come in. I think a) because it was quite the revolutionary county in the civil war. Backed parliament. Wanted reform. And b) because of the extent of the Witch Hunts.’

  ‘Which were because?’ She cocked her head to one side and sat back in her chair.

  ‘Lots of things really but mainly it was to do with class aggression – you look at the European witch hunts and they had it in for all different types of people: aristocrats got burnt at the stake and their lands neatly confiscated by the Church. But in the Essex Witch Hunts the victims are mostly poor, mostly operating outside of society and mostly women deemed “loose”, as in not under the control or protection of a man. Then into this, insert a little guy called Matthew Hopkins whose dick must have fallen off or something.’