Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  Instead here he was indulging some fool’s fantasies.

  As he produced the Bible from his pocket Cordell’s eyes fell upon it not so much in greed but in reverence.

  ‘What’s wrong, reverend? You getting cold feet already?’

  ‘So tell me your theory.’

  ‘Trust me, I saw Rex write things in these very pages.’

  ‘Then start at the beginning.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you don’t want to get rich, too? Or would that somehow be against your nature now?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The thing is, reverend, some of the prison officers aren’t too thrilled to see you here. To them you’ll always be ‘Lucky’ Luke Lyons, son of Rex Lyons the ram-raider who liked to rob the rich. You’re the offspring of one of the most successful Robin Hoods in the country.’

  ‘I’ve had all my pre-appointment checks and security clearances ready to start work.’

  ‘You know what they say, the leopard can’t change its...’

  ‘I have written permission from my faith leader.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I know that, Luke, but what are people in here expected to think? You yourself did time inside not that long ago.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean God can’t save a bad person.’

  ‘To some, your clerical clothes are the Devil’s disguise.’

  ‘We’ve grown that cynical, have we Frank?’

  ‘So what did make you decide to become a prison chaplain?’

  ‘I grew up.’

  Cordell only laughed. Then, undaunted and childishly excited as ever he began to thumb hurriedly through more pages.

  ‘Rex recited certain passages over and over when he was high on drugs. He raved a great deal about his hidden fortune.’

  ‘And how exactly do you intend making sense of it all, Frank?’

  ‘There has to be a clue or key of some kind.’

  ‘Why would I pay any attention to the ravings of a recovering druggy like you?’

  ‘Hard to believe they were random and meaningless ramblings, reverend.’

  ‘You have a plan?’

  ‘I need to know what Rex knew, so why disappoint me?’

  The confidence was chilling. So much so that Luke did not doubt for a moment that, by sharing a cell with his father day and night, Cordell had somehow seen into his soul. He’d found his attitude peculiarly hypnotic and spellbinding.

  ‘What would you have me do exactly, Frank?’

  ‘I would urge you to help me find the right pages in this fucking Bible.’

  ‘Astonishing.’

  ‘Fact is, I’ve had certain lines in my head for years now. For instance, Rex would murmur something like the following: If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as hid treasures… ’

  ‘ Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God . It’s from Proverbs 2: 4-5.’

  ‘Find it, reverend. Find it for me now.’

  ‘Anything to oblige.’

  Luke felt commanded. How could he resist? But, dazzled by the flickering strip light in the ceiling, he saw absolutely nothing about the quotation that was at all useful.

  Cordell was disappointed, too. His good eye scanned pages in a frenzy.

  ‘Again, reverend: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’

  ‘Luke 12: 34.’

  ‘Look it up. Look it up.’

  He located the quotation in the text easily enough.

  Cordell leaned forwards again, his good eye blinking.

  ‘Nothing?’

  Luke shook his head.

  ‘So I have to ask myself, what would Rex say if he were here today?’

  ‘It’s a clue, I tell you, reverend.’

  ‘And we’re doing so well, so far?’

  ‘Try this then,’ said Cordell and with difficulty recited something from The Book of Revelation.

  As with Proverbs, so with the rest.

  Cordell was now strangely calm but in reality his agitation had not abated.

  ‘Look here, reverend. Are those not hand-written numbers inside the cover?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There! 678 034. They must refer to something, surely?’

  But numbers of that combination could not be found anywhere. They both sat where they were for a minute or two, then, casting aside the Good Book, Luke extended one hand to the prisoner across the pews. He meant the gesture to be conciliatory but Cordell only looked aghast – his good eye grew wider, confused and unfocused. He rolled his head.

  A lot depended on finding that treasure.

  Cordell was experiencing a stroke, as well as some serious pain in his chest – all intelligible speech immediately became slurred.

  Not even when medical help was urgently summoned would he consent to go quietly to hospital. Kept wailing about El Dorado. Temporarily lost his reason.

  Luke placed the Bible back in his pocket. Their meeting had proved fruitless but he hated to tell himself, ‘I told you so’.

  *

  This overgrown, former railway was not the easiest place to walk in the warm spring evening. Luke trod the overgrown trackbed to a point high above the River Severn. He pushed past the last few trees and bushes – saw hundreds of silvery snakes uncoil among the black, gleaming mudflats far below. Such currents resembled the blazing backs of living creatures from his unusually high vantage point. He could not help but wonder at their incorporeity and strangeness. Moreover, he was inclined to make out not simply wavering, sunlit channels but gently unravelling hair as though of someone living.

  He stared at the retreating sea and felt the air around him grow suddenly colder. A flaming red sun hung heavily on the horizon and in two hours’ time the ebb-tide would be at its lowest. His view embraced beach as much as bank, estuary as much as river, so expansive did the seamless meeting of sky and water seem – so tirelessly bracing. Only curlews and shelducks appeared to appreciate the contradiction. Then a bark from Sasha broke the spell.

  They were at the end of the line just outside Sharpness. The unguarded drop into the ship canal lay at the tip of his toes. This was the place where the now truncated railway had once continued across the water; this was where it took 6,800 tons of iron to bridge the estuary. Being vertiginous, it soon gave him vertigo.

  ‘A sad end, here, to a great achievement,’ he said aloud.

  ‘You got that right, reverend.’

  He was not alone, Luke realised with a shock.

  A man who had to be in his eighties emerged from the spindly ash trees directly behind him.

  He was, frankly, horrified to see him lean so far over the viaduct’s ruined parapet, since only space spanned then and now. He could embrace the seemingly infinite but not the void.

  ‘Sorry, what did you just say to me?’

  ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it, reverend? How can something so solid simply vanish?’

  Pressed for an answer, Luke had none to give.

  How should he react? He’d already made the mistake of replying.

  His companion’s attitude was that of a tedious and talkative local. Something blazed in his bright brown eyes. This was his spot and he was intruding?

  Luke decided to assert his right to the vista, too.

  ‘River looks magnificent on a day like this, doesn’t it?’

  The other man instantly raised his hand by way of objection.

  ‘Why then should everything feel so soulless? Is it just because something horrific happened here?’

  ‘Such sad remains stand testimony to human folly or bad luck, I suppose.’

  ‘Bad luck?’

  ‘Some would call it the Devil’s work.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘No.’

  That this haggard, unshaven bore still sought to detain him was obvious. To cap it all, he stank of beer and urine.

  ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten those days when you and I went fishing, reverend? Surely you’d recall an
old acquaintance if you met him after so many years?’

  ‘I can’t say. You?’

  ‘The name is Ian Grey. I used to buy elvers from your grandfather to sell to restaurants in Gloucester. He and young Slim Jim Jackson were my best suppliers. You remember Jackson? Of course you do. Later on, it was Jackson who took you and that chubby vicar’s boy – I forget his name – poaching when you were ten or so. Your grandfather showed Jackson where to hide his boat in Berkeley Pill. Then Jackson showed you the same thing. Thus does one inherit a little bit of the river to pass on. It was Jackson who gave you his cap to wear. Called you ‘Captain’.’

  Jackson . Why should it of all the names in the world resurface now?

  It was like a stab with a blade to his heart.

  It rang alarm bells, but in starting backwards Luke found his path blocked again.

  Crazy thoughts rushed into his head. They wanted to hurtle him into the nearby void like a runaway train.

  ‘You done here, Mr Grey?’

  ‘Take it easy, reverend. No reason to get on your high horse with me.’

  ‘Sorry, I have to go. Duty calls.’

  ‘First Jackson then you. If this isn’t fate I don’t know what is.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I ran into the lousy bastard only a week ago in Gloucester. Who’d have thought it, reverend, after all this time? I’m enjoying a quiet beer in my local and in strolls Slim Jim. Bold as brass he was.’

  This time Luke’s blood positively froze. How could this be? Somehow he had convinced himself that the subject of their conversation had to be in the twilight of his life. Like Ian. Because that’s how he remembered him from long ago. A child will always consider an adult to be old. He counted the years on his fingers. In fact, Jackson was probably only in his mid-sixties now. Hardly a ghost, then, after all.

  ‘Slim Jim Jackson’s alive and well?’

  ‘Still up to his former tricks, reverend. Ask anyone.’

  ‘An old man like that?’

  ‘His age is not the problem.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘He and I had a chat about old times. Sank a few pints together.’

  ‘Bad choice.’

  ‘I’ve got to be honest with you Luke, in the end I told him he wasn’t welcome.’

  ‘Is this little chat of ours meant to be going somewhere?’

  ‘I know he was a bit of a wrong’un but I’m not here to muddy those particular waters. That’s just the way things were in those days.’

  ‘Question for you. Tell me what the hell it is you want with me, if it isn’t to do me some sort of harm?’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Just catching up?’

  ‘Love to talk about old times, reverend, but I need your help.’

  Confronted head-on, Luke chose to confront. He braced himself. Had he not already burnt his bridges to be done with the past? He was angry and dismayed. This was nothing less than a vile ambush.

  ‘As I said, we’re done here.’

  ‘It’s about your grandfather Sean Lyons. Now, reverend, will you wait awhile and listen to me or not?’

  Luke stopped dead in his tracks.

  ‘Sean Lyons? Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the only one who might give a shit about what really happened to him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I honestly don’t have time for this.’

  Ian buried his heavily veined fists in his coat in a manner that could only be described as incorrigibly unpleasant. His whole attitude was sly and devious.

  ‘It all took place here at about 10.30 at night on the 25th October, fifty-six years ago, if you recall, reverend? Two oil tankers, the Wastdale H and the Arkendale H got caught in the tide. Some accounts state that a member of the crew lashed the boats together to try to save them both, though that’s disputed. So many died that night it is hard to get the full picture. All we can say is that for some reason neither boat could get free of the other. Going full steam ahead on port or starboard helm didn’t release them from their fatal embrace. Crews only had a few minutes to correct course before they struck one of the railway bridge’s vital piers.’

  ‘No one will ever forget that terrible night, Mr Grey. The death of five tanker crew is commemorated on two fine memorial stones. They’re touchstones, so to speak. Already many a person will refer to something as being ‘before’ or ‘after’ the bridge came down. Such markers along the way are rightly part of who we are.’

  ‘But they don’t celebrate Sean Lyons, do they?’

  ‘Facts speak for themselves. My grandfather disappeared in the fog as he tried to row out to the burning barges in mid-river, right opposite where we are now standing, only to have them explode in his face.’

  Ian paled. It had to be conjectured from the look in his eyes that he, too, had come here to pay his respects today. The screams of gulls still echoed those of men?

  ‘They found Sean’s boat the next day – what was left of it.’

  ‘So tell me something else I don’t already know.’

  ‘Might be nothing, reverend.’

  Luke demurred. He was unresponsive for a while and stared into space. For such a panorama, the light was getting poorer.

  The aftermath of the sun’s heat on the sandbanks, mud and water served to generate an uneasy shimmer.

  It was enough to imagine that he saw the troublesome shapes of poor lost souls as they waded forever forlornly among the treacherous shoals.

  Suddenly he turned and said angrily: ‘My grandfather died a hero, I tell you. There were other valiant men who set sail in small boats that night, too, but that doesn’t diminish the part he played. You know any different?’

  ‘I don’t. Nor did I see him drown.’

  ‘So which is it?’

  ‘No one else found him drowned, either.’

  ‘That’s because the river washed him straight out to sea when the tide turned.’

  ‘That’s one version of events.’

  ‘You have another?’

  ‘Will you hear me out or not?’

  ‘What choice do I have?’

  ‘None – unless you want to go on living a terrible lie.’

  Ian was offering him the chance to listen to him very carefully. Besides, had he not just told him that Slim Jim Jackson lived? Not everyone got to resurrect the one person they murdered every day, in their own mind.

  Clearly just wishing someone dead was not nearly the same as dying.

  17

  Jorge pulled his black cap lower down his brow to shield his eyes from the hard glint off the water. There was, this far upstream, a most unusual graveyard for boats that had been ‘hulked’ to shore up the dyke between the river and the ship canal where he and Luke had once played as boys.

  He caught up with Sasha as she ran round the wrecks.

  This early in the morning it was as lonely a place as the sorriest soul might wish to see.

  Many of the graves were mere grassy humps, while elsewhere a rusty bilge pump or broken bow marked the place. In places the rising sun lit names such as ADA, HARRIET and SALLY that protruded above the sand and grass like tombstones.

  Here, schooners, trows, bird barges and numbered lighters full of mud rose from the ground like the blackened, prehistoric remains of the trees from which they had once been hewn.

  Still others had been reduced to bleached and jagged spikes of timber that resembled bones.

  It was from the beached wreck of the two-masted schooner Island Maid that Luke’s grandfather Sean had gleaned valuable scrap metal in 1953, but Luke had not been like his family. He had openly revered the wrecks. Told Jorge that he must do so, too. Together they used to re-enact the journey 20,000 leagues under the sea in Jules Verne’s journey to Atlantis – they had renamed one of the wrecks the Nautilus while he played Professor Aronnax and Luke was Captain Nemo.

  It was wishful thinking, of course, but he could almost see Luke framed against the river. Atop a hulk.
Telling tall tales.

  It was Luke who told him the real-life story of the captain who had shot himself in the head in his cabin, only to be found years later walking up and down the slanting deck of one of these very same shipwrecks.

  Even if the boats did not come with a ghost they were haunting enough for the screech of a gull to scare him now, thought Jorge.

  There was history to be learnt, too, if you knew where to look. The 127ft schooner Catherine Ellen might be lost from sight today but in 1921 she had been impounded for running guns to the IRA in Ireland.

  This was a treacherous place where the unwary might be tempted to forget that the tide could come racing round the corner like a steam train.

  The last time he was here he had been that careless, Jorge recalled, in an amateurish attempt to wade into the river to fish for salmon.

  He had miscalculated the speed of the bore and spring tide in the darkness while Luke went off to collect firewood. When he looked back to shore the shipwrecks lay askew and broken as water fed fresh silt through their smashed ribs, singing and sighing the strangest of songs.

  Next minute, the level of water was three or four feet up the bank and rising. All ways back to land were suddenly deceptive.

  He tried to wade a hidden gulley. Got struck in its quicksand – the path to safety was a mockery of the bravest, a contempt for the living, a blasphemous invitation to the already dead only.

  ‘Help! Luke! I’m sinking!’

  The expanse of clear night sky added to the silvery silence in which the river appealed, siren-like, to all he had ever liked or loved. Ripples sparkled through the maze of sandbanks and mudflats in jewel-like ribbons. Their sweet melody promised him something most beautiful in the starry reflections if he took another step out to sea; the gathering currents offered him immense riches of dazzling import if he went that little bit further….

  He could not take another step backwards or forwards.