Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  Randal saw his chance.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘I’ve some business here that I must see to first.’

  With that, he barged back into the hut to come face to face with the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Slim Jim, blood dripping from his torn wrist. He’d delayed to bind his wound with his silk, polka-dotted scarf but it had yet to work very well. ‘You have the boy. Now where’s the gold?’

  51

  If only food didn’t look so damned pretty, thought Jorge, on his way out of the Co-op in Berkeley. All those lovely pale green Aeros, yellow Flakes and purple Twirls triggered something in his brain that he could not resist.

  Every time he took a fresh bite he felt a small burst of pleasure as his neurotransmitters went wild. He should have put all the chocolate back on the shelf, but he didn’t.

  If people wanted him to stop gambling with his health they should wrap things in plainer packaging.

  That’s not say that he favoured anyone trying to be overprotective or unduly interfering with his personal choices. Being large was his prerogative, despite all the overworked devils stoking his dopamine. Who had the right to sneer at him, anyway? They would be telling him next that he couldn’t add white wine and cream to his Bolognese sauce and cook it in the oven.

  Perhaps it was a jealousy thing.

  Such dire thoughts raged as he drove along with much forceful declutching of the camper van’s troublesome gearbox. Sasha blinked at him while sitting on his Inspector’s cap. He knew that look. She’d have him exist on pasta, vegetables and olives every day while she gorged on tinned beef.

  The quayside road soon became a mixture of warehouses and cranes. Sharpness New Dock had opened its gates to allow the blue and white cargo ship Sormovskiy to sail into port. He parked the camper van and overtook the Russian vessel on foot. He and Luke had once watched ships like this ferry minerals, cement and fertilizer along the River Severn. He felt the same excitement now, as if by shutting his eyes for a moment he could relive their greatest dreams.

  All the old warehouses had been rebuilt since his last visit here decades ago. Railway lines rusted but there were ambitious plans for smart dockside houses next to refurbished marinas, apparently.

  Next minute he felt Rex Lyons’s Bible fill his pocket and hurried.

  *

  He left the lock at Sharpness Old Dock and found himself on the raised towpath that divided river from canal where it continued north to Gloucester. He was staring at the vast expanse of glittering estuary over which trains had once steamed through the sky on twenty-one iron spans, high up above The Ridge Sand.

  He had never seen the bridge with his own eyes, but he felt its presence now. He was following the gentle curve of the seawall.

  Soon there rose up before him a peculiar, round stone tower. It looked like a watchtower or remnant of an ancient castle but he knew better. Years ago the railway line had pivoted on top of this freestanding structure where its last, twenty-second span had spanned the canal. It had revolved to allow tall ships to pass by safely on the waterway below.

  Over there, he observed, stood the stone abutment to which the swing bridge had once joined, now almost lost in encroaching trees on the canal’s landward side. It was as if his eye, on seeing the sudden plunge into the water, was ready to imagine back into existence the crossing’s missing pieces.

  ‘Here, Sasha. This has to be the right place.’

  But Sasha was distracted by the smell of bacon that drifted from a nearby narrowboat. She didn’t like being led on a wild goose chase?

  The vista changed suddenly as dark cloud crossed the sun and sent a chill through his veins. Something struck him hard in his heart like a splinter of ice. The dazzle of the river died. He stood motionless for a moment with eyes half-closed and his ears attuned to the music of the darkening currents.

  Some sweet voice appealed to him from – where?

  He turned his head to study the waves. Saw a woman surface on the water. Like some great sailing ship’s figurehead, she floated his way; her red hair streamed behind her in the wind even as she called his name:

  ‘Jorge… Jorge… Jorge.’

  Her smile looked cold, but still she managed to appeal directly to something akin to his soul. Her soaked white robes bedecked with jewels were worthy of some queen who lived in a palace underwater. Her glowing, yellow lamp glittered at the end of her outstretched arm.

  Her offer, as ever, was to guide him deep beneath the waves.

  He pinched himself and the chill in his bones alerted him to his fearful fancy.

  Next moment the sun re-emerged and the figure sank back below the water.

  Mellifluous words repeated faintly, even as the seamaid’s music called very distantly:

  ‘Join me Jorge… at the bottom of the river.’

  The Bible weighed heavily in his hand, but it was his Ordnance Survey map to which he referred again most closely. He took a step forward and traced exactly where the bridge had crashed into the river.

  The power of its alluring spell centred on the surviving round, stone pier at grid number SO 678 034.

  ‘Come Sasha, let’s go home and say a prayer for Reverend Luke Lyons. There’s nothing here for the likes of you and me. We shouldn’t even have tried whereas I fear he did.’

  There resounded in his head again the sweet siren words from Rex Lyons’s Bible:

  The ridge sand

  She will give you the treasures of darkness

  at the bridge

  *

  Back home in the Vicarage, Jorge studied again one of the strange pictures painted in prison by Frank Cordell.

  Had he shown them to Luke?

  Almost certainly he did.

  It was the crude depiction of a sailing ship adrift on a tempestuous ocean which was seemingly about to be dragged down into the depths by a huge sea-serpent. Her reefs were rolled on ragged sails, her heavy guns long cast overboard, but in one last-ditch attempt to save the vessel the mizzen-mast was being hewn away.

  Jorge could almost hear the clash of creaking blocks and straining rigging as, from the canting deck, came the screams of men.

  Their fate hung in the balance, should their next decision prove to be the right or wrong one. The crew clung for their lives to the rigging as the enormous silver and scaly sea creature wrapped its tail tighter and tighter around their vessel. From its head streamed long red hair.

  While some truths lay in the eye of the beholder, absolute truth belonged to God alone?

  What if that giant creature was not about to wreck but to rescue them?

  His official task, he reminded himself, was to decide if Luke had done a good or evil thing, but it could never be sufficient to conclude of someone that they were either virtuous or villainous. He should never be too quick to be excessively judgemental. On the face of it his lost friend had abandoned his coat and hat and walked into the river.

  What, though, if Luke had been trying not to kill but to save himself?

  52

  ‘For God’s sake, Jim, put the gun down.’

  Luke felt his stomach turn.

  He was inside the boathouse.

  A deafening roar filled his ears. Eyes swam. Lungs failed to breathe.

  Such painful cramps in his belly were not caused by impending danger so much as by an ill-judged confidence in his own strength which was about to fail him? Surely, being so much younger than this veteran, he should not feel in any way physically inferior now?

  Slim bit the end off a large, straight-sided coronel cigar and spat it at his feet with cocky insouciance. Then he took a lighter from his shiny blue suit. All the while, with his other hand, he kept his grip on his revolver. His black fedora hid his disagreeably shrunken and anaemic-looking features half from view. When his pallid face resurfaced it was all smiles. With the casualness came a cloying sentimentality. He could not believe that his little boy did not want to exchange fond memories?

&nbs
p; ‘You don’t – what – trust me now?’

  ‘You should go to A&E before you bleed out.’

  ‘Not until I have the treasure.’

  ‘That treasure, as you call it, is someone else’s property.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Luke? You not comfortable with stolen goods?’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘But your mother and father did the stealing.’

  ‘Then it’s up to me to put things right.’

  ‘Problem is you’re not a cop.’

  ‘I have right on my side.’

  ‘That clerical collar of yours means nothing to me.’

  The sight of the modified 4mm gun kept Luke focused. It was not the more usual 9mm weapon that he had once used in London. Designed to fire percussion caps, it was what he termed a garden gun. Small but lethal. At close range.

  ‘You forget one thing, Jim. I’m not my parents.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you really don’t have anything to give me, or else.’

  ‘Or else, what?’

  ‘I’ll have to deal with you the same way I dealt with Ian Grey. He thought he could dig up our treasure, too.’

  ‘You killed Ian?’

  ‘We caught him with a spade on the riverbank by the tin tabernacle. He was digging holes…’

  ‘Yeah, but not for gold.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself, Luke.’

  ‘He was digging for bones, for Christ’s sake, as was I, on account of something Mary Brenner told him...’

  ‘They’re all in it together, damn them.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘Gwendolen Lyons, Barbara Jennings, Mary Brenner…’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  ‘The point is, Luke, I don’t care what Ian Grey was doing. He’s dead now.’

  ‘Somehow I believe you.’

  ‘We could have settled this down the pub. Why don’t we, by the way?’

  ‘Shut up and put the revolver down.’

  ‘Relax, Luke, that treasure was never yours to have.’

  ‘The treasure is not why I’m here.’

  ‘No? But you’ve got to admit it’s kind of compelling.’

  ‘Greed is your answer to everything. Is it?’

  Slim Jim looked hurt. Hard green eyes appeared to soften for a moment as he sucked on his cigar until it glowed. Then he opened his mouth. Let drift a cloud of blue smoke. Eased his very real discomfort.

  ‘You asking me? Sounds like you’re the one who won’t share, Captain. Me, I’m prepared to cut you in, in return for your silence.’

  ‘My silence?’

  ‘About me and you.’

  ‘Don’t you realise that I’ve kept silent all my life? It’s my silence that has allowed you to go on doing whatever you like, to God knows whom, all these years.’

  ‘Hey, Luke, guess what, you’re right but that’s not what you should be saying, you shouldn’t be acting up so.’

  Luke felt something stick in his craw.

  ‘How should I be acting?’

  ‘Like a man.’

  ‘I don’t feel like a man.’

  ‘Honestly, Luke, I don’t know what to make of you.’

  ‘You think you can dismiss what you did to me and then at the flick of a switch it will all go away?’

  ‘Stubborn.’

  ‘The fact is, not a day goes by when I don’t relive you raping me in this very boatshed. It didn’t just happen twenty-six years ago, it’s today. It never stops. I’m the boy who can’t grow up. Can’t kiss my own sister without feeling disgusted at myself. Can’t bear to see perfect strangers hold hands. It terrifies me to watch a father take his son in his arms, give him a caress on the forehead. All my good feelings are buried in this sordid little shed that reeks of elvers. Their fishy smell is your smell – on my face, down my legs and in my hair. ‘Pretty glass eel’ you used to call me when you stripped me naked on that filthy mattress. Fact is, I might as well have been made of glass since you smashed me to pieces, inside. How many of us have there been?’

  The smile faded from Slim’s lips. Suddenly his eyes were narrower, meaner.

  ‘Don’t tell me you lured me here just to talk about old times?’

  ‘Talk might not be the right word.’

  ‘My poor sweet boy.’

  ‘Stop calling me that. I’m not yours. Never was.’

  Slim had lost none of his swagger. Nevertheless, wisps of greasy grey hair stuck to his face where he sweated profusely.

  ‘You’ll be saying next that you’re a survivor as if I never gave you what you really wanted.’

  ‘How dare you! I had respect for you, nothing else. That’s why I couldn’t understand why you did what you did to me.’

  ‘What’s not to like, Luke?’

  ‘I’ve had to live in the shadows all my life because of you.’

  ‘You finished with this bullshit or what?’

  ‘You threatened me, Slim. You said I’d go to hell if I told anyone. You said that I would be removed from my grandmother’s care if I so much as breathed one word about you. You knew I’d as good as lost my father to prison, knew that my criminal mother had disowned me at birth. You were like a new parent to me. I trusted you. When Rex was murdered you pretended to console me. I was barely ten years old, for Christ’s sake.’

  Slim took a step forwards. The gun in his hand seemed to weigh more heavily. Next moment there was an abrupt bang on the wooden floor. They were both equally startled. Mel McAtree’s loose glass bauble earring had just popped. Under his foot. He sighed and ground into dust with his toe what remained.

  ‘You and I had good times together, Luke. I have fond memories of us fishing on the Severn. We had something truly special. Damn it, I loved you.’

  ‘My grandfather taught you all about the river when you were a child. And you were best mates with my mother and father. Hell, Slim, you were as good as family. You even took me mink hunting.’

  ‘Did I not say I did my best to make you happy?’

  ‘No, you abused me for nearly two years. It didn’t stop until you went back to prison.’

  ‘So? It’s all a very long time ago.’

  ‘That time my grandmother took me to hospital in Berkeley I lied and said that I had crashed my bike. Split my anus. How could you be so kind to me and then do what you did? Right from the start, you deliberately wormed your way into my head with your false kindness. I had absolutely no idea of what you were going to do to me. You baited your trap for me with the same care and patience that you did with the eels. Lured me in until there was no way back.’

  Slim waved his gun ominously. The light from the fallen torch on the ground illuminated the splashes of blood that dripped from his wrist. His eyes grew restless. Betrayed something less bold than mere bravado. It was agony.

  ‘Hey, Luke, time’s up. Take me to the loot right now.’

  He did not move a muscle.

  ‘I realise that as a child I could never hope to understand what you did to me, but I understand now. It doesn’t take away the terror. I still feel my head beating through my skull. I still feel every joint tear in my body with you inside me. Still hear the dark water lap beneath the boathouse as you rocked me on the sagging floorboards. Thanks to you I turned to crime, too. I lashed out at the world that left me to drown in sorrow. Mostly I did it to hurt myself because that’s what I thought I deserved most.’

  ‘Enough, reverend! You’re a man of God now. You said it yourself.’

  Luke barely flinched. He had thought that he would die at the hands of this man once already, long ago. He wouldn’t let him scare him now, even if it did mean paying the ultimate price. In a flash he seized one of the fishing spears from the bench beside him. Slashed it like a blade…

  Slim spat out his cigar as his cheek peeled apart like an orange.

  …struck again.

  Unbalanced him with a snarl of outrage – half avenging angel and half screaming jinn – a surprising, Godless, unholy creature, the im
age of a devil.

  Slim dropped his revolver to clutch his larynx. Already he was beginning to gargle blood as he fought to breathe.

  ‘Don’t worry, Slim. If I’d wanted to kill you I would have brought my gun.’

  Slim half stepped, half fell backwards through the boathouse doorway. He looked to be in a panic. Made it no further than the side of the hut. There his lips issued frantic whispers in his otherwise horrified calm.

  ‘You don’t… want to do this, Luke. Trust me. It’s a bad idea.’

  ‘What does it feel like to be so helpless? Where’s all that power now? Did you really think you could terrify my sister and her son and get away with it? I don’t think so.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Luke, have you gone mad?’

  ‘They say that chemical castration is good for predators like you. Nothing like the real thing, I say. What was it you told me to look out for whenever we went fishing? Look in the mud for the glint of sun on fin or tail.’

  With that, he drove home his spear. Stabbed with all the pinpoint accuracy with which his victim had once taught him to pierce live eels.

  53

  The knocking grew louder and louder.

  ‘All right! What’s the hurry? I’m coming.’

  Jorge threw open the vicarage’s door and Barbara Jennings stared into his face with such fixed intention that it positively alarmed him. He had long since failed to make up his mind whether or not to distrust or admire this pink-haired old lady who lived so untidily in Angel Cottage, but who always dressed so correctly.

  ‘Ms Jennings? What’s wrong?’

  Clearly the climb from the village had greatly fatigued her.

  She fussed with scarf, handbag and little black gloves. She always had the air of someone who must run the show and make all the arrangements, yet today she looked grey in the face and had smeared her lipstick. Her eyelids looked red and her cheeks tear-stained, her mouth shut tight, her posture tense like someone in pain as she leaned heavily on her walking stick.

  ‘There’s something you need to know, Inspector.’

  ‘Please. Come in. I was just packing some of my things into my camper van. I’ll be leaving Berkeley in the next few days to go back to Gloucester.’