Death of a Mermaid

by Lesley Thomson

  Freddy was finding Sarah’s frequent gifts, the ‘date nights’ in expensive restaurants, spa weekends, stifling. Her own purse wasn’t allowed out; Sarah’s Gold Amex covered everything.

  Sarah believed Freddy would cheat on her. At first this was appealing and Freddy enjoyed reassuring her. Then Sarah became more exacting about Freddy’s movements, which, although typically limited to the route between the supermarket and the house, in Sarah’s mind involved clubs, bars and hotel rooms. It was no longer delightful to find Sarah lounging by the plant and flower stacks outside Waitrose, ready to squire her home at the end of her shift.

  Last month they’d celebrated ‘two blissful years’. The words embossed in gold on Sarah’s anniversary card. ‘Careful what you wish for,’ Toni Kemp would have said. Mags too, except she had never wished for what Freddy wanted. Freddy’s long haul had become a life sentence.

  Her phone buzzed again. Maxine was making her way up the aisle, stopping to direct a man towards the dental section. Hurriedly, Freddy dug her phone out of her pocket.

  It wasn’t Sarah. The number wasn’t programmed into her contacts.

  Your mum is ill. Mags x

  Freddy nearly dropped the phone on the prawns. Her hands shook. She grew hot. She hadn’t heard from Mags for years. Not since everything went wrong.

  ‘You know better than to be looking at your phone in working hours.’ Maxine wasn’t admonishing. Everyone liked Freddy.

  ‘Sorry, yes.’ It didn’t occur to Freddy to tell Maxine what the message had said. She was so astonished it was Mags, her friend – was that the term? – from the convent that Freddy hadn’t taken in the words.

  ‘Got any smoked haddock, Freddy? I’m doing a skink. Friday treat!’

  ‘You’re in luck, we’re a bit low today.’ Freddy gave Mrs Wild her best smile and, snatching up a thin sheet of plastic wrapping, slapped an undyed fillet onto the scales.

  All day Freddy sold fish. She exchanged banter with customers, remembered the orders of her regulars (ten oysters for Mrs Parker and her friend, three small pieces of cod for Mr Russell’s elderly Schnauzer). Upstairs, she plugged the forward orders into the computer.

  At three o’clock Freddy came off shift. She caught the bus two minutes after she arrived at the bus stop and got standing space by the exit door. She stared out through the misted panes at Liverpool, her adopted city, full of promise on a winter’s night. Trembling as if taking the safety catch off a gun, Freddy opened her phone and reread Mags’s message.

  Your mum is ill. Mags x

  The bus lurched and Freddy was flung against one of the poles. The jarring brought her to her senses. Her mum was unwell. Panicked, Freddy got off the bus a stop early and ran, leaping over puddles and skirting commuters. She had to go to Newhaven.

  She slowed down in Sarah’s street. How had Mags got Freddy’s mobile number? Had her brothers – or her mum? – asked Mags to contact her? Mags had put a kiss – what did that mean? Freddy looked at the screen as she walked, mining the brief message for meaning. How did Mags know her mum was ill? Were they in touch? Reenie Power had always had a soft spot for Mags, a cradle Catholic like herself. She had disapproved of Toni’s parents converting to get their girls into the convent. Her judgement softened after Toni’s dad was murdered. The irony of Reenie favouring Mags was neon-lit only to Freddy. Did the kiss mean anything?

  Freddy had dreamt of Mags writing, although the message was different.

  The one person from Newhaven with her number was Toni. They were only in touch at birthdays and Christmas and not at all in the last year, when Toni had left London and joined Sussex Police. She was back in Newhaven. Freddy had forgotten Toni’s last birthday, Toni forgot hers, but that was normal. Sarah told her not to bother with Toni – what was the point if she never saw her? Did Toni see Mags? Were they still friends? This idea came with a whiff of betrayal. Mags wasn’t in touch with Freddy.

  Freddy hadn’t kept up with anyone from those days. Least of all Mags. Sarah scoured Facebook to see what her exes were doing. It’s important to know how the story ends. Sarah never posted anything; as a lawyer, that would be unprofessional.

  Hood up against a rain-soaked squall, Freddy reached the house. A double-fronted affair adorned with railings and a front door with a brass step that some hard-driven maid must have polished in a bygone era. Sarah would employ one now if Freddy hadn’t objected.

  A Michael Bublé song floated out from the living room. Music Sarah knew Freddy disliked. Sarah would be in there, flicking through a magazine, the languorous pose intended to show Freddy she didn’t need her. Freddy would plead for a truce. In bed, in the dark, Sarah would be contrite. It was her fault. Really and truly she would change. Freddy could have her own friends. Go where she liked. Freddy would be faithful. Tomorrow was the first day of the best days of their lives.

  Freddy stepped into the light cast by the absurdly grand chandelier in the hall. Before the Bublé refrain could worm its way into her brain, she extended the case handle and hoisted on the rucksack. Lifting the case over the brass step, Freddy shut the front door. On the road she flagged down a taxi.

  ‘Lime Street station, please.’ Dread for her mum engulfed any elation at finally leaving. Fastening her seat belt, Freddy didn’t look back.

  3

  TONI

  ‘The trawler is divided into four main compartments. They cover all that’s needed on the boat.’ After a year of being in a relationship with him, Toni had finally asked Ricky for a tour of his trawler. Put off by anything on water, she had to admit it was great to see Ricky talk passionately about his pride and joy, bought with a loan from his family’s fishery. She had agreed today because the trawler was berthed at the mouth of the River Ouse in Newhaven. Surely nothing could go wrong there.

  In the distance the swing bridge was lifting. Damn. Traffic would back up on the ring-road and she’d be late getting to the police station. A large boat – she wasn’t good on boats – was being led through by a smaller boat. Toni shivered. The weak sunshine that had cast the slightest sense of warmth had been obliterated by dark clouds coming in from the sea.

  ‘…engine room, cabin, fish hold and the net store where we stow spare netting and nets we’re not deploying. It’s where we do the repairs.’

  ‘Wow.’ Toni knew Ricky, like all the Powers, including his sister Freddy, was a dab hand with a needle. He did his own sewing.

  ‘There are six tanks, for fuel, obviously, and water. We carry at least a tonne of ice when we go out to keep the fish fresh.’ Ricky was in his element. Water was his element.

  ‘Wow. Ice.’ Toni whistled. She pictured a gin and tonic Feeling guilty for this, she grabbed his hand. ‘What happened there?’ The tattoo on Ricky’s wrist was smeared with blood.

  ‘Caught it on a hook.’ He snatched away his hand and rubbed it.

  ‘Careful – you’ll make it worse. You don’t want it to go septic like Andy’s did.’ Toni had never got the point of disfiguring your body.

  ‘Do you want a tour?’ Ricky sounded irritated; he hated fussing.

  ‘I do. So er, you’re up in the, um… cabin?’ She indicated a glassed-in structure on the deck.

  ‘The wheelhouse,’ he corrected her patiently. ‘Done my time in the hold or on the deck. I keep dry unless we hit a problem. Daniel’s life is in my hands.’ He looked serious for a moment.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Toni preferred the police. Give her toughened criminals over raging seas. However, she liked the words associated with the trawler. Beams, goalpost gantry, derricks, gilson lines and topping lifts. ‘Where’s Derek?’

  Ricky biffed her for her feeble joke.

  He yanked a handle on a metal hatch, revealing steps. She followed him down.

  Toni was surprised by Ricky’s actual cabin, wood-lined walls, leather-padded bench seats, kitted out with food and medicinal supplies. If the boat had been on land, she’d rather like chilling out in it. Although even in port, the creaks and squeaks of t
he hull and the equipment would make her on edge.

  ‘You down there, Rick?’ A man’s voice. ‘Need to talk to you about upping our bass order.’

  ‘Wait here.’ Ricky was up the steps before Toni could say she should leave. Sighing, she remembered the swing bridge. No point; she might as well see the rest of the trawler.

  A narrow passage ended in a metal door. Sealed, she guessed, to prevent water getting in or out. Ricky was hot on battening down hatches. She’d noticed that what most people used as clichés or catchphrases – full steam ahead, plenty more fish in the sea – were the nitty-gritty of Ricky’s life.

  She opened the door and her heart stopped. She was faced with gigantic lumps of metal, a generator, an auxiliary generator, the engine. A puzzle of wires and hoses. Huge pipes, the yellow or red paint stained by rust, snaked above. Narrow pipes ran at her feet. Toni recalled Ricky saying that he and Daniel had to attack the engine with spanners when it stalled in a storm. She could change a tyre, but only on solid ground.

  The boat lifted and dropped. And again. She grasped a rail. It would be the wash from the boat that had come under the bridge. She became aware of silence. Of no sound above. Where was Ricky?

  ‘Hello?’ Calling out by accident, Toni heard the unease in her voice before she felt it.

  Toni wove around the maze of components and machinery. She was nauseated by the rank smell of oil and fish. The massive trawler – Ricky said it was comparatively small – the blue-painted hull, derricks and gantries bristling with aerials horrified her.

  The door was locked.

  ‘Ricky!’ Toni yanked the handle and, panicking, kicked and bashed the metal.

  It burst open.

  ‘All right, hun?’ And suddenly Ricky was holding her.

  ‘I was locked in,’ Toni mumbled into his chest.

  ‘You must have pulled the handle up instead of down.’

  ‘I have to go. I’m already late.’

  That afternoon, Toni was relieved to the point of ecstasy when she got to her office with ‘Detective Inspector Kemp’ on the door.

  *

  The call came in at half past nine. Toni, still working, was spell-checking her report on Newhaven’s latest window-smashing spree and picturing her bed.

  Uniform had been first on the scene. Answering a 999 from a dog walker. The man reported a bunch of boy-racers ‘doing silly buggers’ on West Beach. The patrol had found a vehicle crushed against a concrete block. The bunch of kids was just two. A boy and a girl trapped inside the wreckage.

  The beach was a desolate reminder of cheery seaside days. A disused refreshment kiosk smothered in layers of tagging. Tracts of concrete were all that was left of the line of light blue beach huts that had long ago succumbed to fire or were demolished for the drug dens they had become.

  Emergency vehicles fanned out. Two fire engines, the patrol car and a plain-wrap mortuary van if the kids didn’t make it to A and E. Sirens wailed from across the Downs.

  The cold air reeked of petrol fumes, and dark, viscous liquid pooled around the front wheels. The ground glittered with glass. The Ford’s bonnet was crumpled like a discarded crisp packet. Through cracks in the windscreen, the shadowing shapes of airbags ballooned over the dashboard like the take-home vestiges of a party.

  The plate told Toni the Ford – the Grand C-MPV model was brand new. 1.5 EcoBoost, titanium x, four spoke leather steering wheel with silver accents. A couple of months earlier she’d test-driven a black version before opting for a second-hand Jeep Renegade. Ricky liked that she was a woman who knew her cars.

  To Toni, the damage suggested that the Ford had somersaulted, righted itself then slammed into an anti-tank concrete block meant for the Nazis.

  Gloving up, she ducked under the tape. She felt a flicker of relief to see the liquid was oil. Not that anyone was off the hook; the incident was still deadly. She stopped short. A boy’s face was pressed against the driver’s-side window. Jesus, he still had acne. What was he doing in a hi-spec motor?

  ‘My initial inspection of tyre marks indicates a swerve, as if the vehicle were avoiding an obstacle.’ The PC’s face was ashen like someone had turned off his life support, and he was remodelling his gelled hair in the style of Stan Laurel as he talked. ‘It’s odd, though, ma’am.’ He hiccupped and looked briefly panicked. Poor sod, it was probably his first fatality.

  ‘What’s odd?’ Toni knew his face; she scanned for his name. She knew Uniform had a shit job, and she always tried to give them the respect they deserved.

  ‘Swerved into the buffer. Like it was deliberate.’ The PC pointed at the block, less a buffer than a bloody great full stop.

  ‘That Coastwatch station isn’t staffed after sunset. There’s a camera facing the beach that operates twenty-four hours. It’s up there.’ PC Darren Mason – Toni plucked his name from her overcrowded brain bank – nodded at a building up on the cliffs. She knew that most watch stations had been cut by Maggie Thatcher in the eighties. Gradually, with fundraising – Toni had done a parachute jump and raised a grand with Sussex Police – the stations were being reinstated. On a post at the top of the stone steps up to the pier was a camera. She was pessimistic: ‘What’s the betting it’s broken?’

  Paramedics hurtled towards the car, the wheels of their gurneys rattling on the concrete.

  Sheena, the latest member of Toni’s team, a transfer from Police Scotland, appeared over the shingle, as if she’d risen out of the sea. ‘The boy in the driver’s seat didn’t make it. Dead on impact. The girl in the passenger seat has a pulse’ Impassive. Sheena would be proving that, as a Glaswegian, she was way too tough for this shite. Toni was struggling with an instinctual dislike of the younger woman based on her – Ricky said it was a paranoid – belief that Sheena wanted her job.

  ‘Thank you, Sheena.’ Toni retreated, as if Sheena was actually stepping on her toes. The boy at the wheel would have been high on booze and/or drugs and showing off to his girlfriend. Life – and death – was too damned predictable.

  Fire officers were peeling off the Ford’s roof like a tin can.

  ‘It impacted at a speed of at least sixty,’ Sheena said. ‘Suicide by Ford.’

  Keen to avoid Sheena’s pithy headline patter and keeping clear of the emergency crews, Toni circled the car. A St Jude rosary hung from the rear-view mirror. Last week, Mags had given her a rosary for her new Jeep. Toni had resisted saying seat belts were more effective. Neither of the Ford’s occupants had belted in.

  A dark object lay in the oil. Toni approached and, bending down, she extracted it. Avoiding drips of oil, she held it to the headlights of the patrol car. A passport. Most likely an ID for a night out, though she supposed they could have been headed for the Dieppe ferry. She examined the pages, grateful that the oil hadn’t seeped between the covers. Daniel Tyler. Blond hair, pouty lips, butter-wouldn’t-melt brown eyes. Distinguishing feature: birthmark on right buttock. That would have attracted a few laughs. Although, with the looks of a teen idol, Daniel would have ridden them. Sweet sixteen. By that age Toni had done it with Martin Gilbert in the men’s toilet of the Hope pub metres from this beach. Back when she was a good-time convent girl and Mags despaired of her. Sixteen was too young to be behind the wheel of a car. It was too young to die.

  ‘We’ve got the ANPR.’ PC Mason joined her. ‘The boy wasn’t the owner. It’s registered to a Karen Munday, 23 Seaport Road, Newhaven.’

  Karen Munday. Toni would never forget Karen’s first day at the convent. Karen bloody Munday.

  ‘Daniel Tyler works for Ricky,’ she blurted out. Since getting back to Newhaven, Toni’s past had confronted her at every corner. Newhaven was a small town and the Catholic world smaller still. If you were a Catholic girl (or pretending to be), you went to Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart.

  Until that morning Toni hadn’t spoken to Karen since leaving the convent. In her years at the Met in London she’d almost managed to forget Karen Munday existed.

  Toni had gone
into the Co-op to stock up on chocolate. She’d glanced to her right as she was taking a Snickers bar. Karen Munday was watching from the end of the aisle.

  ‘Is Karen Munday a friend of yours?’ Mason broke into her thoughts.

  ‘Not any more. No, never, not at all.’ Darren Mason was looking at her strangely. ‘I mean, not since school.’ The bullying felt as real as yesterday. Karen had nicked stuff from her bag, shoved her, punched her if they were alone and, a more subtle tactic, stared at her in Mass, which distracted Toni when she was doing a reading. From the way Karen had fixed on her in the confectionery aisle, Toni could tell she had still not forgiven Toni for taking her place in the Mermaids.

  When Ricky apprenticed Daniel Tyler on his boat last year, it had taken a while before Toni made the connection with his mother, Karen Munday, who ran the Power family’s fish round. Ricky had been sympathetic when Toni confessed – paradoxically, she was ashamed to be a victim of bullying – but he had no say in who got employed.

  As she took in the wreckage in which Karen Munday’s son had died, for the first time in her life Toni felt sympathy for her old enemy. Never in her most darkly vengeful fantasies about Karen had Toni dreamt up this punishment.

  Toni longed for them to be wrong. But the address in Daniel’s passport matched the one registered to the Ford. Ricky would be in bits; he rated Danny as a skilled fisherman even at sixteen. Toni regarded Daniel’s pretty-boy mugshot. She felt winded with sorrow for the life wasted. Rage welled and she imagined accosting Mags:

  Tell me exactly for what purpose your God whipped up this carnage? These babies have hardly got going.

  Mags would say something about free will…

  ‘Nice-looking lad,’ Sheena remarked over her shoulder. ‘Shame we can’t dish out cautions to this teenager for joy-riding in the family car. Give his mum a ticking off and tell her to take better care of her car keys. Word is you know her?’