Death of a Mermaid

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘What about Mr Carter?’ Freddy had cried. ‘He’s sold one thing for the price of two.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s right.’ Mags was good at maths. ‘He’s got half the money he’d have had.’

  ‘He’s got a whole shop of stuff.’ Toni had danced off down the street.

  Mr Carter never got his money. When Freddy had earned enough to pay for the boat, she spotted a barnacled shipwreck in the window and temptation got the better of her. Like Toni had said, she could have two ornaments and pay for one.

  Freddy had grown to know the signs. They’d be in a shop. Toni would go still, a cat about to pounce, and, unable to bear the suspense, Freddy would flee. Eventually Toni made her stay, because Freddy acting strangely would attract suspicion. The trick, Toni said, was never to glance about. Always buy something. In addition to aquarium ornaments, Toni stole sweets, accessories, bracelets, socks, keyrings, fish hooks. Anything she could hide in a pocket. Forced to accompany Toni to the till, Freddy would die of terror while the legitimate item was rung up. She’d be close to a faint as Toni prolonged the agony with inconsequential chat about the weather and the times of the tides.

  Toni had peaked with a pair of shoes which she wore out of the shop. She bought a scarf to match. Presumably the shoplifting had stopped when Toni became a cop. They’d all moved on since they were Mermaids.

  Freddy wouldn’t turn on the heating and give Ricky another fit. She went out to the little garden and found wood in the old outside lavatory. The logs were veiled in cobwebs. It would have been some time since her mum got downstairs.

  Freddy lugged an armload into the living room and built up the fire. She got one of her mum’s Daily Mirrors from a pile under the stairs in the kitchen. Lady Lucan The Final Tragedy. Freddy scanned the story. In 1974 Lady Lucan had survived an attempt to kill her. She alleged the culprit was her estranged husband, Lord Lucan, who had immediately disappeared and had never been caught. Locally, the story had gained the status of folklore because Lord Lucan’s car was found in Newhaven. He was rumoured to have jumped off the Dieppe ferry. Now, wrongly believing that she had Parkinson’s, Lady Lucan had committed suicide. Not now, Freddy realised: the paper was dated January 2018. Had her mum been ill that long? More likely she’d burned more recent newspapers. Freddy slotted screws of paper within her wigwam of logs.

  She went out to get more wood and, distracted, wandered up the narrow strip of grass to a shed at the bottom. With everything that had happened over the last couple of days she’d forgotten about the small animal hotel. The sign on the shed read:

  Sunnyside Hotel, for anyone with fur or feathers smaller than a cat.

  Freddy was unprepared for the pain. It was almost worse than seeing Reenie dead. She leaned on the shed. Her mum had run a service minding household pets while their owners went away. It was the only work Fred Power had allowed his wife to do.

  Freddy had been Reenie’s deputy. She’d cleaned out hamster cages and rabbit hutches, filled water bottles and feeders and restocked with hay and food. Guinea pigs, a parrot called Marcus, cockatiels, gerbils, rabbits. Freddy fussed over the guests in the hope that they would want to come again. She had been shattered when Reenie broke the news that Mr Bun, a brown rabbit who had hopped after her in the house, had died. Freddy had let rats named Pinky and Perky sleep in her bed. They had weed on her duvet, which had driven her mum spare.

  Freddy crept inside the shed and was enveloped in a sweet mix of hay, seeds, feed and warm fur. She must have imagined the smell of fur, though, because the cages and hutches would be empty now. This was where her mum could be found.

  She groped for the switch. Light bounced off the silver insulation lining the walls. During the day, in the summer, furry guests were settled in caged runs on the lawn, each with a ‘room’ lined with hay for them to snooze in and to nibble. Tubes and toys kept them stimulated. Reenie Power had been before her time in attributing hopes and feelings to her charges. She’d kept carrots as a treat long before vets warned of the high sugar content, and had understood the nutritional quality of hay. Owners planned their holidays around availability at Sunnyside Hotel. The waiting list stretched into the years ahead.

  On a shelf beside a stack of care and feed forms were blank postcards of Newhaven harbour, the breakwaters encircling the sea like loving arms. It had been Mags’s idea to send cards to owners, as if from their happy pets.

  Dear Sybil, I’m having a whale of a time. My friends are guinea pigs called Spice and Sugar. I tell them to ‘Buck up and seize the day.’ I hope you’re enjoying your well-deserved holiday, love Marcus x.

  Writing the cards had become the Mermaids’ ‘job’. Toni got banned after including the awful news that Mrs Prior’s cat had gobbled up Fancy the gerbil.

  Freddy picked up one of the postcards. It would never be sent. How long ago had her mum shut down Sunnyside?

  With an armful of logs, she stumbled back to the living room. The lava lamps were warm, the green and blue globules morphing from one shape to another. Freddy sat on the couch, elbows on knees, her face cupped in her hands, her gaze lost in the flames. She felt a flash of contentment before reality swooped in. Mum is dead.

  Who would take the fish tank? Neither of her brothers had been interested when they were boys. Perhaps Andy’s kids would like them. Was his daughter like Freddy? Idiotic. Why would she be? Freddy hadn’t thought to ask their names. You couldn’t envisage people without their names.

  She was startled by a rap on the door.

  ‘Dolly’s all ready.’ The woman thrust out a carrier.

  ‘Who?’ Freddy was face to face with a cockatiel.

  ‘Two weeks bed and full board. Don’t let her stay up late with the telly.’ The woman, in her seventies with long, yellowed hair, laughed then sobered abruptly. ‘How are you, lovey? It’s so sad about your mum. Reenie was a lovely lady. Dolly will notice. I haven’t broken it to her. Sunnyside’s her high spot.’

  ‘Thing is—’

  ‘Don’t let her chew her bars. A nasty habit, she’ll ruin her beak. It’s not a holiday, I’m having my fireplace taken out – fibroids are the devil – I’ll be in the Princess Royal should Dolls think to write one of her little cards.’ She winked at Freddy.

  Before Freddy could speak – and give Dolly back – her owner had gone.

  Freddy placed the carrier next to the cage she’d seen yesterday. The hamster was standing up on its hind legs. A small animal guest was residing in the middle of the front room, yet Andy and Ricky had forgotten about their mum’s Sunnyside Guest House. Freddy was about to ring Andy when the door went again.

  This time, Freddy was unsurprised by the arrival of an elderly woman introducing herself as Mrs Nowak. Bent with scoliosis, her coat reached to her shoes. She passed Freddy a cage from which peeped a small white rabbit.

  ‘Lovely stay for Mikolaj,’ Mrs Nowak crooned in a Polish accent. ‘My son-in-law will fetch Mikki.’ She told Freddie she was taking her daughter to Lublin. ‘She never went before.’ On the doorstep, Mrs Nowak grasped Freddy’s arm. ‘Ci biedni chłopcy. Those poor boys. No mother to love them.’

  ‘What about me?’ Freddy told the closed front door. The outburst caught her by surprise. She never felt sorry for herself. With great care, she lined up Mikolaj’s carrier beside Dolly the cockatiel. With three cages and the fish tank the room was cramped. She couldn’t house them in the shed; it needed to be heated through.

  Her mum used to say things happened in threes.

  A man in his sixties introduced himself as David Bromyard. His hearty tone suggested she should know him. This made Freddy nervous. So far, the pet owners hadn’t given any impression they knew her before she left home.

  She inspected the mouse-like rodent – Roddy – who was too intent on a leaf of iceberg lettuce to notice that he’d been in transit. She felt Bromyard watching as she positioned Roddy’s fancy wooden cage on the table by the couch. He passed her a sheaf of instructions that carried over from the usu
al care-sheet. ‘It’s not that my wife doesn’t trust you, it’s just she’s very attached to Roddy.’ The paperwork said Roddy was a degu. Small and quick, a degu guest had once escaped when Freddy was doing out her cage. It had taken two hours to find it. Freddy’s heart sank.

  ‘She says he’s more of a husband to her than I am.’ David Bromyard pulled a weird face.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’ Freddy was only being kind. She knew full well that many of her mum’s pet owners were more attached to their pets than the humans in their lives.

  Hovering by the television, Bromyard showed no signs of leaving. If he came out with anything about poor Andy and Ricky, she might hand Roddy back.

  ‘I knew your dad. He was a lovely man.’ Bromyard looked embarrassed.

  ‘Yes?’ Freddy steeled herself for a lecture on what a cruel daughter she had been. Lovely was one hell of a stretch, but it didn’t surprise Freddy. Outside the home, Fred Power had taken care to be charm itself.

  ‘I used to see you. You came on my boat. You were about three, do you remember?’ He looked earnest, as if he really hoped that she did. Jesus wept.

  ‘I don’t.’ Freddy was knocked off course. ‘But if I was three…’

  ‘I took you out on my beam trawler.’ Bromyard had short brown fluffy hair. Now that she looked properly it was his original colour. She’d put him at over sixty, but the fact that he was a fisherman explained the reddened sandpapery skin. He might be younger. He was overweight, but his size and height allowed him to carry it. ‘With your dad.’

  Bromyard laughed, too heartily she thought. ‘Of course, I couldn’t cope with you by myself. I had a three-man crew back in the day to get in the catch. He loved the sea, Fred. He’d have run his own boat if he hadn’t been sickened by quotas.’

  ‘Quotas?’

  ‘It’s the limit set on a species to conserve the stock, so the government says.’ Bromyard pulled a face.

  ‘I know what it is,’ Freddy snapped. ‘What did it have to do with my dad? He didn’t run a boat. He got seasick.’

  ‘Freddy never did!’ Bromyard ground a meaty fist into a palm.

  Freddy. No one had called her dad that. It proved Bromyard had hardly known him.

  ‘I think you must be mistaken.’ It didn’t matter but, fazed by the changes to her family, of this at least Freddy was certain. ‘Dad hated being on the sea.’

  ‘He loved it.’ Bromyard seemed to stop himself from saying more. Likely he wouldn’t want to argue with the woman who was going to look after his wife’s precious degu.

  ‘He got seasick,’ Freddy repeated. She knew she should leave it. If this big, burly bloke attacked her, she would only have a few rodents and a cockatiel on her side.

  ‘It was a life he denied himself. But that was him all over.’ Bromyard looked sad. It shocked Freddy that anyone should miss her father.

  ‘Right,’ Freddy conceded. She’d had enough.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ Bromyard made to go. He hesitated, perhaps to mend the awkwardness. ‘You look like him.’

  ‘How long have we got your pet for?’ Freddy nearly shouted the question.

  ‘A month.’ Perhaps seeing horror in her face, ‘Andy said that was OK. I hope it is?’

  ‘Andy should know.’ Freddy raised a hand to guide Bromyard to the door.

  When she returned to the room, she was shaking. With cold and something else indefinable. She tossed another log onto the fire and raked the ashes. Bromyard was definitely familiar. But if she had been out on his trawler, so had her dad. And that didn’t make sense.

  She remembered a night at the fishery when she had been around fifteen. It must have been the holidays because she’d been working full time. She was on her way home when she realised she’d left her knives behind. Her dad got angry if she left them, which meant she couldn’t ask him to bring them home with him.

  Karen’s uncle was driving a delivery truck out of the gate when she went in. Dave Munday leered at her out of his cab window and licked his lips. He gave Freddy the creeps. Light from her dad’s office spilled over the tarmac.

  When Freddy had retrieved her knives, she’d stopped by his office. After seeing Munday, she didn’t want to walk up the road in the dark.

  Fred Power was slumped at his chair, the order book out on his desk.

  ‘All right, Dad?’ She was gripped by sudden fear.

  ‘Seasick.’ He’d looked at Freddy as if she was an intruder. His skin was white and shiny with sweat, like Ricky when he had the flu.

  ‘Have you been out on a trawler?’ Power’s Fishery didn’t own a boat. Let others do the drowning, her grandfather used to say. Her dad couldn’t even swim because he hated boats.

  ‘I’ll gut you if you breathe a word to your mother.’ He had glared at her.

  ‘Why did you go on the sea? Whose boat were you on?’ If her mum had been there, she’d have signalled for Freddy to shut up.

  ‘What did I say?’ He’d come at her as if he might hit her. He sometimes hit Andy, but never her. Maybe this occurred to him, because he halted in the middle of the room and, waving a hand, mumbled, ‘It’s business. Forget it. Too many pints at the Hope.’

  Now Freddy saw her father’s expression as clear as if it were he, not Bromyard, who had been in the room. Fred Power’s expression had not been anger. It was like he’d been nervous. Was he nervous that his daughter would judge him for his weakness? After all, strong fishermen didn’t get seasick. Freddy hadn’t cared; she’d just been surprised that her dad had gone out on the sea at all.

  Now she reasoned that her dad must have wanted to check the man was legal. Fred Power was picky about his suppliers. Odd that Bromyard thought Fred had loved the sea, but then he could say what he liked; the dead don’t argue.

  Freddy got up from the stool and opened a drawer in a sideboard opposite the window, the gloomy oak accentuated, rather than offset, by a lace runner. Where her mum had always kept it, among elastic bands, pens, redundant keys and other odds and sods, was the Small Animal Register.

  She leafed through the death notices, copied across from the previous book; the list grew each year. The fact that Reenie had known the names of their deceased pets reassured the owners. Bert, white canary – 2002. Fanny, lovebird – 2001. Mr Bun, brown Nederlander rabbit – 1999. Her mum’s handwriting blurred and swam. Freddy dashed at her eyes. Don’t cry. Not for Mr Bun. Or her mum. Her grief was deeper than the sea.

  Freddy ran a finger down the dates. The most recent guest – Brad the hamster, who’d run on his wheel yesterday – had arrived three days ago. Andy knew the guests were coming. Andy had known that once the pets arrived Freddy could not turn them away. She sighed; he must have remembered how much she’d loved looking after them. She resolved to stay for the funeral. She would run her mum’s hotel. Filled with sudden excitement, she bent and released Mikolaj the white rabbit from his cage.

  ‘Have a trot about,’ she told him.

  The visit from David Bromyard still nagged at her, but she pushed him to the back of her mind and returned to the guest list. Brad was due to be collected today. Freddy felt ice creep down her spine as she read the booking information, not in her mum’s handwriting. Brad belonged to Karen Munday. She would not be coming to pick him up.

  Freddy was digesting this grim information when there was another knock at the door.

  12

  TONI

  ‘What do you want?’ Freddy was gruff.

  ‘I came to see how you’re doing.’ Toni tried for a friendly smile but guessed it was more of a wolfish smirk. Freddy had kept her on the doorstop. To the point that when she opened the door, Toni was about to go.

  Freddy glared at her.

  ‘You know, after yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday? Oh, you mean when my mum died and my brother tried to chuck me out of this house? Yes, well, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’ Freddy’s sarcasm failed to mask her hurt.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Damn. Never ask a questio
n that leads to a dead end. Toni, a skilled police interviewer, never made that mistake on the job.

  For answer, Freddy shrugged and wandered off into the lounge. Toni scuttled in after her before she could change her mind. Freddy had got a fire going. Toni gravitated towards the grate then saw a creature on the sofa. A bloody hamster.

  ‘Oh. My. God. You’ve taken on Reenie’s Hotel. Did Ricky and Andy sell you a sob story?’

  ‘Their sob story is mine too.’ Freddy scooped up the hamster. ‘Andy asked me. Until the funeral.’

  ‘Couldn’t you stick a “No Vacancy” in the window?’ Toni had sworn not to resort to jokes. It never worked with Freddy.

  ‘We have rooms,’ Freddy said.

  Freddy sat in her mother’s old chair. She played with the hamster’s ears, and Toni felt a wash of sadness for a time long gone.

  The room felt warm and homely. Reenie had always skimped on wood even after her husband was no longer there to ration her. There was a movement out of the corner of her eye and Toni spotted a white rabbit preening itself under the television. It was like old times.

  ‘Have you come to gloat?’ Freddy stroked the hamster.

  ‘About what?’ Beady little eyes watched. A white bird about a foot in height was perched on the wall clock. Toni, familiar with Reenie Power’s creatures, identified it as a cockatiel. The rabbit was eyeing her too. ‘I just came to see you.’

  ‘About Ricky getting half the estate? He’s welcome to it. They both are.’ She softened. ‘I mean it, they’ve been there for Mum all these years.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Toni got a nasty feeling.

  ‘Didn’t your boyfriend tell you?’ Freddy spat out the word. ‘Mum’s will says Ricky and Andy get the lot.’

  ‘You are kidding.’ Toni was aghast. ‘No. Ricky didn’t say a bloody word. He does have other fish to fry, so to speak, but all the same. You get nothing?’

  She’d been ready for flak from Freddy about Ricky. At some level Toni did feel she’d betrayed her old friend by being with her brother. But she hadn’t anticipated this.