Death of a Mermaid

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Was Mags really here a lot then?’ Freddy felt woozy; she rarely drank.

  ‘She did lots round the edges of the care. The commode, concocting tempting suppers, washing. Made me look like a right bitch. I’d turn up empty-handed and be out in five! Kirsty was as bad, thank God.’

  After Toni had gone, Freddy poured another drink. She could consign herself to oblivion. She prised open the DVD cassette. It was empty.

  Freddy knelt by the DVD player and pressed ‘eject’. Out came The Little Mermaid. Pushing in the tray, she bundled Brad up to her cheek, her nose buried in his sweet hay-scented fur, and settled back to watch.

  26

  FREDDY

  Despite dating from the Victorian era, Newhaven cemetery wasn’t an ivy-clad jungle of Gothic statuary and chunky mausoleums. It covered an open hillside, shaded by one yew tree beyond which swathes of grass awaited the dead still living. Ranks of low-slung headstones, heart-shaped, teddy-bear-shaped, some with photographs of those within the grave. Others scattered with toys and ornaments, windmills, gnomes, miniature picket fences. All reminiscent of a sprawling yet homely suburbia.

  Toni left the car by the statue of the boy and, skirting the chapel, made for the far reaches of the cemetery. There, most graves dated from the early twentieth century, with row upon row of war graves, the light sandstone contrasting with the dark marble of civilian monuments. Toni stopped by a lone headstone in the shadow of a beech tree. An outpost of the dead.

  Nicholas Kemp 1948–1991

  Forever in our hearts

  Safe with Jesus

  Flaking stone had erased the capital N of Nicholas and the J for Jesus.

  Thirteen-year-old Toni had kept it to herself that she had wanted Come Back on her father’s epitaph. Safe with bloody Jesus – what sort of God had let her dad be killed like that? At the time, Mags, desperate to bring Toni back from her living tomb, said it wasn’t simple. God created humans who sinned and could be forgiven. For Toni it was simple. Jesus suffered on the cross for our sins, so why didn’t that let her dad off? She wanted no one forgiven. What was simple was that there was no God.

  Mags had assured her that God would remain with her until one day her belief would reignite. This had been during Mags’s insufferable period, when, as if she had a direct line to the Almighty, she spouted pious crap.

  Toni did not believe in God, but she had grown to be grateful for Mags’s assurance that Nicholas (Nicky) Kemp was in Heaven. A better vision than that his flesh was rotting under the ground. Seeing Freddy make the sign of the cross over Reenie Power’s grave, Toni had wondered if Freddy’s faith (lost when she came out) had reignited. But her visit to her last night had put her straight. Freddy’s only faith was in Mags. Unfortunately, Toni thought as she knelt at her father’s grave, that faith might be misplaced. Toni doubted that Mags would ever come to terms with her feelings for Freddy. Her Catholicism was entrenched; it was too big an obstacle. She appeared to have stood Freddy up the other night and was probably avoiding her until Freddy finally left Newhaven.

  Nicholas Kemp 1948–1991. Two police officers had sat Toni and her sister, Amy, in the living room and given them mugs of hot chocolate, like they were kids. Toni had been outraged, but unable to resist the rich chocolatey smell.

  ‘Antonia, you must be very grown up and look after your sister and your mum…’

  Toni had been aware only of the sickly-sweet drink scalding her tongue and the blue of their uniforms. A Pavlovian moment because in her last year at the convent, drinking a hot chocolate in a café, she’d determined to join the police.

  ‘Hi, Dad. Remember that girl at the convent?’ Toni checked she was alone. She was in the habit of telling her dad (a criminal lawyer) her latest case out loud.

  A grassy mound with no flowers or plants, the grave was low maintenance. Toni left the few flowering weeds, which her dad, a hiker over the South Downs, would have appreciated. Her dad’s final resting place on a hill above the sea had, over the years, lessened the memory of his violent end. The milkman had stabbed him through the heart with a broken milk-bottle. All because her dad had queried the order.

  Toni removed a pot with a dead azalea she’d brought for his birthday in January. She was Nicholas Kemp’s only visitor.

  Burial hadn’t been the Kemp family’s preferred method of interment. Appalled by his murder – for the price of a gold top – the community had collected for a lavish interment with a double grave so that one day the grieving widow would be reunited with her husband. A day unlikely to come. Katy Kemp had remarried and moved to New York with her American husband. Toni’s sister, Amy, was a Buddhist in Scotland. In between her sports massage practice, Amy went on so many retreats that, Toni quipped to Ricky, soon she’d disappear.

  ‘If you remember, I was at school with Karen. She was a bitch… that’s not swearing, she was. Teacher’s pet with Sister Verruca. She got away with murd— all sorts.’

  In the sun’s glare, Toni saw someone under the chapel arch. She scrambled up and hid behind the tree, although from this distance it was unlikely that she was visible.

  As she watched, the person took the central path, coming closer but still a good hundred yards from where she stood. Toni disliked being seen at the cemetery. Her grief was private. Then the person – a man, she thought – moved away, crossing the rows of graves diagonally. He was heading for the top of the hill, where the graves were sparse. He was going to where Reenie Power had been buried.

  Close to the boundary hedge, Toni kept parallel. She drew closer and, when she was as near as she dared be, she opened her phone’s camera and took a photograph. She enlarged the image. She could make out Reenie’s plaque on the temporary cross and the wilting bouquets clustered on the heaped earth. And Ricky.

  Toni felt a rush of love. She started towards the grave. When Ricky had asked her to come with him to his mum’s grave, she’d reminded him she had a murder case on and suggested he went on his own. Which, on reflection, had been unkind. She’d seen he looked nervous. Here he was, actually shaking with grief, holding onto the cross as if he might fall over otherwise. She blundered over the grass towards him.

  Because he was out on the trawler day and night, the tips of Ricky’s dark hair had been bleached auburn by the sun. She often teased him about his expensive highlights. Toni stopped. The man now openly weeping by Reenie’s grave had short dark hair. It was Andy Power.

  Throughout his mother’s illness, Andy had been Mr Practical, covering all angles, booking carers, liaising with the hospice and with Mags. He’d set up a visiting rota. He’d been one step ahead, even organising her funeral before Reenie died. A step too far, Ricky said, although Toni was with Andy on that one. All the time Andy kept the business going, Ricky was the one who seemed to be falling apart.

  Now, Andy was sobbing his heart out over his mum’s floral tributes. Any other place and Toni might have applauded the fact that he wasn’t made of stone and, like Ricky, missed his mum. All she knew right now was that Andy must not see her. Andy could provide the sympathetic shoulder, but he’d be mortified if it was the other way around.

  She backed away, willing him not to turn. She skirted the hedge and headed back to the safety of her dad’s grave.

  When she finally reached the car, Toni swore under her breath. Andy would have seen it. There couldn’t be many with a nearly new Jeep Renegade in the area. Andy had said at the time that she’d wasted her money. But surely if he had seen the Jeep and thought she was in the cemetery, he’d have left.

  Malcolm’s call came in as Toni was pulling into the police station car park.

  ‘Guv, we’ve got a witness, lives on the other side of Karen’s house. She says she heard Daniel and his mum going at it hammer and tongs on the night they died. Apparently, he called her a whore.’

  ‘Why didn’t she come forward before?’

  ‘She said they were always rowing so she thought nothing of it. Although he’d never used, as she put it, such filthy lan
guage before, it never occurred to her that Daniel was a suspect.’

  ‘Even though the local paper was calling him “the Boy Killer”?’ Toni never ceased to be amazed by Other People.

  ‘I got the impression she doesn’t go out much. I went to her house; there’s no telly and more books than a library.’

  ‘Did she notice any strange men? Any men at all?’

  ‘A man whose description fitted Ricky. She said he never got out of his car, he was dropping off the nice young man, as she put it. No one else, but I didn’t get the sense she’s the nosy neighbour type.’

  Toni took the stairs two at a time. Bursting into CID, she got Malcolm in stereo – over the phone and in front of her, where he was hunched over his desk. ‘…It’s pointing towards Daniel. We have him at the scene and it explains his crazy driving. Yes, there’s Ricky’s fingerprint, but he had a reason to be in the house.’

  ‘This case is closing itself,’ Toni agreed. Malcolm swivelled around in his seat and chucked down the phone. ‘Daniel – and perhaps Daisy – administered their own capital punishment.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say that Ricky was scared in that interview? Innocent scared not guilty scared. I don’t think it’s him.’ Malcolm continued, ‘Daniel murdered his mother in what amounts to a glorified domestic. A cliché of a tragedy.’ He abruptly zipped his chair across to the murder wall and, rising, tore down Daniel’s boy pop star picture. He sat looking at it.

  ‘I can see it.’ Sheena got up from her corner. ‘He bears her a grudge, grumbling away at him. Probably something stupid like wanting driving lessons, or to sleep with his lassie. His hormones are raging. Against his mother, against his boss. Sorry, guv, but being realistic, maybe he wasn’t as happy working with Ricky as Ricky was with him.’

  ‘We get used to seeing all sorts in the force.’ Toni’s lips pursed to stop the words Shut up, Sheena escaping. The woman got to her.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing for a boy to go to the bad like that.’ Malcolm was still looking at Daniel’s picture. Toni remembered that, while looking like a teenager himself, Malcolm’s own son was Daniel’s age.

  A speedy wrap-up was good for the team. Good for her record too. Later, when Toni was booking the pub’s function room to celebrate the end of the case, she reflected how, once upon a time, she’d have thought the world a better place without Karen Munday. Now, she would give anything for Karen and Daniel to still be living in that little house by the port.

  27

  FREDDY

  A wave smashed against the stone pier, the explosive spray obliterating the lighthouse and sending pebbles spraying like bullets over the esplanade. In gaps between onslaughts came the cry of the wind. A seagull blown off course recovered itself and swooped away over cliffs. The horizon was fuzzy grey. Sky and sea the same.

  Extreme weather inevitably attracted amateur photographers to the coast willing to dice with mortality for the perfect shot. Today the only person braving the beach carried no camera. They stumbled blindly in the lee of the cliffs.

  Freddy avoided the chunks of chalk that signalled the likelihood of more rockfalls. She’d put Sarah off for two days with the excuse that she needed space. She’d expected Sarah to argue – turn up on the doorstep – but Sarah had said she’d use the time to catch up on work. If she hadn’t been relieved, this might have roused Freddy’s suspicion.

  Freddy had come back to the battery. She hadn’t admitted – it was, after all, absurd – that she harboured the hope of finding Mags. Toni’s visit on Saturday night had brought alive their Mermaid days at the convent. That easy camaraderie, shared humour, shared experiences. Freddie didn’t have to describe her dad to Toni. She knew.

  Freddy couldn’t leave Newhaven until she’d seen Mags. That morning she had plucked up her courage and gone to the library to suggest they have lunch. Only to find it was closed. She’d peered in at the glass doors either side of the building but seen no staff inside. Mags hadn’t answered the buzzer to her flat either, even though Freddy was sure that she could see a light on inside. Neither had Mags replied to Freddy’s texts. Freddy couldn’t face the possibility that Mags’s silence meant she wanted to be left alone.

  Freddy gravitated to the lunette battery because, apart from the church, where else could she go? She had not gone to the church for fear of having to explain herself to Father Pete. The battery was where, in the dusk of a summer evening twenty-two years ago, she and Mags had done, as Toni had put it, the deed. They’d consummated their love. Freddy winced. Love? The last thing Mags had said to her on the day she’d left Newhaven was that they had committed a terrible sin.

  In daylight Freddy could see pools of brackish water on the floor of the battery. The walls were slimed with seaweed. Pressing her face to the grille, she found some shelter from the deafening tumult. As a girl, Mags had imagined the wind’s shrill whistle was the song of mermaids. Toni had said surf booming against the wall was the Devil’s drumbeat. Toni always brought the Devil into it.

  I love you, Freds. Mags had cradled Freddy’s head in her lap, stroking her hair, while Freddy pretended to be dead. No one else called her Freds. From that day, their friendship had segued into being lovers. At first, necessarily clandestine, it had been exciting. The heightened emotion dictated by secrecy was a drug of which Freddy couldn’t get enough. Without external opinion, their relationship was free from expectation; there had been none of that awkwardness with Rob from the youth club when each date was expected to end with clumsy kissing and groping. Had Mags been a boy, Freddy’s mum would have approved of their old-fashioned courting. But the fun of the hidden wore off and hindsight had shown Freddy it was toxic. A love kept secret feels barely true.

  That summer, the landscape golden in the setting sun, the sea a deep azure, Freddy’s life changed for ever. When she saw her for one last time, Freddy would ask Mags how happiness could be a sin.

  Something lay on the pebbles beyond the battery. A baby seagull storm-tossed from its nest, wing flapping. Freddy swallowed hard as she struggled towards it. She hated creatures to be hurt. Nearing it, she saw it wasn’t a bird, but a takeaway wrapper.

  Ever trying new apps, Sarah had added a litter-spotting app to Freddy’s phone. You snapped discarded crisp packets and uploaded the location onto a nationwide database. The idea was to shame manufacturers into reducing their plastic packaging.

  Eyes smarting in the salty air, Freddy was bent on achieving one good deed. It didn’t measure up to working in a soup kitchen, but might at least make her feel better. Freddy pushed against the wind, willing the rubbish not to whirl away before she reached it.

  Freddy crouched on the wet pebbles. It wasn’t rubbish. It was a book, pages flapping in the wind, not a broken wing. Revelations of Divine Love. Freddy knew the author only too well. Julian of Norwich. The saint who Toni reckoned Mags had chosen over Freddy.

  Pocketing her phone, Freddy gingerly examined the book. It was the same as the edition given out at Our Lady which Freddy had inadvertently abandoned on a train while they were still at school. Not exactly beach reading, and not in a ten-force gale. Who had dropped it? Several pages were mended with Sellotape, which had cracked and yellowed. The pages, damp and crinkled, bulked up the slim volume. If it had been washed up on the tide, it would have fallen apart. A hardback, it must have been dropped near where Freddy had found it, beyond the reach of the tide.

  There were initials on the fly leaf. MPTM. Freddy sat back on the shingle heavily. Margaret Pauline Theresa McKee. It was Mags’s actual copy. The paper was damp. Not wet.

  Mags must have dropped the book recently.

  *

  An elderly black woman was replenishing the votive candles. Freddy could see at once that Mags wasn’t in the church, but it felt rude to walk straight out again. She wandered up to the altar, suddenly aware of all the times she had come here. The lingering smell of incense, the musty prayer books – the place was part of her. How often had she received the host and felt blessed by
the warm touch of the priest’s finger on her forehead? She recalled the sensation of her dad holding her up to kiss the feet of Jesus on the cross held by the priest. Her mum forbade her to kiss the wood because of germs. When Freddy was a teenager, a deacon was ready with a disinfected cloth to wipe after the touch of the congregation’s lips. Freddy and her mum kept to air-kissing.

  The confessional was no longer used – for safeguarding reasons – but Freddy still imagined the dark box, light filtering through the grille, where every Christmas and Easter she confessed how she hated Ricky for messing with her make-up or her dad for hitting Andy. She made up false sins for Andy so he had something to tell the priest, usually Andy refusing to share sweets. Andy shared everything with her and had nothing to confess. But that would have made Fred Power even more angry with him.

  Newhaven had a long Catholic history. A couple of saints’ relics were locked away and brought out on saint’s days. Statuettes of saints and tableaux illustrating the stations of the cross were fixed to the walls. This was where Freddy would find Mags.

  The woman, in her sixties, her greying hair trimmed short, nodded a greeting at Toni. She placed a last candle in the rack and, taking a container holding spent night-lights, went off to the vestry.

  Two candles were newly lit. One was burning down. It could have been because Freddy was in the church where she’d spent her formative years or that she was clutching the damp volume by Julian of Norwich, but she was prompted to light a candle. Dropping a couple of pounds in the box, she took a wax spill, held it to the flame of one of the lighted candles and put it to the wick of another candle. It was for her mum. She executed the sign of the cross and blew out the spill.