Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  These drug dogs were absolutely bloody marvellous but he carried no Mamba or Spice on him this morning, easy enough though it was to pass it off as rolled tobacco.

  He decided to risk a bit of banter with the handler, nevertheless.

  ‘I hear that Dutch prisons have bought four sea eagle chicks. They want to train them up to attack rogue drones.’

  ‘You got that right, Inspector. We had a drone crash into the roof only last week. It tried to deliver drugs to a cell window in West Block. Now we’ve been told we might get a specialist unit of our own to bring them down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, it’s going to be called the ‘flying squad’.’

  ‘Seriously, two men have just been jailed at Luton Crown Court for trying to flood prisons across Suffolk and Kent with contraband worth £50,000, including drugs and phones. They flew them over the prison wall. Mind you, eagles are pie in the sky if you ask me.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘What kind of person thinks a bird can bring down a drone?’

  ‘A birdbrain.’

  *

  It was his first visit to HMPL…. and already he felt shut off, shut in and enclosed, thought Jorge. It was like being confined on board a submarine.

  Boots echoed emptily down corridors and doors clanged as though he had just joined the crew on some undersea voyage.

  Such was the formidable change in sound between ‘in’ and ‘out’ that every noise was magnified tenfold in a world so stark and bright. He flinched at each step, or rather its prequel. It was as though just before each boot hit the floor along the metal tunnel every man in his cell held his breath. He did the same.

  He took one look at the grubby chairs and declined to sit down.

  ‘I really don’t have much time to waste.’

  It was a reassuringly rotund prison chaplain called Hammond who directed them into the wing office.

  ‘That’s what I thought you’d say, Inspector.’

  ‘I’m here to speak to Frank Cordell, the child rapist who’s due for release on licence tomorrow.’

  ‘Damn right you are.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘As you say, Cordell’s free to go in the morning but here’s the rub: his beloved grandchild died last night from a bleed on the brain.’

  ‘Ironic, huh? But what’s that got to do with the purpose of my visit?’

  ‘I want to be honest with you, Inspector, someone has to break the bad news.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, that person is me?’

  ‘Nothing you can’t handle?’

  ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘I’d do it myself but as managing chaplain I have to meet the Governor for the daily briefing in five minutes.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  Jorge felt perspiration pour down his chest. That was another problem with being somewhat large and sartorially challenged, you could feel hot in all sorts of unexpected places. A lot of red, itchy spots began to prickle between his ‘moobs’.

  But Hammond wasn’t finished.

  ‘The thing is, Inspector, the guv nearly blew his lid when he heard you were coming. Never heard of a church detective before and doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Nor do I. I expected to be in charge of cathedral keys and security for VIPs.’

  ‘Just thought I’d warn you.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Heaven knows what that bastard Cordell will have to say to me anyway.’

  Hammond, playful as ever, landed a heavy pat on his upper arm. His face quizzed him with the same suspicious smile that he had displayed on first making his acquaintance. The truly personable did not give that smile, thought Jorge. It put him on guard. He clutched his file of paperwork ever more firmly under his arm. Set off fast down the corridor.

  ‘Hey, Inspector, guess what? Cordell has been asking after you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘By the hour.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘It’s not every day that someone agrees to pay a visit to a paedophile in prison. Actually, you could say you’re the talk of the town.’

  He might have guessed. News travelled fast in prison and even from prison to prison.

  *

  He was no fan of special care and segregation units but he did appreciate this one’s surgically sterile, anti-septic atmosphere. The pronounced tenseness in his leg muscles, that so threatened to upset his equilibrium, eased as he stepped over the threshold.

  He felt momentarily emboldened.

  But the suggestion that he was here to depend on some sort of testimony from the old man who sat at the table in front of him seemed ludicrous. The hideously conspicuous scars on his forehead, the tattoos on his knuckles, the one good, hard green eye, lent him all the attributes of a pathetic old whaler no longer able to go after his quarry.

  Before he sat down he wiped the chair with a tissue.

  ‘Hallo Frank, my name is Inspector Jorge Winter.’

  ‘You here about your brother, Inspector? Please tell me you are.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Frank, but I have bad news.’

  Cordell’s face fell. When someone was incarcerated for years they lost out on just about everything. Since they lost out on so much, there was always a lot to desire. They had to make do with wild promises to themselves and other people. But if they had someone special to look forward to when they were freed, they could at least reassure themselves that they had something to salvage in the future.

  ‘Don’t tell me. My grandson Alex is dead?’

  ‘Last night. I’m so sorry, he collapsed at home in Bristol. An ambulance rushed him to Southmead Hospital, but to no avail.’

  Cordell pressed both hands to his face. The horrible twist in his nose, the loss of an eye, only emphasised the physical manifestation of pure wretchedness. He rose from his chair, Jorge from his.

  Cordell banged his fists on the table. He leaned straight ahead. Stared into thin air. Jorge took a step backwards and kept the table between them, as the other man tried to circle it and him – his sudden move caught him seriously off guard.

  ‘Damn you, Inspector. May you all rot in hell for keeping me from him.’

  ‘Really? It’s my fault now?’

  Any other person would have told him, ‘Now you know what it feels like to see your own suffer,’ but he didn’t. Of course the grandson’s demise was a cruel blow, but what was he to say?

  Cordell was already out of breath. Having held cruel sway over children, a child now held sway over him.

  He looked doubly unwell as he paled but refused to sit down.

  ‘Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for that boy, Inspector. Now it’s too fucking late. What’s the point of getting out of here now?’

  ‘It’s God’s will.’

  ‘He told me he’d set things right. He promised me that he had a plan. And he did, but he fucking well let me down.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘That fucking priest who was the prison chaplain. Your brother.’

  ‘Brother as in the church. We’re not related.’

  ‘He’s betrayed me, Inspector. Oh, I can tell you a thing or two about him. You should go after him straightaway.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Are you not here to catch one of your own since he strayed?’

  ‘That’s not what I asked. I’m here to find out why you have the effrontery to keep writing such abusive letters to the Bishop of Gloucester. In them you swear that you’ll go to the press if no one listens to you. You say that Reverend Luke Lyons isn’t dead. So where in God’s name is he?’

  *

  Most people simply forgot each other after decades apart. It was easier. But sometimes there was one person on whom you never quite gave up? Luke was like that, thought Jorge, walking out of the prison. Perhaps it had something to do with having known one another when boys. It never totally went away but resided in some dark part of your soul. The joy. The understanding. The sympathy. The forgiveness.

  But ho
w did anyone get back to it? To this shared beginning? Which ship took you home? Back into yourself? The most mysterious of voyages on the most secret of currents – into your own heart.

  2

  It was Easter Monday 2016 and Rev. ‘Lucky’ Luke Lyons had just walked out of Wandsworth Prison on this, his last full day in London. It was his 35 th birthday. Perhaps because he was skin and bone the sudden chill hit him hard.

  One hour later he arrived home just as Storm Katie struck London. She tore up trees, felled power lines and diverted aircraft on her rampage to the North Sea while the Dartford Crossing in Kent had to be closed, as did the Severn Road Bridge in Gloucestershire. A roof blew off just round the corner from where he rented his flat in Vauxhall.

  ‘Steady, Sasha. ‘Sash’? Do stop barking. It won’t help.’

  His miniature Bull Terrier flattened her ears. She left the windowsill and its panoramic view of the Thames. Let droop her thin, rat-like tail. She trembled at the strange mood in the air as much as he did.

  Her small dark eyes stared straight at him with an anxious meanness.

  Roused to fight or flight by all the thunder and lightning, it was difficult to dissuade her from constantly growling. He was used to that growl: she had been kept in a cage for three years by her so-called owners who had, one day, donated her to an unimpressed seller of The Big Issue outside Waterloo railway station.

  Which was when he had stepped forward to make his modest donation to a cause close to his heart. She had followed him home in the pouring rain.

  He still had to take her from place to place and show her things such as cars and pushchairs, because she had not really been out in the world. Her behaviour could be vicious in public, but no more so than was consistent with terror.

  He had no cause to suppose she was beyond all hope, thought Luke. Had not so far regretted giving his fellow loner a fresh start in life.

  Until he’d come along she hadn’t even had a name.

  He was not one to believe that weather could be demonic, but he did wonder if something akin to a malevolent spirit had set foot on land as he listened to two tenants squawk in the flat directly below him.

  It had to be because of them that Sasha was so fidgety lately? She was shocked and unnerved, not simply by the fact that both young men were mentally disturbed (they had recently been rehoused by the local council and with them came the stink of vomit on the stairs), but by the desperation with which they howled.

  It sounded like wolves.

  Luke could share their fright, if not their plight, when he switched on his TV set to drown out their noise.

  A face appeared on the screen.

  Blue-black eyes, uncannily like his own, stared directly at him through a fringe of hair that was dyed bright purple.

  Clearly some elderly expat was being interviewed via satellite link to Spain? The matriarch looked, by her relaxed attitude on the studio couch, very proud of herself and appeared to relish all the attention.

  The eager young TV presenter fired questions at her.

  ‘So, Ms Jessica Kennedy, you admit it’s true that between 1971 and 1981 you and your gang stole pictures and antiques worth millions of pounds from English country houses, but only a tenth of it has ever been retrieved? How is that possible, by the way?’

  ‘What the hell!’ cried Luke.

  Alarmed, he took to pulling at his clerical collar before it choked him. ‘Hell doesn’t even begin to cover it!’

  He felt like a rabbit frozen in the glare of someone’s car headlights.

  The interviewee broke into a broad smile.

  ‘Please, dear, call me Jess. As to your query you’d have to ask my ex-boyfriend. He buried the loot somewhere thirty-five years ago.’

  He leaned closer to her in his horror.

  ‘That’ll be Rex Lyons? He’s your lover and partner in crime?’

  ‘Technically. He’s dead.’

  ‘So, Jess, how come Rex had the stolen goods and you didn’t?’

  Jessica blinked her false eyelashes for the benefit of the camera.

  ‘Or maybe the fact that I got caught by the police a few hours before he did says something?’

  ‘That’ll be after your last raid in 1981? That was the night a pregnant woman was fatally wounded, was it not?’

  ‘The thing is, dear, I should be plain with all those watching in the UK right now, with the toffs as well as the cops, that no one ever set out to take a pop at anyone…’

  ‘Possibly Lady Sara Greene wouldn’t agree with you?’

  ‘Who cares? She died.’

  ‘You say you never meant to kill anyone?’

  ‘Okay, dear, it’s just that if there was a need to protect ourselves when robbing someone’s obscenely big house, then we would do so. Rex only ever reacted because Lady Sara gave us no choice. We had to defend ourselves against someone who thought nothing of shooting the likes of us simply because we’d invaded their home. I mean, everyone has the fucking right to kill or be killed, don’t they, when some Sir or Lady points their shotgun at you?’

  Still Luke refused to avert his gaze from the beaming face on the TV screen. With her absurdly coloured perm and brash sapphire rings on all her fingers, Jessica did her best to portray herself as a charmless but harmless old lady who smiled straight into the camera’s lens and showed off her cleavage.

  Her shamelessness shamed him. He quickly became conscious of how fast his heart was beating, how recklessly. The rise in pulse rate was not exactly inexplicable yet grew steadily more violent. He sat on a chair and the hammering in his chest subsided. When he tried to ease the pain in his side, it pounded.

  The interviewer’s face adopted a slightly bemused expression as he addressed his next killer question.

  ‘Judge Alexander Bristow, when he sentenced you and your gang for the raids, was pretty damning, was he not? This is one of the worst instances of aggravated burglary I have ever seen come before this court. Most of the property has not been recovered and is doubtless well concealed in the Gloucestershire countryside or passed on for disposal. Your mockery of the police is indicative of your contempt for the law. You have no respect for people’s lives or property so I have no alternative but to impose very serious sentences. ’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, dear.’

  ‘Just to recap, you also targeted shops, did you not? For instance, you and your gang stole a lot of Waterford crystal and Royal Doulton china from four stores in Warwickshire. That haul alone was worth £150,000.’

  ‘It’s not a good thing, dear. I mean we did an awful lot of thieving back then. But the judge didn’t come down so hard on us because of a few shops, it’s because of the rich people we robbed.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Jessica leaned back from the camera. Her long black, curving eyelashes blinked faster in the harsh studio lights as though she was, after all, nervous of being exposed to the media at her age. She was sixty-seven, she admitted sheepishly. Her picture had been in all the British newspapers lately which was how everyone, including him, knew her face as the onetime head of Britain’s number 1 crime family of the 1970s and 80s, now living in exile on Spain’s Costa Del Sol.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Jessica. ‘I can’t have been such a bad mother, can I? Not when my daughter Ellie is about to get married and my son has gone into the church. So, Luke, dear boy, if you’re watching this now, please know that mummy is coming home for your sister’s wedding.’

  3

  Jorge righted one of the segregation unit’s hard plastic chairs and ordered Cordell to do the same. To his surprise the prisoner, wearing his regulation yellow vest, obeyed, but not before he exuded that peculiar smell of all those who were on HMPL….’s programme to come off heroin.

  It was hard not to turn up his nose at the stench of methadone.

  ‘You’re messing with the wrong man, Frank. You hear me?’

  ‘That’s funny. Reverend ‘Lucky’ Luke Lyons said the same thing.’

&nbs
p; ‘Don’t call him that. That man is gone.’

  ‘Really, Inspector? And if you catch up with him, dead or alive, how do you think he’ll feel?’

  ‘Redeemed.’

  Cordell raised his head and his one good, bloodshot eye focused on his face.

  ‘ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and dust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal . Matthew 6:19.’

  ‘I’m not following you.’

  ‘Now that I literally have your attention, Inspector, let’s talk man to man. Stop me if you don’t already know that Reverend Lyons’s mother and father were fucking celebrities? They burgled the rich and famous. Rex Lyons and Jess Kennedy amassed themselves a fortune. We’re talking national treasures worth millions.’

  ‘It’s all in my file.’

  ‘Shocked, are you?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  ‘Your missing priest has a black heart. Want me to go on?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what you’re insinuating.’

  ‘Rev. Luke must have found it very hard to grow up in the shadow of his parents’ glamourous past, don’t you think? His father, in particular, was such a hard act to follow. I bet he resented his old man something rotten. Now he’s gone back to the Devil.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  ‘But this is what you are here to determine, isn’t it, Inspector?’

  ‘In a very broad sense.’

  Cordell changed tack most wilfully, Jorge noticed. His wall eye never blinked, but that settled nothing.

  He narrowed his own chestnut coloured eyes and gripped his chair’s seat to confront what he was sure would turn out to be total nonsense.

  Back in the day he was always standing up for Luke’s bad behaviour. The petty lies. The minor thefts. He’d do it now, if he could. Adults never understood his loyalty at the time. They hated it. What they couldn’t accept was that a vicar’s son could like someone so bad and vice versa. It broke all the rules.

  Genes had to be a factor, though, in everyone. In his own case he had an unexpected ancestry via his mother’s side, hence the spelling of his name. It was said that he was called Jorge after a famous seventeenth century Portuguese pirate who had been in the family. He doubted this version of events because not only did ‘Jorge’ derive from the Greek name ‘georgos’ meaning farmer, but he could find no record of any pirate named ‘George’, no matter what the spelling, in the history books. He liked to think, nevertheless, that his fiery temperament, if not his fastidious side, derived from his mysterious Mediterranean blood.