Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  Jorge fretted and frowned, not just because of what Rex said but because he did not dislike the face that said it. This crook had loved his family very much. He saw not a thing to disprove it. Discount the wild disregard and contemptuous callousness and he could have been looking at Luke himself. Father and son shared the same good looks. Rex was a powerful thug, with muscles well honed by exercise and bodybuilding drugs. He saw the gang’s trademark tattoo of a giant, serpent-like Sabrina round his neck, just inside his smart shirt collar.

  His face was jokey and jovial when he chatted to the pretty waitress in the Berkeley tearooms, but dark and agitated as soon as the door opened and someone else entered.

  ‘I don’t want Luke or Ellie to have it as hard as I did,’ said Rex. ‘I don’t want them to be seen as somehow non-people because their parents have behaved a little bit differently.’

  While he could not help but dismiss Rex’s complaints as the selective recollections of a criminal mind, Jorge did raise his eyebrows when he came to his criminal record. Rex had set fire to the dormitory while in a youth custody centre. Acquired twenty convictions for fifty-six offences in a few years. After that, snuffboxes worth £5.5 million were taken from a National Trust property in Buckinghamshire. Silverware, porcelain and clocks worth £800,000 were stolen from a Formula One tycoon’s house near Swindon.

  Other burglaries followed. Right from the start he and his fellow thieves called themselves the Severn Sea Gang. Sheer daring gave him his appalling cockiness, while all the time the base from which his fearless raids were launched remained a modest caravan site in Gloucestershire.

  Jorge curled his lip a trifle grimly. Rex’s favourite way of breaking and entering was to tie a section of telegraph pole to the roof rack of a Land Rover and batter his way into a manor house as if it were a castle. Nor had he been indifferent to his hauls: ‘I love old things. I went to all sorts of museums and auctions and collected their catalogues.’

  When the end came, it came swiftly. Police forces from Gloucestershire, Thames Valley, Warwickshire and West Mercia joined forces to hunt the robbers down.

  That’s when the Lyons’s family caravan was raided next to the River Severn. ‘Armed cops burst in everywhere,’ said Rex. ‘They shoved a gun in my mouth. My mother as well as my girlfriend, Jess, were terrified. The press never gave me and the rest of the gang a chance. We were all named and shamed before it got to trial. It was all a conspiracy by the upper classes to bring us down. I was afraid that Jess would miscarry with the twins, just like my mum.’

  Rex was convinced that someone had betrayed them. He had no idea who it was but one day he and Jess would get even: ‘The courts should never have believed a word that snitch said. They used him to get at me. It was unfair.’

  The interview ended abruptly, but not before the journalist managed to elicit details of how Lady Sara Greene had come to be shot dead in Rex’s last, botched burglary in Wiltshire. ‘Imagine, if you can, that you’re in some rich mansion and you see a burglar rush at the lady of the house and shoot her. What just happened, you wonder? You think he’s killing her in cold blood in order to escape. Well, you haven’t nearly seen it all. In fact, the burglar with the gun has noticed the lady about to fire at his girlfriend and kill her. He rushes between them and saves her life. The unfortunate thing is, in all the tussle, the gun goes off and fatally wounds the lady. Context is everything. The courts were totally against me and Jess and all because Lady Greene was nine months pregnant, but Jess was pregnant, too, and that should have been taken into consideration. Jess had to have her babies, Luke and Ellie, in prison. But no, it was a callous, heartless act on our part, apparently. No one in the court gave her a single thought.’

  If Luke had been his childhood friend, thought Jorge, it was because Luke had been the next generation of the Lyons family. Gone was his father’s self-righteous accusations of constant persecution. Mostly. In their place he had met a lonely boy whose mother wanted nothing to do with him and whose father was in prison.

  When Luke had visited Hill House vicarage all silver had been locked away. He had come with the burden of his father’s reputation – anyone foolish enough to give evidence against the Lyons family was forced into witness protection for their own safety. Those less brave were sworn to silence.

  Yet Luke had held him in some esteem, thought Jorge. How could he explain it? Back then he saw nothing in himself to indicate any godly calling. They had once stolen a wheelchair from outside a house and thrown it in the river.

  Asked to justify himself, Luke had said nothing while he’d sobbed in fear of his father’s next savage beating.

  This was the same Luke who’d won a place at Lydney Grammar School in time for his eleventh birthday, only to drop out of classes after little more than a month or two. Rex had by then been murdered in prison. Thus did history repeat itself: at about the same age, Rex had ‘gone off the rails’ when his father had disappeared in the river in 1960.

  Still no adult then could entirely account for Luke’s change in character.

  But he could, thought Jorge, he had an idea why he had turned so violent, so suddenly.

  It had little to do with like father, like son.

  Once, when he had found Luke sobbing alone by the hulks on the riverbank, he hinted at something that had ‘fucking shipwrecked’ his life.

  He should have tried to get more out of him but he was a child then, too.

  When he asked him what he meant, Luke cut short his inquiry with a cry of his own. He spat three words, only:

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  27

  The sun set on his rusty Land Rover as Luke drove along the winding lanes that led the short distance from Hill House to the hamlet of Shepperdine.

  No fond memory should have such splendid views across the Severn and yet be so shattering. The vista was a cruel dream.

  Why choose to resurrect childish recollections by a return so reckless?

  Yet it all looked so beautiful as a great flock of dunlin and knot wheeled and turned like smoke across the River Severn before they chose to roost for the night along its shore.

  He was in a half-remembered land of grassy fields next to reed beds and silt lagoons as he took his bearings from a big white building. It was said that it had started life as a fisherman’s cottage but later became The New Inn. Bargees had moored their boats there to drink their beer. Not that it had kept its first name for long. Given a strong north westerly wind it could be nigh impossible to leave the shore again.

  According to his grandmother’s stories many a bargee had stayed for ‘one more pint, please’. They claimed that the wind was far too strong to set sail on the river.

  So much so that the pub had changed its name to The Windbound. It had been a local joke for years.

  He, too, had gone there to slake his thirst, long ago.

  But there would be no beer for him tonight. The land was earmarked for Oldbury B station and its new reactors.

  On one of the derelict inn’s walls there resided a very large red and white sign that said FOR SALE, although he knew for a fact that the site had already been sold to H – Nuclear Power.

  Rumour had it that the former inn would be a pile of rubble by December.

  As would nearby Chapel Cottage, if he had his way.

  ‘Come along Sash. Be quick. Let’s get this over with.’

  Several placards said No To Nuclear in the fields. A lot of good people had reason to hate him now. All he had to do was to sign on the dotted line and his grandmother’s home would join the vast site for redevelopment. No need to delay further since the last piece in a very valuable jigsaw lay within his grasp.

  It was one reason why he had thought twice before coming here tonight. It would do no good to advertise his presence to hostile neighbours.

  He glanced at his newly acquired pocket watch after a few strides.

  There was still time.

  *

  The Church of St. Mary the Virgin at S
hepperdine had never lost its walls of corrugated galvanized iron, although originally it had been designed to be rebuilt in solid brick or stone. Its sides resembled tin, hence the church’s other name of ‘the tin tabernacle’. It resembled the tents once used as a sanctuary before the final settlement of Jews in Palestine; it had been erected hurriedly about a hundred years ago to cater for an upsurge in religious belief. Such huts had also been shipped out to the colonies.

  With its three fancy finials, red tiles and freshly painted weather boarding, it made a cheerful refuge in the gloom.

  Luke found a cluster of old-fashioned Bakelite switches which worked the lights and wiped his feet on a rug on his way in.

  ‘Ian Grey? You there? It’s me, Reverend Lyons.’

  Two bulbs glowed in white shades in the three-sided roof whose brown, varnished planks resembled the hull of a capsized boat not far above his head. Conversely, bare boards creaked beneath his heels. It was, in reality, more like boarding a very old tram.

  He looked quickly round. Seven rows of hard wooden seats lined the walls whose square, plain glass windows gave little sign that he was anywhere overtly religious. Another blue and white rug covered part of the floor at the other end of the ‘car’. He was deeply impressed by its simplicity, but being conscious of the actual reason why he was there, he struggled to explain the uneasy feeling with which it filled him now. He could only say for certain that so far he was altogether alone.

  A very plain altar with a cross and a pair of candlesticks was draped in a pale, floral cloth. Someone had filled two blue vases with fresh, wet seaweed and mistletoe.

  With them came the smell of a pungent perfume whose briny taste dissolved salt on his tongue.

  He walked past the blue satin cloth that dangled down the front of a lectern-cum-pulpit when something else caught his eye.

  On a front pew rested a wooden collection plate. Devoid of coins, it contained a little piece of rolled paper.

  On the scroll was a name.

  *

  The tiny church immediately turned unbearably claustrophobic. Luke hurried outside. There, he found Sasha sniffing at a line of stepping stones that led across the grass.

  He could see muddy footprints lit by the glow of the lamp above the chapel’s porch. Whoever had entered and then left the church had done so just before him. They’d headed towards the river.

  He decided to follow. There was a stillness in the air which came with the darker side of twilight.

  It was, he told himself, simply because everything was so quiet.

  At his back lay the grassy fields, hedges and orchards full of mistletoe, but a few yards before him stretched another, entirely different world of reed beds and silt lagoons. Dangerous routes led across the River Severn at such places and times as this, that’s to say at low tide. The Romans, too, had learnt to wade in and out of the shifting sandbanks and gravel beds long before any proper bridges had been built. They had followed the local cattle drovers as they herded their animals from one side of the estuary to the other in order to shorten their journey to market.

  The sensation was uncanny. The longer he stood in silence under the vast night sky, the more he convinced himself that someone else passed by. He heard in front of him the tread of footsteps, steady, purposeful, into the estuary!

  ‘Ian? Is that you? It’s me, Luke Lyons.’

  Someone was wading mud and water?

  He heard them rattle dead bulrushes.

  Whoever knew such secret ways could walk across the river on the remains of weed-covered ‘fencing’ woven from hazel, he fancied. It was into such conical traps that men had once driven salmon. Built to catch fish on the ebb tide, oak, larch or elm staves were driven into the riverbed to build weir-like hedges that were twice the height of a human being and stretched far out into the estuary. Such traditions went back to the 5th century. Then, with a shiver, he gave a nervous cough. He gave up trying to listen to ‘nothing’.

  Sasha, too, suddenly barked at the vast emptiness.

  Luke gave her a pat on the back. Whoever walked on water in the dark was not Ian Grey.

  Tonight would not be the night that he learnt the significance of his grandfather’s pocket watch? Nor could he ask about Slim Jim Jackson.

  He opened his hand. Unrolled the piece of paper that bore his name.

  On it were four hastily written words:

  RUN FROM THIS PLACE

  28

  If food were a drug then it was also his best friend, thought Jorge as he sat up in bed, sweating. He was in need of some sort of detox.

  Definitely was he missing his classic full English breakfast.

  There was something addictive about the sight of pork sausages, eggs, thick-cut bacon, grilled tomato, hash brown, beans and sourdough bread.

  Of one thing he was cruelly aware: such hallucinations of good food still visited him in his dreams. His favourite start to the day, when living in York, had been a particularly mouth-watering combination of orange and cinnamon sugar torrijas with smoked bacon, crème fraiche, toasted almonds and maple syrup.

  Right now he could taste wonderful things in his chewed up pillow.

  Instead of which it was Day Six of his cabbage soup diet.

  No wonder he didn’t want to leave his bed.

  Today was the day he could eat as much protein as he liked, though, which meant steak and leafy greens.

  Praise be.

  He stumbled into Hill House’s bathroom to shave where, critically, he regarded himself in the mirror. His fat jowls looked like a squirrel’s. Their entire disposition struck an attitude that was of smug but unsettling defiance.

  ‘You think I look a bit thinner today?’

  At his feet Sasha rolled her eyes. Her look, her stance, the droop in her tail, these were all sympathetic demonstrations of the subtle difference between a whine and a whimper.

  Sam Rooke’s messianic bonfire of Luke’s effects suggested that the gardener knew more than he cared to admit about why he wanted to destroy such valuable evidence, Jorge concluded.

  The pyromaniac had in no way misunderstood some vague instruction to tidy the house, but had set about it with a fiery vengeance as if to eradicate some definite evil. Surely it was the thought of not finishing the task that had filled his eyes with such obstreperousness, which explained why he had not yet returned to dig the celery trenches, as promised.

  Next minute the phone rang.

  It was Hammond.

  ‘Guess what, Inspector? The police in Bristol are convinced that Frank Cordell leapt off that roof all by himself. He was high on Black Mamba, apparently.’

  Jorge gave a snort.

  ‘Frank was in a very bad way but trust me, the only leap he ever meant to make was into the dark by meeting me. I arrived too late to save him, thanks to a real suicide off Clifton Suspension Bridge. There’s something more we need to know, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I did some digging like you said, Inspector.’

  ‘Very well, let’s hear it.’

  ‘It seems Frank did a bit of excavating himself.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Seriously, he was twice fined and then ‘sent down’ for digging up archaeologically important wrecks along the River Severn. He’s been at it for years, on and off, between spells in prison.’

  ‘I know the place very well, at Purton. Did he say what he was really doing there, at all?’

  ‘Nothing was found on him but he’d cleared a very deep trench next to one of the keels.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘It seems the fool really did believe in buried treasure.’

  ‘Did you get to look in HMPL…’s visitors’ book for me?’

  ‘Honestly, Inspector, I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘The woman who visited Cordell early last year signed her name all right. Guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was Jessica Kennedy.’

  A sharp intake of bre
ath hit the back of his throat.

  ‘Not a redhead, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rex’s ex-girlfriend visited Frank in prison? What for? I thought she spent all her time sunning herself on the Costa Del Sol?’

  ‘It must have been for old times’ sake?’

  ‘No, she wanted you to think that.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Jessica Kennedy wouldn’t bother to visit an old lag like Frank Cordell without a very good reason all of her own.’

  ‘She did that interview last year on TV, remember, Inspector. She bragged about all the loot that she and her hubby stole.’

  ‘She’s not the only one in the Lyons family to crave celebrity status.’

  ‘Better ask her yourself, then.’

  ‘Her villa in Spain won’t answer my calls.’

  ‘Sounds like sour grapes.’

  A curse died on his lips.

  *

  Jorge donned his black cap and blue sweater as he and Sasha set out to walk the extensive estate that surrounded the vicarage.

  Windblown branches of several fir trees began to scratch, rub and groan at their approach. The sound somehow made him uneasy, but no one on a manhunt with God’s rich bounty in mind could permit himself to baulk at the gloominess of somewhere quite so secluded.