Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea Read online

  Next he added onions, bell peppers and carrots. His intention was to saute them until tender, after which he would stir in some garlic. A chicken broth lay beside him ready for the cabbage.

  He bared both arms. Donned his spotless white apron.

  He was, in the guise of some bold alchemist, striving to experiment – which went some way to explain the horror of his creation.

  ‘Large I may be but I will not be demonised. The real demon is sugar. It’s the new Satan.’

  He reached for his recently acquired spiraliser which was particularly useful for ruining perfectly good courgettes that all food bloggers were now eating. Were these not the same young, beautiful people who wanted him to eat chia seeds by the handful? Such bird food set him thinking.

  ‘If I had to hazard a guess, Sasha, I’d say that should Luke ever come back to life he’ll return home here. To Hill House. What else can I say? Do the dead even need food and drink to sustain them?’

  On the shelves were the missing man’s cans of fruit and baked beans whose expiry dates had years to run.

  Sasha whined. Wrinkled her nose. Flicked an ear.

  ‘Yes, of course I can smell it, but where is it coming from? Who’s the culprit here?’

  Next minute he was striding, still draped in his apron, as far as the main reception room where he looked in.

  No spark had leapt from the enormous gilded chimney piece to set fire to rug or furniture, thank goodness. Still the smell of smoke intensified. He continued along the corridor to its end. He rattled double doors. Worked their wonky handles.

  Sasha whined to be let out to the terrace beyond. Jorge followed. Big, fluttering, grey and white petals immediately stuck to his blue NATO-style sweater and crisply ironed black trousers. They were whisked his way on the wind like the last cherry blossoms off the trees in the garden – they stuck, most annoyingly, to his highly polished black boots and even his apron.

  It was hot ash.

  Sasha hurried past the clipped pyramids of yew that flanked one corner of the house.

  He shared her dogged indignation.

  ‘Not so fast. Be careful.’

  The midday sun had yet to shine through the smoky fir trees, he discovered, with a shiver.

  His parents might have emigrated to Portugal in 2005, but the 18 th century sundial still stood on the lawn covered in daisies and a pair of equally old, stone piers supported metal gates of a former carriage entrance. Tall urns stood atop the garden walls and commemorated in their patterns of stone and yellow lichen the union of ancient families by marriage. Hill House boasted a history far beyond that of a simple vicarage which, even while growing up here, he had never bothered to unravel.

  The unnatural ambivalence that he felt towards his gloomy childhood home was as nothing to the outrage that gripped him now.

  Volcanic red flame erupted within the brick confines of the kitchen garden. Sure enough, a man dressed in old clothes and Wellingtons stood by a large black oil drum in which the blaze was imprisoned.

  A captain’s cap shaded the arsonist’s eyes as he went on picking things out of a large wheelbarrow. Paintings of shipwrecks came apart from their frames in his hands. Stuffed fish lay half out of their cases at his feet.

  Before each bout of firing he took a swig from his silver flask.

  ‘Luke, dear friend? That you?’ cried Jorge.

  The stoker removed his cap and scratched his broad forehead. Long white hair hung in a ponytail at the back of his neck. His beard was equally white, his large eyes very alert, his skin a mass of wrinkles which the smoke was busy tanning the colour of old leather. In height he was not very tall with very straight shoulders – not an old salt of the sea, after all, as he resorted to his wheelbarrow for more fuel.

  ‘My name is Sam Rooke. Who are you?’

  Jorge covered his nose and mouth with a tissue to combat the fumes.

  ‘Never mind who I am, what are you doing in Reverend Lyons’s garden?’

  ‘I’m his gardener.’

  ‘Doesn’t explain why you are burning his books and pictures?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘He tell you to do it?’

  ‘What gives you the right to interfere?’

  ‘How did you get into the house?’

  ‘I have a key. You?’

  ‘I’m Inspector Jorge Winter and I’m here to investigate Reverend Lyons’s disappearance.’

  ‘You working for God or the Devil?’

  ‘If you’re so keen to listen to idle gossip then you’ll know that I’m in charge of Gloucester Cathedral’s private police force. I’ll investigate you, if necessary.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you can stop me doing my job, Inspector.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you can destroy Reverend Luke’s things.’

  ‘Well, you’re too late. I’m doing all that needs to be done right now. It’s going up in flames as we speak.’

  Jorge flinched at the pyromaniac’s hostile gaze.

  ‘Fact is, Mr Rooke, Rev. Luke Lyons and I grew up together around here.’

  Rooke extended his hand to the fire and dangled a book over it with a momentary pause of apparent anguish.

  ‘He ever bring you here, at all, Inspector?’

  ‘I brought him. Back then, I was the local vicar’s son. This was my home, not his.’

  ‘And now he’s not here any more, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I’m here to establish whether anyone contributed to his untimely demise.’

  ‘Oh, so you do think there was foul play, then, do you?’

  He smiled vaguely. The notion that Luke might have been murdered was still a consideration of his.

  ‘It is important for the Church to know for certain that no claims can be brought against it in the light of some sort of preventable accident.’

  With that, Rooke let slip the book he was holding.

  ‘Give the Devil his due is more like it.’

  ‘No one wants to be accused of vicarious liability, let alone contributory or criminal negligence.’

  The book burned bright in the flames.

  ‘You really do think it was murder not accident or suicide, Inspector?’

  ‘For the sake of Reverend Lyons’s soul, I hope to prove something.’

  Rooke scratched his nose somewhat violently.

  ‘Sounds ambitious.’

  ‘It all comes down to burden of proof. Normally one thing that might assist me would be the doctrine of res ipsa loquitor. It means ‘the matter speaks for itself’.’

  ‘Sorry, Inspector, you’ve lost me there.’

  ‘If Reverend Lyons was killed through the gross negligence of another it may constitute the criminal offence of manslaughter. However, since the police have no evidence to suggest that he was ‘murdered’ any proof of how he did come to die must be on the balance of probabilities. If he was not pushed and he did not mean to kill himself, something else must have induced him to venture too close to the river?’

  ‘Damn it, Inspector. A man like that does as he likes.’

  ‘You last saw him when, exactly?’

  Wood, glass and varnish crackled as the stuffed fish joined the inferno. Then, seeing that his job had been fatally interrupted, Rooke backed away from the hellish inferno.

  ‘I last saw Reverend Lyons with Barbara Jennings on the morning of the day he disappeared. I was watering plants in the greenhouse over there when they walked together through the garden. She was very agitated about something. I didn’t distinctly hear what she said but she was asking for some kind of forgiveness.’

  ‘His or God’s?’

  ‘Ask her yourself, Inspector. She rents a place in the village by the name of Angel Cottage.’

  ‘How did Reverend Lyons appear to you in the weeks or days before he vanished? Was he upset or ill? Did he have financial troubles? Was he, by any chance, a gambler or womaniser? More significantly, how strong was his faith, do you think? Had he begun to doubt his own calling
?’

  Rooke’s eyes were evasive, his gait awkward, his fingers flexed as if to re-enforce his own calm.

  ‘I’d say he was a man possessed.’

  ‘Interesting. Was it connected to what Barbara Jennings told him?’

  ‘Reverend Lyons had become preoccupied with something about the River Severn – or the Severn Sea, as he liked to call it. Then Sabrina visited the vicarage.’

  ‘Would that be the shipping magnate Sabrina ap Loegres, by any chance?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I read about her in a magazine.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know what she saw in him apart from their shared interest in sailing ships.’

  Jorge picked ash off his sweater. Whatever he did it would now stink of smoke forever, he feared.

  ‘Loegres is an unusual name, is it not?’

  Rooke raised a finger to stab his point home.

  ‘That’s not the most mysterious thing about her, if you ask me.’

  ‘So where can I find her?’

  ‘You can’t. She lives abroad or sails the oceans.’

  ‘Does she have flaming red hair?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Never mind that now.’

  ‘Intend to stay here long, do you, Inspector?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Rooke with a shudder. ‘I moved out of my cottage in the grounds two weeks ago. Doubt if any man can live here by himself, now.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  At that moment Rooke’s phone rang in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll be back later, Inspector, to dig the celery trenches.’

  ‘Celery?’

  ‘You can say. It should have been sown by now. There’s nothing like food you love, is there? This garden should be kept alive, if nothing else.’

  ‘Why bother if Reverend Lyons has gone forever?’

  ‘You don’t like celery, Inspector? The Captain does. He absolutely loves it. This year he wants me to grow the old-fashioned type. It’s not self-blanching.’

  So saying, Rooke stepped through the doorway in the kitchen garden’s red brick wall and vanished.

  Jorge gave a whistle. He’d come to Berkeley intending to perform a miracle. Since he now knew that he could not simply summon Luke out of thin air, he began to worry in earnest that he had not only performed a remarkable vanishing act but something almost supernatural. Outside the ordinary operation of cause and effect.

  ‘This way, Sasha. You and I need to take another look at Hill House before our gardener friend deliberately destroys any more clues with his crazy exorcisms.’

  Sasha cocked her head on one side and shook ash off her ears. Suddenly the senseless, risky bravado was all his. He did try to justify himself to her, but straightway was he subjected to her scornful silence.

  It was the same dubious look she gave him when he announced a new diet, except for one thing: she was aware, like him, that for all Sam Rooke’s talk of Rev. Luke Lyons’s murder, he still spoke about him in the present tense.

  20

  The frustration in the burglar’s voice was plain to hear.

  ‘It has to be here, damn it. Was he not always banging on about fucking ‘Treasure Island’?’

  He was baffled by the sheer number of books in front of him, Luke observed as he took a cautious step forward along the vicarage’s wide, dark corridor.

  Sasha’s growl broke the otherwise profound silence.

  Next moment he issued his own separate challenge.

  ‘Do me a favour. Tell me what you think you’re doing in my home?’

  The response was immediate.

  The bullet-headed phantom dived for the icy rain through the open doorway – his sprint into the wet night was a professional exit with a knowledge of Hill House that was a dire test of his hospitality.

  ‘Now! Go get him, Sash!’

  The moon cleared black clouds as Luke heard the fugitive’s fading cries. In the meantime he began to retrieve books getting wet on the floor in the corridor.

  First in his hand was ‘Coral Island’ by R.M. Ballantyne complete with coloured plates of ‘the wonderful cavern’ and pirates on board the mission schooner.

  ‘Captain Singleton’ came next, a tale of piracy and unexplored Africa by Daniel Defoe.

  Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ was more realistic.

  He soon discovered that Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, alone of the scattered volumes, had not been torn apart in mindless rage.

  But before he could attempt to explain such wanton destruction, he was recalled to the patio door by Sasha who stood whining on the terrace. She had returned empty-handed.

  When he rang the police and told them that so far as he could tell nothing had been stolen, all they would do was consent to log the crime.

  Who was he to say whom he’d seen, anyway? Had he not been half asleep when it happened?

  Luke felt a sudden sense of restless motion that was not unlike the shifting of a boat on water. He had to sit down in his chair by the fireside for as long as the nauseating rocking of the walls all round him reduced the room to waves.

  After that, he stared at his 10,000-piece jigsaw. Pondered why so much refused to fit together.

  But it would, he vowed. He’d get to the bottom of it, no matter what.

  Sasha, meanwhile, kept one ear open for the slap, slap, slap of any more wet footsteps in the hallway. His unwelcome visitor had shivered in body and soul like a very cold man until the chill suggested a death rattle. No one made such a noise unless he was dying or half frozen to the bone. He favoured the latter. It was the man’s teeth that he’d heard chattering. To say it was Sean Lyons risen from the river might be a step too far?

  21

  ‘Since when were these steps so steep?’ said Jorge, as he trod Hill House’s old oak staircase. Had he not run up them with ease when he was a boy, though he had not been exactly thin then, either?

  Breathlessness overtook him and sweating was no less evident as his podgy fingers stuck to the dusty banister. His pounding heart was less heroic than horrendous.

  He felt the need to give his beer belly a rest at the first twist in the treads. Dabbed his brow with his sleeve.

  ‘Too many barbecued burgers. Too many pot noodles and pork belly bao buns for brunch,’ he gasped.

  Whereas the ground floor had felt claustrophobic and dark, up here was altogether different. The stained glass window, at least, had not changed since his childhood as he threw back its shutters to let in some light.

  ‘What the devil!’ said Jorge and stood open-mouthed on the landing.

  So many copies of famous seafaring paintings hung on the walls that he, too, could have been all at sea at that moment as he became aware of his earnest desire to share the drama.

  That Luke had felt the call of the ocean from the very depths of his heart was indisputable – he had collected all things nautical when sailing all over the world.

  Such a siren-like calling was not necessarily the opposite of everything religious, not when the theme of such a great accumulation of relics concentrated on the sea’s power of destruction and redemption.

  He was drawn to one dramatic picture in particular. It was a reproduction of JMW Turner’s wreck of the Minotaur. The Royal Navy 74-gun ship of the line was breaking up on the Haak Bank off the Netherlands in darkness and heavy weather. She had already rolled over on the sand. Was making water. Too late, the crew had cut all the masts to lighten the load only to see their ship flood its forecastle. Now the hull split under the relentless pounding of the waves as men took to a broken and rudderless launch and yawl to try to make it back to land.

  He was familiar with the event of 1810 since the painting was so famous, but never before had he heard men’s actual screams sound in his ears.

  The mariners were so distressed and miserable and yet so tenacious that their howls filled the house with a heart-felt plea for their very souls.

  Could L
uke have heard the same thing?

  Dangerously fascinating was how he found it, as if his friend chose to celebrate that moment of suspended animation when lives hung in the balance between heaven and hell.

  ‘What had you in its spell, Luke? Was it literally that moment which decides someone’s fate forever for good or ill? Or did you simply fall in love with death itself?’

  Poor, lost Luke. He must remember he was not forgotten. Still had a friend. Perhaps then he could come home. Reach shore.

  The whole collection he could view only as heart-rending and disturbing.

  *

  Jorge very much began to suppose that to ignore such calamitous seascapes was to miss some other heinous wickedness or devilish atrocity.

  Ships’ bells carried the names of lost vessels while antique compasses, sextants, telescopes, binnacles and diving helmets lined the wide corridor at the very top of the house with items gleaned from dead captains’ cabins. It all ran contrary to those distant days when Luke had forbidden him to salvage a single thing from the wrecks beside the River Severn.

  Sasha was not usually one to bother that a house could have its own special atmosphere, but next moment she began to bark furiously at a half-naked, red-haired figure propped on a chair.

  He only thought the carved woman superbly defiant.

  The bare-breasted beauty leaned his way with earnest intensity. One outstretched arm forged a path ahead with her burning lamp until he could not but thank her for her welcome light.

  But how enigmatic seemed her face to him then – she’d come from a real shipwreck, to be sure.

  Sasha advanced to the silent, immobile chatelaine and sniffed her grey, sculpted skirt. The sentinel slept with slits for eyes but with sufficient smile on her face that Jorge felt sure she dreamed of distant oceans. Her cheeks were bleached as white as bone from wind and water. Her black-painted and varnished lips retained their gloss, as if she might one day placate the high seas again by commanding the waves?

  Whereupon he became aware of a nervous prickling on his skin – a frisson of apprehension at some inhuman presence, scarcely identifiable at first, but whose proximity grew more and more offensive.