Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea Page 32

‘He couldn’t stop the monster uncoiling in his heart, he said. The superstitious fear and wonder with which the idea was awakening his feelings had all the ferocity of some crafty sea-snake. Told me that such a siren’s call pre-dated his God and mine. What could I do about it? It was akin to the serpent that tempted Eve. He said the goddess of the river had spoken wondrous things to him and he had answered.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Love. Retribution. Revenge.’

  ‘So how did that make you feel?’

  ‘Trust me, Inspector, I told him that no such heathen creature played any meaningful part in our lives any more. I believed that they were only ever silly legends. As did he, but now he was not so sure.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because he’d twice seen her riding the bore on the River Severn.’

  ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘And now Sabrina was offering to help him put things right in exchange for a great treasure.’

  ‘He was delirious, or what?’

  ‘I said you really ought to go to A&E. Your concussion is making you say all sorts of blasphemous things.’

  *

  That evening, Jorge emailed Captain Singleton to inquire more about Luke’s state of health while aboard the Amatheia.

  As the ship battled heavy seas the captain felt honour bound to discharge his duty to his only passenger with compassionate care:

  ‘I visited Reverend Lyons twice before he closed his eyes for the last time and more than once did he allude to the storm’s siren voice, like his own sister calling. It conveyed such an impression to his mind as produced a rooted hatred for sin and a desire for holiness – thank God for it. More than once he called upon Jesus Christ to forgive him. His fears were such that he seemed to float on the brink of some mighty cataract. When I looked again I gazed upon his lifeless face and his smile, even in horror, could not but hope he might yet be saved.’

  Jorge emailed the captain straight back.

  ‘Is that why Reverend Lyons tried to return home so unexpectedly? He was finally forced to admit that he was going to die without medical treatment that he had spurned previously?’

  While no great revelation came by way of immediate reply, he did receive later that night a more detailed account of his friend’s last hours.

  ‘We all think we can outrun our most secret selves, don’t we, Inspector, but what else awaits us at the end of the world?’

  *

  Waking early, Jorge took Sasha for a pleasant walk by the river. The sun was barely up but the jackdaws suddenly took off en masse from Berkeley Castle’s pink-tinted walls to begin feeding in the meadows. A keen-eyed goshawk, meanwhile, waded water beside the reeds in a manner very unlike its usual method of catching ducks.

  His presence failed to deter it.

  The tide was on the turn and the river began to swirl. Currents thickened into arms and tentacles, beads of light burned in sunshine on the water’s surface as it sparkled and glittered like jewels. From now on a restless excitement would grow and grow as the surge from the Atlantic came rushing home. Everything was waiting for its genius loci.

  These serpentine rivulets could not settle for as long as its keeper and protector remained at sea, but back she’d come twice a day in her watery chariot.

  In the wreckage of a man’s life something had finally, irrevocably stirred among the deepest, darkest water.

  In the forefront of his mind was Gabriela’s strange suggestion of revenge. Even as Luke’s resolve to seek retribution had lain undisturbed ever since childhood, so at last it had found a way to the surface like that monstrous growth inside his skull? Like Oceanus, like that secret freshwater stream that the eels followed every year to the Caribbean, the need to go with the flow had proved irresistible in the end? It had taken him with it when his dam of pain and silence had finally broken?

  After so long Luke had sought to discover the one thing he’d lost as a boy.

  The secret of happiness was the truth.

  As for himself, thought Jorge, he had come to Berkeley fearing to confirm that his friend really had killed himself. Now he knew better. Luke’s return to England was his last chance not to get even any more, but to face up to his past. His own and his family’s. He had wanted to find the courage to fight that sinking feeling.

  That’s not to say he had finally gone crazy. He was not all at sea, just undergoing a sea-change. Finding his sea legs. Not drowning.

  He smiled.

  It was enough to satisfy his greatest hunger.

  56

  To: cathredral_house@glosdioc.uk

  Subject: Investigation into the disappearance of Rev. Luke Lyons.

  From: Jorge Winter – jorgewinter484@gmail.

  Dear archdeacon, herewith some explanatory observations and summary of my findings into the disappearance of Reverend Luke Lyons – named hereafter the respondent – on Sunday, 31 July 2016. As you are aware, the recent new Clergy Discipline Measure replaced the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 and has greatly simplified a process that was complex, expensive and slow. Nor was it particularly useful to treat the proceedings as criminal or semi-criminal. Certain terms such as ‘the accused’, ‘ecclesiastical offence’ and ‘guilt’ were not always helpful.

  However, even though a full disciplinary tribunal by the Church might not use the language and practice of the criminal courts, but follow the disciplinary procedures of other professions, I feel I must draw on some legal language to explain certain points in full.

  From my report (see attachment) you will note that I will seek to demonstrate that, just before the respondent went missing, he lured Slim Jim Jackson and Mel McAtree to the boathouse by Berkeley Pill on the pretext of giving them a treasure worth millions. For this information I am, in part, indebted to informal testimony from a young witness called Randal (the respondent’s nephew.) Through such a ploy, the respondent sought to confront Mr Jackson with past crimes of a sexual nature which resulted in things spiralling out of control. I believe the respondent castrated his victim and left him to bleed out next to the water. In fact Mr Jackson survived his murderous amputation.

  However, even if the assault had resulted in death I have no doubt that, were we the courts, we should consider this diminished responsibility. Such a thing is covered under section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957, which states: where a person kills or is party to a killing of another, he shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent cause or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts...

  The burden of proof in such extreme cases is on the defence who must prove it on a balance of probabilities and by calling evidence from at least two medical experts. As I say, there is some relevance here to our case.

  What I have been able to ascertain is that the respondent was suffering from a growth on his brain which did, in all likelihood, result in an abnormality of behaviour in his last few months alive. Ironically his own worst fears have not been entirely borne out by the autopsy which has now proved the growth to be benign.

  But many a person will lose their reason when they think that they might be about to die – the respondent’s actions were driven by the terror that he would depart this life before he could ‘set the record straight’. It is the task of the jury to decide this, not medical experts, though medical opinion may be taken note of.

  The abnormality of mind does not have to be connected with madness.

  Moreover, having spoken to many people in Berkeley, in particular the respondent’s twin sister Ellie, I am of the firm opinion that by July last year he was in a doubly reckless mood on account of something that a prisoner called Frank Cordell had told him about his father Rex Lyons, in HMPL…. It was Cordell, thought to be a snitch by other members of the notorious Severn Sea Gang, who believed that the clue to the gang’s hidden riches lay in an old Bible.<
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  Indeed, for a while it seemed highly likely that a former gang member killed him for that very secret on the day of his release from prison, even as Ian Grey was drowned in the River Severn to silence him. Appearances can be deceptive, however, as I will explain shortly.

  The whole effort to locate the stolen hoard of antiques amassed by the Severn Sea Gang was actually financed and masterminded by expat Jessica Kennedy from her villa in Spain.

  Accordingly, she flew in to the UK briefly to visit Cordell in prison.

  While her stint on Spanish TV was a brazen attempt to flush out clues to its whereabouts, her real intention was to set one person against another. She never even fully confided in her own daughter, Ellie. Instead, the latter’s wedding proved convenient cover to keep tabs on the respondent, albeit by proxy. Jessica never could accept the painful truth that her dead lover Rex Lyons had entrusted the treasure’s hiding place to anyone but her.

  Thanks to the police investigation in Bristol we now know that Cordell actually met his death at the hands of someone whom he had abused years ago. It was my misfortune to witness the murderer’s last moments on Clifton Suspension Bridge on the fateful day.

  But my real point is this. The respondent was scheduled to have a biopsy done on his brain which left him with nothing to lose, in his own mind. Still nothing bad would ever have happened, I don’t think, had it not been for the intervention of others. To say of him that he was very nearly seduced by some devilish creature not of his own making should never be sufficient. That he was secretly very angry, suffered from low self-esteem and blamed himself for what had happened to him years ago is, however, indisputable when a chance meeting with Sabrina ap Loegres, the mysterious Welsh shipping magnate, changed everything.

  What began as a simple desire to sail abroad to escape two violent criminals became something quite different: he decided to ‘die’, apparently by drowning, just as his grandfather Sean Lyons had done in 1960.

  In fact Sabrina gave him the chance to stow away aboard her ship, the Amatheia, wherein he made a terrible mistake. He was really running from himself.

  To quote Isaiah: ‘If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea.’ I can say with some surety that Sabrina’s uncanny influence over all parties in this extraordinary case has yet to be fully quantified.

  Which brings me to the heart of the matter. In my report I have established beyond doubt that Eva Greene shared the same grandfather as the respondent. It was her family’s very valuable antiques that were stolen by the Severn Sea Gang in 1981 when Eva’s pregnant mother was fatally wounded by Rex Lyons, the respondent’s father. Eva plotted to get even with the Lyons family. Sabrina agreed to help her. There is, however, no suggestion that either of them played any part in the mutilation of Mr Jackson. (The latter’s total refusal even now to name his attacker says it all.)

  On the contrary, the respondent alone made the decision to confront Mr Jackson on that awful night. He challenged the old man for the violence he had perpetrated against him when he was nine and ten years old. To this man’s propensities I can, to some extent, attest myself since I, too, once had to fend off his clumsy attempts to touch, stroke and kiss me at the same age. Nor did the respondent ever tell me precisely what happened to him in that riverside hut; he only swore me to complete secrecy. He said he would kill himself if I ever so much as thought of speaking out. He never wanted his parents or grandmother to know.

  Not only was the respondent incapable of making rational judgements on the night of the castration, but he could not exercise the will power to control any physical act in accordance with that rational judgement. He simply lashed out at last, since Jackson had the effrontery to resurface from the darkest part of his life as if nothing had ever happened between them.

  Which brings us to the autopsy itself. The exact circumstances of the recent reappearance of the respondent’s dead body aboard the Amatheia may never be determined. Certainly, though, he resided only a few months in Bermuda before his ill-fated attempts to hurry home. How to account for this risky volte-face? Could he not face a life on the run, after all? I can only think that he suffered from a fit of conscience: he really had murdered Slim Jim Jackson for all he knew. Truth is, he had never expected him to reappear in his life. This was the man who had done his best to destroy him. Left him wrecked and sinking. Becoming a priest had put him on a new course but now all that was in peril. He had to fix it once and for all. That meant payback. Once done, Sabrina gave him a way to sail away from it all – from the monster he’d become. But it was the wrong choice. He was in danger of going under again, of hiding another terrible secret.

  To me his return smacks of panic – he had sinned before the eyes of our Lord? I haven’t found the real reason. It seems frivolous to say of a man that food in the Caribbean didn’t agree with him?

  But here’s a thing. The Coroner has been able to determine that a trace of eel blood resides in the corpse. Doctors confirm that such blood is poisonous to humans and other mammals. It is normally rendered harmless by cooking and the digestive process. However, a very small amount of eel blood when eaten raw is enough to kill a person, not unlike pips from an apple. The toxic protein cramps muscles, especially the heart, and is very dangerous to children. It is possible that the respondent, having ingested it in raw form, went into anaphylactic shock; he may have been allergic to glass eels in a way none of us ever knew.

  Since he had convinced himself that he was dying anyway, it seems particularly vindictive that anyone should have gone to the trouble to murder him, unless of course he did, as I suspect, tell one too many lies about the supposed existence of the so-called treasure.

  If he did know where it was he chose not to dig it up for whatever reason best known to himself. God moves in mysterious ways and although the respondent came to believe again in the goddess of the River Severn (to his terror) he never, in my opinion, lost his faith in doing the right thing at last.

  Luke went in search of what he treasured most from the wreck of his life. He salvaged his sense of self-worth. His dignity.

  Thus do men and women outdo the Devil in their carelessness.

  See full report. Inspector Jorge Winter.

  PS. Please excuse my unexpected absence from the cathedral this afternoon, but I really must attend Ellie Kennedy’s and Jeremy Lawrence-Hamilton’s wedding reception on this fine, sunny day in Berkeley Castle.

  I have it on very good authority that there’s going to be banoffee pie for desert.

  Praise be!

  57

  Tina fingered the bone-filled glove carefully inside the green biscuit tin. From its frozen grip she removed its prize. Sealed the tin’s lid. Began to think, too, how fitting it was that it should take pride of place among all the other things in her collection. In fact, the presence of such an object seemed unlikely and absurd, it having belonged recently to a person of which nothing much else remained?

  It was a very old, very large, brass key.

  Brass did not rust in salt water.

  As a result, words engraved on its gold-like, metal surface remained legible among the barnacles: SHARPNESS SWING BRIDGE CABIN.

  In any case it was sensible to keep together everything she had so far gleaned from the River Severn in what constituted something of a shrine to its goddess and guardian. She had a fossilized sea urchin, thought to have come from a Bronze Age grave, a chiselled flint that once tipped a Stone Age fishing spear, a green octagonal ink bottle, two wig curlers, a First World War button and all sorts of blue and white delftware and pearlware as well as a circular pot lid from a Victorian pharmacy on which was painted a black ship in full sail.

  The hand, however, surpassed everything that she had ever found in mud or sand.

  No longer could her favourite doll take precedence, although she began fondly to recite the ballad that went with it. She knew a lot of bloodthirsty ballads. The doll was, accord
ing to Wikipedia, likely to be over a hundred years old.

  She knew by heart the song by Seba Smith called ‘A Corpse Going to a Ball’ from which the cold, immobile figure had acquired its name of ‘Frozen Charlotte’. In the poem Charlotte froze to death after she rejected her mother’s offer of a blanket to keep her warm on a long sleigh ride to a party.

  All because she wanted as many people as possible to see her pretty, new dress.

  Tina could only reflect again on how strangely unresponsive and helpless its torso looked with its arms pressed flat to its side. The dark river had devoured its head and legs in the same way it had bitten pieces out of pots and snapped the necks off bottles.

  Randal, meanwhile, watched geese fly over the ruins of the nearby railway bridge where its trackbed now ended in mid-air. Grew bored. Poked his stick about on the towpath between river and ship canal.

  Suddenly his phone rang in his oversized tweed jacket.

  ‘It’s my mother.’

  Tina frowned.

  ‘Oh bloody hell.’

  ‘Do I answer it, or not?’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘What if someone sees us? I’m tired of keeping secrets.’

  ‘I’ve warned you already. You’d better forget all about that. Telling people would ruin everything.’

  Randal pouted.

  ‘Don’t see why. We’ll be famous.’

  ‘How can I trust you?’

  ‘But you don’t have a plan.’

  ‘You have no idea what I’m thinking.’

  Randal’s phone rang again.

  ‘It’s mother. Do I answer it this time?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Randal! Have you forgotten we have to be at the church in a few hours’ time?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Tina again.

  Ellie hadn’t given anyone a moment’s peace ever since her brother Luke’s cremation in Bristol. Really, it was just pre-wedding nerves.

  ‘Well?’ said Randal. ‘We going, or what?’

  ‘Tell her to get lost.’