Death of a Mermaid Read online

  Death

  Of a

  Mermaid

  Also by Lesley Thomson

  Seven Miles from Sydney

  A Kind of Vanishing

  The Detective’s Daughter Series

  The Detective’s Daughter

  Ghost Girl

  The Detective’s Secret

  The House With No Rooms

  The Dog Walker

  The Death Chamber

  The Playground Murders

  The Runaway (A Detective’s Daughter short story)

  Death

  Of a

  Mermaid

  Lesley

  Thomson

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Lesley Thomson, 2020

  The moral right of Lesley Thomson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788549714

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788549721

  ISBN (E): 9781788549707

  Jacket design by kid-ethic

  Photography by Shutterstock and Mark Swan

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Domenica de Rosa

  I had an inheritance from my father

  As small as the note it came on.

  Few words exchanged

  In such a long time.

  An unwelcome surprise

  To walk over familiar ground.

  Winter sun clears the mind,

  My youthful spirit returned.

  Accept, forgive, disappoint,

  Who needs to know?

  I had an inheritance from my father

  And I said no.

  Stuart Carruthers

  2017

  Contents

  Also by Lesley Thomson

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two: Two Weeks Later

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Prologue

  Buffeted by the wind, a woman picked her way down the cliff path. A sign on the shingle warned, ‘No safe access beyond this point’. Icons showed four kinds of danger. Falling rocks, slippery surfaces, rocky foreshore and deep water with high tides.

  The sun had set; the sky towards Shoreham was washed pink.

  Four dangers. Or five?

  The grille across the entrance to the battery was open. The woman had to look twice to be sure. All her life it had been barred. The Mermaids used to scare each other making up what lay within. They knew the layout from history lessons. Gun chambers off a passage, apertures facing the sea. They’d imagined a skeleton on a heap of ammunition that was used to fire at Napoleon’s ships. He would have been a lovelorn soldier who’d killed himself and was never found.

  At first the tunnel was pitch black, but bit by bit the woman orientated herself and shapes resolved into doorways into the chambers.

  As fast as this vision excited her, it dissipated. She felt the enormity – a plummeting realisation – of her mistake. She was no longer seventeen and in love. The gravelly trawl of the sea ground into her thoughts. If she left now, she’d be caught.

  Swiftly, silently, she pulled shut the grille behind her. The padlock hung loose, but in the dusk it would not be obvious that it was unlocked.

  She groped back down the tunnel. The walls were wet, not with seawater or rain; neither would penetrate into the heart of the cliff. It was the slime of centuries. She clutched her crucifix and made herself retreat to the end of the tunnel. She hid in the furthest cell. The light was dwindling, the shape of the gun sighting blurred. It was as if reality had retreated with her.

  She had come to redress sins. Instead she was skulking in a tomb with her secrets. She crossed herself.

  She felt a warm grip around her neck. She tried to shout. Something was stuffed in her mouth. She went to prise off the fingers, but snatched at nothing. She fought blindly, kicking, unable to slither out of the iron-like grasp. Whatever was in her mouth blocked her nose. She heaved for breath but her lungs found no air.

  ‘Where is it?’ A grating question like the shingle dragged by the waves.

  She had vowed to be unafraid of death. When her time came, she would welcome Jesus. Except…

  Not now… not yet…

  PART ONE

  1

  KAREN

  ‘Sort it,’ Karen Munday snapped. On her way upstairs, she heard the front door shut. She assumed she was alone.

  The bedroom was a heap. Karen picked up a pillow from the floor and then, revved up by the exchange, flung it down. She was within sight of her goal.

  That morning she’d bumped into Toni Kemp in the Co-op. Kemp was no better than she ought to be. Just like when they were kids. Acting like she didn’t need God. This time, Toni had served Karen gold on a plate.

  She retrieved the pillow and, hugging it, sank onto the bed. Her mind travelled back twenty-five years as if the morning in the convent chapel had been just hours earlier. The forty-year-old Karen Munday was a teenager again, sliding along the Mermaids’ pew in the hope of sitting close to Mags.

  *

  ‘Sorry, Karen, this is taken.’ Mags did sound sorry, but Karen didn’t pick it up.

  ‘Then where will I sit?’ Karen glared at the crucifix above the altar.

  ‘We don’t care, but you can’t be there.’ Freddy Power’s rosary dangled
from her fingers. She jerked a thumb for Karen to move away from Mags.

  ‘I was here first.’ Although marked with a prayer card, Karen flicked through her missal for the place. Some pages were ripped from when her mum had gone off on one.

  ‘Toni’s dad’s dead,’ Freddy hissed. ‘That’s her seat now.’

  ‘But I’m a Mermaid,’ Karen asserted loudly.

  ‘Shut up!’ Freddy hissed. Being a Mermaid was a secret thing. ‘So is Toni.’

  ‘Who says?’ Karen was stung by this news. You got to be a Mermaid if you liked the Disney film of The Little Mermaid or, like Karen, you’d stopped Mags being done over by one of the Dunnings. Karen survived home life by keeping her head down, and school by going in fists first. A face-off with Freddy Power was new territory. Freddy’s dad ran the local fishery. Karen’s uncle had lost his job for giving Fred Power lip, and Power had seen to it that he couldn’t get other port work. The Mundays never again took on a Power. Until now.

  A hush fell over the pews. Girls scented trouble. Fights in the convent were supposed to be out of sight, if not from God, at least from the nuns. And never in a sacred space. Two sanctions equalled a misconduct mark. Karen had three for sins that involved queue-barging for a second pudding, chewing gum in class and not doing her homework.

  ‘Leave it, Freds,’ Mags mouthed at Freddy. Karen was off the hook. Freddy Power always did what Mags told her. Freddy moved up for Toni Kemp and was rewarded by a smile from Mags.

  Mass progressed in a blur for Karen. Toni Kemp was a Mermaid, which meant they were no longer a select group of three. As Father George lisped through the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’, Toni approached the altar and Father George passed her a book. She was doing the second reading. You only did that if you’d been very good, could read without stumbling or were Margaret McKee.

  Karen swiped through her missal to the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians. Not a confident reader, she slid her prayer card down line by line to follow.

  ‘“…This you can tell from the strength of his power at work in Christ…”’

  Toni had sounded a bit like Karen’s idea of God. Surprised by the girl’s cool authority, Karen felt a pain as if, like Mr Kemp, she’d got herself stabbed in the heart with a broken milk bottle.

  ‘“…which is his body, the fullness of him who fills the whole creation. The word of the Lord.”’

  ‘The word of the Lord.’ Karen had raised her eyes. Toni Kemp was watching her. With the twisted perception of a thwarted adolescent, Karen was convinced Toni had engineered her tragedy to worm her way into Mags’s Mermaids.

  Karen leaned forward in the pew so Mags could see her doing a decade of Hail Marys.

  ‘Holy Mary, mother of God,

  Pray for us sinners, now…’

  ‘A-men.’

  *

  Caught in the tendrils of the memory, Karen spoke out loud in the bedroom. ‘At least it’s not me whose dad is buried up at Newhaven cemetery.’

  Karen had harboured humiliation and the rapier sting of betrayal since the convent. Now she had the perfect means for revenge. That morning in the Co-op, Toni Kemp had not realised that Karen was standing in the sweet section.

  When Karen went to the toilet, she didn’t hear the creak on the stairs.

  2

  FREDDY

  Freddy Power loved early shifts at the supermarket. The hour and a half before customers arrived when – if you didn’t count night staff – she had the shop to herself. Her particular domain was the fish counter at the back of the shop. Although it wasn’t why she’d come to Liverpool over twenty years ago – she’d been running away, not running towards – the job was tailor-made for her.

  Never overly interested in fashion – at the convent she’d accepted the uniform – now Freddy welcomed the white shirt and black trousers. It made life simple. Shutting her locker, she stepped onto the shop floor. She switched on the fish counter and the oven cooker and like a proud theatre director surveyed the house before the audience arrived. In the fish cooker she caught the aroma of garlic and rosemary from yesterday. At six in the morning the smell was too much for some. For Freddy it heralded the start of a new day.

  She admired the sweep of stainless steel reflecting bright overhead lights. Her blank canvas. She envisioned the fish she would arrange there.

  Behind the scenes Freddy released the trap in the ice machine and an avalanche of chipped ice shot down into a giant container. She wheeled it through to the counter and hefted it onto the sloping display until it was inches deep in sparkling crystals. Freddy’s hands were numb. She preferred contact with her wares. Working with fish, slippery skin, scratchy scales – dead or alive – was about the senses.

  In the fridge room, she drew forward the cage of fish that had been delivered overnight. The plastic boxes of fish and seafood reminded her of the fishery when she was young. Yellow, blue and red, filled with fish that needed gutting, filleting, weighing and bagging. Sarah couldn’t understand why Freddy loved every minute of it.

  Something lay on the floor and she picked it up. Blue beads and a silver chain. Not much of a Catholic these days, Freddy always kept her rosary in her pocket. Mags had bought all the Mermaids a rosary on the convent trip to Notre Dame when they were fourteen. Toni had said Mags only bought it because Freddy was poor and she felt sorry for her. That wasn’t kind of Toni, but as she’d got comatose the night before and had a terrible hangover, Freddy forgave her.

  Now she remembered that, as the ferry berthed at Newhaven, Toni had flung her rosary into the sea, declaring at the top of her voice that God was dead.

  Chilled by the frozen air, Freddy found herself doing a Hail Mary for the Mermaids, wherever they were now. For Mags.

  There was a shortfall on her order of smoked haddock. It was a popular day for making Cullen skink, a soupy stew of haddock, leeks and potatoes. She’d be out of haddock by mid-morning.

  Annoyed with herself, Freddy set about arranging her stall. Erica had been on the nightshift so all was shipshape, price labels ready, cutting boards scrubbed. Freddy put the previous day’s unsold fish at the front of the cabinet, closest to the customers, to encourage a quicker sale. Smoked fish on their left, then breaded fish, followed by a strip comprising tuna, scallops, sardines and squid. Hake, bass and one of her favourites, bream. Lastly, a delicate arrangement of prawns, oysters and mussels around the bags of samphire and parsley and delineated with lemons. The samphire was imported from Israel. As a kid, Freddy used to pick it from the beach at Newhaven, getting out early to beat anyone else who knew where to look. She’d sell it to her dad, leaving a ten per cent mark-up for his customers. Frederick Power had encouraged his eldest child’s entrepreneurial spirit. She took after him, he used to say. Before he called her a freak of nature and disowned her.

  Freddy speared the labels on sticks into the ice. She walked around to the front to consider the effect from the customer’s perspective. When they were trading insults, frequently these days, Sarah said people paid no attention to how the fish were displayed. Freddy said Sarah spending her life with murderers and rapists had killed her eye for beauty.

  In a terrible American accent Maxine PA’d that it was ‘five to take-off’. Freddy was on schedule.

  Last but not least, the knives. From her locker Freddy hooked out a bashed-up leather bag. She had bound the handles with a ring of blue gaffer tape, the colour code for fish, to avoid cross-contamination with the meat section, coded red.

  The knives had been a coming-of-age present from Freddy’s father when she turned ten. They were, he’d informed her, his mark of trust in her. His father had given him the same gift. She was the next generation. She wished he’d let her stick around to prove it.

  She wiped the blades of the knives and placed them on the blue cutting board. She retied her overall and adjusted her net cap. She was all set.

  Lift-off, we have lift-off. Maxine’s voice crackled over the system. Freddy felt a cool draught. The street doors were op
en. The first customers were coming her way.

  Freddy’s phone buzzed. Phones were supposed to stay backstage in lockers, but that morning Freddy and Sarah had had a humdinger of a row.

  Today’s slanging match had been ignited when Freddy found the front door ajar. All and sundry could waltz in and murder us. A realistic possibility; a defence lawyer, Sarah had a few unsavoury clients. OK, so no one had waltzed in, but it came on the heels of Sarah shrinking Freddy’s best jumper in the hot wash and buying her five more as compensation. Sarah’s behaviour meant Freddy never knew if she was coming or going. Going, perhaps.

  This has to stop, the text read.

  Yes, and? Freddy flicked a look for an approaching customer or for Maxine. When Sarah messed up Sarah usually declared they break up and Freddy find a better person than her. Although she knew that this was the answer, Freddy would embark on a round of cajoling, making up instead of giving up.

  Another text. A photo of Sarah’s bags in the hall. The bags were in black and white, the rest in colour. Upset though she apparently was, Sarah had Photoshopped the snap. Ever consummate with the wordless threat. If Freddy had been there watching, Sarah’s packing would have been a hectic affair of banging wardrobe doors and swearing in French. Sarah spoke French fluently and during arguments would rattle off in it to annoy Freddy.

  The bags were Freddy’s. A new departure.

  Let’s talk tonight. Heart thumping with misery, Freddy tried to limit the damage. What was there to say?

  What is there to say? Sarah fired back.

  When they’d got together two years ago, Sarah had declared she was ‘in it for the long haul’. She bought Freddy a ring and mooted a big wedding, marquee, band, outfits… Aside from the hard labour implied by the phrase, Freddy was charmed by Sarah’s commitment. Used to partners who ran a mile if Freddy suggested they live together, she had embraced the haul, long or whatever. They opened a joint account for bills and discussed getting a pet. Sarah wanted a cat. Freddy liked dogs, so that hadn’t come off. Freddy moved into Sarah’s big house. Now, pacing behind her array of fish, it occurred to Freddy that the subject of marriage hadn’t come up in months.