Siren Song, page 2
‘It put an end to it all. One word from his lawyers and they all stopped wanting to know.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What little I still could, which wasn’t very much. They said I was conducting a vendetta against him. He said he was heartbroken – that was the word he used – at the death of Helen, that he loved her, that they had plans for the future together, and they believed him. But it was all lies. She would never have done that, not with a man like him. He never knew her, not properly. The only person who really knew her—’
I resisted the urge to say, “Was you?”.
She began to cough and held a hand to her mouth, and the effort of this caused her pain, which she tried unsuccessfully to disguise. I waited until she was composed.
When she next looked at me, there was a wariness in her eyes.
The envelope still lay on the desk between us.
‘Why now?’ I asked her.
She wiped a finger across her lips and straightened her already straight collar.
‘Because I’m ill,’ she said. ‘And because I’m unlikely to recover from this illness. And because I want to at least make one last effort to sort this out before I die.’ There was neither pleading nor self-pity in her voice, and she held my gaze as she spoke.
‘What is it?’
‘Three years ago, the year before Helen started university, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I was treated; it went away; I was in remission. Two years ago, I had a small, supposedly benign tumour removed from just here.’ She turned her head and lifted the hair behind her ear. There was nothing to see. ‘Once again, I was cured.’
‘And now?’
‘And now they’ve found other tumours in my throat, my oesophagus. Nothing much to actually see, as yet – no unbearable pain to speak of – but the doctor who found the tumours and who told me what they were seemed less than wholly convinced that this time they were benign. We’ve already started to plan a course of treatment. The prognosis at this stage is not good. I may lose the power of speech. I may have to have liquid food fed directly into my stomach when I can no longer swallow. I may lose my tongue and the tumours may spread to invade my face. It’s a lot of “mays”, Mr Rivers.’
I considered all this. ‘Will you do nothing at all?’
‘I’ll do whatever he recommends to keep the worst of whatever pain I may yet have to endure at bay. But I’ve decided not to start anything that will become unstoppable or irreversible. I’ve been there before, only then I had a good reason for doing it.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Daughters. I have – had – two. Helen and Louise. I was married and widowed twice, and had a child by each husband. My first husband – Louise’s father – was a trawlerman and he was lost at sea.’ She paused for a moment to let the full significance of this become clear to me. ‘We’d only been married three years. Louise was two when he died. I didn’t meet my second husband until fourteen years later. Helen was born a couple of years into the marriage. I was thirty-seven when I became pregnant. My second husband died when Helen was fourteen. It’s been just me and the girls for the past seven years. And for all those years before that, it was just me and Louise.’ Her words were again drying in her mouth. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want or need your sympathy, Mr Rivers. And I certainly don’t want all this to be part of your reckoning if you do choose to help me. I just want you to know why I’m doing this, and why I’m doing it now.’ By then even her whispering was painful for her.
‘How long does the doctor think you have if you refuse all treatment?’
She shrugged. ‘I haven’t told him that it’s what I’m going to do yet.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m seeing him in two hours.’
‘And what you tell him then may depend on what I decide now?’
She half-smiled. ‘I know – good old honest emotional blackmail. No – I’ve already made up my mind what I’m going to tell him. I wouldn’t do that to you.’
I turned the envelope, still without opening it.
‘The reason I don’t want your sympathy, Mr Rivers, is precisely because I need someone who isn’t emotionally involved in all of this, someone detached, apart, to go back over everything instead of me doing it again. I know you’re not going to make the coroner reconsider his verdict; I know Helen is lost for good – as lost as Louise’s father was and is – but I need this for me, for my own peace of mind.’
‘Why did you continue to insist that Simon Fowler had killed Helen and not simply that he perhaps knew more about her death than he ever let on?’
She was ready with her answer. ‘Because it’s all only words,’ she said. ‘And those words, the way things were said and phrased – it all became evasions, excuses and concessions. You make one concession and then another and another. Everything gets made convenient, everything gets explained away. And for people on the outside, looking in at everything, that’s probably the best way for everything to be. But for those of us caught on the inside, those of us still looking for something believable, still looking for the truth of the matter, things are very different.’
‘Like the journalists and broadcasters were on the outside?’
She nodded. ‘I accused Simon Fowler of killing Helen because it was the only way I could keep anyone interested in trying to discover what had truly happened to her. If you want to know what everybody else thought had happened to her, it’s all in there. “Local Girl Drowns In Tragic Circumstances”. Or if not “Tragic” then “Mysterious”. “Unforeseen Circumstances”, “Unpredictable Tides and Dangerous Currents”. You can only read the same few tired words and phrases so many times before they become meaningless. And once they mean nothing, then they hide and obscure and confuse considerably more than they were ever likely to reveal.’
‘You’ve said all this before,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Probably no more than a thousand times.’
‘To the journalists?’
‘They stopped listening when they considered I was becoming too ungrateful and critical of them.’
By then I was having difficulty in hearing what she said.
She rose and went back to the window, looking across to where the faded lettering called back to her from forty years ago. If everything she had told me was true, then the remnants of the carefully painted words would outlive her.
She pointed to the corner of the room in which my dry sink stood. Men had washed and laundered clothes there when the whole building had been a ship-chandler’s.
‘We used to flick water into the boxes to keep the flowers moist,’ she said.
I slid the envelope across the desk towards me, and though knowing what I was doing, she remained looking away from me.
‘I’m very grateful,’ she said. But by then her words were little more than air.
3
THE CLIPPINGS ALISON Brooks had left me told me nothing she hadn’t told me herself. They were new copies, carefully cut to size, and some were only those parts of longer articles which dealt with the death of her daughter. She had written in the margins of most of the pieces to identify their source. I knew that there would have been considerably more written at the time of the drowning. I knew, too, that Alison Brooks would have known that what she had given me would not have satisfied my curiosity, and that, as my investigation progressed, I would have uncovered everything else that had been reported anyway.
The one thing that most of the reports agreed upon was that the deaths of Helen Brooks and her unknown companion had been tragic accidents, that the pair of them had been ill-prepared for the river upon which they had sailed.
I sorted the clippings by date, knowing that many of the later ones – they spanned only twelve days – would do little more than repeat what had already been reported. I noted each time the word ‘Tragic’ was used, just as Alison Brooks had done.
On the night of the twelfth of April, last year, a man called Peter Nicholson, a resident of Paull Holme, on the Humber, had been walking between Cherry Cobb Sands and his home when he had seen a small yacht beached a hundred metres from the shore on the Foulholme Sands. The Humber here was more mud, silt and shifting, shallow channels than running water, and at the time of the sighting the river proper was at least a further hundred metres beyond the stranded vessel.
Peter Nicholson was not carrying a phone, and said that at first he was undecided about what to do. His attention had been attracted to the yacht by someone standing at its prow waving and shouting to him. He wasn’t certain if they were calling to him – to anyone – for help, but judging by the vessel’s position and its angle in the exposed mud, this had been his assumption.
Peter Nicholson had lived at Paull Holme all his life and he knew the river well. He’d worked as a Humber pilot, guiding tankers in and out of Immingham and Hull docks, until he was fired by Associated British Ports upon their employing all the previously self-employed pilots anew under less profitable contracts.
Peter Nicholson was an eye-witness and an expert. There was no doubt in his mind, he said, that there would not be sufficient water to refloat the beached yacht for at least a further six hours, during which time it and its occupants would be stranded on the mud.
Foulholme Sands, apparently, was notorious for the wrecks and beachings it had caused. It surprised Peter Nicholson to see that a vessel had come so close, even one so small and with a shallow draught, and especially on a falling tide. It was his opinion that whoever was sailing the yacht was a stranger to the river.
In addition to the waving, shouting figure – which Peter Nicholson did not at first identify as either a man or a woman, but whom he afterwards believed to have been a woman – he said there was one other figure on board. The second figure sat towards the stern of the vessel and made no attempt to join in his or her companion’s efforts to attract attention.
It was eight o’clock, and already growing dark on the river. There had been rain earlier in the week, adding to the outflows running into the Humber and the Sands – but the night was dry and clear. Peter Nicholson clearly remembered other, much larger vessels at anchor and towards the far shore, sitting out the night in their deeper berths.
As he watched, the figure at the prow of the vessel appeared to start climbing overboard, and then to fall. Peter Nicholson cupped his hands and shouted for whoever it was to stay where they were, that the liquid mud was uncrossable, and that with the tide still draining through it, it would support no weight. It wasn’t clear from the article whether this is what he had shouted to the person on the yacht, or if it was what he had told the reporters afterwards. I guessed at the latter.
Peter Nicholson’s name was mentioned in several other articles. Peter Nicholson, I guessed, was a man with a grievance, and a man who liked the sound of his own voice.
Having climbed or fallen overboard, the figure then disappeared from view. Whoever it was can have been little more than a vague outline at that distance. When asked if either of the yacht’s occupants had been wearing life-jackets, Nicholson could not remember. It was something he took for granted, he said. Later he said that he could not remember seeing jackets through the falling darkness, and that if whoever had climbed down from the yacht had been wearing one, then he would have seen it against the darkness of the water and the mud.
Peter Nicholson waited where he stood, shouting occasionally, to see if the figure on the mud reappeared. It didn’t. He then directed his shouting to the person still sitting at the stern, but received no response. He wondered if an attempt was being made to repair a failed engine or to somehow work the vessel free and back out into the deeper water. Whatever was being attempted, Nicholson was convinced that it would be unsuccessful.
He was two miles from his home, and so instead of returning there to raise the alarm, he turned inland, towards the lights of a farm on the track between Little Humber and Thorney Crofts, where he arrived breathless and told the occupant – a woman well-known to him – what he had seen. She immediately called the Spurn coastguard, handing the phone to Nicholson as the man began asking questions.
Nicholson repeated everything and the lifeboat was launched, crossing the twelve miles of the estuary mouth in under twenty minutes.
Afterwards, the story was taken from the hands of Nicholson and was couched in the language of the rescue services. The police were contacted, and four men were sent from Hull and another two from Hedon to help co-ordinate a rescue from the shore.
The lifeboat was an inflatable, and it was hoped that it might be able to get close enough to the stranded yacht to carry out an evacuation from the river. It was almost nine o’clock before this arrived and its searchlights began playing back and forth over the water.
It was considerably darker by then, and it was difficult for the men on the river to see anything clearly, or to locate either of the two figures Peter Nicholson had seen. Contrary to their expectations, the lifeboatmen were unable to approach closer than fifty metres to the yacht. A spokesman said afterwards that their plan had been to attach a line to the vessel – not to help pull it free; one of their larger, more powerful rescue boats would be needed for that – but to attempt to pull themselves closer to it and to at least take off the people still on board.
The police ashore continued searching for the person Nicholson had seen climb overboard, but they found nothing.
Peter Nicholson left the farm and returned to where he had first spotted the yacht to tell these newcomers what he had seen. He showed them where the firmest land lay, where old groynes and long-abandoned wooden jetties were still revealed amid the mud. If anyone was attempting to save themselves, then these were the routes by which they would most likely find their way to the solid ground.
More lights were rigged on the shore, scanning each of these features in the hope of finding someone clinging to one of them. But there was nothing.
The larger lifeboat arrived. The inflatable withdrew and began moving back and forth over the river in the hope of finding someone floating there. Peter Nicholson was asked how certain he was that there had been a second figure on the yacht, because there was certainly no one aboard now.
The controller at Spurn had tried to contact the vessel by its radio, but this had been switched off. No flares had been fired, no other signals of distress given.
A helicopter arrived from RAF Leconfield and began passing in a zigzag overhead, its own searchlights adding to the illuminations below.
I imagined all this frantic activity as I read the reports. They were familiar enough images and routines to anyone living on the Humber. It was a big river. People drowned there every year. Some were recovered immediately; some were found days and months later. And some were lost for ever. There were few variations on the theme.
With a falling tide, the water, cold and silt-laden, would be moving in excess of twenty miles an hour. The hour between eight and nine that night might have seen anyone adrift in the water beyond the estuary mouth and out into the expanse of the North Sea. Swimming in those conditions was never an option.
Police divers were called for, but their work would not begin until the following morning. Anyone free of the clinging mud and out in the water would be taken away from the shore and the crumbling jetties and into the middle of the channel.
Peter Nicholson was asked again if he was certain there had been a second person present on the stranded vessel when he had first spotted it. I could imagine his indignation at being doubted. He told a reporter that he was certain this second figure had been present. He pointed to the size of the yacht – forty feet – and said that it was unlikely that anyone would attempt to sail it alone. And especially not at that time of night. And even more especially not in the direction of Foulholme Sands with the tide running as it was. I could hear the grievance in his voice at the questioning of his own lost authority.
Most of what had happened that night was speculated on at length over the following three days. Additional background material was slowly added.
The yacht had belonged to Simon Fowler and had been taken earlier in the afternoon from its mooring at Hull marina, with his blessing, by his girlfriend – some reports said ‘partner’, some said ‘close acquaintance’ – Helen Brooks. She had tried to persuade him to accompany her, he said, but he had been too busy.
It had been raining for several days previously, and April the twelfth had been the first clear, warm day of spring.
They had eaten lunch together at a restaurant on Scale Lane, and afterwards they had parted. The yacht had been recently serviced and overhauled and was in good running order. It had a full tank of fuel, a full complement of sails, and the radio, distress beacons and location-finders were all in perfect working order. The navigational lights were all operational; there was a locker containing several dozen distress flares, and at least six life-jackets on board. Charts detailing the waters for a hundred miles in every direction lay in the chart drawer.
Simon Fowler said he was devastated at the loss. He had agreed to Helen taking the yacht only if she could find someone capable of sailing it to accompany her. And then only if she contacted him at regular intervals while she was on the river. He had a record of his calls and text messages from her. He had made her promise to return to the marina before darkness fell. At lunch, he said, they had arranged to meet again for dinner to make up for his absence during the afternoon. A reservation was made and then left uncancelled as the events of the day unfolded.
Asked if he had grown concerned when the yacht had failed to return as anticipated, Fowler said he had been completely unaware of the fact. He had been in an important meeting until seven that evening. It was this meeting, he said, that had made it impossible for him to accompany Helen that afternoon.
He was asked about Helen Brooks’s experience on the water and he described her as ‘competent’, adding that he imagined whoever she had found to accompany her would have had more experience of sailing. Helen had not told him of her intended route. When asked if he had tried to contact her, he said he hadn’t, that he had been unable to. Her own messages had reached him at his meeting, the last being recorded at six-twenty. He had last seen her at two in the afternoon; he was expecting to see her again at eight that same night. When the beached yacht was finally identified, Simon Fowler had been traced to his apartment home in Robinson Court. Twenty men confirmed that he had been among them all afternoon.
