Something Coming Through

17. Sea Devils

Norfolk | 8 July

Jean Simmons, the owner of the bleak little caravan park at the edge of Martham, was a stick-thin woman with iron-grey hair and a face pinched by suspicion. The kind of person who was never disappointed when the world failed her, because it confirmed her expectations. She’d lost her farm when the sea level had risen, she told Henry Harris and Chloe, had bought the caravan park with the compensation money. ‘More trouble than it’s worth, most of the time. You see how I live.’

She perched on the edge of the sofa in the living room of her spartan bungalow, dressed in jeans and a wool check shirt, sipping at a hand-rolled cigarette. She couldn’t remember much about her former tenants, she said. Sahar’s wife had died before he and his children had come to Martham. Some sudden illness, very sad. Sahar had worked on the local shrimp farm.

‘That’s what we do here. Fish and farm shrimp. And there are the visitors, of course.’

Jean Simmons meant tourists, and the gangs of volunteers who were attempting to remove invasive species and rewild the flooded coast with native plants and animals. According to her, the Chauhans had lived at the caravan site for about a year, and then Sahar Chauhan had gone away. Jean Simmons said that she thought he had taken up a new job.

‘That was three years ago,’ Chloe said.

‘I suppose.’

‘I heard that he went up and out to Mangala.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that. Mr Chauhan mostly kept himself to himself.’

Chloe asked about the children. She had changed out of the borrowed trouser suit, was wearing what she thought of as her Official Interviewing Outfit: black jeans, a thin charcoal turtleneck sweater from Muji, flat-heeled shoes. She hadn’t put on her spex: Jean Simmons was spooked enough as it was.

‘They stayed on,’ the woman said.

‘In Martham?’

‘Not here. With friends.’

Henry said, ‘Could we have the names of the friends? Their address?’

Jean Simmons shrugged again. ‘I wouldn’t know. None of my business.’

Chloe didn’t challenge the obvious lie. If she backed the woman into a corner she’d most likely clam up completely. ‘When I met Fahad, he was living in London. Do you know when he and his sister left? And why they left?’

‘Well, I know they left. But I’m not sure when. I suppose I last saw them around Easter.’

Chloe asked if Fahad had shown any sign of artistic ability while he was living in the caravan park. ‘Did he like to draw or paint? When he moved out did he leave any pictures behind?’

‘Pictures? No, nothing like that. He did odd jobs for me. Cleaned the toilet block, the caravans after people moved out. You should see the mess some of them leave. Worse than animals. He did a stint on the shrimp farm too, in the school holidays. There’s not much money around here, and you have to work hard for it. Now I think I’ve told you all I know,’ Jean Simmons said. ‘And I need to get on. My sister’s faring badly. I have to organise a bite of supper for her.’

Outside, in the warm windy sunlight, Henry said, ‘She didn’t know why the father left? She didn’t know who was taking care of his children? Bullshit. She’s exactly the kind of landlady who pokes around her tenants’ belongings when they’re out. I had one like her when I was a student.’

‘I think she was spooked because you let her think you were a policeman.’

‘It got us through the door. I’m wondering about that shrimp farm where the father was supposed to be working.’

‘You think the owners took in his children?’

‘There’s that. But I’m also wondering what it might be growing besides shrimp.’

‘Drugs,’ Chloe said, and thought of Chief Inspector Nevers.

‘Shine, or something else. Drugs are the only way to make real money out here. Drugs and smuggling. Sahar lost his job in the pharmaceutical industry, he had gambling debts…’

Chloe saw a movement at one of the blinds that shuttered the windows of the bungalow. ‘She’s watching us.’

‘Probably while phoning whoever it is she doesn’t want us to know about. We should definitely pay a visit to this shrimp farm.’

‘I’d like to check the school. I can do that while you go off on your Scooby-Doo quest for evil drug farmers.’

‘Where you go, I go.’

‘We’re on an island, Henry. I’m not going anywhere you can’t find me. And I really think I should visit the school on my own.’

‘Why? Are you worried I might scare the kids?’

‘I’m worried you might scare the teachers.’

The headmistress of the town’s little primary school confirmed that Rana Chauhan had been a pupil there until early in May, but refused to tell Chloe who had been taking care of her and her brother. ‘I have a duty of confidentiality towards my children.’

Chloe said that she understood, asked if Rana had shown any unusual artistic ability.

‘No more than any of the others,’ the headmistress said.

Chloe fired up her tablet and paged through Fahad Chauhan’s pictures, asked the woman if any of her pupils had produced something similar.

The headmistress’s gaze shuttered. ‘I’m sure I would remember if they had,’ she said, and that was that.

There were examples of children’s art posted on the walls of the reception area of the school. Amongst the naive depictions of nuclear families in front of two-dimensional houses, lopsided cows and horses, ships perched on the sea’s horizon and superheroes riding blue skies, were drawings of Jackaroo avatars and scenes of other worlds. None of them resembled Fahad’s red desert and latticework spires.

The village pub where Chloe and Henry Harris had rented rooms was a functional brick building built sometime around the middle of the last century. Henry had paid in advance, with notes peeled off a small tight roll. ‘I like to pay cash for everything on a job,’ he’d said. ‘As far as I know, it’s still untraceable.’

There was no sign of him when Chloe returned. She told herself that it didn’t matter, but had an edgy feeling that she was losing control, that he wanted to push the investigation in the wrong direction. Away from Fahad Chauhan’s pictures, into some mundane conspiracy involving the drug trade.

Her room had a view of the town’s little harbour: a clutter of boats and yachts, the open sea stretching beyond the sea wall. A glimmering of stars in the darkening summer sky. A warm breeze fluttering the net curtains. She was leaning at the open window, breathing the fresh salt air and trying to convince herself that even if this didn’t pan out she’d made the right decision to escape London and the fallout from the select committee and the assassination, when someone rapped on the door.

It was Henry Harris. Chloe told him that she hadn’t had any luck at the school, asked him about the shrimp farm.

‘As far as I could tell, it was just a shrimp farm. No locked sheds, no goons with bad attitudes. And the owner was very eager to tell me that he didn’t know who had taken in the Chauhan kids after their father left.’

‘Reading from the same script as Jean Simmons.’

‘Classic small-town mindset,’ Henry said. ‘Everyone knows everyone else’s business, but no one will talk about it with outsiders. Except, lucky old me, I come back here and just happen to meet someone who’s more than happy to talk.’

‘“Just happened” as in it was no kind of accident?’

‘I’m pleased to see that Daniel doesn’t employ stupid people. Want to meet my new friend? He’s waiting downstairs.’

He was standing at the bar: Jack Baines, a burly middle-aged man with a wind-burned complexion and thinning blond hair. Saying, after Chloe had been introduced to him, ‘I was telling Henry about the sea devils.’

‘It’s a nice little story,’ Henry Harris said. ‘Let me buy you a drink, Jack, and you can tell Chloe all about it.’

The pub was the kind of place where a cluster of locals clung to the bar like barnacles while tides of visitors washed in and out. At the long table by the big bay window that overlooked the harbour a group of people in expensive casual clothes were making more noise than anyone else in the place. One of them, a man in a candy-striped shirt, was smoking a fat cigar. Several of the people at the bar were smoking too.

‘Visitors like to cruise the Flood,’ Baines said, when he noticed Chloe staring at the noisy group. ‘It’s a thing. Ruin porn and suchlike.’

‘There are a couple of tasty yachts in the harbour,’ Henry said. ‘And a motor cruiser as big as a house.’

‘They come and go,’ Baines said, ‘but they don’t see what’s really going on.’

‘Sea devils, for instance,’ Henry said.

‘Visitors from foreign parts think this is a backwater,’ Baines said. ‘Ruins, a few fishermen. But you’d be surprised at what goes on out here. Lights in the marshes, UFO sightings, tracks of strange animals…Three porpoises beached themselves last week, and several of my fishermen pals have glimpsed something out at sea. A very big sea serpent by all accounts. Maybe an alien beasty, maybe a new kind of machine. We’re a regular Area 51, we are. And because my work takes me all over the marshes, I see more than most.’

Chloe had met a lot of people like Jack Baines. They had all kinds of stories, plenty of inside information they’d disclose if the price was right. She saw him spinning tall tales to wide-eyed tourists, and was pretty sure why he’d glommed onto Henry Harris. She wondered why Henry thought him worth even two minutes of their time.

‘Jack knows of a couple of women who were visited by devils,’ Henry said.

‘Sea devils,’ Jack Baines said. ‘Thing is, like I told Henry, the women who saw them are friends of Sahar Chauhan. Took in his kids after he left, as a matter of fact.’

Chloe looked at Henry, who gave a little shrug. She said, ‘Do you know why the kids ran off?’

‘From what I heard, Fahad got it into his head to follow his father,’ Baines said. According to him, Fahad and Rana had stayed in Martham, living with two unmarried sisters, after their father had gone off to work on one of the Jackaroo worlds. ‘Fahad always was a bit of a loner. Given to bunking off school and such. And then one day he took his little sister out of school and stole a boat that later turned up at Acle. No sign of the two kids then or since, until you come here, saying they’re in trouble in London.’

‘They’re not exactly in trouble,’ Chloe said, and gave her explanation, well-honed by now, about Disruption Theory and its work, and why it was interested in Fahad’s pictures. ‘I’m here to do some background research. I’d very much like to talk to the women who took in Fahad and Rana after their father left.’

‘It’s interesting, you mentioning the boy’s pictures,’ Baines said. ‘One of them was young Fahad’s art teacher, in the Catholic school over in Acle.’

Chloe said, ‘And she sees ghosts.’

‘Her and her sister. I’ll be happy to take you over to talk to them.’

‘It’s a good lead,’ Henry said, smiling at Chloe, daring her to contradict him.

Chloe said, going along with it, ‘Do they live here, these two women?’

‘Not in town as such,’ Baines said. ‘Not far away, though.’

‘Jack has an airboat,’ Henry said. ‘He’ll take us tomorrow, for a small fee.’

‘Just my usual guiding rates,’ Baines said. ‘I take visitors out into the marsh. We get a lot of birders.’

After the man had left, Chloe said, ‘You realise he’s a total fraud.’

‘But it’s a good story, isn’t it?’ Henry was studying the menu chalked on the blackboard over the open fireplace. ‘I reckon the fish must be fresh.’

‘I’ll have a salad. And you can tell me what this is really about.’

‘They don’t grow much in the way of vegetables out here. The rise in sea level has poisoned the water table. Everything has to be brought over from the mainland. But fish, that has to be fresh caught. Although fish have faces, and you can’t eat anything with a face, can you? How about shrimp? Do they have faces? I don’t think so. Not what we’d call faces, anyway. Or scallops, or mussels. Is it true that the Jackaroo are like giant walking shrimp?’

Chloe said, ‘You’re thinking of the!Cha. Although whatever’s in their tanks probably isn’t especially shrimp-like. We’re being set up for something, aren’t we?’

‘The art teacher — that was a nice touch. We’ve definitely attracted someone’s attention. They know we’re interested in Sahar Chauhan’s kids. They know we’re not police, and they want to find out exactly who we are, and what we want. Hence Mr Baines.’

‘Who is going to take us out of town tomorrow, but not to a couple of women troubled by sea devils.’

‘There you go.’ Henry raised his hand to get the barmaid’s attention.

Chloe said, ‘What have you got us into?’

‘I intend to find out.’