his line. Something big and heavy, yet, oddly, it didn’t seem to be struggling to escape capture. When the fisherman peered into the water he could make out the flash of silvery scales. If it was a fish it was enormous, although it was lolling around in the water as if it were already dead. No, not scales, he realized. Sequins. Not a halibut or a haddock – a woman. Or a girl. He yelled for his friends and between them the four managed to hook the dead mermaid and haul her on deck.
Hand of Glory
Out at sea, in the wide mouth of the South Bay, Jackson could see a fishing boat making its way back into harbour. The sea was glassy and reflected the early-morning sun. It looked like a nice day to be out in a boat, he thought. He was taking Dido for her daily constitutional before driving back up the coast to his cottage. He had not gone home last night, instead he had slept in one of the several spare bedrooms at High Haven, having downed a couple of whiskies with Crystal once Harry and Candy had gone to bed. It had been more like medicine than alcohol for both of them, and even if he hadn’t had anything to drink he was still riding a tide of exhaustion that would have made climbing back in his car seem impossible. He had fallen asleep with Dido curled on the rug at the foot of the bed and woke to find her stretched out beside him, snoring peacefully in the vast white acreage of the emperor-size bed, her head on the pillow next to him. (When you last sleep with woman? With real woman?)
While he drank his coffee, Crystal was drinking a dubious beverage the name of which sounded like something you would shout in a karate class. (Kombucha!) Martial arts was something she had taken up, she told him. (‘Wing Chun. I know, sounds like something you’d order in a Chinese restaurant.’) So were the headbanging moves in the café at Flamborough Head on the Wing Chun curriculum? ‘Nah, I just wanted to kill the stupid bugger.’
She cooked sausages for Dido, but all Jackson was offered was buckwheat porridge and almond milk, with the admonition that he should be watching himself at his age. ‘Thanks,’ Jackson said.
Crystal looked as though she was ready to breakfast on a leg ripped from a cow, but no, a ‘raw cacao ball’ was the ultimate indulgence for her, apparently. It looked like shit to Jackson, but he kept that opinion to himself in case he found his face mashed into the breakfast table, and instead he ate up his buckwheat porridge like a good boy.
The elusive Tommy Holroyd had not appeared. Jackson was beginning to think Crystal’s husband was a figment of her imagination. He wondered what Tommy would have made of a strange man availing himself of his bed and his buckwheat porridge, like an unwanted Goldilocks.
In tribute to the early-morning warmth, Crystal was wearing shorts and a vest top and flip-flops. Jackson could see her bra strap beneath the top and her fantastic legs were on full display. As was her fantastic black eye. ‘Here,’ she said, dumping the mug of coffee in front of him. Jackson thought that he had never met a woman who was less interested in him.
The Amazon queen sat down opposite him and said, ‘I’m not paying you, you know. You’ve done fuck all.’
‘Fair enough,’ Jackson said.
When he left High Haven after his workhouse breakfast, both Candy and Harry were still asleep upstairs, worn out by the previous day’s events. Harry had sketchily related their exploits before exhaustion got the better of him last night. They had been driven to a field, he said, and been locked in a caravan from which they had subsequently escaped, but Harry had no idea where the caravan was except that it seemed to be near the sea. After they had escaped, a man had given them a lift back to High Haven. He didn’t give his name but he was driving a silver car – at least, Harry thought it was silver, it was difficult to tell in the dark, and no, he didn’t know what make it was because he had been distressed to the point of collapsing at the time, he said, so could he please be left alone now to go to bed and sleep? And what did it matter anyway as