Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

I tapped on the door across the corridor and my daughter Siobhan called me in.

She too was reading. Sitting up in bed with a copy of Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club , which involved two friends of the Swallows and Amazons children having more water-based adventures on the Norfolk Broads, apparently. She had been given it to read by her English teacher who was no doubt keen to show her a pleasanter way of life than the gritty reality of the great Metropolis that we had left behind and which had evidently crept into some of Siobhan’s creative endeavours. Personally, I wasn’t worried and Kate agreed with me that there was a certain cathartic healing in writing out the stuff of her nightmares. Kate herself knew only too well the side effects of bottling up childhood trauma. The brain can apply a particularly potent pressure. But there is a yin and a yang to everything and, if Siobhan took comfort from escaping to the middle-class fantasy world of high jinks on the jolly old Broads in 1934, then that was fine by me too.

‘How’s the book?’ I asked.

‘Can we get a sailing boat?’ she replied.

There’s a downside to everything, too.

‘Maybe in the spring, when the weather is better, we can hire a boat from Wroxham and take a trip, see how you like it in real life.’

‘Got to be a sailboat, though. Motorboats are for foreigners and hullabaloos.’

‘I see.’

‘Foreigners are holidaymakers. It’s not racist.’

‘That’s good to know.’

‘Not proper Norfolk people like us.’

I sat on the bed beside her. ‘We’re proper Norfolk people now, are we?’

‘We can be if we want to be.’

I nodded reassuringly. Sometimes things are simpler when you are eight years old. But, then again, maybe she was right. We are all made in God’s image, apparently. But what we make of ourselves, after that, is largely down to us. I hadn’t made such a good job of it lately; maybe I should listen to my daughter more. From the mouths of babes.

‘Tell me a story, then,’ she commanded, settling herself back on the pillow.

‘OK — do you want to hear the tale of Black Shuck?’ I asked, mindful of Kate’s instructions.

‘Black Shuck. What is that?’

‘It’s a local tale.’

‘A Norfolk tale.’

‘Better than that: a North Norfolk tale from this very coast.’

Siobhan made saucers of her eyes, a tad over-dramatically perhaps. But she was a Delaney, after all.

‘Go on, then,’ she said.

‘So now, twelve hundred years or so ago on the North Norfolk coast early in the month of July when the sun was a blazing star in the midday sky and the corn was golden and tall and ready for harvest. All the talk in the village of Sheringham was about the carnival that was coming up in the following month. A committee of the village elders, the local druid and a strange woman who lived in a cave gathered to prepare for it. It was a time of feasting and laughter, of wine and song. There would be displays of strength and racing, and each year a carnival queen was to be appointed. And that year they chose a fair maiden by the name of Eadlin, which actually means princess in the Anglo-Saxon tongue so maybe her parents knew she would be crowned a princess. Even if it was only for the week of the Sheringham carnival. Everybody called her Eadie and everybody loved her.’

‘Was she pretty?’

‘She was fifteen years old and the one man who loved her most was Owen Tregatthen, the druid. And he had pledged her parents the princely sum of three goats if they would give her hand in marriage to him.’

‘Wasn’t she too young to be married?’

‘Not in Norfolk at that time. Now, the town had been raided for many years by the Viking warriors from across the North Sea. And that year the elders had decided that they had had enough. A sacrifice had to be made to the sea gods. The committee elected to take the carnival queen to the top of the Beeston Bump. And as the sun set into the sea at the end of the summer solstice they were to bind her to a stake in the middle of a large bonfire that they had built and then sacrifice her.

‘The solstice arrived and the sunset approached. The villagers took the young maiden Eadlin and led her up the hill to the summit of the Beeston Bump. Approaching on the sea as the sun set, the flames of a torch could be seen as the Viking craft drew near to the shore. It was a long wooden boat and at the helm there was a dragon’s head, with blazing eyes painted red.

‘The villagers cast their own burning brands into the bonfire that they had built, and the flames crackled and flared upward, dancing in the cool evening breeze. The crowd fell to their knees and prayed to the god of the seas.

‘A tempest arose, the like of which had never been seen before. So that the Viking craft carrying the men who had come to take their loot was hurled beneath the waves and the men drowned. But just as quickly as the storm had come it vanished, when the sea god realised that the druid had tricked him. Had tricked all the villagers, too, because the figure tied to the stake was not a real person at all but an effigy with a waxen face and a wig.’

‘Like our own Guy Fawkes?’

‘Exactly so, darling. It was too late to bring back the drowned Viking warriors but the sea god looked down and saw that the sole survivor of the shipwrecked vessel was a black dog. Paddling in the now-calm waters. And the sea god took his vengeance, for when that dog reached the shore he had become the size of a small horse, with wild shaggy hair and huge saucer-like eyes that flashed with fire.’

‘Black Shuck!’

‘Black Shuck indeed. And since that fearful day over twelve hundred years ago, when the sun sets over Sheringham and Overstrand, then Black Shuck comes out to prowl, loping and hunting, along river bed and shoreline, on the clifftops or up in the dark pine woods, along the quiet country lanes, leaping over flint walls in churchyards and cemeteries. Jumping out, headless sometimes, from behind old gravestones, seeking retribution on the druid who had tried to cheat the gods. And if anyone hears him behind them, howling like a very banshee from Cork, then they’d best make sure not to set their eyes upon his fearsome form. For if they do, they will be dead within the year.’

‘Yes, but that’s just a story, isn’t it?’ my daughter asked, clutching the bed sheet up to her chin.

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Course it is, darling. You’re safe up here.’

The four men stood in the dark. All in dark clothing, all with balaclavas over their heads under black watch caps.

Two of the men held sawn-off shotguns. The other two held baseball bats. They were motionless. Silent. Their breaths misting in the cold air. They were waiting.

They knew how to wait.

Bill Collier flicked the on switch on the CD player mounted under his dashboard and pressed PLAY.

Dolly Parton started singing ‘It’s a Hard-Candy Christmas.’ Bill didn’t care that Christmas was a couple of months away yet. He liked Dolly Parton. He had promised himself that one of these days he would make the pilgrimage to Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s huge theme park based in the good old US of A, way down south in Tennessee. A temple to the lady herself. With accommodation and shows and amusement rides. And, as he had often said to his strong but dim associate, he’d sure like to take a ride on Dolly’s special attractions. He smiled to himself at the thought, felt himself stiffening as her throaty voice sang about the loneliness of a single woman at the festive season. She wouldn’t be alone for long if he had his way. She’d have some hard candy, sure enough. And not the sort you could buy in a sweetshop.