LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE John Lorimer’s Discovery

      IT WAS EARLY SPRING, 1998, on the south side of the Wash in north-west Norfolk. John Lorimer and his brother-in-law Gary took the path through the pine woods, climbed up the dunes and stood at the top to catch their breath. The tide was now well on its way out, and the peat beds, which ran along the beach midway between high and low tide, were just beginning to be exposed. Between them John and Gary held a brand-new shrimping net, and today was to be its first outing. It was home-made, but sturdy and built to last. They knew it would be futile to test the net until the tide had retreated beyond the peat beds, as only then would the seabed be smooth enough to allow them to drag it through the water, so they decided instead to go crabbing and to test the net in an hour or so. At least that way they’d have something to take home for tea.

      Just beyond the beach, behind a coastal barrier of dunes, was Holme-next-the-Sea Nature Reserve. It was a land of birds and dunes, of thin wiry grasses, orchids and Scots pines. And then of course there was the wind. It was always with you at Holme. Sometimes you thought it had dropped entirely, and that the air was truly still. Then you looked at the ground and saw that the blades of grass had never stopped nodding. It was as if someone had just left the room and had shut the door firmly behind them. There were little swirling drafts – not wind, not even a light breeze. Other times, when the weather came from off the Wash, the gales tore at the dunes with a destructive force that even a modern army couldn’t match. Coastal defences were ripped up. I have seen the aftermath of a fierce storm, when wire, fencing, young trees and posts had been hurled inland. In just two hours, a whole summer’s patient dunes-conservation programme could be reduced to a useless, tangled mess.

      The Nature Reserve Warden, Gary Hibberd, and his wife Alison lived in The Firs, a large, late-Victorian house that had been built as part of a speculative venture which never got off the ground sometime around the turn of the century. One of the ground-floor rooms had been converted into a small shop and Visitor Centre, and Gary would chalk up a list of rare birds that could currently be seen in the reserve.

      The pine trees that were presumably planted when The Firs was built covered the dunes between the house and the beach. They were mainly Corsican pines, a more vigorous species than our native Scots pine and better able to cope with the fierce conditions of this coast. They grew particularly well along the Holme dunes.

      John and Gary knew that the best crabs were to be found lurking in dark nooks and crannies below the shelves of peat. John was walking in the shallow water along the edge of the peat. Before he’d even bent down to feel for a crab, his eye was suddenly taken by something green and metallic in the mud. Without thinking, he picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It wasn’t iron, he knew that. Was it brass? Probably. In which case it could have been a fitting – perhaps part of a porthole, or something from off the bridge – from the old wreck behind him, which he could see was just beginning to emerge from the waves. Still, he thought, it doesn’t exactly look brassy. He had seen pieces off wrecks before, and somehow this wasn’t right: it was more coppery, and with a strange, red-gold surface sheen.

      Gary saw John standing slightly bent forward, with furrowed brows, turning the thing over and over in his hands, and wandered across to see what he’d found. John was always collecting things from off the beach. He was a regular jackdaw. His house a few miles away at North Creek was stuffed full of treasures: shells, blanched bones, driftwood, weird-shaped stones, pieces from wrecks. If he found anything attractive, John would want to take it home.

      Gary looked at the piece of metal, shook his head and agreed it was probably something from the wreck. But they had work to do, so they thought no more about it. True to his jackdaw instincts, John slipped it into his back pocket. By now the tide had retreated well beyond the peat, and the timbers of the wreck were fully visible, surrounded by huge expanses of smooth, damp sand. Together John and Gary carried the net out into the shallow water, just above knee-depth. Then they tested it. It worked. In fact it worked well, and is in regular use to this day.

      John and his wife Jacqui are special-needs workers, who look after children with particular problems. John has found that taking his charges out in the mini-bus for a trip to the beach can do wonders for them. But they must have something useful to do when they get there, or they soon get bored, and mischief is never far behind. Towing a shrimping net and then sorting through the catch is ideal. And once the work’s over, the small brown shrimps are delicious for tea.

      During the next four weeks, John visited Holme beach regularly, seeking crabs and shrimp. He would often return to the spot where he had found the metal object, which he was becoming increasingly convinced had nothing to do with the wreck. The more he looked at it, the more certain he was that it was an axe. With its crescent-shaped blade, he reasoned, it couldn’t be anything else.

      It was a week or two after finding the object that he first noticed a large tree-trunk, with two strange-looking branches, like the stumps of amputated arms. It was close to the spot where he’d made his discovery, and was the same colour as the peat beds around it. But it looked odd. As he told me later, he couldn’t put his finger on why it looked so strange, but it did. Just like the metal object, there was a simple explanation, but it didn’t seem to apply. Holme beach was the site of a prehistoric ‘forest bed’ of tree stumps. And that’s what everybody said: his odd-looking stump was just part of the old forest. But John wasn’t happy with that explanation.

      The peat didn’t actually touch or cover the strange stump, but stopped three or four paces short of it. John noticed that as the tide swirled around it, the water wore the sand and mud from around the trunk. Soon a natural trench began to form, and he was able to feel well down into the grey mud that lay directly below the beach sand into which the tree was embedded.

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