Mystery on the Beach

This is a short piece which refers to the sunken prehistoric forest that in recent times has revealed itself on the beach after some strong tides have removed the sand that covered the trees when the sea rushed in many thousands of years ago.

Mystery on the Beach

Mrs Hughes swore she would wring the heron’s neck. If she was arrested, then so be it. Her goldfish were her life, and she’d have no regrets to be taken away in handcuffs to the town police station. She had nurtured those fish, woken each day with the first gull cry to scatter their feed on the surface of her green garden pool, sweep clean and weed their watery world so they could glide around in circular freedom. They were her children, and as she explained to sympathetic ears in the village shop, they were being stolen away by a cruel grey plumed spectre.

Looking back, I remember Robert and I were always not so sure. We agreed the heron was a suspect, but no more than that and as Robert pointed out, Mrs Hughes did not have all the facts.

I need to explain something when I say facts. We had evidence. I don’t mean the sort you find on a road sign, or in a school book, or if you google something and the year it happened or who was the prime minister pops up. I mean what you can see or hear or smell and when you do all those things and you are twelve (alright, I was eleven but Robert was, almost) and both of us having grown up in the village, spending all our time on the beach when we weren’t doing other stuff, learning to be experts in the mysterious world of washed-up rope and plastic debris, tidal times, storm dead crabs, and stranded jellyfish. We also had open minds, the sort kids have before the internet really kicks in and everyone stops having any original thought. It all meant we knew how to investigate.

It was on a rained off, clouded afternoon with the tide out and every rock exposed and Robert had shouted over the sand to come over and we found the evidence.

Mrs Hughes’ precious fish had been piled up like a deck of cards in a deep stone fold of the sea defences, so tight no push or pull of a wave could steal them away. We were detectives, and we knew the heron was innocent as he was no seaside magician to have salted them away like that.

We didn’t tell Mrs Hughes because it was a security thing, and Robert said it was a stake-out so we couldn’t tell anyone.

I remember it was cold and wet with the sea rushing in like it’s trying to get away from whatever is out there. As the afternoon darkened, we hid from the wind against the sea wall and waited.

What happened next was not something we could have told Mrs Hughes or the shop or anyone and Robert agreed with me that the police would have been useless even if they came with loads of handcuffs. It lumbered out of the sea as if those trees of the sunken forest still towered above us, lurching around their stumps, defying the thousands of years of our own existence, and we knew it was headed for Mrs Hughes’ back garden for the rest of her fish.