The red shore, p.1
The Red Shore, page 1
The Red Shore
William Shaw
Copyright
Hemlock Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2025
Copyright © William Shaw 2025
Jacket design by Sean Garrehy/HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Jacket photograph: Andrew Ray/Alamy Stock Photo
William Shaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008720407
eBook Edition © July 2025 ISBN: 9780008720421
Version: 2025-06-25
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In memory of Chris ‘C.J.’ Sansom, with much gratitude
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Sixty-Four
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by William Shaw
About the Publisher
Prologue
The boy wakes, scared. Something is wrong. It is all his fault.
‘Mum?’ he whispers into the night.
The bed he has woken in is rocking from side to side. Above him, voices howl: Ooooooooo.
In his night-foggy brain, still tangled in sleep, the boy realises he is not at home in the house on the red beach. He knows he is somewhere else, far away.
He is in the boat.
And then he remembers shouting at his mother and telling her he hated her for taking him out in the boat and for being so weird that everyone teases him at school.
Your mum is so fucking weird.
There is the water, slapping at the boat’s sides: blap blap blap blap. Ooooooo, blows a ghostly wind through the mast’s wires, a note that rises and falls in intensity.
He is nine. He has been on this boat often enough to know that it is not ghosts that make the eerie noise, but it might as well be.
He does not like this story. He should have been nicer to his mum. He should not have got angry. The boat should not be moving like this, tipping, pausing, then tipping back the other way – not feeling like it was ever going to stop.
‘Mum,’ he says out loud. ‘I feel sick.’
There is no answer.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he whispers, reaching out his left hand across the gap between their two bunks. The sheet where she would have been is empty and cold.
Mum is not there.
Of course. She must be sailing the boat.
The black is very black and that makes it harder to breathe. Nothing is steady. Everything is in motion. There is acid in his throat.
Blap blap blap blap. A little bit more awake now, he realises that water should not be slapping at the boat’s sides like this. It is not the right noise. The right noise would be the creakiness of being at anchor, or the thump of sailing into waves, or the grumbling of the diesel engine. This is something different. The boat should not be moving this way, like a roly-poly toy clown. It doesn’t feel right.
‘Mum.’ He sits up, feels instantly seasick. ‘I’m scared.’
On the right side of his bunk is a curtained oval window. He pulls back the fabric and peers out, nose against cold glass. No lights; no stars. Just black.
Added to the noise of the water and the wind, his own breath. Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry.
When he tries to get out of the sleeping bag it’s like someone is grabbing his legs. His feet are tangled in it. He tugs and tugs until finally one is free, then the other.
‘Mum!’
He drops his legs over onto the unsteady floor, feels in the dark for the aluminium doorhandle, turns and pulls.
It does not move.
‘Mum?’
He tugs at the door harder. He has been locked in.
‘Mum!’ Voice trembly now. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean it.’ Bangs now. ‘Mum!’
Eventually fingers find the switch on the round light above the head of his bed and suddenly he is blinking in the brightness. There is no sign of his mother; no sign her bunk has been slept in.
‘Mum, where are you?’ he shouts.
Blap blap blap blap goes the water.
Ooooooo goes the wind, its note higher.
‘Mum!’ he screams, louder than he has ever screamed in his life, and he yanks at the handle as hard as he can but something is stopping the door from opening.
His mum is not sailing the boat, he realises. There is no one on the boat apart from him and his mother has gone.
And if he hadn’t shouted at her this would all be different.
He peers at the narrow crack between the door and the frame and he can see nothing at all.
He is here, in the middle of the sea, all on his own and the night is dark and the boat is out of control. And now he is really cold and scared. His mother is gone, and it is all his fault.
In a small, dark room in London, a woman reads the Shipping Forecast into the BBC microphone. ‘Portland, Plymouth,’ she says, ‘Southeast, 6 to 7 occasionally gale 8, squally showers, good becoming poor in showers.’
The weather in the Channel is worsening. Out in the sea, there is a boat. Its navigation lights should be on, but they are not. There is no sail hoisted. Hull side on against rising wind, the mast sways to and fro in a wide arc sweeping across the water. The keel creaks. The noise of the wind in the halyards is louder now. It is drifting, at the mercy of the south-easterly.
‘Help me,’ says the boy in the cabin, slipping onto the cold floor. ‘Please help me. I’m alone.’
One
‘Single. And happily so,’ answered DS Eden Driscoll.
‘No big ex?’ teased Constable Lisa Ali.
‘Shut up.’
‘No kids?’
‘With this job? Last thing on my mind is children.’
‘Well, that’s just one more challenge I’m going to have to overcome,’ anno
Eden could hear other coppers’ laughter in his earpiece. The third day of sitting on the bench at Walthamstow Waterworks in East London, Constable Ali was obviously bored. Some people were just not cut out for undercover work.
‘Are you lot enjoying this conversation?’ whispered Eden.
‘Loving it,’ answered Lima One from his post in the unmarked van.
Constable Lisa Ali was five years his junior and she was taking the piss. Eden stood in the bird hide at the centre of the waterworks, a pair of binoculars round his neck, raising them occasionally to scan what he could see of the footpath behind the wall. Lisa was talking to Eden on the radio she was wearing under a headscarf. DS Eden Driscoll had laid the trap, and Constable Lisa Ali was the bait.
‘We can call the boy Eden Junior if you like. Eden. That’s an interesting name,’ said Lisa.
‘You reckon?’ Eden whispered into his mike.
‘Just that I’ve never met anyone called Eden before.’
‘At least I did better than my sister. She’s Apple.’
Lisa laughed, a good, hearty laugh.
‘Not so loud,’ cautioned Eden. ‘You’re not supposed to be happy.’ Eden could hear Lima Three snorting too. ‘Come on, guys. Keep it together.’
‘He’s not here,’ answered Lisa. ‘Three days and there’s no one bloody here apart from you and me and the rest of the boys – and, while it’s been nice, my bum is getting cold. He’s not going to show.’
‘We have two more hours,’ pleaded Eden.
‘He’ was Ronan Pan, also known as Tony Markle and Tony Jalil, ex-partner of Hasina Hossein. Hasina Hossein was currently living under protection at a women’s refuge miles from here after Ronan had threatened to kill her.
Lisa looked a lot like Hasina: tall, dark-eyed, round-faced and slight. It was why Eden had picked her. Eden had warned Lisa, Ronan was a very dangerous man who had coerced several women – including Hasina – into sex work and threatened to kill Hasina for leaving him.
Lisa had jumped at the chance. ‘Are you kidding?’ she had said. ‘I could be sitting in a patrol car watching my sergeant pick his nose or I could actually do something to help catch a very bad man.’
The first time Hasina had tried to leave him Ronan had poured boiling water on her back. Working on the Major Incident Team, Eden had seen the half-healed skin for himself, pale white. There had been other women before Hasina too. Once, Ronan had sprayed a teenager’s face with battery acid. Afterwards the girl had refused to testify against him because she was so afraid he would do it again.
‘So you’ve never had an actual girlfriend?’ asked Lisa.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Oh, God. I think Diesel is pooing again. How much can a dog hold?’
Diesel was Ronan’s American Bulldog, a beefy, big-jawed, stupid-looking animal. Hasina had taken the dog with her when she escaped. Apparently Ronan was as angry about that as he was about Hasina leaving.
After the assault, Ronan had vanished, just as he had done before. He appeared to have the keys to properties all over the East End, and no amount of intel would reveal his whereabouts. Eden had worked to win Hasina’s confidence. He had promised to keep her safe.
It was the dog that had given Eden the idea. It was a pretty distinctive beast. They knew that Ronan had operated around Limehouse. He had spent a little time seeding rumours among the market workers on Commercial Road that Hasina – and Diesel – had been seen out here in Walthamstow. Hasina might have gone into hiding, but she would need to take the dog out for a walk every day. Eden had gone so far as to create a fake women’s refuge at an address close to here. Every morning for the last three days, Lisa had walked Diesel from there to here, to the wildlife reserve that had been created in this disused Victorian water treatment works, waiting.
‘Oh, bloody God!’ exclaimed Lisa. ‘It’s a runny one. I am not going to clear that up. I bet you Hasina wouldn’t. And I’m acting as her, right? Like, method. I probably hang the poo in trees if I do pick it up.’
‘Voice. Down.’
‘Oh, come on, Eden. Three days and no sign of him. He’s not coming, is he?’ complained Lisa.
The Detective Chief Inspector had okayed the budget, but only for a limited period. He had not been convinced. And now this was Saturday, day three of three, and they had come up with nothing. Operations like this cost money. It had all been Eden’s idea, and it had been a waste of time, so far at least. Either Ronan had not picked up on the rumours Eden had tried to start, or he was not as angry about losing Hasina and the dog as Eden had calculated.
They had four pairs of eyes on the small park. There was an unmarked van parked off the Lea Bridge Road, another officer dressed as an angler on the footbridge over the Lea, and a fourth was concealed in brambles to the west. Time and money.
Today was Saturday too, which was more expensive. He only had the officers until 4 p.m.
‘Seriously. You’re a good-looking boy, Eden. Loads of the girls say so,’ flirted Lisa.
‘Thank you. You know this is all on tape, don’t you?’ said Eden. ‘That’s on public record now.’
‘What about the rest of us?’ Lima Four demanded.
‘You’re not single like Driscoll is, Billy,’ said Lisa. ‘Or as good-looking.’
Lima Four was DC Bailey, known as ‘Bill’. Bill was an old hand at this kind of thing.
‘Lima One,’ a voice interrupted. ‘Woman coming your way down main track.’ Lima One was the van, parked by the main road. ‘Birdwatcher, I think it’s the one who came yesterday, by the look of it. Red coat. Scarf. Maybe you can strike up a little relationship, Eden, like Lisa says. She’s got a lovely big pair of binoculars.’
‘Hands off, bitch,’ said Lisa. ‘He’s mine.’
‘Come on, you lot,’ said Eden. ‘Last couple of hours. Keep it together. We have to concentrate.’
For a while, the mics went quiet. They sat in silence, waiting. Birds sang. A heron flew overhead, neck long, beak sharp.
Then Lisa’s voice burst into Eden’s earpiece. ‘Oh, God!’
‘What?’ Eden lifted his binoculars, tense. But Lisa was still on her own, just hunched over her phone. There was no one else in sight.
‘Anyone else seen this story, just come up on the news? The RNLI picked up a yacht floating in the Channel this morning. No one on deck,’ Lisa continued. ‘It looked abandoned, but when they boarded it they found a nine-year-old boy locked in one of the cabins. All on his own. His mother had been sailing it, apparently. But she vanished. They’re doing an air and sea search for her. I guess she must have fallen overboard. Boy on his own, out there on the sea, shut in a cabin.’
‘Poor kid,’ said Lima One.
‘Just imagine that,’ said Lisa.
‘Concentrate,’ said Eden again.
‘Breaks my heart,’ said Lisa.
‘Oi! Handsome,’ interrupted a voice, speaking in a whisper. ‘Man resembling the suspect approaching from my direction.’
‘Say again?’ said Eden.
It was Bill’s voice. ‘Man, on his own, coming across from the marshes. Fits the picture.’
‘Serious?’ breathed Lisa.
‘Yes. Ten metres away from me now.’
‘Shit.’ Lisa was suddenly quiet.
They had all been issued with photographs, mostly culled from social media. The photos had never been of Ronan himself; he was camera shy. His was just a face glimpsed in the background of other people’s photographs. They had clipped his fuzzy face from group shots. It was the best they could do. There was a photofit too, done by Hasina. But they knew for sure he was stocky. Hasina had reckoned around five-eight.
‘Yep. I think it’s him,’ said the voice again. ‘Short-arse.’ The voice was DC Bailey’s – Lima Four – stationed at the footbridge over the River Lea.
One of the reasons Eden had chosen this place was that there were only two ways of approaching the site without climbing over fences – from the main road to the north, where Lima One was stationed, and the Hackney Marshes to the south.
‘He’s past me. I’m following the suspect now,’ whispered Bailey.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ muttered Lisa.
‘Don’t worry, Lisa,’ Bailey assured her. ‘I’m right behind him.’
Eden had a good view of Lisa, but not of the path leading towards her from the south. He scanned to the right to try and spot the man approaching.
‘I got eyes on him too,’ said a third voice. ‘Looks good. Closing in.’
