The Gold Locket: A Symbol of Fate and Obsession in The Raging Storm

What Is the Gold Locket?

In Ann Cleeves' The Raging Storm, the gold locket is a piece of jewellery found by Jem Rosco on a Devon tideline. It is a small, gold-coloured pendant with a broken catch, suggesting it slipped from its owner's neck. Inside, saltwater has destroyed whatever picture once sat there, but on the back remains an inscription: My darling Grace. For Rosco, this object becomes a key that unlocks not only a woman's identity but also his own future fortune.

The locket first appears in Chapter Seventeen when Eleanor Lawson recounts the story to Detective Matthew Venn. She describes how she and the young Jem Rosco set out to find the elderly Grace Fanshaw, the locket's owner. Their success leads to a friendship, an inheritance, and eventually to the money that funds Rosco's round-the-world sailing record. The locket thus operates as a concrete hinge between Rosco's penniless youth and his later fame.

Discovery and the Grace Fanshaw Connection

Rosco finds the locket while beachcombing with friends, mixing it with sea glass, shells, and weed on the tideline. Rather than sell it for the gold value, his romantic nature drives him to trace the owner. Eleanor describes him as "like a terrier when he set his mind to something." Together, they ask around Greystone and Morrisham until they identify Grace Fanshaw, an elderly woman living in a Georgian house on Morrisham High Street.

Grace's story, as Eleanor tells it, carries its own weight of loss. Her lover, a naval officer, gave her the locket as a girl. He had the inscription done before dying in an Atlantic accident just after the war. Grace never married, and she seemed haunted by the sea, eventually stopping her daily beach walks. Rosco befriended her, doing her shopping, pushing her wheelchair along the promenade. The text shows Grace as frail but of sound mind, a woman with no local family except a distant nephew in London.

This sequence matters because it establishes that the locket is not merely treasure-hunt luck. It becomes the foundation of a genuine human connection. Eleanor herself visits Grace with Rosco, cementing the friendship among the three. Yet Venn, listening to Eleanor, feels sceptical. He suspects the story has been shaped by Rosco's own mythmaking: "something a man like Rosco might make up from fragments of other stories." This doubt hints at the book's deeper unease about how much of Rosco's public legend is invention.

Inheritance and Consequence

Grace Fanshaw remembers Rosco in her will, leaving him the house and all her savings. The will is contested by the London nephew but upheld because Grace is deemed mentally competent. The money gives Rosco his first real boat, the Nelly Wren, which becomes the vessel for his record-breaking voyage.

This inheritance transforms the locket from a sentimental trinket into an engine of wealth. It also plants the seed of resentment in those who knew Rosco earlier. Bartholomew Lawson, the yacht-club commodore, bitterly tells detective Ross May that everyone wondered where the money came from. The locket's story, he implies, felt too convenient, too fairy-tale. For the resentful locals, especially those who, like Alan Ford, nurse grudges against Rosco's success, the locket becomes a symbol of unfair luck.

The object thus carries a double charge. On the one hand, it represents the randomness of fate—a broken locket on a beach can change a life. On the other, it embodies the kind of romantic story that makes Rosco a national hero but also a target for envy. The locket is never recovered in the present-day investigation; its value lies entirely in its remembered power.

The Locket in the Investigation

When Venn learns the full locket story in Chapter Seventeen, he is already questioning Eleanor's motives. She presents the tale as evidence of Rosco's kind heart and of her own long-ago closeness to him. But the locket also reveals why Eleanor might have felt bound to Rosco—he named his first boat after her, a fact that later comes to light through the drunken testimony of Bartholomew Lawson in Chapter Fourteen.

Later, in Chapter Fifty, when Eleanor confesses to planning Rosco's murder, Jen Rafferty reports that Eleanor could not stop talking about the locket. For Eleanor, the object represents the shared history that made her feel special—and the hope of escape Rosco offered. By the time of her confession, those feelings have curdled into bitterness. She uses the locket story to position herself as the mastermind, the one who knew Rosco best.

This evolution matters for the theme of deception and hidden identities. The locket's true meaning shifts depending on who is telling the story. For Rosco, it is a romantic origin myth. For Eleanor, it becomes evidence of her lifelong entanglement with him. For Venn, it is a clue to motive—not a sentimental one, but a practical one about inheritance, class, and the lingering power of first love.

Thematic Connections

Obsession and Unrequited Love

The locket directly feeds the theme of obsession and unrequited love. Rosco names his boat after Eleanor, returns to Greystone hoping to see her, and never marries. Eleanor admits he was the love of her life, but she chose Bartholomew as the safer option. The locket, found by Rosco and linked to Grace Fanshaw's own lost love, mirrors the pattern: a token of devotion that never reaches its intended fulfilment.

Class and Resentment

Grace Fanshaw, a wealthy woman, leaves her estate to a poor local boy. This crosses class lines in a way that the Greystone community finds hard to accept. The class and resentment theme runs through the novel: Rosco's mother was a single parent on seasonal wages, while the Gregorys and Fords were established families. The locket story underlines how luck—and a romantic story—can override traditional social hierarchy, breeding the envy that leads to murder.

Power and Manipulation

Eleanor uses her knowledge of the locket story to manipulate Venn's perception. She frames herself as Rosco's one true love, a woman too timid to run away with him. But in her confession, the locket becomes a prop in her own self-aggrandisement. This aligns with the theme of power and manipulation. The object that once symbolised innocent romance becomes a tool for controlling a narrative after death.

Community and Isolation

The locket also touches on community and isolation. Grace Fanshaw lived alone, haunted by her lost officer, until Rosco befriended her. The locket connected them across generations. But in Greystone, that same locket story isolates Rosco from the locals who see his success as unearned. The intimate connection between two outsiders (Grace and Rosco) is viewed with suspicion by the tight-knit village.

Four Study Questions with Answers

1. How does the gold locket transform Jem Rosco's life, and why does this transformation breed resentment?

The locket leads Rosco to Grace Fanshaw's inheritance, giving him the capital to buy the Nelly Wren and sail around the world. This windfall elevates him from a poor local boy to a national hero. Locals like Bartholomew Lawson see this as undeserved luck—a fairy tale that bypassed the usual structures of class and effort. The resentment festers for decades and, in the case of Alan Ford, becomes a motive for murder.

2. What does the locket reveal about Eleanor Lawson's character and her relationship with Rosco?

Eleanor uses the locket story to position herself as Rosco's true love and confidante. She was present when he found it, helped him trace Grace, and visited the elderly woman with him. The locket symbolises their shared youth and the promise of escape that Rosco represented. However, Eleanor reveals in Chapter Seventeen that she never had the courage to leave Bartholomew. The locket becomes a symbol of her regret and of the fantasy she constructed to endure her marriage.

3. Why does Matthew Venn doubt the locket story, and what does his scepticism tell us about his investigative method?

Venn finds the story too neat, too like a romantic film. He suspects Rosco embellished or even invented parts of it. This scepticism reflects Venn's commitment to factual evidence over narrative appeal. Unlike the characters who romanticise the locket, Venn treats it as a checkable claim—he wants to verify the will and the inheritance. His doubt also signals to the reader that not every charming story in this novel can be trusted.

4. How does the locket connect the novel's themes of love, class, and power?

The locket begins as a token of love (Grace's officer gave it to her), then becomes a vehicle for class mobility (Rosco inherits wealth), and finally serves as a tool of power (Eleanor wields the story in her confession). Each stage transforms the object's meaning. The novel uses the locket to show how a small material thing can carry multiple, competing interpretations, depending on who tells the story and why.

Conclusion

The gold locket in The Raging Storm is never a mere piece of jewellery. It begins as a serendipitous find, becomes the seed of a national hero's fortune, and ends as a weapon in a murderer's storytelling arsenal. Ann Cleeves uses this small object to anchor the novel's larger concerns: how luck and charm can rewrite class boundaries, how love letters harden into resentment, and how a broken locket on a beach can chain a community to its past. For readers studying the book, the locket offers a concrete entry point into its tangled motives—a single, golden thread that, once pulled, unravels the whole storm.