The Salt Marsh

by Clare Carson

  ‘We’d better go now.’ She checked her watch with an exaggerated arm movement. ‘It’s later than I thought. Thank you for the tea.’ She paused, reluctant to let any lead slip. ‘If we are passing this way tomorrow, perhaps we could drop in and see you again.’

  Alastair shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ He held the door open for them. ‘Channel it,’ he said as she passed. ‘Focus on the barn owl.’

  She headed up the shingle, aiming for the Land Rover, trampling through parched clumps of valerian. The beach was devoid of life. A couple of Arctic skuas circled overhead, scavenging for dead matter. The wind hustled, carrying grit and discarded greasy chip wrappers. Sonny kicked at the pebbles as he walked. ‘He freaked me out.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of all his stuff about shadows catching up. It’s all an act with him.’ She didn’t sound very convincing.

  ‘And what about the things he said about you and your powers?’

  ‘Do you really think I’m a witch?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well...’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘You seem to be quite good at putting spells on people.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘Or perhaps you are the one who has been enchanted.’

  *

  They passed a dilapidated fisherman’s cottage, reflections of a thousand clouds scudding across its shattered window panes. A crow crossed their path, flying backwards in the strengthening wind. They reached the Land Rover.

  Sonny said, ‘I need a smoke.’

  He searched his jacket for his fags and his lighter, cupped his hands to shield the flame from the gusts. He cracked his jaw, created a ring which held for a second before it was blown away. Sam watched it disperse while she attempted to make sense of what Alastair had told her – what he hadn’t told her. The strange boat he’d seen on the Saturday that Luke went missing. The warnings about the gruesome fate of informers. He had seen something he wished he hadn’t seen, a smuggler’s boat dragged up on the shingle, a person with the boat doing something dodgy. And he was worried that whoever he spotted on board had seen him watching, and would come after him if anything was said. Had Alastair seen Regan? Had she sent the heavies round to see him?

  The clouds scudded across the sky, covered the sun, cast the beach in shadow. She leaned against the Land Rover’s door, slid down, gave in to her sense of despondency, crouched on the shingle, arms around her legs, face against her knees. She didn’t want Sonny to see her cry. She lost herself for she wasn’t quite sure how long. He sat beside her.

  ‘My father’s dead. Dave’s dead. I worry I’ll never find Luke,’ she said. ‘I can’t deal with all this loss.’

  ‘Loss. It’s part of life. Nothing lasts for ever. A rainbow. Shooting stars. Some kinds of love.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes the most beautiful things are fleeting.’

  ‘I don’t see beauty. I only see dead men.’

  He put his hand on her arm gently. ‘Time blunts the edges.’

  In the distance along the shore, the lone fisherman stood and waded into the waves. She wondered how far he would go.

  ‘I want Luke back,’ she said.

  She kept her eyes on the Channel.

  ‘I think you’ll find Luke,’ Sonny said. There was an unspoken but to his sentence. She decided not to ask. The fisherman was waist-deep in the water as the Land Rover pulled away.

  SEVENTEEN

  THEY LEFT THE shingle ridges of Denge, the silver lakes of Wallands, and headed into the green sea of Romney Marsh. No sign of the black Audi. He pulled up on the verge by the bridge.

  Sonny said, ‘I’m going to find somewhere less obvious to park the Land Rover.’

  She dug out the gear from the back – sleeping bags, camping stove, saucepan, bag of coffee, biscuits – and crossed the bridge to the meadow. Pools of brown water shimmered among the grass, black clouds of midges hanging above. A heron stood guard over the ditch, its stick legs mirrored in the water, undisturbed by her efforts to drag the camping gear across the sodden field. The rain had given the vegetation a virulent potency; she had to beat back the brambles and deadly nightshade as she tramped across the mound. Nobody, she decided as a stinging nettle whiplashed her arm, had followed this path since the last time she was here. She glanced up at the hut, saw a shadow through the glassless window. She froze, skin prickling. Luke? Jim? A blackbird twittered. She unlocked her limbs, flung herself through the doorway, eyes flicking around the cramped interior of the ruin, as if anybody could possibly hide in one of its four corners. Empty. The willow leaves rustled. Her hand went to her penknife – though she knew it was only the breeze – and found the comfort of its smooth surface. She had mislaid her penknife a few weeks previously and had been distraught. Luke had bought her a replacement, a belated birthday present, and had given it to her the last time they had slept in the Lookers’ Hut. The weekend before he had gone missing – the first proper summer weekend of the year. Hot and sunny, Dungeness a riot of yellow and purple, broom and bugloss, the shingle radiating the heat, the power station twinkling like a fairytale castle. Luke had cast a line, caught a sea bass. They had grilled it over the flames of a makeshift beach fire, then retired to the Lookers’ Hut, lay on the blackthorn mound and watched the sky fade from coral to crimson and indigo. That was when he had given her the knife. She had been touched by the present – a reminder, he said, of the times they camped in the Lookers’ Hut together. A knife to slay the bitter withies. She had only discovered the message engraved on the blade later, when she had returned to London and was alone. Sam – love you. Luke. She had been too coy to mention it to Luke when she saw him again. Didn’t want to say thank you, make a big deal of it. Love you. Accepted it silently, mulled it over in her head, allowed the words to fill her with warmth.

  She cradled the penknife in her palm and thought about the message Luke had left her on her answerphone. Listen, there’s something else... Dave. Luke had been careful to shield her from his suspicions about Dave, she concluded. He wanted to protect her from danger, so he had followed up with Patrick Grogan by himself, driven down early to Dungeness, tried to keep her out of it. She gripped the penknife tightly.

  Sonny appeared in the doorway, made her jump.

  ‘I didn’t hear you coming,’ she said. ‘How did you manage to creep up on me?’

  ‘You’ve got to think like an animal, Sam, imagine you are being stalked and behave as if you are the prey. Your life depends on remaining hidden, not being heard or smelled.’

  Now they were out in the open, exposed, he snapped into a different gear – bushcraft, military training. Jim had been the same, dealing with difficult situations with what could seem like curt authority when he was merely following the drill, concentrating on what needed to be done. Emotional disengagement in order to survive. She had rebelled against it, of course, yet she found it reassuring to see the same reflexes in Sonny. He assessed the interior of the hut.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s well camouflaged by the shrubs. You wouldn’t spot it from the road. Does anybody else know about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I mean, nobody apart from Luke.’

  Sonny gave her a questioning glance, filled her with unease and, for the first time in a while, she thought about the bone and the hair she had found in the Lookers’ Hut the night Luke had disappeared. Dave had been curious about the odd objects, and she had thought he was just being Dave – with his idiosyncratic interests. All she had cared about anyway was that they weren’t the remains of Luke. But Alastair’s story about the informer, dismembered and his parts thrown across the marsh, had unsettled her. She shook her head, dislodged her concerns. The bone and the hair were irrelevant, field-walker’s finds to be bagged, noted, labelled, examined then left in the bottom of a cupboard for decades.

  ‘Let’s find this pub,’ she said. ‘I could do with a drink.’

  *

  Hands feeding the wheel, right turn on to the main road, he nearly failed to clock the
speeding bike and almost pulled out in front of it. The bike swerved around the Land Rover; the leather-clad biker leaning close to the handlebars glanced back over his shoulder as he passed, clocked her through the black visor of his helmet.

  ‘Moto Guzzi,’ Sonny said. ‘Nice bike. It’s fast but low – built for Italian shorties.’

  An endless stretch of straight and narrow tarmac, boxed in by a dark green wall of maize spears, head height, blocking the view on either side. There weren’t many places on the marsh where the far horizon was occluded. The Owler was invisible until they were right on top of it. One of those in the middle of nowhere pubs with a garden that attracted bikers and a police car with a breathalyser on the last Saturday night of the month when officers were trying to boost their charge stats. Start of the week though, the car park was more or less empty. Apart from a Moto Guzzi bike. And, in the far corner, a knot of men with grotesque blackened faces, eyes blinking white, lipless mouth holes, black ragged capes draped around their shoulders and top hats with pheasant feathers in the band. Sam blanched at the sight.

  ‘What are those men?’ Sonny asked. He swung the Land Rover into a parking space under a willow.

  ‘Crow-men. Morris dancers from the dark side. I saw them at a May Day celebration in Hastings this year. Although, the first time I saw them was at a May Day fair with Jim when I was a kid.’

  She shook as she spoke, the violence of the reaction surprising her; the memory filled her with dread and anger. She picked a fallen withy stem, slashed and sliced the midges clouding her vision.

  The wind had dropped to nothing, allowed the sun’s rays to penetrate, heated the warm afternoon into a muggy evening, purple clouds gathering above the Weald. In the still air, she could hear the creaking of the crow-men’s leather boots as they moved into position – a rehearsal, she presumed. They were a hefty crew, intimidating with their blacked-up faces. She walked over to watch. The musicians started playing – the drum and bone, the squeezebox, the banjo and a leather-jacketed man hitting the spoons against his thigh. The crow-men didn’t dance. They stomped, whacked the ground with their wooden staves, then clashed the clubs together in the air over their heads. As the beat of the music quickened, their movements became more manic, violent. She stood mesmerized, unable to shift, flinching each time the wooden clubs were thwacked in the air, jolting with the thud of their boots on the ground. The music stopped.

  ‘That’s it, boys,’ the banjo-man shouted.

  The dancers put their truncheon-wielding arms down, formed a line and, without another word or smile, marched out the car park and down the road. Left the spoon-man standing. He collected the crash helmet that had been placed on one side of the car park, and entered the pub.

  ‘The English do some strange things,’ Sonny said.

  Inside the pub was dead. The spoon-beating Moto Guzzi owner was playing the slot machine. An old-fashioned one-armed bandit. He pulled the handle and set the dials spinning, lights flashing, music twanging, then pulled the handle again. And again. The noise put her on edge, made her nerves jangle with the Chinese water torture of its repetitiveness. She checked the bar’s gloomier recesses for Patrick, but he wasn’t there. They sat in a corner and waited. They had arranged to meet at six, and he was already ten minutes late. She fidgeted.

  ‘We shouldn’t have agreed to meet him here,’ she said. ‘We should have insisted on meeting him at his parents’ place.’

  ‘I doubt if it would have made much difference. If he wants to show up, he will.’

  ‘What if something has happened to him? The men in that Audi obviously knew his address.’

  Sonny shrugged, eyes fixed on the biker playing the slot machine. She checked her watch again. Six fifteen. The bar door creaked. A bespectacled, dun-haired, mid-height man walked in. Patrick. Except he looked thinner than she remembered, frailer, as if some process of osmosis had blurred his boundaries, colour leached, left him diminished. She caught sight of his yellow-striped Adidas trainers and a lump formed in her throat. They reminded her of Dave. Football buddies, fellow Aston Villa supporters, five-a-side mates. He caught her eye and walked over to their table without a smile.

  ‘I can’t stay long.’

  God, he was jumpy. He sat on the chair nearest the door, didn’t bother to think about a drink, fished in his jacket, pulled out a packet of fags, fumbled, flicked his Bic, flame dancing with the trembles of his hand, fingernails bitten ragged. He gave Sonny a nervous glance. Sonny smiled, but he clearly failed to reassure. She wished she had told Sonny to stay in the Land Rover. She’d become used to him, learned to block out the hard man exterior.

  ‘Sonny is a friend of mine.’

  Patrick nodded, puffed on his cigarette. Sonny had the sense to shrink into his seat, reduce his presence.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked Patrick. Stupid question.

  He shook his head. ‘Dave’s death has done my head in.’

  ‘It’s done mine in too.’ Better to start with Dave, try to build up a connection, rather than rushing straight in to questions about Luke. She had to be cautious; she didn’t know the details of Dave’s involvement and there was a possibility that Patrick had been dragged into the caesium smuggling craziness.

  Patrick said, ‘He called me the night before he died.’

  ‘Did he?’

  She recalled the conversation she had overheard at Dave’s house. Hi, Dave here. Sorry to call so late, mate. I just wanted a quick chat. So he was calling Patrick.

  ‘He called me late. I was in bed and I couldn’t be bothered to get up. I should have done, I realize now. But I didn’t. He left a message.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It was one of a series. We kept missing each other on the phone.’

  She knew the feeling. Her life was being driven by a series of missed phone calls. Messages picked up too late. Phantom voices on an answering machine.

  ‘I listened to the message in the morning. It said something odd had turned up.’ He glanced over his shoulder, then stared at her hard, as if she should know what he was getting at. ‘And it made me edgy.’ He squeezed the filter of his fag between his finger and thumb, sucked the nicotine out, stubbed the butt in the ashtray.

  ‘I know Dave likes you,’ he said. ‘Liked you,’ he added.

  ‘I always got on well with Dave. He was like a brother.’

  Patrick smiled for the first time since entering the pub. ‘Yes, that’s what Dave said. You treated him like your brother.’ She imagined Dave complaining about her to Patrick. Her cheeks burned, but her embarrassment seemed to put Patrick more at ease.

  ‘Why did his message make you edgy?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a long story, goes back a few months.’

  He reached for another fag.

  She risked a prompt. ‘Was it something to do with the lab?’

  ‘The lab’s security.’

  She attempted to sound surprised. ‘Is there a problem with security there then?’

  He glanced over his shoulder, fiddled with his lighter. ‘Yes. Well, there isn’t a lot of security at the lab – why would there be? It’s only a research lab; just a load of geeky environmental scientists, that’s all.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘Well, there’s always one person on the site to protect the equipment and also to oversee the security of the hazardous materials. A security guard-cum-caretaker. The guards are provided by this security firm. There’s a roster. So they come and go. You might see one guy a few times and then never again, it’s that sort of work. Some of them are OK, some of them sit in the office smoking and reading The Sun and I don’t really notice them.’ His words were gushing out now, as if he had turned the tap and couldn’t stop the flow. ‘There was this one bloke, though, lovely he was. Colombian. Miguel. He was working at the lab until about six months ago. We were friendly. I speak Spanish. We had a bond. Then one day, sometime around the beginning of the year, he told me there was a new security guard on the roster
, and he suspected he was doing some kind of fiddle. Vince, this guard is called.’

  The slot machine kerchinged. Patrick jumped, lowered his voice.

  ‘Miguel had noticed that Vince always worked the day there’s a delivery from Amersham – on the first Tuesday of every month. Tomorrow, in fact.’

  ‘What do they deliver?’

  ‘Radioactive materials for research purposes.’

  She screwed up her face. ‘You mean like caesium 137?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He scowled.

  ‘I know about caesium because of Dave’s research,’ she explained.

  ‘Of course. Dave always said you were a closet egghead.’

  She laughed and then she said, ‘So you have caesium 137 delivered regularly?’

  ‘Yes. By van.’

  ‘Jesus. That sounds a bit mad, having radioactive materials being driven up and down the motorway in a van.’

  ‘We are licensed. So is the delivery company. And the amounts they deliver aren’t particularly large. Just the vials we need for the kind of experiments that Dave carries out. Used to carry out.’

  ‘Right.’ Dave’s special subject, she reminded herself, caesium 137 contamination of water and its impact on marine environments.

  ‘Anyway, this guard Vince always did the long late shift on the Amersham delivery day. So he would be there in the afternoon when the delivery was made and stay there for the evening until somebody came to relieve him around one a.m. And one night Miguel was on the shift after Vince. Miguel turned up for work early, mainly because he lived in a shitty place so he might as well be at the research station as hanging around in a cramped room. And when he arrived, he saw somebody he didn’t know in the loading bay. He went over to investigate. Then suddenly Vince appeared, looking menacing, told him to fuck off and come back later when his shift started. Miguel questioned him, and Vince told him everything was under control and if Miguel knew what was good for him he’d better keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘Did Miguel say what the stranger in the loading bay looked like?’