The Salt Marsh

by Clare Carson

  NINETEEN

  SHE WOKE WITH the sun on her face, hand still on her penknife, and Sonny sitting by her side. She had intended to stay up all night, but she must have dozed despite the intensity of her fears, her lingering doubts about Sonny. Perhaps she had been able to sleep because her mind had resolved to keep looking for Luke, whatever the risks. The dangers of doing nothing were now greater. She was no longer certain that Harry knew what or whom she was up against. She needed to find Luke, make sure he was safe from Regan and her heavy mob, and then they could deal with Crawford together. She took a deep breath, held it; in the stillness of the air she could hear the flap, flap of the rooks flying overhead.

  Sonny had been busy while she slumbered. He had found a fallen willow tree, chopped off two slices for stools. He was perched on one drinking coffee. She sat up, eyed the short axe at Sonny’s feet.

  He said, ‘You know, I think on the inside, people are like the trunk of a tree; the core is your heart, and every year you grow another ring. But where there is a childhood trauma, it marks the core. And then the scar tissue grows to cover it, and ever afterwards the rings of the trunk follow the lines of the scar.’

  He pointed at the cut surface of the vacant trunk; the bark, the cortex, the sapwood, the heartwood. ‘Look, you can see, the wood is scarred, but it’s still growing; it’s not rotten. The scarring makes it stronger.’

  ‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ she said.

  The problem she had with Sonny was that whatever her doubts, she couldn’t help liking him. He had stuck by her, helped her. He passed her a mug of coffee. She felt the warmth in her hand, blew the steam across the surface of the black liquid, watched it evaporate and wondered whether she had the power to conjure a mist with her mind, draw the vapours from the water. She became conscious of Sonny observing her. He lifted the fag to his mouth, inhaled, cracked his jaw. A smoke ring wobbled and floated above his head, luminous in the morning sunlight, a burnished ring. And then it dissipated – his halo slipped. She wasn’t so sure now, in the morning light, that he was working with the American and Regan, but she was certain he had killed Flint. She didn’t care whether he confessed or not, she wasn’t a witch-hunter. She wanted him on her side – pissing out, as Jim would have said, not pissing in. She wanted information that could save her life, and Luke’s, so she had to take him for what he was rather than condemn him. Jim. Flint. Crawford. Sam. She needed to understand the connections.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Do you remember that newspaper cutting Harry gave me, the one about the ex-cop, the Westie, the old lady and the hitman with a halo?’

  He rolled his eyes heavenwards.

  She said, ‘Flint. That was the name of the ex-cop who was shot.’

  Sonny nodded to the sky.

  ‘Harry told me Flint left the Force because there were rumours he’d been taking cuts from these bullion launderers who were trying to convert their stolen gold into drugs money.’

  Sonny played with his Zippo, turning it in his hand, chucking it in the air and catching it.

  She continued. ‘Flint was working with Crawford at the time. Crawford was in charge of the laundering case. So he must have dealt with the corruption allegations against Flint.’

  Sonny was still playing with his lighter; there was something irritating about his obsessive fidgeting, something niggled as she watched the Zippo spinning. Harry said Crawford was a good cop, but Jim had told her he was an evil bastard. Flint had been done for corruption, yet Jim had a meeting with him about something. It didn’t add up. The Zippo glinted in the sunlight as it twirled through the air, pitched over and fell – like Alastair’s alchemy vial, the bellarmine tipped upside down. Curse and counter-curse. Then it clicked. ‘Oh god,’ she said, ‘I see it. He flipped it. Crawford flipped the accusation. That’s what coppers always do. Flint was saying Crawford was bent, so Crawford turned the accusation on its head and accused Flint, discredited him, stirred up allegations of corruption, and he had to leave the Force. But then perhaps Flint wouldn’t shut up, said he had some evidence.’

  Sonny stood, pocketed his Zippo, stepped across to the doorway of the Lookers’ Hut, scanned the surrounding meadow, returned, sat down on his willow trunk stool.

  She formulated her question carefully, searching for the solid ground. ‘Could it have been Crawford who ordered Flint’s hit?’

  ‘Crawford?’ He dragged deeply on his fag butt, squeezed the filter between finger and thumb. ‘A senior cop commissioning a hit? A superintendent the trigger man? He wouldn’t be so stupid.’ He exhaled smoke jets through his nostrils. ‘And anyway, he doesn’t have to commission, because he can engineer.’

  ‘How would he do that?’

  ‘He could use information.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘Names. Who is on the case. What they know. Who they are about to collar.’

  She opened her mouth, furrowed her brow, then she said, ‘Crawford is a mole. An informer. He leaks information that could provoke somebody else, one of his criminal contacts, to commission a contract on another cop or ex-cop. He issues a death warrant.’

  ‘If they are about to expose him, then yes.’

  ‘Like Flint?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Sonny nodded. ‘But like I said, he wouldn’t ever do anything directly. Leaks here and there. He nudges. He drops a name, twists an arm, pulls in a favour, prods a raw nerve, a fear, a debt – and then a deal is set in motion.’

  ‘That’s appalling.’ Shafting your colleagues, lining them up for a hit, was about as low as you could go, she reckoned.

  Sonny snorted, rocked. She gave him a quizzical stare. ‘What’s so funny?’

  He stopped laughing. ‘I’m surprised you are surprised. Your father was part of it, after all.’

  He was right. Jim was part of it. She pictured the entry in Jim’s diary. Meet Flint 9 p.m. The image of a candyfloss stick doodled underneath. And then she saw it, the point of the doodle. The meeting wasn’t with the candy man – it was about the candy man. She was sweating, her hands clammy. ‘Do you think Flint passed some information on to Jim about Crawford, and Crawford found out?’

  Sonny closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  She said, ‘But it’s possible. And it’s possible Crawford leaked some information about Jim, which he knew was almost certainly a death warrant.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Crawford?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you warn me that he was a hit-engineering psycho?’

  He locked his fingers together, twisted his hands, revealed his palms. ‘I didn’t know. Not for sure anyway. The hitman is at the bottom of the command chain, and doesn’t always know who is at the top, especially if it’s an indirect order. Somebody contacts you in a dingy bar, gives you the details. So I didn’t know, I could only guess. I thought your guess was as good as mine. And anyway,’ he said, ‘sometimes it’s safer not to know. Not knowing is protection. It’s better to keep the walls in place.’

  She remembered how he had lied about shooting Spyder, trying to keep her out of it.

  He shrugged. ‘Too much knowledge can be dangerous. As you’ve discovered.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know anything about Crawford. So why is he after me?’

  Sonny said, ‘You don’t always know what you know.’

  She rubbed her birthmark. ‘Do you know what I know?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  She wanted to cry – frustration, anger.

  ‘I’ve only ever seen Crawford once before, when I was eleven.’ Her voice quavered. ‘It was ages ago. 1978. I was with Jim at a fair out beyond the burbs, in the criminal belt. You know, near the place where Jim was buried. Jim disappeared and I realized this man was staring at me. He tried to stop me leaving. Jim told me he was evil. That’s all I know. It’s nothing.’

  ‘There must be some detail there that you don’t realize is significant. But Crawford does.’ Sonny shrugged
. ‘It’s enough.’

  Enough for Crawford to try to fit her up with a record on an MI5 terrorist index, discredit her even if he couldn’t make the charges stick, have her permanently on a surveillance list?

  *

  Enough for him to engineer a contract on her? A crow landed on the broken wall of the Lookers’ Hut, hopped along, wiped its beak against the red brick, cawed and flew away. Crow, bird of death. There were lots of them out here on the marsh. She thought about Sonny’s phone conversation she had overheard in Vauxhall. You’ve got to hold off. I need more time.

  She said, ‘Sonny, do you always complete your contracts?’

  He shook his head, reached for his Marlboro carton, flicked a fag in the air, caught it in his mouth, lit it and puffed. ‘Sometimes I take a contract to stop anybody else from carrying out the hit.’

  She took a slurp of coffee – tepid, but still comforting. She decided she would have to take his word for it; she didn’t have much choice. She cradled the tin cup in her hands, concentrated, made it boil, steam rising, the particles swirling, forming a mist, spectral barn owl wings outstretched, soft feathers floating, filling the air.

  Sonny’s voice brought her back to her senses. ‘Is there a church near here?’

  ‘A church?’ Churches weren’t her thing, but she could do with a distraction, a reason to move; escape this Lookers’ Hut that no longer felt safehouse with its bones and hair, ghosts and crows, the menaces of the smugglers. ‘There’s one not far from here. Thomas à Becket. We could get there without much danger of being seen if we cut around the fields.’

  *

  The sun warmed her back as she walked around the fields, picking their way across the ditches, the grass still wet beneath their feet. The hedgerows kept them hidden from any cars passing in the lanes.

  ‘When you were back home, growing up in the Transvaal,’ she asked, ‘did you confess your sins to the pastor?’

  ‘No. My sins have always been between my God and me.’ He plucked a dog rose from the brambles, twiddled it between his fingers, let it drop. ‘Confession to another person usually ends in betrayal of one sort or another, I’ve found.’

  The three-stepped brick church rose out of the grass and mist; its humble appearance was touching – a lowly snail looking up to its creator. The door was unlocked. The interior was intimate yet open: white wooden boxed pews along the walls of the short nave, a timbered roof that resembled the hull of an upturned boat.

  He walked to the chancel and knelt in front of the altar, the Lord’s Prayer and the eye of God looking down on him from a painted screen. She opened a box pew, sat on a wooden bench and contemplated the simple beauty of the church, the text boards attached to the roof.

  ‘Be ye doers of the word, and not be hearers only, deceiving your own selves. James ch. 1 v 12.’

  The verse played on her mind and she wondered whether she was a hearer only, guided by the voices in her head, the recorded messages on tapes, deceiving herself. She reached into her pocket, touched her penknife and torch for comfort.

  ‘Will you come and pray with me?’ Sonny asked.

  Why not, she thought, even though she didn’t believe in God. At least, not the God of this church. She went and knelt beside him.

  ‘I don’t know any prayers,’ she said.

  ‘We could recite a passage from the Bible.’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know many Bible passages.’

  ‘Ecclesiastes.’

  ‘Yes, I know Ecclesiastes.’

  They said the words together. ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.’

  He kept his head bowed and his eyes closed, and the low morning light through the church window shone on the tears rolling down his cheeks. He was right, she suspected, it was safer to know nothing than to live with difficult truths. She sensed he had an urge to obliterate himself, return to dust, unable to live with the things he had seen and done, and he wanted to find a church, recite the Ecclesiastes verses, not because he needed forgiveness or reassurance that there was a time to kill if God ordained it, but because he was preparing to die, the dark shadows engulfing him.

  *

  Early evening, they decided to approach the research station from the north, avoiding the roads and the coastline where, they agreed, Crawford was most likely to be watching for them. They found a disused track leading into the shingle wilderness between the beach and the marsh and left the Land Rover hidden in a clump of blackthorn.

  Sonny tried one more time to dissuade her. ‘I still think it’s safer to sit tight, wait for Harry to deal with the file and sort Crawford out.’

  ‘Yes, but Harry thinks Crawford is OK. A good cop.’

  The thought made her shudder. How come nobody, not even Harry, could see through Crawford? He was like a plague-carrying rat that crept from house to house spreading infection; the bodies piling up around him, everybody blind to the culprit in their midst.

  She said, ‘Well, whatever Harry manages to do, I still have to find Luke and make sure he is safe.’

  ‘OK. OK. I get it. But take the Firebird.’ He rummaged in his rucksack, produced the pistol.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ she said.

  ‘Put it in the inside pocket of your overcoat.’

  ‘No. I mean, I don’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘You do. I showed you.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were a natural.’ He smiled and added, ‘You just need to remember to take the safety catch off, that’s all.’

  She took the Firebird, even though she felt stupid with it, placed it in the pocket of her coat.

  ‘Let’s get moving,’ Sonny said.

  ‘Hang on. I want something else.’

  She scrabbled around in the back of the Land Rover, located the Dictaphone with her answering machine cassette inside. She wanted the comfort of the recorded voices with her. Luke. Dave. Liz. She fumbled with the machine, flustered fingers unable to remove the tape.

  ‘Come on.’ Sonny was edging to go.

  She gave up fiddling, closed the Dictaphone lid, jammed the machine into her coat pocket.

  *

  The stony desert stretched away before them; the sun beating down and the power station shimmering like a mirage in the glare. They didn’t speak for a while; it was an effort to trudge across the pebbles. Cormorants squatted on their untidy nests, balanced on the topmost branches of willow trees that had been submerged in rain-filled gravel pits. They rested in a dip shaded by a stunted hawthorn. The hollow was littered with rusty sheets of corrugated iron, which might once have been somebody’s makeshift shelter. A grass snake slithered away as she nudged the debris with her foot. They shared a bottle of water, some bread and cheddar.

  ‘What’s the plan then?’ Sonny asked.

  ‘Well, from what Patrick said, it sounds as if Regan comes just before midnight to pick up the caesium they’ve creamed off from the Amersham delivery. I think we should try and get into the research station before Regan shows up. Confront the security guard, Vince. Tease some information out of him. See if he knows anything about Luke.’

  She sounded more confident than she felt.

  ‘Let’s call in on Alastair first though, and find out whether he’s noticed anything going on, seen any more strange boats on the beach.’

  *

  The hot airlessness of the day brought mist at dusk. The humidity dispersed the light from the setting sun and filled the eastern horizon with a bloody haze. They neared the outlying fishermen’s cabins and she focused on the mist, drew it closer with her mind, let its softness curl and wrap around them. By the time they were directly behind Alastair’s cottage, the fog had obliterated the sea and was turning the shingle dark with its moi
sture. They walked along the stack of crates marking the boundary of the cabin’s backyard.

  ‘He’s moved the funt,’ she said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The funt. The lamp he had outside his front door.’ She pointed. ‘He said he used it as a sign to show whether he was at home or away. I wonder whether he’s done a bunk. Let’s take a look.’

  An untidy pile of not quite clean bones had been left on the doorstep: the toad, the carcass he proposed to throw in a river to strengthen his magic powers. She knocked on the door. No answer. A mildewed curtain pulled across the kitchen window blocked the view of the interior. She called his name. Silence.

  *

  She remembered what he had said about the back door, the buggered lock. She placed her shoulder against the peeling painted wood, shoved, the door gave way and she marched through the kitchen – noted the cooker and its gas cylinder still standing below the window. The front room had been cleared of nearly all his belongings – boxes, papers, bird skulls, wings, decrepit armchair – all gone. The walnut desk was the only piece of furniture remaining and, sitting on top of it, the school chemistry rack holding three corked test tubes with Alastair’s alchemical experiments still fizzing away inside the glass. The door of the cellar was more obvious, she noticed, now the room was empty. She spotted something new – a pentagram chalked on the wall, a folded piece of paper pinned to the top point. She niggled the pin free with her nails, removed the paper, unfolded it; a hastily scrawled doodle of a boat with two stick figures on the deck. She held it up and recalled her last, stilted conversation with Alastair about the smugglers’ ghost boat. The one he thought he might have seen the day Luke went missing. He had stalled when she asked him whether he had seen anybody on board. She examined the stick figures; next to one of the single-stroke torsos he had drawn a small circle around a three-pronged symbol, like a badge. Was it a peace symbol? A CND badge? Or perhaps its was a smiling sun nuclear power no thanks badge. Maybe it was an irrelevant detail, a mystical sign from the Magus. She relegated the badge to the back of her mind, focused on the boat. There was a name written in tiny letters along the hull. She squinted. Pluto. She twitched, half gasped, folded and deftly stuffed the paper in her pocket. Pluto, the name on Dave’s note. Pluto, the god of the underworld, she had assumed, a bleak reference to Dave’s own downward descent. Wrong again. Pluto was the name of a boat.