The Salt Marsh (10 page)

‘That is really interesting, Mum, but I'm going to have to go now because I'm waiting for another call.'

‘Oh.'

An offended oh, Sam realized, but frankly, right then she reckoned she was the one who should be offended by Liz's failure to behave in a normal motherly sort of way.

‘Call me back another time,' said Sam.

‘Will do.'

‘Bye.'

‘Bye.'

She replaced the receiver.
Paradise
bloody
Lost.
Jim had kept Liz grounded, in touch with reality. Since Jim's death Liz had cut loose, aided and abetted by Roger, and now she floated around in the stratosphere talking in literary quotes and interesting recipes she had unearthed in Greek tavernas. What kind of family did she grow up in if the parent who kept them grounded was an undercover cop who spent half his life on secret missions pretending to be somebody else?

Thinking about Liz reminded her she had been given Harry's number and an instruction to call him. She could do with a conversation with Harry; he was always unflappable. She dug in her pocket, found the paper. Dialled. The phone rang.

‘Hello, Harry here.'

‘Harry, it's Sam. You left a message with Liz.'

He didn't bother with niceties. ‘You been causing trouble again?' He said it jokingly, but she knew he wasn't.

‘No,' she said. ‘Why?'

‘Somebody thinks you have.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't want to alarm you, Sam, but word is somebody has opened a file on you.'

‘A file?' So what, big deal. ‘I thought the Force had files on everybody who'd ever been on a protest.'

‘Well, maybe they do, but there are files and there are files. And this is one of the files that belongs to the latter category.'

Harry's voice unnerved her, the softness of his Welsh accent doing nothing to mute the seriousness of his tone.

‘So what kind of a file is it?'

‘The kind that if you're not careful ends up being transferred to an Intelligence computerized index of possible terrorists.'

He said it matter-of-factly, but his words made her gasp.

‘Computerized index of terrorists?'

‘R2 it's called. MI5's list of people they think need watching. Subversives. Possible terrorists.'

‘But I'm not a possible terrorist.'

‘Of course you're not. And you're not actually on the list. You are just on the pile for further investigation, as far as I know.'

She couldn't entirely comprehend what he was saying; it was so ridiculous.

‘Why is anybody even considering adding my name to a list of possible terrorists when I'm clearly not one?' Her voice was shrill.

‘OK, stay calm. Nothing irreversible has happened yet.'

‘Yet? For Christ's sake, what's this about? Am I under surveillance? What have I done? How can I stop it?'

‘Look, don't panic. We can work this out. Mistakes happen. False information gets put about.'

‘Obviously.'

‘Do you think you know anybody who could be classified as a terrorist? An extremist of some sort or another?'

‘No.' Don't be ridiculous, she wanted to say, but didn't because she didn't want to sound rude.

‘You've not been hanging out with any dubious people then?'

‘No. Only my sisters.'

‘They don't count. Nobody else?'

She wrestled around in her mind, was about to tell Harry about Luke's disappearance, decided it was better not to. She didn't want to confuse the issue by talking about the planned Dungeness protest, the contact at the power station. Didn't want him to think there was any possibility she might have done anything to warrant a file. Harry interrupted her internal dialogue.

‘Does the name Dave Daley mean anything to you?'

She jumped. ‘Dave?'

‘Yes, Dave Daley.'

‘He's my housemate. Or he was. He's gone to Skell for six months. Why?'

‘It's probably nothing. Somebody mentioned his name, that's all. He's not a loony leftie like you then?'

‘Dave? God no. The only time he ever protests about anything is when the ref gives a yellow card to an Aston Villa player. He's an environmental researcher. He knows people in Greenpeace but, to be honest, he tends to be a bit sniffy about campaigners. Amateurs, as far as he's concerned, unless they have a PhD from Imperial.'

‘Well, as I said, somebody mentioned him. Nothing more.'

Luke's answerphone message played in her mind.
Listen, there's something else... Dave...

Harry said, ‘I'll see what I can find out.'

She wanted him to say something more reassuring. He didn't.

‘I'll contact you one way or another when I've got something. In the meantime keep your head down till I know what's what. Sit tight. I'll sort it.'

‘OK.'

‘You've got my number. Bye for now. Oh, better to use a phone box next time.'

Harry replaced the receiver abruptly and she realized she'd forgotten to ask him about the whistling, ‘The
Third Man
Theme', check whether that was his
call me
signal. She thought about ringing him back, but didn't want to aggravate him. It would have to wait until the next time they spoke. The whistler seemed like a minor worry right at that moment anyway compared to a file marked terrorist.
I'll sort it.
She wasn't sure whether she was relieved or alarmed to hear that phrase.
I'll sort it
when uttered by an agent of the secret state usually meant you were already up to your neck in it. First Luke disappeared and now this, her file waiting to be added to a computerized terrorist list. What was her name doing on that pile? And what was all this about Dave? That had to be a mistake. Sit tight, Harry had said, but it didn't feel like a viable option when she was being dragged sideways by hidden tides and crosscurrents. She lay down on the floor, miserable, limbs trembling with tension and exhaustion.

She opened her eyes; her bones ached, the hallway had already darkened in the afternoon shadows. She must have slept there, on the damp boards, for hours. She gazed up at the cracked ceiling tiles; asbestos, Dave had said, invisible killer. Time bomb, ticking away inside. Not even aware you've inhaled the fibre until you wake up one morning thirty years later to discover your lungs are fucked and you've got six weeks left before you die. Thanks, Dave, for the interesting information. She coughed. Patted her chest. A snail inched past her nose, retracted its horns when she sighed. She pushed herself on to her hands and knees, crawled to the phone, dialled Luke's number. Nobody picked up. She was like the snail, fumbling along the damp wainscot, no idea where she was going. She needed to recover herself, clear her head, walk along the river.

*

She stood on Vauxhall Bridge, the dusk air thick with city grime. Downstream, the eastern horizon of Docklands was crowded with cranes reaching heavenwards, as if searching for salvation. Behind, a ruddy sun was setting on the derelict cold store and the chimneys of Battersea power station. She fixed her eyes on the water running below and summoned her father. The first time she had seen Jim underneath Vauxhall Bridge was earlier that year. January. She was walking home late from the nightclub where she worked twice a week. A vast perigee moon hung over Westminster, the river little more than a mercury ribbon, sucked dry by the lunar pull. She glanced over the bridge and saw a figure standing among the rotting timbers, the remains of a Bronze Age jetty that marked the muddy foreshore. She knew instantly the figure was Jim, although she couldn't be sure how she knew. She called out his name. He didn't react. Still, she was certain it was him. She wasn't scared, she wasn't even surprised – she had half expected him to reappear.
Where are you going? Over the hills and far away. Will you come back? I've always come back before, haven't I?
When she looked again, he had vanished. Death hadn't changed the pattern.

She watched a solitary waterman rowing with the current, oars dipping, pulling. Traffic growled over the bridge and a helicopter buzzed along the line of the river. Through the white noise she heard a mournful whistle, the familiar tune. She leaned over the railing, couldn't see anything, hurtled down to Albert Embankment. The land below the bridge had been purchased by property developers and fenced, the gate padlocked, but there was a hole in the chainlink under Alembic House. She crawled through, around the scattered bricks, prostrate scaffold poles, down the slipway to the shore. The river flickered from lead to quicksilver as she descended to its level. There was no sign of Jim. She scanned the muddy banks. A trickling caught her attention; water running down a channel from a tunnel entrance in the embankment wall, invisible from the bridge. Sewage? She stumbled across the rocks, clambered on to the grey concrete lip, bilge water seeping into her shoes, waded up past greening timbers. The entrance was blocked by a vast portcullis sluice gate that looked like the mouth of hell, and above it a sign.
River Effra run-off.
She had always imagined the underground Effra to be a wild torrent flowing deep below the streets of south London. Not a crap-filled dribble. She pushed against the iron; it refused to budge. She squinted through the gaps, shadows danced along the tunnel wall, a rat crept through the rubbish. She hollered.

‘Jim.'

Her voice echoed around the bricks. Jim... im... im. Then silence apart from the drip, drip, drip of water trickling. The wetness of her shoes made her look down. A line of footprints in the wallow trailed into the tunnel, as if somebody had managed to walk through the sluice gate. Jim was in there somewhere, hiding out in the rivers buried beneath London. She dismissed the idea. She shouldered the iron barricade again.

*

Definitely locked. And yet, there was the trail of footprints – somebody obviously had walked into the tunnel, somehow. She squatted, poked at the tangle of rotting vegetation, cans, plastic bags, matted hair entwined around the base of the sluice. A smooth grey object caught her attention. She yanked and nagged until it was free, carefully wiped away the slime and found a spiteful face grimacing at her from the belly of a ceramic pot, its neck sealed with a lump of cracked black wax. She shook the bottle gently; it rattled. She tipped it upside down without thinking, stuck her hand under the bottle's mouth as the wax splintered, caught the falling objects. A puff of fetid mist filled her nostrils and a dribble of liquid passed through her fingers. She coughed, almost dropped the lot. What was that smell? Asparagus? Worse than that. Urine. She unfurled her fist and gingerly examined the bottle's contents she had scrunched in her palm. A slither of what looked like bark and a roll of shrivelled brown felt. She spread the material with a finger; it was cut in the shape of a heart and had three dressmaker's pins stuck through it. She reeled; there was something unnerving about the way these strange artefacts – bones, hair, bottles with peculiar contents – kept appearing at her feet; she was a field walker among the darkness. She poked the woody slither and thought of the green-haired woman she had met at the spring fair when she was eleven, the packet of bark shards she had pushed into Sam's hand. Was it willow? The bark of the bitter withy, the tree of death and grief and weeping? She contemplated the bottle's strange contents for a while, then pushed them back into its belly. She was examining the gurning face again when she sensed somebody watching her. She looked up. A man in a parka holding a metal detector waved at her from the river's edge; there were often treasure-seekers here when the tide was low.

‘What have you found?' he shouted.

‘I'm not sure.' She jumped down from the run-off channel, walked over to him, showed him the pot. His eyes gleamed.

‘That's a nice one, very nice.' He had an Indian accent. ‘Very well spotted. I've found one myself, but it was cracked.'

‘What is it?'

‘A bellarmine. A witch's bottle.'

She twitched, nearly dropped the bottle. She had been right, she was an archaeologist of the occult. She tried to remember whether
Daemonologie
mentioned bellarmines; she didn't think it did. King James was more interested in torture methods than the artefacts of magic.

‘It's a protection against witchcraft, a counter-curse. People thought the river had mystical powers, so they chucked charms and counter-charms in the water. And then hundreds of years later they surface, appear in the mud.' He eyed it enviously. ‘Where did you find it?'

She pointed to the sluice gate.

‘The Effra run-off,' he said. ‘The Vauxhall sluice, they've just finished building that. It's supposed to provide extra drainage for the Effra, flood control. They'll need that by the end of the summer with all the rain we've been having. They open the gate when the drains are full and let the water out into the river.'

She pictured the footsteps leading along the chute.

‘So the sluice gate is usually locked?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

‘It's not possible to get in?'

‘Oh, it's easy to get in. There are hundreds of entrances. You just have to find a manhole. Most of them have access ladders.'

‘Seriously?'

‘There's a whole other world down there below London, the underground rivers, the drains and sewers. Some people say you can tell which manholes lead to the rivers by the gurgling they make. And the smell they give off. I've never been down there myself.' His brown eyes swivelled back to the bellarmine. ‘You should take that to the Museum of London. It could be old. Seventeenth-century even. Although, people didn't stop using them then, so it might be much more recent than that.'

She thought of the green-haired stallholder again, wondered whether she was a user of bellarmines as well as a seller of herbal remedies.

‘I could take it if you want,' he said.