The Salt Marsh (11 page)

‘No, it's OK.' She said it too quickly, curled her fingers around the bottle like Gollum clutching his precious. The treasure-seeker didn't take offence.

‘As you like. It's a lucky find. Very lucky.' He paused. ‘Unless of course you tip the contents out and then you reverse the charm and curse yourself, and that would be very unlucky.'

She giggled nervously, wiped her hand on her coat. ‘I wouldn't do anything so stupid.'

‘I was only joking anyway, I don't believe in all that witchcraft stuff myself.'

‘Me neither.'

He nodded at the bellarmine. ‘Although there are plenty of people who do. There's a lot of it about – irrational beliefs, fears and accusations. That's why I come out here, to escape.'

He replaced his headphones over his ears, trudged under the bridge, waving his metal detector in front of him, disappeared from view. She lifted the bottle to her face; the malicious bellarmine face leered back at her. Jesus, what had she done? She'd upended a bloody witch's bottle, tipped its contents out, and reversed the charm. She was so stupid. Maybe if she handed it over to a museum, got rid of it, she could negate the curse, undo any damage. Somewhere deep inside, she knew that wasn't going to work. Whoever had dropped it in her path – the River Effra, the maker of the footprints, a cunning woman – she was the finder, so she was the keeper. She had to deal with it; she couldn't pass it on. She weighed the bottle in her hand as she slithered back across the shore, decided against taking it home because it smelled so rank, and left it at the top of the slipway above high tide mark, well hidden in a gutter. She would come back for it when she had decided how to deal with its peculiar contents.

A trail of wet footprints followed her as she traipsed under the railway arches. She dialled Luke's number as soon as she reached home. It rang. And rang. Then somebody picked up. Elation.

‘Hello.'

Deflation. It was Spyder. Luke's scumbag housemate. She met Spyder when she started working in the Soho nightclub the previous September. He worked in a club around the corner. Hate at first sight. Posh boy slumming it, small-time drug dealer, all-round git.

‘It's Sam. Is Luke there?'

‘No. Ain't he with you?'

Ain't. Seriously, who was he trying to kid with his mockney accent?

‘No. He isn't with me.'

‘I wonder who he's stayin' with then.'

Piss off, scumbag.

‘When did you last see him?'

‘Friday night at the club. We both worked the shift.'

‘You didn't see him Saturday morning?'

‘I told you that. Friday night. I stayed out after the club closed, he said he wanted to get home. I got home about five in the morning, crashed, woke up midday and he wasn't there.'

‘Did he say anything to you about where he was going or what he was doing on Saturday?'

‘No. What's all this about anyway? Has he left you?'

‘No. Thanks for your help.'

‘Pleasure, darlin'.'

She jammed the receiver down, sat in the dark hall with her arms wrapped around her knees, listened for the gurgling of the Effra somewhere way below. She pictured the bellarmine, its pierced felt heart, the willow bark. She held her palm to her face – her skin still reeked of piss. She had upended the contents of the witch's bottle, reversed the magic, flipped it from a blessing to a curse. She was turning everything she touched to shit.

FIVE

S
HE WAS WOKEN
in the early hours by the call of a vixen. The cries of nocturnal animals – the shriek of an owl, the scream of a fox – had an unnerving human edge. She went to the window, pulled back the curtain. Not one fox, but a pack of fifteen or twenty animals, weaving between parked cars and puddles like trained urban assassins. The creatures halted in unison and lifted their heads. A solitary howl set them running again, hunting unseen prey, some beast deadly enough to warrant a co-ordinated pack attack. The red stream flowed down the road, merged with the shadows. She returned to her bed, lay awake, thinking of Luke. Dave.

She waited for the first pale light, ran down to the phone box – she was wary of using her own phone to call Dave, she didn't want to reveal her plans to anybody who might be tapping her line. Dave was an insomniac, like her. Three a.m. was her witching hour, the time when she gave up on sleep, crept downstairs to make a cup of tea. Dave was often sitting at the kitchen table already, the glare of the bare bulb glinting off his bald patch, squinting through his John Lennon gold-rimmed NHS glasses, usually reading a journal article he had photocopied earlier in the college library. Three a.m. was the time they had found his mother, Astrid, floating face up in the Digbeth Branch Canal, under Love Lane Bridge. She was from Berlin, fourteen years old in 1945 when the Soviets invaded. Astrid had been raped by the Red Army, her mother too. They had survived, ended up in Birmingham. Astrid had met John Daley when he came over from Tipperary to find building work. They fell in love and had four children, the youngest of whom was Dave, and they seemed to be happy for a while, but the past caught up with her in the end.

Early morning was the time Sam missed Dave most, since he had decamped to Skell. He answered the phone after two rings. He attempted to ask her how she was, but she launched straight into the disappearance of Luke, or at least the story she felt it was safe to relate. The plan to meet Luke at Dungeness, Luke's message on the answerphone. She didn't want to tell him about Harry and the file, not on the phone. She wasn't sure how she was going to tell him about that anyway. She wasn't coherent, jabbered on. Dave was dismissive.

‘He's probably gone off for a couple of days to see a mate.'

Difficult to convey the seriousness of the situation when she was self-censoring.

‘Yes, but what about the Greenpeace stuff?'

She whispered, as if it would make any difference if somebody was eavesdropping.

‘The Greenpeace stuff? I wouldn't worry about that. It's not like, you know, you're doing really dodgy stuff.'

Condescending sod. As she had explained to Harry, Dave maintained what he saw as a professional relationship with environmental campaigners; he was happy to provide them with scientific advice, but he was not a protestor.

‘I know we're not doing anything really dodgy. But it doesn't mean to say that other people won't interpret it as dodgy, does it?'

Impatient tut from Dave at the other end of the line.

‘Listen. Can I drive up to Skell and talk?'

‘Of course you can. But Sam...'

‘What?'

‘Take it easy on the road. You sound like you're getting a bit...'

‘A bit what?'

Hysterical. She silently dared him to say it. He didn't.

‘Tired and stressed. Drive up here, we can talk everything through calmly and work it out.'

‘OK. I'll be there this afternoon.'

‘OK.'

‘And Dave.'

‘What?'

‘Thanks for being helpful.'

‘Don't mention it. Anytime you want to dump your shit on me, Sam. It's fine.'

She ran home, eager to get on the road, fumbled with her key, pushed the door, the red light of the answering machine flashed. She pressed play. The cassette whirred, paused, a breath, the familiar tune and then somebody spoke. ‘Trust nobody.' Was it Harry's voice? Was there the hint of a Welsh accent? She rewound the tape, replayed. She couldn't be sure it was Harry, but the message was unambiguous.
Trust nobody.
A clear warning. About whom?

She walked into the kitchen, Harry's question in her head.
Does the name Dave Daley mean anything to you?
She fiddled with a saucepan, water, coffee. The black sludge glugged, a geyser of erupting volcanic gases. Coffee brewed the Turkish way, as demonstrated by Luke, in memory of his late father. Strange how the bereaved and damaged found one another out, recognized each other in a crowded room. Negative attraction. Her, Dave, Luke. Luke's father was English and Monika, his mother, was German – another reason he and Dave had bonded.

*

Monika came from Cologne; she had married Ben, an Englishman and a failed academic according to Luke. Ben thought he should have been a Professor of English Literature but didn't quite make the grade. Shortly after Luke was born, Ben had become bitter and critical of everything European, including his wife. He left them to be something big with the British Council in Istanbul where he said he felt at home. Ben admired all things Turkish and claimed that Ottoman culture was far superior to anything Europe had to offer. Luke visited him in the summers and it was during one of these holidays that his father died of a heart attack. Luke had found the body but he couldn't remember the details because he was only six at the time. His mother had filled the blanks in when he was older. All his memories of his father were echoes, he said, not real but retold stories. Luke's Turkish coffee was another of these ripples, a small attempt to connect with his long dead, largely unknown father.

She sipped the coffee and felt his skin touching hers, ached with his absence. She rubbed her damp eyes, walked back to the phone in the hallway, dialled his home number, counted the rings. Five. Nobody picked up. She couldn't put the receiver down, just in case somebody was there. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Still, she couldn't let go. Not yet. She would hang on until he answered, until eternity. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Somebody picked up. Spyder.

‘Kinell.' Kinell. The South London alphabet: K is for fucking hell. ‘Will you stop ringin' the friggin' phone. Who is it anyway?'

Pause while she wondered whether she should say anything or replace the receiver without speaking.

‘It's Sam.'

‘Oh, you. Might have guessed. He still ain't here. So you can piss off and stop buggin me.'

He slammed the receiver down.

*

Skell wasn't much more than a hundred miles from Vauxhall, but all roads leaving London were slow. Heavy rain had left pools of standing water that fanned as the camper van ploughed through them. Single lane across East Anglia. She ignored her impatient tail of cars as she crawled through the regimented pines of Thetford Forest, past the RAF base, a black transporter plane coming in to land like a giant hornet. Dogged rain bombarded relentless cabbage fields. She didn't spot the sea until she'd been looking at it for ten minutes because it had merged with the sky in a seamless grey blur. Off the main road, into the hawthorn-hedged lanes, over a humpback bridge, swifts diving for midges in the meadow beyond. Battered Land Rover behind. Skell's dilapidated windmill sails marked the horizon; a reminder that the place had once been a port busy enough to have its own red-light alley, until the river inlet had silted up and left the harbourmaster's house overlooking a saltmarsh. Stone terraced fishermen's cottages, narrow flint passageways once bustling, now abandoned to the cold easterlies blasting in from the North Sea. Skell had the forlorn air of a cheated wife, unsure how long to hang on before she gave up hope and walked away.

Sam parked her grime-caked van around the back of the village, water pouring down the run-offs at the side of the road. Through the puddled flint-walled lokes between the houses, sharp around a right-angled corner. A wild strawberry glowed like a ruby in the grass edging of the path. She stooped, plucked and dropped the tangy berry in her mouth, then spat it out when she saw a Labrador advancing, leg-cocking and spraying the verge as it moseyed along. The Barbour-wearing dog walker tweaked a stiff smile as she passed.

The foxgloves in the walled garden behind Dave's place drooped with the weight of the day's deluge. She poked her hand through the wrought-iron gate in the wall, tried the latch. Locked. She made her way along the side of the house, peered through the kitchen window, light on. Dave must be home; he always switched the lights off when he left the house. She leaned to one side, trying to see if he was at the far end of the kitchen, but her line of sight was obscured by a palm cross propped against the pane. She rapped the glass with her knuckle. No reply. She walked almost to the end of the loke where the path joined the main street through the village, cut right across the paved front garden with its neat lavender and rosemary beds, and rang the doorbell. No answer. She rang again. Nothing. She stooped, pushed the letterbox open, peered, nothing, nobody. Her eyes watered, breath shallow, throat constricting.

‘Dave. Where the fuck are you?'

Eventually his voice.

‘OK, OK, I'm coming. Give us a chance.'

She watched him waddling towards her through the rectangle of the letterbox, and before he had a chance to reach the door, she shouted, ‘What were you doing?'

He opened the door.

‘Having a crap. I didn't realize I needed to clear it with you first.'

‘I thought something might have happened to you.'

‘God, you're jumpy.'

*

They retreated to the kitchen; rusty-red flagstone floor, pine dresser displaying hand-thrown thick pottery mugs.

‘Look at all this.' He waved his hand around the kitchen dismissively.

‘What about it?'

‘It's so... so bourgeois.'

‘Better than the curling lino and stained Formica we have in Vauxhall.'

‘I'd rather be in Vauxhall.'

‘I'd rather you were too.' She meant it, although even as she said it she heard Luke's voice in her head –
Listen, there's something else... Dave –
and a slither of something she didn't like crept into her mind. Doubt. She brushed it away.

Dave said, ‘It's not like you to be so forthcoming with your affections. What's wrong with you?'

She was about to say, well, Luke's gone missing, but silently reddened instead.

‘I know,' Dave said. ‘Of course. You need a shoulder to cry on.'

‘That's not what I meant.'