The Salt Marsh (12 page)

‘Don't worry. I understand.'

He brewed her a cuppa – a Barry's tea bag dunked in one of his precious Aston Villa mugs. He had two and he had taken them both with him when he moved to Skell. Loyalty to his beloved football team prevented him from drinking tea out of anything else, least of all a hand-thrown pottery cup. The kitchen had an Aga but Dave couldn't quite cope with the extravagance of leaving it on the whole time in order to use it occasionally. He had acquired a range of electrical equipment to supplant its various functions: plug-in kettle, Morphy Richards toaster, Baby Belling cooker, single-bar heater. His collection of cheap domestic appliances and his tacky football mugs made him seem like an unwelcome refugee in this expensively rustic interior.

‘So, what's the story?' Dave asked.

‘Luke is in some kind of trouble because of the protest at the power station. He went down to meet this power station worker at Dungeness and then he disappeared.'

Dave shook his head, tipped himself backwards on the dining chair, foot resting against a table leg, arms folded, eyeing her through his thick lenses.

‘A protest at a power station? Why would he be in trouble because of that? Why would anybody give a toss?'

Dave was dismissive about politics, activism, conspiracy theories. So even if she did tell him about the file and MI5's computer index he would probably scoff. His aversion to politics stemmed, she figured, from his Brummie Irish childhood. He remembered the carnage of the IRA's pub bombings in 1974 and he experienced the backlash against anyone Irish afterwards. The events made him wary, not angry – more interested in physical chain reactions than political agitation for change.

She said, ‘Well, you can be cynical about it all, but look what happened to the
Rainbow Warrior.
'

‘Yes, but the
Rainbow Warrior
was a bit different from a couple of people waving a banner around in Dungeness. The
Rainbow Warrior
was a highly organized set-up. They were in New Zealand because they were planning to disrupt the French government's nuclear weapons tests. The
Rainbow Warrior
was challenging the French state's security apparatus. Which is why the French secret services blew it up. It was a real threat. You and Luke, I mean you are just asking a few people to come and join you at a bloody roadside and shout a few slogans. It's a symbolic gesture. It wouldn't be a threat to anybody.'

She didn't respond.

‘He's probably gone off somewhere for a couple of days. As he said. To see a mate, I would guess.' He dunked a chocolate Hobnob in his tea, swirled, removed the biscuit, sucked the soggy half. ‘Luke's really got under your skin, hasn't he. You can't stop obsessing about him.'

She scowled. Dave seemed to enjoy scratching at her relationship.

‘I'm just saying, that's all,' he said.

‘Just saying what?'

‘Just saying that he doesn't have to ask your permission if he decides to head off somewhere by himself for a couple of days.'

‘He didn't say he was heading off somewhere. He said something had come up. He sounded scared.'

Dave reached for another biscuit.

‘Maybe he made it sound more dramatic because he was worried you would blow your top at him if he said he wanted to go off for a few days with his mates.'

She took a slurp of her tea, examined the mug, beginning to feel she had made a mistake, driving up to Skell.

Dave said, ‘OK. Let's see if we can work this out. Was he in Dungeness when he called you on Saturday morning?'

‘He phoned me twice. The first phone call, the one I picked up at about nine on Saturday morning, was from Dungeness. He told me he was there early, waiting to meet this contact from the power station. The second phone call, which I think he made at about ten thirty, must have been after the meeting. I had already gone, so he left me a message.' She replayed Luke's words in her head, tried to make sense of them. ‘He said he had to go. He must have been about to drive off somewhere. There was background noise on the tape, wind and breakers I think. So I suppose he was still in Dungeness then.'

A flicker of – what – concern, or doubt about her version of events perhaps, registered in Dave's dark eyes darting around behind the lenses. What was he thinking? She's deluded?

*

Or was he hiding something from her?
Trust nobody.
She dunked her biscuit, watched it disintegrate and sink to the bottom of the mug, tried to block the disquieting voices in her head.

He pushed himself away from the table. ‘Let's have something to eat, then go for a walk.'

‘You've got something cooking in the Aga then?'

‘Nope.' He rummaged in a cupboard, produced a can of baked beans, tipped it in a saucepan, plonked it on the Belling.

The sky was clearing behind them to the west, but it was still leaden overhead and coal-black in the east. Spitting rain hit her cheeks, the back end of the downpour. They crossed the high street – once the main harbour road – ducked under the arch by the old customs house, slithered along the muddy edges of an oily puddle, disturbed a toad, cut around the back of the windmill and climbed the steps to the coast path. She balanced on top of the stile, watched the waves of wind-flexed rushes. The mudflats, the saltpans and the tidal lagoons shimmered in the low evening sun, radiated yellow, and she thought of Chernobyl's plume, the nuclear rain falling across the uplands.

She jumped down from the stile, swished her hand through the damp stems.

‘What did you say about the dangers of radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl fallout?' she asked.

He pushed his glasses up his nose, surveyed the coastal plain.

‘Well, obviously there's the immediate direct hit, and the north of Britain got some of that, although nowhere near as much as countries closer to the original source. Ukraine, Belarus, Germany and Sweden. But then there's the secondary contamination with long-lived radionuclides like caesium 137. That happens through soil absorption, wash-off, bioaccumulation in plants and animals – the stuff we eat – that sort of thing.'

‘Comforting.'

‘You know my view. Levels of contamination in Britain are unlikely to be high enough to harm human health.'

‘Not even in the long term?'

He shrugged. ‘Who cares about the long term? In the long term we're all dead anyway.'

‘That's a bit flippant.'

‘OK. Sorry. But the thing is, the long-term impacts of Chernobyl are not going to be anywhere near as bad as the long-term health and environmental impacts of straightforward air pollution – car fumes, industrial smog. I'm always amazed by the extent to which people turn a blind eye to the hazards they live with every day, because it's too inconvenient to recognize them.'

He pointed across the headland. ‘That's the field centre where I work, beyond the dunes, at the end of Flaxby Point.'

The distant building sat at the furthest edge of a beckoning finger of shingle and sand that curled round to form a bay on its inner side. The ocean was bluer here than the grey Channel at Dungeness, but it was the same longshore waves that coaxed the fringes of the land into these shifting, unreliable spits and marshes. A red-rimmed rainbow arched the sky, bright against the cloudbank, and dropped down on the roof of a solitary house. She pointed. ‘Look where the rainbow ends.'

‘Bane House.'

‘Does anybody live there?'

‘It's deserted. I've seen people camping in it occasionally.'

‘Let's walk over and see if it's harbouring a crock of gold.'

The drizzle eased, the rainbow evaporated, leaving the dusky sky and sea more amethyst than blue. A grey heron took off from an inlet as they approached, its landing gear still trailing. She felt at home in these ghost lands borrowed from the water, earthsea, inhabited only by smugglers and the fishermen who had travelled this coast for centuries. What was that phrase that Alastair had used? Den and strand. The fishermen from Dungeness had rights to land and dry their nets on these beaches, summer migrants to East Anglia returning south to Dungeness for the winter fishing. Dungeness. Her mind snapped back to Luke, his disappearance. She couldn't stop thinking about him.

‘Is it possible Luke might have been given some information from this power station worker he met that's put him in danger?'

‘Like what?'

‘Safety problem? Maybe Dungeness is another Chernobyl waiting to happen.'

‘Well, there have always been questions about why anybody in their right mind would build a nuclear power station on a bed of shifting shingle in an area prone to flooding. But that's hardly secret information.'

‘OK then. Could he have found out about some criminal activity?'

‘What sort of criminal activity?'

‘Dunno. Somebody stealing nuclear material.'

‘Why would anybody steal nuclear material?'

‘Build a bomb.'

‘That's pretty far-fetched, even by your standards.'

‘But theoretically, is it possible?'

‘Theoretically, anything is possible.'

‘Jesus. You know what I mean. Is it possible, for example, that somebody could build a bomb with the waste material being transported from Dungeness to Sellafield?'

He frowned. ‘I'm not an expert on nuclear weapons, but I'd say it certainly wouldn't be easy.'

‘Yes, but possible?'

She watched his face while she waited for him to answer and she sensed that her question had troubled him in some way she couldn't fathom.

‘OK, if you want a sensible answer, let me think it through.'

The wind strengthened as they approached the coast. A vee of geese flew silently overhead. She moved closer to Dave so she could hear him speak.

‘So, well, nuclear bombs are usually made from plutonium. The fission process in a power plant produces plutonium. And, of course, the spent fuel rods do contain the products of the fission process.'

‘Bomb material?'

He shook his head.

‘Not easily. For a start, the plutonium produced by power plants is generally reactor grade, not the purer weapons grade. Which doesn't mean reactor grade plutonium can't be used to make a bomb – but I would imagine it's extremely difficult to do. Those spent fuel rods are not exactly small. Any would-be bomb maker would have to magic away a piece of metal that weighed several tons, perform some kind of extraction process to obtain any fissionable material and then create a device that could set off the chain reaction for an explosion when and where you wanted it to happen. And you have to do all of this while protecting yourself from radiation. Otherwise you're fried. Obviously it's possible. But, personally, I think you would need some sort of state backing to steal nuclear material and turn it into a bomb. It's a bit of an organizational nightmare. It would cost a fortune to put all of that in place.'

She plucked a frond of sea lavender, wound the tough stem round her fingers. Dave revelled in being the rational scientist. He referred to himself as a northern chemist, even though he came from the Midlands. Political divide, not geographical, he maintained – anywhere north of Watford was off the radar as far as Westminster was concerned. Whatever. He wasn't even a proper chemist. He was a biochemist. He twiddled his lip nervously, as if there was something eating him. She attempted to process what he was saying and not saying, winkle out the cause of his edginess. She said, ‘I still think the power station worker must have given Luke some information that has made him feel he might be targeted in some way.'

He snapped, ‘Why does everybody assume there's always some threat or conspiracy attached to anything to do with nuclear power? Why can't people just look at the science?'

She was taken aback by the fierceness of his response.

‘OK, so what's so good about the science?'

‘It's amazing. Nuclear scientists are like modern magicians. They worked out how to split atoms, transform metals.'

‘Transforming metals?' She asked nervously, wary of provoking another flare of intensity. ‘Like alchemists.'

‘Yeah. Like alchemists. But instead of the chemical processes the alchemists were searching for, they use physical processes – nuclear fission.' He frowned. ‘Where did alchemists spring from anyway?'

‘Dungeness. When Luke didn't appear on Saturday, I ended up talking about alchemy with this new age hippy who lives in one of the fishermen's cottages on the beach. Alastair. He came to the meetings we organized down there.'

The marbled wings of a redshank rose from the shingle in front of her feet; the bird fluttered away.

‘He told me he had a spirit guide.'

‘Oh my god. This is what happens when I move out of the house for a few months. You start consulting spirit guides.'

Dave's tone had returned to its normal level of teasing, clearly relieved the conversation had moved away from Luke and the power station.

‘He was interesting.'

‘What, the hippy or the spirit guide?'

‘Both. One and the same, I suppose. His spirit guide was a real person, a seventeenth-century alchemist called John Allin.'

‘Did you meet John Allin?'

‘Possibly.'

‘And did this John Allin claim to have found the alchemical formula?'

‘Well, the way Alastair explained it, alchemy was a spiritual quest as much as a material one so maybe he did find the answer in some way. Perhaps he managed to transform himself.'

They turned north along the shingle headland, white-crested breakers crashing on the shore, and she saw a figure emerging from the foam of the waves and thought for a moment it was Jim, but then she realized it was nothing more than spindrift.

‘Or perhaps Allin drove himself to despair because he couldn't find the formula to turn base metal into gold,' she said. ‘Perhaps he flipped to the darker side. That's what Alastair was saying about alchemy, dabbling in the occult, people might start off with good intentions, but once the power is unleashed it can be turned around, become a curse. Reverse alchemy. Isn't it the same with nuclear science? Isn't that why people are afraid of it? Einstein despaired when he realized the atomic science he had helped discover could be used to make a bomb.'