The Salt Marsh (13 page)

‘Yeah, I know. Poor bloody Einstein having to live with that on his conscience. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The thing is, though...' He stalled, adjusted his glasses; picked the conversation up again. ‘I mean, you're creating lots of conspiracy theories in your head about the power station, Luke and nuclear bombs, but you don't need to build a nuclear bomb to create terror. You could just release radioactive material in the air. Or into the water supply. It wouldn't be as instantly destructive as a bomb, but it would be easier to do, and it would certainly terrorize people with the fear of radiation – poison pumped through your system and dying from the inside out. There are plenty of sources lying around in places that aren't even half as secure as a power station. Hospitals. Research labs...'

He dried up. Neither of them spoke, heads down into the wind, Sam wondering what Dave was getting at as they scrunched along the shingle. They neared Bane House, with its chimney pot squatting on the slate roof in a one-fingered gesture of defiance to the elements.

‘What's a house doing out here in the middle of nowhere anyway?' she asked.

‘Nobody really knows. But according to local legend it was built by smugglers.'

‘A lookout place, I suppose.'

‘More gruesome, I'm afraid. The barman at the Butcher's Arms told me informers were taken here for questioning by the local smuggling gangs to find out what they had told the authorities. Sometimes they would be kept alive for weeks, apparently. Chained up, beaten, forced to confess, reveal the information they had given away. And then they were killed anyway, their bodies returned to their relatives in hacked-up pieces as a warning not to talk...'

‘God, that's grim.'

‘I don't know why you're sounding shocked. People still torture informers these days, don't they?' His voice was agitated again.

‘What people?'

‘Oh, you know, Sam. The mafia. The IRA. Drug gangs. The CIA. Anybody carrying out some kind of dodgy activity they're desperate to keep secret. That's how most shadowy activities come to light, isn't it? Informers. And so any dubious outfit is going to be on the lookout for tell-tales and will try to scare everybody shitless so they don't say anything. Possibly by hacking the odd tongue out and sending it to a loved one.'

She poked the tip of her tongue against the back of her teeth and remembered all the times she had been told to say nothing about Jim, his work, anything she might have seen or overheard, because it was dangerous to talk, pass his secrets into the wrong hands. Loose tongues cost lives. Hers as well as his.

‘That's why it's called Bane House,' Dave said. ‘Because it's fucking cursed.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders. He was behaving so oddly tonight, not his normal self at all. She had a definite sense that Dave was hiding something. Was he keeping a secret that he was too scared to tell? They were right below Bane House now. She assessed the building's façade: two windows, one edged with jagged glass, the other partially boarded. She glimpsed a movement behind the shattered pane, a fleeting whiteness, a pale face staring through the window, directly at her. No, she must have been mistaken. Scudding clouds reflected in the broken glass. They scrambled up the steep shingle ridge from the shoreline. The house disappeared from view as they climbed and then reappeared when they reached the flat top of beach.

Sam said, ‘What if there is somebody inside? If they are doing something illegal and we burst in on them, they might react badly.'

‘I shouldn't have mentioned smugglers.'

She slowed her pace, her feet silent on the carpet of bird's-foot trefoil and sea blite underneath.

He said, ‘If you don't want to look in, we don't have to. It doesn't bother me.'

‘We're here now. We might as well look inside.'

An outside toilet with a red door stood apart from the house at the bottom of a slope. As she passed it, a kee-wick call from the marsh startled her.

‘Was that an owl?'

‘It could have been.'

She looked across to the far side of the headland and the bay inside the spit's curling finger, but there was no sign of the bird.

‘Is there a path that way?'

‘Yes. It goes down to a jetty, the water route to the research lab. You can take a boat from the harbour of the next village along the coast road.'

She spotted the dark line of the path threading through the marsh to the bay. Tied alongside the jetty, she could just make out the shape of an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor. A Zodiac possibly, like the one the French secret agents used to blow up the
Rainbow Warrior.
She wanted to point it out to Dave, but he had already reached the house and was looking through the broken window. She caught up with him.

‘I don't think there's anybody at home,' he said.

She must have imagined the face. Ghosts of her mind. She shaded her eye with her hand, searched the corners, spotted an empty crisp packet.

‘But I think somebody has been in here.'

‘Undoubtedly. It's not locked up.'

She followed him around the side of the house, to the back door, unlocked. Inside, one large brick room, the last of the evening light exposing its emptiness. A broken chair. Long extinguished firewood in the grate. Empty beer bottle. Used condom.

‘See,' Dave said. ‘There's nothing nefarious going on here.'

He sounded relieved. The low sun shot into a far corner, glinted. She walked over. Not gold, but the silver cover of a book of matches with black letters on the front.

‘Matches from Heaven,' she said. ‘I've got a friend who's a bouncer at Heaven.'

Dave glanced over, eyebrow raised.

‘St Peter?'

‘Not that heaven. The gay nightclub underneath the arches behind Charing Cross station.'

She lifted the matchbook – the archaeologist's instinct to examine any artefact – then remembered Jim telling her about pocket litter, the bus tickets, till receipts, sweet wrappers that accumulate in people's pockets and give away secrets about their identity. Jim and his tradecraft tips. She eyed the book in her hand; it had dropped out of somebody's pocket, revealed something about its owner. She flipped the cover open. One match remained, black stem, silver head. She tore it out, swiped against the strike; the match exploded, a blue flame burned, fizzled and died. The matchbook couldn't have been lying there long; it wasn't damp. She slipped the empty silver cover into her overcoat pocket.

‘Come on, let's go,' she said.

She walked out the back, glanced right, noticed the red door of the outside toilet flapping open in the wind, and then spotted an indistinct figure striding along the pathway to the jetty and the dinghy. Tall, thin, dark-haired, or was it a hat? She squinted. There was something about the silhouette, the movement, that made her think it was a woman. She stared until the twilight air fizzed and danced and she realized the figure had vanished. Perhaps she hadn't seen anything in the first place. Her fatigued mind was playing tricks on her this evening, the dusk distorting her vision. She fingered the book of matches in her pocket, turned and watched the curling breakers hitting the sea-facing side of the spit, the ranks of waves stretching over the North Sea to the Lowlands. Amsterdam. She loved Amsterdam. She and Luke had made an unplanned trip there in the dreary days of February. He appeared in Vauxhall one Friday evening with tickets for the ferry train. They had a weekend of hash cafés and parties in huge squatted factories. On their return, pie-eyed and happy, they were hauled aside by the customs officers at Dover, made to empty their rucksacks. The customs men found nothing. Who would be stupid enough to carry hash on them when they were returning from Amsterdam?

Dave closed the back door of Bane House behind him, joined her.

She said, ‘This part of the coast would be a good landing place if you're coming from Amsterdam.'

‘So?'

‘Maybe this place is still used by smugglers after all.'

‘I've never seen any sign of it.'

‘Maybe you've not looked very hard.'

‘Maybe I just don't go searching for the dark side. Unlike some people I could mention.' Who was he kidding, she thought, he was definitely in a saturnine mood tonight.

‘Do you still have the phone sessions with the therapist?' he asked.

‘Yes. Why?'

‘I was just wondering.'

Fuck him and his digs. She said nothing. The tide was flooding in as they returned along the headland. They walked on the flat shingle, between the breakers and the saltmarsh, the wind pressing from behind, thankfully, rather than lashing her face. She kept her eyes on the horizon, the silhouette of a small boat breaking the line between sky and sea, thought she saw the black dot of a dinghy nearer to the shore, dipping through the swell. Was that the Zodiac she had seen earlier by the jetty?

‘You're quiet,' he said.

‘You don't usually mind if nobody says anything.'

She didn't like this tension with Dave, it wasn't how it was supposed to be. Dave was her mate. She balled her hand, shoved it in her overcoat pocket. Her knuckles touched the bone from the Lookers' Hut – she'd forgotten about her finds. She pulled it out, held it on the flat of her palm. Peace offering.

‘Look what I unearthed in one of the Lookers' Huts out on Romney. Is it a sheep's bone?'

He took the bone from her hand, held it up to his face, lifted his glasses.

‘No. It's not a sheep's bone. I reckon it's human. Metatarsal.'

‘Jesus. Really? A finger?'

‘Yep. It's quite large so probably male.'

‘How old do you think it is?'

‘It's impossible to say. You'd have to radiocarbon test it to find out.' He stroked his chin. ‘It looks to me as if it has been burned.'

‘What, you mean somebody threw a finger in the fire and burned the flesh off it?'

‘Possibly.'

‘You don't think it could be Luke's finger, do you?' Her voice was tight.

‘No. No. For god's sake no. Of course it's not Luke's finger.'

She relaxed, dug in her pocket, removed the folded tissue holding the lock of hair.

‘I found this too. Probably nothing to do with the bone. I wondered whether it was some kind of charm. You know, a shepherd placing a lock of hair in the hearth to block out evil spirits.'

He reached for the tissue, unfolded the package she had made and stood dead still, staring at the contents, his face pallid.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Nothing. Well, it's very black.'

‘So? It's not Luke's hair.'

‘I can see that. Can I keep it?'

‘What, the bone?'

‘Yes. And the hair.'

‘Sure, I don't want them.'

The way he was behaving made her head swim.
Trust nobody.
Her gut tightened.
Listen, there's something else... Dave.
The tension made her want to spew. She couldn't stand having niggling doubts about her best mate. She couldn't trust nobody, she had to believe in her friends. She didn't want to question him. She didn't want to argue with Dave.

They headed inland in silence, across the saltmarsh, the first stars appearing above. A hawk swooped though the reed beds like a dambuster; hefty, golden brown, endless wingspan.

‘Marsh harrier,' he said.

She concentrated, mind on the hawk gliding, hovering low above the reeds, water furrows below. She caught a movement, drab among the green. A bunting, frozen in terror. A wave of sickness ran through her body; she knew she should dive and catch the small bird, but she couldn't face the kill. She left it, the saltmarsh spreading out below her as she gained height, the indigo creeks forming fractals in the green and brown of the spit. The harrier soared away with a shrill shriek and she returned to earth.

SIX

S
INGLE FILE ALONG
the sea wall path. The headlights of a car driving the coast road lit up the grey houses of Skell then disappeared inland. Sam, mind elsewhere, stumbled over a rock, caught herself on a knee and an outstretched hand. She straightened, brushed off the soil, glanced over the steep bank to the reed beds below.

‘Any solid ground down there?'

‘If there is, it's difficult to find. Saltpans, creeks and irrigation channels. It's not like Romney, there's no sea wall holding the water back here, the tide comes in behind the shingle and fills the creeks and lagoons.'

She scanned the marsh, picked out the white zed of a wading bird and, as she looked beyond to Flaxby Point, a flicker of light flared and died.

‘Will-o-the-wisp,' she said.

‘Yeah, I saw it too. And I saw the leprechaun carrying it.'

‘Seriously. I did see a light. Look. There it is again.' The point of light hovered, lengthened, vanished.

‘It's a torch,' Dave said.

‘Somebody walking the path from the jetty to Bane House.' The figure she had seen earlier, the person she had thought might be a woman, were they returning now they knew the coast was clear?

‘No. Not a torch. Definitely a will-o-the-wisp.' Dave chuckled. Then he stopped abruptly and said, ‘Do you ever see your dad?'

She was still watching Bane House, the headland, but nothing was visible apart from the froth of the breakers crashing against the shore.

She said, ‘Sometimes I glimpse him. I see his face in the crowd. And then he disappears.'

She didn't want to tell him about Vauxhall Bridge, the figure on the shore, the Effra run-off. The footprints leading into the tunnel. They were both silent now, listening to the howl of the wind, the terns mewing as they flitted overhead.

Sam asked then, ‘Do you ever see your mum?'

He didn't respond immediately and she wondered whether he was crying, although when he spoke his voice was steady.

‘I saw her a couple of times after she died. That's quite common, I would imagine.'