The Salt Marsh (17 page)

She arrived at the far entrance to the loke, no cordon. She paused, breath quick and shallow, glanced over her shoulder, decided she would risk it, walked cautiously along the sodden grass edging. The whiff of fag smoke reached her a moment before the voices. Two of them. Smoking at the bottom of Dave's back garden, talking and guffawing, apparently unaware of the possibility of being overheard. She walked cautiously to the garden boundary and stood in the lee of the flint loke wall. The loudness of her own breath scared her, made her gasp for air.

*

She pictured the Oval gasholder, and it comforted her. Inhale, exhale. The cop's obnoxious banter floated over the wall – a misogynistic dissection of the cleaner's body in lurid anatomical detail. The hierarchy was audible in the bullying and obsequiousness of the statements and responses. The sidekick amplified his boss's nastiness, laughing at his snide digs.

‘Time to call it a night.' The top cop had no particular accent, just a hardness of tone. ‘Where are the digs then?'

‘Cromer.' Not local cops, if they needed somewhere to stay. Down from London, she guessed. What was the Force doing out here, in the sticks?

‘The pathologist seems like a pain in the arse to me.'

‘He's user-friendly. He said he couldn't see any immediate evidence that pointed to anything other than suicide, so that's that. I'll leave it up to you to tidy any loose ends here. The Prof bloke should turn up at the morgue tomorrow for the identification. Not that there's much of his head left to identify.'

She wanted to retch.

‘Ask him about the gun. He'll confirm it doesn't belong to him, no doubt. Dave Daley, Irish as we already knew. And a Catholic, so he fits the profile. Unlawful possession of firearms, confirms our suspicions. I would imagine it's not going to be hard to trace the links.'

Her mind started wandering, grasping for the implications of the cop's words. Possession of firearms. Suspicions. Irish. Links. She poked her fingernails into her arm, made herself pay attention.

‘We'll have to see what we can find on the girl.' The way he said
the girl
made her sweat.

‘Don't think we can do much more today.'

She listened to their footsteps diminishing; the back door of the house banging shut. She slumped down on the edge of the loke, oblivious to the damp spreading through her coat. A car door slammed, engine revved, tyres slick on wet road. She sat with her head on her knees in the darkness; the shrieks of hunting owls played in her head. She wanted to curl up and howl. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard Jim telling her to get a grip, quit the self-pity. Think about Dave, poor bloody Dave.

She lifted her head, surveyed the corridor. A movement at the far end, a blind corner, made her freeze. Yellow eyes glowed and vanished. Fox. Or cat. Everything assumed a larger size in the dark. The back of the house was unlit. She stood, breath shallow, edged along the wall until she came to the kitchen window. The upside-down palm cross glowed white against the darkness of the kitchen. Jesus, Dave had left her a message; he had moved the cross to the far edge of the sill and turned it on its head. A warning. Danger. A sign that he had left something in the drop box. Through the open kitchen door she could glimpse the hallway, partly illuminated by the outdoor security lamp on the far side of the house. The blinking light of Dave's answering machine caught her attention. Red flash. Somebody had left a message. There was something not quite right about the silhouette of the machine, though; the lid of the cassette slot was open. Somebody had removed the tape. God, what was going on?

She pressed herself hard against the flints, ignored the spikes in her spine, sidled back along the passage to a spot where the overhanging apple tree branches would give her some purchase. She had to give it a go, she owed it to Dave. She grabbed a branch and a protruding flint, hauled, clambered on to the flat wall top, checked the house again – no signs of life – dropped on to the flowerbed on the far side, bent double as she edged along the garden wall. She reached the ceramic urn, lifted it, slipped her hand under. Her fingertips touched something smooth and miraculously dry. She edged it out carefully, let the urn drop back into place. A slip of paper: a folded page from one of Dave's lined A4 notebooks. She placed it in her back pocket. She looked at the urn, decided she wanted to double-check, squatted, tipped the urn, stuck her hand under, and her fingertips touched something soft. She almost screamed. Dead mouse? Calmed herself, pulled the substance out. Black hair. She blanched, inserted her hand again, fumbled around and touched a small hard object. It was like the party game they used to play where you had to wear a blindfold and somebody stuck your finger in a bowl of jelly and said that's Napoleon's eye. She clutched the object, removed it. A blackened bone. The bone and the hair she had found in the Lookers' Hut and given to Dave to identify; the shepherd's charms. Why had he left them there? She was wondering whether to take them or not when a rustling on the far side of the garden startled her, made her look up. She glimpsed yellow eyes, hastily shoved the bone and hair under the urn, dropped it back into place, clambered back over the wall and jumped down into the loke.

She retraced her muddy trail across the field and walked down to the marsh, located a causeway to the windmill. Her monkey boots slipped around and she was sniffling by the time she arrived back at the van. She almost trod on the toad squatting at the edge of the puddle below the van's door, its warty skin blending with the gravel. She was too tired to drive back to London. The windmill car park was, she reckoned, a relatively safe place to spend the night. Relatively. Was anywhere safe for her right now? She wormed her way into the back of the van, squashed in the narrow gap between the seats where it would be difficult to spot her, unless you peered through the windows. Water must have seeped in, because the floor was damp. She scrabbled in her bag for her torch. She took the folded paper from the back of her pocket and read it in the beam –
55 pluto.
Was that it? 55 pluto. What was that about? The 55 meant nothing to her. The most obvious meaning of pluto was that it was short for plutonium. Was he communicating something about their protest at Dungeness? What had he told her about plutonium? Only reactor grade in the spent fuel rods, not weapons grade plutonium. Maybe he wasn't trying to communicate anything, maybe it was just a random scrap from his notebook that he'd stuffed in the vase to let her know he had been thinking about her. Their last conversation. The periodic repetitions. Perhaps pluto was a reference to the god of the underworld. Maybe it conveyed his dark descent, beyond reach, not waving but drowning. And 55? Could 55 be something to do with his mother? Her age? She tried to work it out. Fourteen in 1945. Committed suicide in 1980. Fifty-five was the age his mother would be now if she had lived. Oh no. Please no. She cried as she thought of Dave, wondered whether he had quietly planned, acquired a pistol, bullets, kept the gun there, in the house, loaded. Waited for the moment when he could no longer resist the stardust pulsing through his veins, the pull of the stellar cycle, the repetitions of the periodic table. She could have helped, she could have stopped him. It was her fault, whichever way she looked at it. She had cursed him, tainted him. She started to drift, her head lolled.

The cry of an owl roused her. She must have dozed, because she found herself sprawled across the floor, head against the front seat. The back of her hand was wet. Dribble. Snot. Tears. A pain below her ribs – the jabbing heartache, the empty cavity; Luke, Dave. She wiped her face on her sleeve. Three a.m.; her witching hour. Toads and bats for company. She reached for her thermos and her foot cramped, she winced, pulled her toes backwards to stretch the arch. She needed a walk, a breath of fresh air. She crawled into the front seat, peered around the car park. No signs of life. She opened the door carefully and crept out like a fugitive.

Waves of rain drifted as she climbed the steps to the causeway. Faint moonlight oozed through the clouds and burnished the dark surfaces of the irrigation channels. She ambled a short way down the path, slithered around in the crud. Stopped. The sound of a diesel engine made her turn; headlights of a car heading down the coast road, the gravel crunching as it turned into the car park. She scuttled back along the path and hid herself in the shadows of the trees. Battered green Land Rover. She tried to catch her breath, stay calm: late-night Labrador walker surely. She watched transfixed as a figure emerged, khaki jacket, hood up, face invisible. He stood still for a moment, a fox taking its bearings, stalked over to the camper van, switched on a torch, drizzle caught in its arc, directed the beam through the van's front windows, checked the front seats, the dashboard, the back. Jesus Christ. Plain-clothes copper? He walked slowly around the van, the beam moved to and fro, as if he was hunting for something specific. Or someone.

The beam swung round, across the windmill outhouses. A bat disturbed, flitted away. The torchlight swept the steps and illuminated the backside of the customs house, caught the pulses of precipitation in its cone. She breathed a sigh of relief. The beam swung back. Caught her. Shit. Shit. Shit. His feet pounded the gravel. She didn't stop to think, belted down the causeway – head start, draw him away from the car park, circle, return to the van and drive off before he could reach her. She stumbled, foot caught in cord grass, eyes distracted by yellow trefoil runway lights. She heard his boots clatter up the steps. She could get away if she was fast enough. She had to keep running, maintain her pace. She could hear him behind on the path, already gaining ground, faster than her, her monkey boots losing purchase.

‘Sam.'

Fuck. He knew her name. Who was he? Why was he after her?
You are in danger.
Her clothes were drenched, battered by the incessant pounding of wind and rain. She was knackered. Petrified. She glanced down to her right, saw the solid ground of the drained lea, started in that direction then spotted the fence. She would lose too much time scrambling over, he would catch her on the wire. She looked to her left, across the saltmarsh in the direction of Bane House. Snap decision. She slithered down the soaking dropwort-covered bank, splashed among the reeds, up to her ankles in the sump. Knew instantly she had made a mistake. Dave had warned her, there was no solid ground in the saltmarsh, only slick mudflats, sucking reed beds, rushes in the tidal flow, no safe path among the creeks and ditches. Mired. She had no choice, she had to keep moving. Trial by water. She glanced back as she pushed on into the darkness; he had reached the point where she slid off the path, square-shouldered on the causeway path, dark against the bloody corona of the moon.

‘Sam.'

She had heard that voice before. Where? Her mind whipped around, her feet fumbled along the slimy channel edge, searched for a foothold, slipped into the swampy brine as the wind slashed her face.

‘Sam. I want to help you.'

He had to be kidding.

‘Stop. For fuck's sake. Stop. I want to fucking help you.'

The accent. South African? Then she remembered. Shit. He had tracked her down, after all this time. She instinctively ducked lower among the reeds, as if she was dodging a bullet, as if she could escape if he chose to aim at her. He was a total nutter. The misted light of the shrouded moon came and went, cast gleams then smothered them. She was wading through black pools, inlets, drains, not bothering to find the firmer ground, hoping the head-height reeds would provide her with some cover. She glanced behind again, spotted her pursuer tumbling down the bank, hitting the reeds, splashing, arms hacking at stems as he tracked her. In the distance ahead she perceived a white flicker. Barn owl? No, a figure over to the right, further along the headland, silver in the haze. Jim. He was there, her father. Jim would know what to do, he always did. She shouted his name into the wind. He didn't stop. He was striding away across the saltmarsh, following the path from Bane House to the jetty, leaving her behind. Why had he abandoned her? Left her alone to face a madman? Did he really think she would be safer by herself?

‘Wait. Jim. Wait.'

She stumbled, didn't watch where she stuck her feet, determined to reach her father, certain he was her salvation, unaware she was at an angle until the spikes brushed her face and she sensed that she was tripping. Past the midway point of no return. She lurched forwards to catch herself, grabbed at blades. Her ankle twisted the wrong way. She was down, winded, face in brackish water, mud, bogland; a mouthful of infected earth and radionuclides. Up. Up. She had to get up. She pushed herself on to her knees. Deep breath, brine inhaled. She wheezed, spluttered salt. Collected herself, ready to run again. She sensed a presence behind her and she looked back over her shoulder. Too late. His face loomed over her, haggard, unshaven, mud-smeared, brain-fried, pointing a pistol at her. Christ all fucking mighty. She thought that was it. Over. He was talking, rambling insanely.

‘Please, Sam, to every thing there is a season...'

Psychotic Bible quoter. She caught the glint of the gold chain and cross at his neck and some instinct overrode the paralysis of fear that gripped her stomach. She heard Jim's voice in her head, and she remembered all those times he had nearly flipped but not quite, more mad than bad, and she knew then that she could talk her way out of this if only she kept calm. Her mouth spoke the first words that landed there.

‘And a time to every purpose under the heaven.'

Her voice was breathless, tightly wound, near hysterical. Even so, her words seemed to calm him, brought him to his senses. And as she spoke the line it soothed her too, a litany that drew her mind back to her body and gave her courage.

‘Ecclesiastes,' he said.

‘The Book of the Preacher.'

‘You read the Bible.'

‘Yes.'

The lie came easily.
To every thing there is a season
: she'd learned the verse from Jim. She pushed herself up so she was facing him and saw he was much as she remembered, black flickering eyes, cropped dark hair as if he couldn't let go of the military habits, thick-lipped volatile mouth. Trip-wired to explode. Not much older than her – maybe late twenties – although he had aged, time lines, scars on his skin like tribal tattoos. She cast her eyes down to his hand, the pistol. He clocked he was pointing a gun at her, let his arm relax, pushed the weapon into his jacket casually, as if it was a packet of fags. She thanked Jim then, for being so edgy she was able to deal with psychopaths.