The Salt Marsh (20 page)

Larry let her in with an indifferent nod. She tried to reply with a charming smile of gratitude, but he wasn't looking – too busy eyeing up some girl in pvc staggering drug glazed on to the pavement.

The narrow staircase was draped with near comatose bodies. Zombies. Girls with eyes unfocused, slipping out of fifties dresses, men sporting silver earrings and leery smiles. Hands up skirts. She stepped over the casualties, up the stairs, into the dim back room, walls dripping, sticky underfoot, rent boys in the corner, toilet queue for hard drug taking. The bass hit her. An irresistible rush that pulsed and transformed the seediness into some mystical high. Low blue lights shaded the clubbers swaying, hypnotized by the rhythm, mesmerized by the twirling sharp-suited black dancers. Through the pall of smoke, she spotted Spyder dancing behind the bar. He was doing tragic jerky arm thrusts, thrashing the air like a man being electrocuted; enough to bring anybody back down from their transcendent cloud. She had loathed Spyder from the moment she met him. He looked like a rat with his Brylcreemed hair and his narrow-lapelled grey suit hanging off his twitchy thin shoulders. His attempt at fifties cool. He didn't fool her. She knew he was a posh boy, slumming it, playing hard. Small-time drugs dealer, supplier to all the nightclub workers including her when she was desperate, served behind the bar at the Wag most nights of the week, which he thought made him mister big. Luke had laughed when she said Spyder was a creep and she thought he was mad to share a house with him. That was part of Luke's charisma; he didn't let anybody get to him. Well, apart from the occasional new age hippy. Luke said the rent was cheap and Spyder was the ideal housemate because he was out of the house most of the time. Crawling through the sewers, searching for shit, Sam reckoned. She had to keep a lid on it, her venom, until she had extracted some answers from him.

He turned away as she approached, pretended he hadn't seen her. Reached up, glass in hand, released a shot of amber whisky from the upside-down bottle behind the bar.

‘Spyder,' she shouted above the thump of the bossa-nova bass. He ignored her. Deliberately of course. Git.

‘Spyder.'

He swivelled round slowly.

‘What can I do for you, darlin'?'

She suppressed the urge to tell him he could stop calling her darlin' for a start. Quit pretending he had been dragged up in the mean streets of east London.

‘I'm looking for Luke. Larry said you told him he was sick.'

He ran his tongue around his thin lips. ‘I was covering for him. Told the gaffer he had flu and he'd be back next week. He's done it for me before when I've not made it in. That's what we do. Cover for each other. Cos we're good mates.' He leered at her. ‘Don't you know where he is then?'

‘No.'

‘Blown you out, has he?'

She ignored him.

‘Has he been home since Saturday?'

‘I told you already on the blower. I haven't seen him since Friday night when I left the club. I've no idea whether he was in when I got home. He wasn't there when I got up on Saturday morning. But, you know, that's nothing unusual.' He gave her a snide look. ‘Cos he's often away.'

‘He often stays with me.'

‘Spose so.'

She willed herself not to let him wind her up, gritted her teeth. ‘Do you have any idea where he might be?'

‘Am I my brother's keeper?' He hunched his cadaverous shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘It's none of my business what he does. Where he goes.' He licked his lips again. ‘And if he didn't tell you, then maybe it's none of your business either, my little friend.'

Fuck the slimy wanker. She wanted to turn and walk, but she made herself stay. She had to see this through.

‘I'm a bit worried about him. Seriously, do you have any idea where he might be?'

He lifted the tumbler from the bar, knocked back the whisky shot he had poured, wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He was eyeing her up, over his forearm. Arsehole.

‘What's it worth?'

‘Not much.' She swung away. He leaned over the bar, grabbed her arm, pulled her back.

‘Hang on a minute.'

She yanked her arm free; his ferret eyes darted around her face, calculating lecherously.

‘He told me last week he'd been to see that mate of yours.'

Her muscles tightened.

‘Dave?'

‘Yeah. Him.'

‘I knew about that.' Her heart was thumping. Had he been to see Dave without telling her? Is that when he told Dave he was worried about her?

‘Oh really?' Spyder said. ‘He told me not to mention where he was if you phoned.'

She could see his jagged teeth as he pulled his lips back into something resembling a smile.

‘Thought maybe he'd gone to sort ‘im out.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Luke told me you and Dave were very close.' He raised an eyebrow. She found it hard not to react.

‘We are close.' No, we were close. ‘But not in that way.'

‘What other way is there?' He smirked, grabbed her arm again. She felt her lip curling with disgust.

‘You owe me one,' he said.

He jerked her arm up to his mouth, attempted to bite her flesh. She pulled her limb upwards, out of his grip, wiped it on the bar, unable to keep the repulsion from her face.

‘I owe you fuck all.'

She shoved her way through the punters crowding around the bar, and as she left she heard Spyder shouting, ‘Maybe he's got a new bird.'

She barged across the dance floor, down the stairs, out into the dirty street, the pavement littered with bottles, fag ends, needles. Larry had disappeared. Overhead a wave of starlings flocked and spiralled. She tripped over the kerb, righted herself, spotted something scurrying among the black rubbish bags piled in the gutter. Rodent. Never more than six feet away.

She gathered speed as she headed south. She was a mad woman. Crazy. Off her head with love sickness, an infected heart pumping poison round her system. What a waste of time that had been, letting Spyder wind her up for nothing. Now she was worried that Luke had thought there was something going on between her and Dave, that it might have pushed him away. Jesus. Why hadn't he just mentioned it to her? She could have told him straight up there was nothing going on. She had to block out Spyder's insinuations. She knew deep down that wasn't the reason Luke had disappeared; he'd gone because he was scared. He was hiding from something. Someone. She had to find him, sort it out. She charged along the alley to Trafalgar Square. Her neck bristled. She recognized the sensation – somebody was following her. Spyder. It must be Spyder. He was after her. Coming to claim his dues. Fucking, fucking jerk. She sheltered against the wall, below the fig tree, in the shadow of the National Portrait Gallery. A nightbus pulled up. She checked the window as the double-decker slowed, searched for Spyder's ratty reflection, spotted a figure hanging back in the passage. She waited for the bus to pull away, then darted, made a leap for the back platform, clung on to the pole. Along Whitehall, past the Treasury, around Parliament Square, into Millbank. She jumped off as the bus reached the north end of Vauxhall Bridge. The first rays of the rising sun should have been visible in the east, but a ridge of ragged clouds behind St Paul's was muffling the light, the river swathed in early-morning mist. She breathed in the cool air coming off the Thames. The Tate's translucent glass dome glowed in the amber phosphorescence of the street lights. As she stepped on to the bridge, she felt a presence and glanced over to the other side of the road. A man bending down to tie his shoelace. He didn't look up. Couldn't be Spyder, too broad – and anyway she'd lost him at Trafalgar Square. She breathed a sigh of relief and headed south, reached the far end of the bridge, leaned over the railings, searched for Jim along the foreshore as she always did. No sign of him this time, the gentle water ripples and the twisting vapours the only movements by the river. She turned to walk on and gasped; somebody was standing right behind her.

TEN

T
HEY SAT AT
either end of her favourite embankment bench; the Houses of Parliament ahead, the verandas of the old St Thomas' Hospital behind. She came here so often to sort stuff out, deal with the phantoms, she considered it her outdoor office. The silver disc of the sun gleamed through the clearing mist. She wrestled silently with the situation, attempting to dissect her feelings rather than reveal them. She needed somebody to help her, she was running out of friends. He had been following her around anyway, and he was unlikely to go away if she ignored him, so she might as well acknowledge he was there. But he was her father's killer. There had been no investigation, accusation, trial or judgment, there had only been a cover-up and speculation. She couldn't claim injustice, demand the truth, because her father had chosen to inhabit the shadowlands of the spooks where everything was shrouded in deceits. Although, that didn't stop her feeling angry. Or scared. And here she was sitting next to the guilty hitman who walked around with loaded guns and was prepared to kill anybody, if the price was right. But he hadn't killed her, not yet anyway. Maybe he was waiting for a better deal. She briefly wondered what her therapist would make of it, where she would place this meeting on a riverside bench with Jim's assassin in the five stages of grieving. Still stuck in denial. Yes, but denial was sometimes a good survival mechanism, and she was in survival mode. She shuffled along the bench.

Sonny searched in his pocket for a fag, cupped one hand around its end and flicked his Zippo with the other. Cracked his jaw and blew a smoke ring. She studied the circle as it wobbled and dispersed, and racked her brain for a neutral subject to talk about.

‘South London,' she indicated behind her, ‘used to be marshland. The big sink. And then by the seventeenth century it was filling up with small industries. Leather tanning. Prostitutes. And of course it's full of plague pits.'

Sonny puffed a second smoke ring, sent it chasing through the first. ‘Plague?'

‘1665. Thousands of people died in London.' A black-beaked plague doctor's mask floated into her head. ‘The graveyards were overflowing so they dug vast pits. Collected the bodies in carts at night and chucked them in, unnamed. London is one large necropolis. Never more than six feet away from a rat and a skeleton.'

A pigeon hopped along the embankment wall. A cormorant perched on a barge railing, spread its black wings to dry.

‘Vauxhall.' She inclined her head to the left. ‘That was Jim's favourite bridge.'

Vauxhall. Talking for thirty seconds and she had slipped Jim and the location of his assassination into her supposedly neutral conversation. She couldn't control herself, the compulsion to return to her dad's death, even when her rational self knew it was a bad idea to needle. What was she playing at? Perhaps she needed to cross the shadowlands if she was going to escape the darkness hanging over her. Maybe it was inevitable that her travelling companion should be her father's killer. The repeat patterns. The cormorant took off, flew downstream, searching for breakfast. Sonny stared straight at her and she wondered about his parents because his watery eyes were so dark; she had always thought white South Africans were either sandy Dutchmen or red-necked Germans.

‘Are both your parents South African?'

He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket, like a schoolboy, shook his head.

‘My father is Afrikaner. My mother is Italian. I don't remember her clearly. She left my father when I was young.'

Perhaps he was inventing a sob story to make her feel sorry for him.

‘You haven't tried to find her?'

‘I'm always looking for her. She ran away with an Englishman and came to London, but I don't know his name.'

‘Why did she leave your father?'

‘She couldn't put up with his drinking and the life.'

‘Why didn't she take you with her?'

‘I don't know.'

He hunched his shoulders.

‘So your father brought you up in South Africa?'

‘Yes. In the Transvaal. He's a stoer boer, a farmer. He kept cattle; there's not a lot else to do in that part of the Transvaal. He taught me how to hunt. You have to know how to survive out there, you need bushcraft.'

She twitched as she remembered how he'd tracked her down across the marsh, a weasel chasing the petrified rabbit.

‘That's why I ended up in the Recces, because of the bushcraft. I had to do my national service and the sergeant put me forward for the Special Forces.'

She sighed. He wanted to explain how he had arrived here, next to her, a South African hitman in London. She folded her arms, decided she might as well let him get on with it, justify himself.

He said, ‘We were in Angola 1982, busting SWAPO. My commanding officer was a madman. I suppose they all were. We did so much drinking, even in the coffee there was always some whisky – Renoster koffie. It was a mark of pride, being able to hold your drink.'

The detail struck a chord, although not an easy one – she was familiar with the macho drinking culture of men in uniform.

‘We were on patrol, the two of us alone, my commanding officer and me. He liked going out on patrol with me. He called me his fundi – his apprentice. We looked for animal tracks, hunted game. We shot duiker and took them back for the braai. And then one day we came across some boys playing football in the bush, they were using dirty shirts for goal posts. They were teenagers, about ten of them, wearing rags, barefoot, kicking a ball around in the sand. They didn't see us coming, they carried on playing.'

He puffed another smoke ring.

‘I remember the sand whirling and the laughter. I was struck by their happiness. Maybe it was their happiness that annoyed the CO. He said take them out, straight like that, as if they were nothing more than antelope. I said you're kidding, but he repeated the order. In a year's time they will be fighting for SWAPO or some other commie-backed militia, he said, so take them out now and save somebody else the bother later. It would be doing everybody a favour – including them, because they could die quickly, painlessly, here, and then they wouldn't have to crawl through the bush with flies swarming around their blood and guts. Get on with it, he said. But something in me flipped. I told him no way. He got mad, said it was an order. I said fuck you, man. I don't have to take orders from every draadtrekker who gives me shit. And I turned on him. One shot.'