The Salt Marsh (21 page)

He pulled on his fag. She watched the Thames swirling, the tide indecisive, on the turn.

Eventually she said, ‘That was brave.'

‘It wasn't brave. It was a reaction.'

Hair trigger, she thought.

‘I wasn't able to obey him. So it was one jerk for the lives of ten boys. Well, one jerk and me because then I had to run.'

He strained the filter of his fag, removed another from the carton, lit the second from the first and dropped the dead one on the ground.

‘I headed back into South Africa because that's where I had friends. But it was a mistake. I knew I couldn't stay there long. I found a bike and I set off north. In my head I was going to England. I thought I would find my mother and everything would be OK, she would help me. I got as far as Zaire and I met this man in a bar in Kinshasa. He was a security expert, he told me. He guessed I was on the run, he offered me work. I thought I could trust him and I made the mistake of telling him I'd shot my commanding officer. He promised me a new identity, a British passport. A fresh start. But he used the story I'd told him to twist my arm. He threatened to hand me back to South Africa whenever I refused to do his shit.'

Sonny's expression was pleading, his eyes damp. ‘I would have been court martialled if I went back. Executed. I had no choice.'

She kept her sight fixed on the Thames, the eddies and the whirls.

‘There's always a choice.' If she said it often enough, perhaps it would be true.

He gave his filter one last tug, dropped the butt; it fizzed in a puddle – raining again and she hadn't even noticed.

‘I want to make up for what I've done,' he said. ‘I want to help you.'

His story had a ring of truth, but she didn't trust him. Why would she? On the other hand, at least he didn't treat her as if she was a paranoid wreck. He acknowledged there was something to be worried about, it wasn't all in her head.

‘You are in trouble,' he persisted. ‘Your friend Dave has been killed.'

She nodded.

‘Tell me,' he said.

She sucked her top lip, the sharpness of her teeth cutting her skin. It would be a relief to talk. She had to be careful, though, not to reveal too much. She said, ‘I arranged to meet my boyfriend Luke in Dungeness and he didn't turn up.'

‘You were looking for him that evening when you camped out on Romney Marsh alone?'

He had been following her then, of course; it must have been his Land Rover she heard driving away in the morning.

‘Yes. We were planning a protest against the transportation of nuclear waste, he went to meet a contact from the power station, then he disappeared, left me a message saying he had to go away. He sounded scared. I haven't heard from him since.'

He fiddled with his stubble – glints of silver in among the black. She was going to tell him about the note from Dave – 55 pluto – but decided that was too much. Too raw.

She said, ‘I have a friend – Harry – he's an ex-cop. And now he works for some part of Intelligence, but I don't know which and he wouldn't tell me if I asked. So I don't. But he told me he's seen a file with my name on it.'

‘Is it a serious file?'

‘Apparently it's on a pile for further investigation and inputting into some list of possible terrorists that Intelligence keeps on a computer. R2 it's called, the list.'

‘R2? That is serious.'

‘I know.'

She rubbed her neck, her muscles aching, and then she yawned; too tired to think straight, too drained to fight her instinct that he was not bad, just lost, fumbling for a safe path through dangerous territory. Not unlike her. She made a decision.

‘We are going to get wet if we stay out here and I need some sleep. You might as well come back and hang out at my place for a while.'

Sonny nodded. ‘OK. Ja.'

Funny, the way that South Africans sounded like posh Englishmen from the thirties, the yahs and clipped tone. They walked back along the embankment, under the railway bridge, past the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. A huddle of men in biker jackets and ripped jeans leaned against the railings, talking, laughing, sharing a last smoke before they split. One of them wolf-whistled as they walked past. Sonny turned, smiled at his admirers, and she thought there were some things about him she found appealing too.

*

She had to rest. She offered Sonny the use of Dave's room. She woke in the late afternoon, surprised to find how easily and for how long she had slept. She had no food in the house so they walked over to South Lambeth Road and ate in the Portuguese café where they always had football on the television. He had clams and squid. She ate potato croquettes and mushrooms with garlic and flirted with the waiters.

‘I'm a vegetarian. Well, I do eat fish occasionally,' she said. ‘I've found it difficult to eat meat since...' She couldn't finish the sentence. He knew what she was going to say anyway, she could tell by the way he looked at her with his doleful brown eyes.

‘Two years ago,' she added. When she had identified her father's waxy corpse in the morgue.

‘About the same time I...' His hand went to the crucifix. She wanted to disapprove of his Christianity, see it as fake, but she could see he needed the faith to help him deal with his demons, and she wondered what it said about her that she warmed to his tortured soul.

‘You didn't believe in God before?'

‘I was brought up a Christian. We went to church and I listened to the pastor. We said prayers at home and read the scriptures. But I didn't believe.'

She pushed the half-empty bowl away, reached for her espresso. ‘What made you see the light?'

He lit a Marlboro, puffed a stream of grey smoke through his nostrils.

‘It was when...' He tapped the fag against the ashtray, gave her an earnest look. Or perhaps it was more psychotic than earnest. ‘I wanted to start afresh. Leave all of that behind – the contracts, the agents. But I couldn't sleep. Every day, I was getting closer to the edge, thinking I didn't deserve to live, that I should just end it all quickly.'

He was gazing at her with his wet eyes and she tried to shake off the sense that they had some deep connection, both grappling with the same bleak legacy. She needed to keep her distance.

He asked, ‘What did you do after your father's death?'

‘I went to university. And then I...' She didn't want to confess that she had a crisis too that had precipitated a year off, hanging around in Vauxhall. Dungeness.

‘Is that where you met Luke? At uni?'

She shook her head. She hadn't clicked with any of the men at Oxford; the rugger buggers and the Hooray Henries were non-starters, and when you had dismissed them the pool was considerably diminished. Even among the potential kindred spirits, she hadn't met anybody who had bowled her over.

*

Nice men. Interesting men. Clever men. Yet they all seemed... were lacking a certain – what – recklessness? Edginess? No chemistry. Nobody clicked. Maybe she hadn't been in the right frame of mind.

‘I met Luke when I was working at the nightclub.' She nodded her head in the vague direction of Soho.

‘What does he do?'

‘He's a photographer. He got a scholarship to do a photography course in an American college. LA. And then he ended up working with this NGO that gives cameras to people living in war zones, or in Third World slums, so they can record their lives.'

‘I met some people doing that kind of thing when I was in Angola with the army. He is older than you?'

‘He's twenty-six. I'm twenty.'

‘Good-looking?'

Sam nodded. ‘But that's not why I like him.' She reddened. ‘I want to find him.'

‘Do you think it's wise to go looking?'

‘Wise?' She tipped her coffee cup, surveyed the swirl of muddy grounds, wondered whether the patterns could be read like tea leaves.

‘I'm not sure wise comes into it. I have to find Luke before anybody else gets to him. I have to make sure he's safe.'

‘Ek verstaan,' Sonny said. ‘I understand.'

She tipped the espresso cup a different way and watched the brown sludge slip across the china; she didn't have much to go on in her search for Luke. Dave's note – 55 pluto. The matchbox from Heaven and the clenched fist sign of Venus feminist badge left by the slender dark-haired figure in Bane House. Perhaps she should start somewhere more obvious, go to Luke's place, look around his room, see if she could find anything that might indicate where he had gone, or exactly what had made him run.

She said, ‘Luke's housemate Spyder will be out working tonight. Maybe we should go and have a look around, see what we can find.'

‘Have you got a key?'

‘No. But I know how to get in round the back without too much difficulty. We'll have to wait a few hours. Spyder won't leave until eight or so.'

Sonny shrugged. ‘If it's what you wish to do, I'll help you.'

God, it was like having a gun-toting genie in a bottle for a companion.

*

They set off at ten. Spyder's house was on the edge of Rotherhithe, east along the river. The property developers had taken over and they had to negotiate the blocked roads and diversions that accompanied the building mania. In the seventies, Jim had worked in Tilbury docks downstream in Essex and he always said the deep water container port would put the London docklands out of business. He was right. But then the city started booming and there was cash everywhere and loads of it was pouring into the vast industrial wasteland sitting on the money market's doorstep. Docklands was one vast building site now – wet docks, dry docks, wharves and warehouses ripe for conversion into luxury flats. Anybody who had lived there before – boatmen, dockers, packers – had been shunted elsewhere. Although, in among the chaos of bulldozers, cranes, dug-up roads, gas pipes waiting to be buried, there were untouched streets; warehouses, cobbles and back to backs. Bastions of resistance. Spyder had managed to grab a slice of the real-estate action – purchased a small house squeezed on to a corner beside a disused pub on Rotherhithe Street before prices started rocketing. Riverside view, in estate agent's terms; the grey waters of the Thames visible through a gap in the houses opposite if you craned your neck out of the top-floor window.

Sam parked the van by the river. The construction workers had departed for the day and the drills and bulldozers were sleeping. The eerie silence of the empty streets was broken only by the scurrying of rodents and the creak of a pub sign swinging in the breeze. Spyder's place was the last in a row of condemned houses. Apart from his, they were all boarded up, front doors marked with red crosses like the houses of plague victims, families locked inside with their already dead relatives, waiting for their turn, the sweet scent of rotting flesh in the air.

The clang of a bell startled her and she thought for a moment it was the corpse collector calling for the dead.

‘Church bells,' she said. ‘Eleven.'

Spyder's house was a wreck even though it wasn't condemned. A squalid drug dealers' den; peeling wallpaper, broken panes replaced with hardboard, missing floorboards that meant you could see the room below when you used the toilet. And anybody in the room below could look up and see you peeing. When Luke discovered that
Oliver Twist
was set in nearby Jacob's Island, he had painted a sign saying Fagin's Lair, nailed it to the frame above the front door. Luke rented a room from Spyder at the back of the house, which he had painted black. Sam had stayed overnight once, but that was enough. Spyder's presence, the squalor, the lack of a toilet floor had been too much for her and, after the one-night trial, Luke always came back to Vauxhall with her.

The house was dark. No movement. No sounds of life.

‘I'll knock,' Sonny said.

‘Spyder's not the kind of person who would answer, even if he was in. I'm certain he's not there anyway. He's working at the Wag.'

‘Do you know this Spyder guy quite well then?'

‘No. Thankfully.'

‘Did you meet him through Luke?'

‘I met Spyder first, before I knew Luke. Last September when I started working at the Ballroom. He turned up one evening and introduced himself. He's a dope dealer as well as a barman. He tends to get everywhere, like a virus.'

She wasn't sure Sonny was paying attention, too busy assessing the house, searching for an entrance.

He said, ‘Over the wall round the back?'

She nodded.

‘Why don't you stay here, and I'll go inside and look around.'

She tutted. ‘I'm coming with you.'

They clambered over the brick wall into the small courtyard behind the house, littered with upturned tables, broken wardrobes, smashed crockery and three-legged chairs. Spyder had chucked the unwanted rotting furniture out the back when he moved in. Something scuttled.

‘Rat.'

They picked their way across the yard to the back of the house. Sam took the credit card that Barclays had sent her the first term she was at Oxford and slipped it between the bottom and top frame of the sash window. She jiggled the catch free and then wiggled the bottom frame upwards.

‘Where did you learn that trick?'

‘Jim.'

He had demonstrated on their back window – emergency measures in case she was ever locked out. She edged over the windowsill. The kitchen was scuzzy; the orange street light cast a sickly glow on the sink full of dirty plates and the tin foil takeaways stacked on the table. She suspected this was more evidence that Luke hadn't been here for days. He knew how to use a rubbish bin.

‘I'm going to look in his room first,' she said.

‘Use a torch,' he said. ‘Here, take mine.'

‘I've got my own.'

She stuck her hand in her pocket; touched her Swiss Army knife and found her torch. The thin beam picked out dirty underpants, dirty mags; Spyder's scum. She picked her way through the debris, up the stairs, into Luke's room, sat on the bed and put her face in her hands, overwhelmed.