The Salt Marsh (3 page)

She said, ‘He told me to tell you that you should take more care of me, otherwise something nasty could happen.'

‘Fuck him,' Jim shouted. ‘Fuck him.' He opened the car door. ‘There isn't a fucking handbook. I have to make it up as I go along. I get it wrong sometimes. Maybe this time I got it wrong.'

She wasn't sure whether he was talking to her or to himself. He got out of the car, slammed the door. She followed with the dog. He walked up the front steps of their house. At the top he stopped, turned.

He said, ‘He's an evil bastard. He might look normal but he's a fucking evil bastard.' He paused, then he said, ‘He is a candy man, that's exactly what he is. A candy man spinning his sickly deceits. Using kids, for fuck's sake. You'd better remember his face. If you see him again, don't think twice. Run.'

Jim went inside, left the front door open, left her standing on the pavement. She didn't want to remember the candy man's face, the icy eyes, the scythe-shaped scar. She wanted to forget him, bury it. Along with all the other things it was dangerous to remember about her father. A gust of wind carried a swirl of apple blossom along the road. She stretched, caught a white petal as the mini tornado passed, squished it in her fist, released the intense perfume of the blossom, sweet like candyfloss. The scent made her retch.

ONE

20 June 1986

F
RIDAY EVENING, ALONE
in the house: Dave her old housemate away in Skell, Luke her boyfriend doing a bar shift at the Wag. The room overshadowed by the Oval gasholder, its grey lung full. In the middle of the weekly phone session with her therapist; the last one before the memorial service that she had planned to mark the second anniversary of Jim's death. The soft voice coaxed confession. She held the receiver to her ear with one hand and in the other she clutched a photo of her father, taken from behind, black and white. He had always avoided the camera's lens, he did not want to be identified. She conjured up a memory of his features, tried to hold the image steady, but it slipped and faded into a recollection of his blank eyes staring up from the mortuary slab. He had been identified then, in the morgue, by her.

The beat of sullen raindrops against the window filled the pause in the conversation. Another drencher; a washout of a summer. She sighed and dropped the photo of her father on the floorboards, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Tasted saltwater on her lips.

‘Sam, are you still there?'

‘Yes.'

‘You were saying your father always whistled a particular tune. What was it?'

She attempted to replicate the melody into the receiver.

‘Oh, now where have I heard that before?... I know it...'

Sam laughed. ‘“The
Third Man
Theme”. Anton Karas played it on a zither.'

‘Of course. What a great film. Set in Vienna, wasn't it? The swindler who fakes his own death.'

‘Yeah, and then Philby was called the third man because he was the double agent working in MI6 who helped his two mates Burgess and Maclean escape to Moscow.'

‘Of course. Philby, the third man. You know your spies, don't you.'

She didn't answer. She never did go to Vienna, she never went on the Reisenrad with Jim.

The therapist asked, ‘So when was the last time you heard your father whistle this tune?'

‘I can't really remember. Perhaps it was a couple of days before he was...'

Killed by two bullets in the back of his head. Up by the Thames, the patch of trampled grass behind the railway arches at Vauxhall Bridge. Officially, a car crash. Unofficially, the work of a contract hitman.

‘Sam, I've lost you again.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Sam. We've been doing these phone sessions for over a year now and I still find it difficult to get you to talk in any depth about your father.'

Sam scowled at the invisible therapist somewhere down the line. The therapist had been her mother's idea, of course. Sam had managed the first term at university, still numb from the aftershock of her father's death, gliding along on a thermal of jokiness and uplifting indifference until an unsettling event had caused a crash. March, just before the Easter vac. She had volunteered to collect money for the local women's refuge and was standing in Cornmarket Street rattling a tin with little result, apart from a handful of insults. Domestic violence? Doesn't happen. Not to decent women, at least. An innocuous-looking man had sauntered up to her – posh Harrington, stay pressed trousers, glasses, mouse hair swept back, potato face. Hard to place him, he could have been the manager of the local Tesco, sub-editor of
The Sun
, solicitor. Anything. There was nothing in the way he approached her that tripped any of her alarm bells. He stuck his hand in a pocket, whipped out some small change, dropped it in the slot, whispered, ‘I know you. You are Jim Coyle's daughter.'

She jumped, too startled to push him away or leg it, her reflection in his glasses, mouth gaping, rabbit-caught-in-head-light eyes. He strode off down the street without a backwards glance. She stared after him, replaying the words in her head, uncertain whether she had misheard. Although, she knew she hadn't. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again and then she saw that everything was the same but everything was different. The whispered words had unsteadied her. Who was he? How did he know who she was? She made it back to her college room, lay on her bed, tried to forget it. She stared at the plaster ceiling but it was fracturing and dissolving into atoms, as if the stranger's identification of her as Jim Coyle's daughter had given her clearer sight of the hidden patterns beneath the fasçade. Nothing was as it seemed. She could see the secrets, the truths, and she was filled with fear and dread. She needed a distraction. She grabbed a slim volume from the pile of history textbooks by her bed:
Daemonologie
– a treatise on witchcraft by King James the First of England. It wasn't a comforting read, but she couldn't put it down. Found her eyes glued to the king's malicious words, his insistence that the dark power ran in families, passed from parent to child. Look for the mark, find the witch, make her confess and burn her. Sam's hand went to the splodge on her cheek as she stared at the page and sensed her tormentors circling.

She had missed several tutorials and Liz had turned up to find out what was wrong. She said she thought she was under surveillance, for some reason she couldn't quite explain other than that they knew she was her father's daughter. Liz observed that she'd always had obsessive tendencies – listing birds, collecting beetles, had to finish the cryptic crossword – and now she was becoming obsessively morbid, tripped into paranoia by thoughts about her father's death. Sam decided to take a year out to recover. Liz urged Sam to find a therapist – as if talking to somebody about Jim's death might take her mind off the subject. Her mother had insisted, found a friend of a friend, but she worked in Oxford and Sam had left Oxford, moved into Dave's south London home. Liz suggested doing the sessions by phone, and the therapist agreed. Sam couldn't see the point, but she went along with it anyway because she didn't want to argue; better to do the passive thing and say yes. A one-hour telephone conversation every week, not such a high price for keeping Liz off her back. Although, the therapist's connection with her mother was inhibiting. One more reason, as if she needed another, not to say too much.

‘Sam? Are you still there?' The therapist waiting patiently at the other end of the line.

‘Yes.'

‘This is a safe space for you to talk. If you don't talk about your feelings, if you suppress them, they will come out in more destructive ways. You won't necessarily be able to control your emotions. And in the end, the person who will be most hurt is you. Do you see what I'm saying?'

‘Yes.'

‘Sam, you know grief has five stages.'

Oh god here we go again. ‘I know. Yes.'

She mouthed the list silently as the therapist went through it.

‘Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.'

Silence.

‘Sam, I don't want to push you here, but maybe you're still in denial.'

‘I'm not.'

‘You don't express any feelings about the loss of your father.'

Loss. He hadn't been lost. He had been killed by a contract hitman.

‘Sam, why can't you talk about the feelings you have about your father?'

‘It's just that...'

Habits so deeply etched she barely perceived their existence. Hedging to avoid unknown dangers. Words played like sleights of hand.

‘I'm not always entirely sure what my feelings about my dad actually are...'

‘Well, that's what I'm here for, to help you work it out. Everybody has to go through the grieving process.'

‘I didn't realize it was compulsory.'

The therapist sighed.

‘Why don't you try saying the first thing that comes into your head instead of preparing your lines?'

She eyed the Oval gasholder through the storm-splattered window. ‘OK. But isn't our time up anyway?'

‘Almost. One last question. Did “The
Third Man
Theme” have any significance for Jim?'

‘No. Not really.' She heard a click on the line. ‘Are you recording this conversation?'

‘Of course not.'

‘I thought I heard a click.'

‘I didn't.'

Perhaps it was the rain. ‘I must have been mistaken.'

‘OK. Well, I'll call again next week.'

She replaced the receiver, plucked the photo of Jim off the floor. Only the back of his head was visible because he was facing Harry, who was grinning at the camera with a megawatt smile that softened his hard man broken nose. Harry, Jim's one and only trusted mate. How old was she when she snapped the photo? Ten. Eleven perhaps. The camera was a Christmas present and she had bugged Jim with her attempts to capture him for her album. You, he said. You again. You're always there watching. Seeing things you shouldn't see. Sticking the details in that memory bank of yours. The Third Man – that was Jim's nickname for her, the invisible addition to his partnership with Harry. Jim's silent shadow. She leaned back, held the photo up above her head, as if that might give her a clearer view of her father, and attempted to whistle the familiar tune one more time. The notes came out in a squeak. She gave up, licked her lips and tasted the saltiness of her tears.

*

The conversation with her therapist gave her a bad night's sleep. She arose fuzzy-headed. Saturday morning, ten a.m. Time to head south, to London's periphery. Standing in the hallway, her brain checked the list of camping gear while her eyes followed a going nowhere snail trail that shimmered across the doormat bristles. She wondered why she had suggested the ceremony in the first place. She wished she could skip the graveyard, drive straight down to Dungeness. The phone rang. The second call that day: Luke had phoned her first thing. She wavered, pick it up or leave it? Unlikely to be Luke again. Perhaps it was Dave, calling from Skell to tell her he had spotted a bittern in the reeds or something like that. She enjoyed talking to Dave, but she didn't have the time right now; she had to leave otherwise she would be late. Decided to ignore the call: if it was important they could leave a message.

The dog next door howled. The phone rang and rang again and then the answering machine cut in with her disembodied voice. ‘There is no one at home to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.' The tape whirred. Beeped. A pause. A heavy breath, and then the familiar tune. ‘The
Third Man
Theme'. For a moment she thought Jim was on the other end of the line, whistling impatiently while he waited for her to pick up. Her hand reached for the receiver then stopped in mid-air when she remembered that was impossible. The whistling ceased. There was a clunk as a receiver at the far end was replaced. The cassette spooled backwards and left the red message light blinking. She retracted her hand, wiped the perspiration from her face, walked away, climbed the stairs, checked her bedroom window was closed. The floorboards lurched. She slumped, head down, knees up, covered her face with her hands. Who was whistling down her phone? She recalled her conversation with the therapist, the click she had dismissed as rain; perhaps somebody was listening to her conversations after all. Some weird knicker sniffer was letting her know they were out there. She didn't want to think about it, block it out. She took a deep breath, returned downstairs. The red light of the answering machine winked in the gloom. Her hand hovered, index finger over play. She pressed the message erase button. And it was only then that she recalled her conversation with Luke earlier in the morning, and she wondered whether he had given too much away.

*

Inside the house where she had grown up, two suitcases stood by the front door. Liz was shouting instructions to Jess about some Folio Society special offer she had paid for but still hadn't been delivered. Roger was leering in the background. Sam had realized, in the aftermath of her father's death, that Roger had been hovering for longer than she had suspected. Leafing through an old family album, it had become apparent that Jim was more or less absent from the photographs while Roger appeared in nearly every one of them. Spritzer in hand, lurking in front of the blackcurrant bush at a summer barbecue. Hand to hair on a windy afternoon's chance encounter in Greenwich Park. Why hadn't she noticed before? Roger the Todger, they used to call him. They couldn't any more, at least not within earshot of Liz. Partner was the coy term her mother used. Liz turned to her youngest daughter as she made her way into the front room.

‘Sam.'

There was guilt in Liz's enunciation.

‘Mum.'

‘I was worried you wouldn't arrive in time for me to say goodbye.'

‘Goodbye?'