The Salt Marsh (32 page)

Hastings was morose – nothing worse than a seaside town on a wet summer's day, trying to be jolly in the rain. The Channel lay still and lifeless there, a foam caul covering the shore. Beyond Rye, the mudflats of the Rother and the melancholy of the marshes came as a relief. Silver grass and grey lakes gleamed in the dim light, sheep drifted across the leas. A kestrel hung overhead, haunting the leaden clouds. She followed the falcon with her eye, found a thermal, soared, and observed the land from on high; the brown nose of Dungeness edging into the blue channel, shingle fringe, white line of rolling breakers.

Sonny's voice startled her. ‘Sam, I said which way.'

‘Sorry. Take the right.'

She spotted a telephone box at the end of a straggle of bungalows in Camber. She wanted to check Patrick Grogan's address and she asked Sonny to pull over. She hit lucky with the telephone directories; the local one had not been ripped out. Two P. Grogans listed, one living in Rye, the other in Lydd. The telephone number she had matched the address in Lydd. She memorized the house number and road, then dialled the number again, although she felt Patrick was unlikely to pick up. She was right; there was no answer.

‘Lydd's not far from here. We should go to Patrick's house, see if we can work out what has happened to him.' Sonny said nothing. They drove on. Beyond Camber, the lakes spread larger, spiked with reed beds and clotted with greylag geese. She spotted a crow hitching a ride on a sheep's back, a bad omen she thought, a sign of black magic being worked, and she stuck her hand in her pocket, touched her torch and penknife for comfort. Past the army shooting range with its painted targets of dead men standing, under the scar of wires and pylons.

They reached Lydd, an old garrison town, parked the Land Rover and headed in the direction of the sandy square tower of the church. Patrick's house was on a street leading away from the east side of the graveyard. They sat among the tombs and observed the terrace through the clutter of crosses and the angels. A man in overalls balanced on a stepladder snipped the top of a privet hedge, the clack of his shears mingling with the rooks' caws.

‘You stay here,' she said to Sonny. ‘I'll see if he's at home.'

She followed the path through the graveyard, headed along the row of old workers' cottages, reached Patrick's house, rang the doorbell and waited. No answer. She peered through the letterbox, spotted a pile of envelopes on the doormat. She rang the doorbell again, held her breath, stomach sinking. No answer. She checked right and left along the street – nobody in sight apart from the hedge cutter – peered through the dirty net-covered window. Nothing to see except for a line of dead flies adorning the gap between curtain and pane. She walked back the way she had come; the shears stopped clacking as she passed the step-ladder and she felt the eyes of the privet trimmer on her neck.

Back in the Land Rover, they were about to pull away when a black car appeared in the rearview mirror, advancing slowly down the road, two men in the front, the passenger wearing wraparound shades.

‘Don't look,' she whispered. ‘It's an Audi. It must be Regan's heavies.'

The Quattro slid past, continued down the road, disappeared in the distance.

‘Let's go,' Sonny said. ‘Before they come back.'

She said, ‘Patrick's place has the smell of a deserted house.' She tried to catch her breath, but couldn't, realized she was panicking. ‘Do you think we arrived too late?'

Sonny shrugged. ‘Maybe he's at work.'

‘Let's get out of Lydd then find a phone box. I want to try something.'

They drove to the coast, a straggle of bungalows lining the shore, spotted a telephone kiosk. She jumped out. In luck again, the directory was still intact, the phone in working order. She found the Grogans and this time dialled the number in Rye. She counted the rings. Eight. Nine. Ten. She willed somebody to pick up. They did. She jammed her coins in the slot.

‘Hello. Pete Grogan speaking.' Trace of a southern Irish accent. She took a punt. ‘Hello, Mr Grogan, I was calling to see if I could speak to Patrick.'

‘Oh yes, hang on a moment, I think he's here.' She had guessed correctly; he had retreated to his parents' home.

‘Sorry, can I ask who is calling?'

‘Yes. It's Sam. I'm a friend of Dave Daley's. I used to share a house with him in Vauxhall.'

‘Oh dear. Poor Dave. So very sad. Patrick has been upset by the news, he's taken it very badly. Hang on, I'll find him.'

She fiddled with the loose change in her pocket while Pete went to fetch his son. Somebody picked up the receiver at the other end.

‘Hello.'

His voice sounded timid. Scared.

‘Hello, Patrick?'

Short silence. ‘Who is it speaking again?'

‘Sam Coyle. I live with Dave in Vauxhall... I lived with Dave in Vauxhall. I think we might have met once. Dave showed me around the research lab last year.'

‘Yes. I remember.'

‘I wondered whether we could meet up. I wanted to talk about Dave.'

‘How did you know I was here?'

She had to lie, she didn't want to spook him, let him know she had been chasing him for days, found his number in the bedroom of her disappeared boyfriend. ‘I spoke to somebody at the research station and they said you were staying with your parents in Rye and gave me your number.'

‘Why do you want to talk to me about Dave?'

‘It's just...' She stammered, taken aback by his defensiveness. ‘I've been really upset about his death and I wanted to talk to somebody else who knew him well.' She stuck her finger in the nine hole on the dial, waggled it around.

‘Why do you want to talk to me rather than anybody else who works at the lab?'

She could hear the agitation in his tone. As he spoke her mind was digging, analysing his reactions, picking over the possibility that Patrick was complicit in whatever Dave had been doing. She tried to keep the wariness from her voice.

‘I was going through some of Dave's old papers. Sorting out his room. I found one of his articles and saw you were first on his list of acknowledgements.' Dave had told her they were both born in Birmingham, she recalled, both of Irish descent, both Aston Villa fans. ‘I thought I would try and talk to you because I remembered you and he were good mates. I've found it so difficult to make sense of Dave's death.'

Heavy sigh at the far end. ‘Me too.'

‘I'm in Dungeness now with a friend. I wanted to show him the beach. We could drive over to Rye. Meet up at a pub. The Mermaid perhaps.'

‘No. Not Rye. Romney. The marsh. There's a pub called the Owler, out beyond Hope.'

‘I know it.' Beyond Hope, that sounded ominous.

‘OK. Six?'

‘Six is fine.'

He replaced the receiver abruptly.

*

She clambered back into the Land Rover. ‘Well, at least he's still alive,' she said. Then she wondered whether she had tempted fate by speaking her fear. ‘I've arranged to meet him at six in a pub out on the marsh.'

An afternoon to kill. She sat with her head in her hands and tried to work out whether there were any other leads she could find that might guide her to Luke.

‘I'd like to visit Alastair.'

‘Alastair?'

‘He lives in one of the fishermen's cottages down on Dungeness. He turned up at the meetings we organized.'

‘We?'

‘Luke and me.'

‘Of course. Luke.'

‘I met him the evening Luke disappeared. I thought at first he was the informer feeding information about me to Crawford, but that was before you worked out that Spyder was the grass. There's something odd about Alastair, though,' she said. ‘He's an old hippy. Drug dealer, I reckon.'

‘Could he be part of Regan's smuggling network?'

‘Maybe, but I suspect he's too small-time to be involved with Regan. Perhaps he's seen something going on along the beach. He's sharper than he seems. He's observant. And he's...' She was going to say
clairvoyant
, changed her mind. ‘He's perceptive. He's something of a Magus. A shaman.'

‘Sangoma.'

‘What?'

‘Witch doctor.'

‘Yes, one of those.'

‘I don't want to visit him then.' He folded his arms.

‘Are you serious?'

‘I don't mess with that stuff. Witch doctors.'

‘Why not?'

‘There was one who lived in a nearby village back home. I had a friend who wanted to visit and ask about a stomach pain, so I went with him to the sangoma's hut for a laugh, to see what all the fuss was about. He was wearing this feather headdress and did some drumming, went into a trance, called up the ancestors, did a question and answer routine and gave my friend a diagnosis and some medicine. Pretty much as I had expected.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘We were about to leave, but the sangoma told me to wait, and he touched my arm, closed his eyes, went into a trance again. When he opened his eyes again, he said he could see I had a shadow. A ghost. I asked him what the ghost looked like and he described a young woman with long brown hair. I tried to laugh it off, but he said I should have a charm, some magic, to prevent the ghost from stealing my soul. I said no, but my friend was scared and said I had to do it. So I agreed and he asked me to hold my arm out.'

Sonny lifted his forearm, rolled up his sleeve, revealed the crosses in a band around his elbow.

‘He made two cuts,' Sonny continued. ‘Just here. He rubbed them with sand.'

He pointed to the first cross – different from the others, less pen and ink, more like a scar.

‘I offered to pay for the charm but he refused, and it made me nervous, so I asked him more about my ghost, whether she had a name, an identity. Foreign name, he said, one he hadn't heard before. Flavia.'

Sonny's eyes were welling.

‘Your mother?' she asked. ‘I thought you said she'd run away to England.'

‘Ja. It's what I hoped, it's what I thought. I still search for her, but the sangoma made me doubt she is still alive.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘That was the week before I left home for my military service,' he added.

First in his line of crosses, she thought. She glanced at the band, and saw there were two pen and ink crosses that looked as if they had been recently added, sore and raised. Two crosses. The last one Spyder, she was sure. Who was the other one, the one she had first noticed when they were sitting in the Portuguese café on South Lambeth Road? He rolled his sleeve down hastily. A crow alighted on the Land Rover's bonnet, preened and strutted from left to right, flew away.

‘So I am wary of sangomas or people who have supernatural powers of any kind,' he said. ‘I'm afraid they can do more harm than good. Tell you things you were better off not knowing. But I'll come with you, if you like. Don't expect me to join in the conversation.'

‘No problem.' She felt uneasy, a nagging fear that Alastair might say something she didn't want to hear.

*

They parked the Land Rover at the end of the beach track. The concrete mass of the power station loomed, radiated an unnerving stillness, a hobby tumbled around the reactor tower. A weak sun shone through the low cloud, but whatever warmth it brought was whipped away by the onshore wind. They walked heads down against the buffeting, past storm-battered fishermen's cabins, clumps of fading poppies. Further along the shore, a solitary fisherman sat motionless with a rod and line in front of his military green windbreak like some lone survivor of the apocalypse. They reached Alastair's cabin; the funt was outside the front door indicating he was in – although the blankness of the windows made her suspect nobody was at home. She knocked on the door, wind chimes clanking above her head, peered through the glass when there was no answer, spotted a movement inside. She waited. The door creaked, Alastair peeped through the crack.

‘Sam,' she said.

‘Oh, hello. Good to see you again.' He pulled the door open, smiled – warily, she thought – then frowned when he saw Sonny standing behind her.

‘This is my friend Sonny,' she said.

He nodded, surveyed the beach over her shoulder, as if he were searching for somebody.

‘Come in for a moment, out of the wind.'

Inside it was gloomy, the intermittent sunlight failing to reach the interior through the grimy panes. The gusts buffeted the walls, calling down the chimney, whispering through the floorboards, and Sam was reminded again of a ship's cabin, lurching in a gale. Alastair retreated to the kitchen.

‘No tea for me, thank you,' Sonny said. He stood by Alastair's crate-top mortuary of bird wings and skulls, looked down at the collection with obvious disgust. Or perhaps it was dread. She was drawn to the desk. The test tube rack contained three glass vials filled with a mouldering greenish semi-liquid substance.

Alastair emerged, holding mugs of tea, glanced at Sonny. He retreated into a corner of the room. Alastair tipped his head to one side as he handed Sam her cup. ‘Did your boyfriend turn up in the end then?'

‘He went to stay with friends,' she said. She tried to sound offhand, not too concerned, didn't want to give too much away. ‘It was a misunderstanding after all.'

‘Oh right,' Alastair said. His features dropped, puzzled, realigned themselves. There was an awkward silence that Sam could not decipher. She searched for a safe topic of conversation, a route to the information she wanted, and pointed at the test tube rack on his desk. ‘Is that some sort of alchemical experiment?'

He nodded, produced a packet of Rizlas, rolled as he talked.

‘One of the letters from John Allin in the archive had some details of his research lab. He had these...'

‘Test tubes?' Sam suggested.

‘Flasks.'

‘Are you hoping to make some gold?'