The Salt Marsh (34 page)

‘Do you think it's safe?' she asked.

‘It's well camouflaged by the shrubs. You wouldn't spot it from the road. Does anybody else know about it?'

‘I don't think so. I mean, nobody apart from Luke.'

Sonny gave her a questioning glance, filled her with unease and, for the first time in a while, she thought about the bone and the hair she had found in the Lookers' Hut the night Luke had disappeared. Dave had been curious about the odd objects, and she had thought he was just being Dave – with his idiosyncratic interests. All she had cared about anyway was that they weren't the remains of Luke. But Alastair's story about the informer, dismembered and his parts thrown across the marsh, had unsettled her. She shook her head, dislodged her concerns. The bone and the hair were irrelevant, field-walker's finds to be bagged, noted, labelled, examined then left in the bottom of a cupboard for decades.

‘Let's find this pub,' she said. ‘I could do with a drink.'

*

Hands feeding the wheel, right turn on to the main road, he nearly failed to clock the speeding bike and almost pulled out in front of it. The bike swerved around the Land Rover; the leather-clad biker leaning close to the handlebars glanced back over his shoulder as he passed, clocked her through the black visor of his helmet.

‘Moto Guzzi,' Sonny said. ‘Nice bike. It's fast but low – built for Italian shorties.'

An endless stretch of straight and narrow tarmac, boxed in by a dark green wall of maize spears, head height, blocking the view on either side. There weren't many places on the marsh where the far horizon was occluded. The Owler was invisible until they were right on top of it. One of those in the middle of nowhere pubs with a garden that attracted bikers and a police car with a breathalyser on the last Saturday night of the month when officers were trying to boost their charge stats. Start of the week though, the car park was more or less empty. Apart from a Moto Guzzi bike. And, in the far corner, a knot of men with grotesque blackened faces, eyes blinking white, lipless mouth holes, black ragged capes draped around their shoulders and top hats with pheasant feathers in the band. Sam blanched at the sight.

‘What are those men?' Sonny asked. He swung the Land Rover into a parking space under a willow.

‘Crow-men. Morris dancers from the dark side. I saw them at a May Day celebration in Hastings this year. Although, the first time I saw them was at a May Day fair with Jim when I was a kid.'

She shook as she spoke, the violence of the reaction surprising her; the memory filled her with dread and anger. She picked a fallen withy stem, slashed and sliced the midges clouding her vision.

The wind had dropped to nothing, allowed the sun's rays to penetrate, heated the warm afternoon into a muggy evening, purple clouds gathering above the Weald. In the still air, she could hear the creaking of the crow-men's leather boots as they moved into position – a rehearsal, she presumed. They were a hefty crew, intimidating with their blacked-up faces. She walked over to watch. The musicians started playing – the drum and bone, the squeezebox, the banjo and a leather-jacketed man hitting the spoons against his thigh. The crow-men didn't dance. They stomped, whacked the ground with their wooden staves, then clashed the clubs together in the air over their heads. As the beat of the music quickened, their movements became more manic, violent. She stood mesmerized, unable to shift, flinching each time the wooden clubs were thwacked in the air, jolting with the thud of their boots on the ground. The music stopped.

‘That's it, boys,' the banjo-man shouted.

The dancers put their truncheon-wielding arms down, formed a line and, without another word or smile, marched out the car park and down the road. Left the spoon-man standing. He collected the crash helmet that had been placed on one side of the car park, and entered the pub.

‘The English do some strange things,' Sonny said.

Inside the pub was dead. The spoon-beating Moto Guzzi owner was playing the slot machine. An old-fashioned one-armed bandit. He pulled the handle and set the dials spinning, lights flashing, music twanging, then pulled the handle again. And again. The noise put her on edge, made her nerves jangle with the Chinese water torture of its repetitiveness. She checked the bar's gloomier recesses for Patrick, but he wasn't there. They sat in a corner and waited. They had arranged to meet at six, and he was already ten minutes late. She fidgeted.

‘We shouldn't have agreed to meet him here,' she said. ‘We should have insisted on meeting him at his parents' place.'

‘I doubt if it would have made much difference. If he wants to show up, he will.'

‘What if something has happened to him? The men in that Audi obviously knew his address.'

Sonny shrugged, eyes fixed on the biker playing the slot machine. She checked her watch again. Six fifteen. The bar door creaked. A bespectacled, dun-haired, mid-height man walked in. Patrick. Except he looked thinner than she remembered, frailer, as if some process of osmosis had blurred his boundaries, colour leached, left him diminished. She caught sight of his yellow-striped Adidas trainers and a lump formed in her throat. They reminded her of Dave. Football buddies, fellow Aston Villa supporters, five-a-side mates. He caught her eye and walked over to their table without a smile.

‘I can't stay long.'

God, he was jumpy. He sat on the chair nearest the door, didn't bother to think about a drink, fished in his jacket, pulled out a packet of fags, fumbled, flicked his Bic, flame dancing with the trembles of his hand, fingernails bitten ragged. He gave Sonny a nervous glance. Sonny smiled, but he clearly failed to reassure. She wished she had told Sonny to stay in the Land Rover. She'd become used to him, learned to block out the hard man exterior.

‘Sonny is a friend of mine.'

Patrick nodded, puffed on his cigarette. Sonny had the sense to shrink into his seat, reduce his presence.

‘Are you OK?' she asked Patrick. Stupid question.

He shook his head. ‘Dave's death has done my head in.'

‘It's done mine in too.' Better to start with Dave, try to build up a connection, rather than rushing straight in to questions about Luke. She had to be cautious; she didn't know the details of Dave's involvement and there was a possibility that Patrick had been dragged into the caesium smuggling craziness.

Patrick said, ‘He called me the night before he died.'

‘Did he?'

She recalled the conversation she had overheard at Dave's house.
Hi, Dave here. Sorry to call so late, mate. I just wanted a quick chat.
So he was calling Patrick.

‘He called me late. I was in bed and I couldn't be bothered to get up. I should have done, I realize now. But I didn't. He left a message.'

‘Right.'

‘It was one of a series. We kept missing each other on the phone.'

She knew the feeling. Her life was being driven by a series of missed phone calls. Messages picked up too late. Phantom voices on an answering machine.

‘I listened to the message in the morning. It said something odd had turned up.' He glanced over his shoulder, then stared at her hard, as if she should know what he was getting at. ‘And it made me edgy.' He squeezed the filter of his fag between his finger and thumb, sucked the nicotine out, stubbed the butt in the ashtray.

‘I know Dave likes you,' he said. ‘Liked you,' he added.

‘I always got on well with Dave. He was like a brother.'

Patrick smiled for the first time since entering the pub. ‘Yes, that's what Dave said. You treated him like your brother.' She imagined Dave complaining about her to Patrick. Her cheeks burned, but her embarrassment seemed to put Patrick more at ease.

‘Why did his message make you edgy?' she asked.

‘It's a long story, goes back a few months.'

He reached for another fag.

She risked a prompt. ‘Was it something to do with the lab?'

‘The lab's security.'

She attempted to sound surprised. ‘Is there a problem with security there then?'

He glanced over his shoulder, fiddled with his lighter. ‘Yes. Well, there isn't a lot of security at the lab – why would there be? It's only a research lab; just a load of geeky environmental scientists, that's all.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘Well, there's always one person on the site to protect the equipment and also to oversee the security of the hazardous materials. A security guard-cum-caretaker. The guards are provided by this security firm. There's a roster. So they come and go. You might see one guy a few times and then never again, it's that sort of work. Some of them are OK, some of them sit in the office smoking and reading
The Sun
and I don't really notice them.' His words were gushing out now, as if he had turned the tap and couldn't stop the flow. ‘There was this one bloke, though, lovely he was. Colombian. Miguel. He was working at the lab until about six months ago. We were friendly. I speak Spanish. We had a bond. Then one day, sometime around the beginning of the year, he told me there was a new security guard on the roster, and he suspected he was doing some kind of fiddle. Vince, this guard is called.'

The slot machine kerchinged. Patrick jumped, lowered his voice.

‘Miguel had noticed that Vince always worked the day there's a delivery from Amersham – on the first Tuesday of every month. Tomorrow, in fact.'

‘What do they deliver?'

‘Radioactive materials for research purposes.'

She screwed up her face. ‘You mean like caesium 137?'

‘Exactly.' He scowled.

‘I know about caesium because of Dave's research,' she explained.

‘Of course. Dave always said you were a closet egghead.'

She laughed and then she said, ‘So you have caesium 137 delivered regularly?'

‘Yes. By van.'

‘Jesus. That sounds a bit mad, having radioactive materials being driven up and down the motorway in a van.'

‘We are licensed. So is the delivery company. And the amounts they deliver aren't particularly large. Just the vials we need for the kind of experiments that Dave carries out. Used to carry out.'

‘Right.' Dave's special subject, she reminded herself, caesium 137 contamination of water and its impact on marine environments.

‘Anyway, this guard Vince always did the long late shift on the Amersham delivery day. So he would be there in the afternoon when the delivery was made and stay there for the evening until somebody came to relieve him around one a.m. And one night Miguel was on the shift after Vince. Miguel turned up for work early, mainly because he lived in a shitty place so he might as well be at the research station as hanging around in a cramped room. And when he arrived, he saw somebody he didn't know in the loading bay. He went over to investigate. Then suddenly Vince appeared, looking menacing, told him to fuck off and come back later when his shift started. Miguel questioned him, and Vince told him everything was under control and if Miguel knew what was good for him he'd better keep his mouth shut.'

‘Did Miguel say what the stranger in the loading bay looked like?'

She could guess the answer.

‘Actually he did. It was a woman.'

‘A woman?'

‘Yes. Tall, black hair.'

Regan, of course. In some ways it was almost a relief to find the pieces fitted.

‘Miguel asked me what he should do about it. Because the intruder was a woman, I think I was less concerned than I would have been if he'd seen a man. I thought maybe it was Vince's girlfriend, something like that. I was more worried for Miguel's sake. I was never entirely sure of his immigration status to be honest – he'd hinted a couple of times he'd come in on a student visa and never left, so I knew he had to be careful about drawing attention to himself. I told him I'd do a bit of digging around, but I didn't really bother.'

Patrick fiddled with his B&H packet.

‘I spoke to Miguel again a couple of days later. He told me then that the manager of the security company had pulled him aside for a chat, said Vince had reported him for stealing lab equipment. So then Miguel had reacted and spilled the story to the manager about seeing Vince in the loading bay with this woman. I thought holy shit, it didn't sound good. In fact it sounded as if, whatever was going on, the manager and Vince were in it together. But I didn't want to scare Miguel. He was already nervous, and he had an accident with a vial of caesium, not being careful enough, forgetting to follow the proper procedures. Shortly after that, he went missing.'

Sam's gut lurched, knotted in anticipation of the inevitable ending of the story.

‘Yeah. He didn't come into work. He'd been absent for about three days. We were wondering what we should do about it, because we didn't have any names or numbers of families or friends, when the police turned up. They said he was involved in a smack smuggling gang, and implied he had probably had a bust-up with some dealer or another, gone back to Colombia. On the run.'

Her mind raced, going through the connections.

‘Well, it's possible, isn't it? Maybe he was involved in drug smuggling.'

Patrick tutted. ‘Come on. Not all Colombians are drug dealers. Miguel was a country boy, trying to earn a bit of money to send back to his family. But the copper in charge of the investigation was insistent that it was all down to Miguel's drugs links, so I began to assume that he must have some information on him.'

‘What was the cop's name?'

‘Superintendent Crawford. Are you OK?'

She must have paled. ‘Yes, I'm fine.' She wanted to retch. ‘And did you do any more digging around after Miguel went missing?'

Patrick agitated the wheel of his lighter with his thumb.

‘I decided to have a quick look at the accounts. I knew a bloke in Amersham and I was able to get him to look at the delivery log and check it against our log. And nearly every time a delivery has been made over the last six months, one vial of caesium 137 that has left Amersham in the lab consignment hasn't been recorded in the research lab log.'