The Salt Marsh (38 page)

Enough for Crawford to try to fit her up with a record on an MI5 terrorist index, discredit her even if he couldn't make the charges stick, have her permanently on a surveillance list?

*

Enough for him to engineer a contract on her? A crow landed on the broken wall of the Lookers' Hut, hopped along, wiped its beak against the red brick, cawed and flew away. Crow, bird of death. There were lots of them out here on the marsh. She thought about Sonny's phone conversation she had overheard in Vauxhall.
You've got to hold off. I need more time.

She said, ‘Sonny, do you always complete your contracts?'

He shook his head, reached for his Marlboro carton, flicked a fag in the air, caught it in his mouth, lit it and puffed. ‘Sometimes I take a contract to stop anybody else from carrying out the hit.'

She took a slurp of coffee – tepid, but still comforting. She decided she would have to take his word for it; she didn't have much choice. She cradled the tin cup in her hands, concentrated, made it boil, steam rising, the particles swirling, forming a mist, spectral barn owl wings outstretched, soft feathers floating, filling the air.

Sonny's voice brought her back to her senses. ‘Is there a church near here?'

‘A church?' Churches weren't her thing, but she could do with a distraction, a reason to move; escape this Lookers' Hut that no longer felt safehouse with its bones and hair, ghosts and crows, the menaces of the smugglers. ‘There's one not far from here. Thomas à Becket. We could get there without much danger of being seen if we cut around the fields.'

*

The sun warmed her back as she walked around the fields, picking their way across the ditches, the grass still wet beneath their feet. The hedgerows kept them hidden from any cars passing in the lanes.

‘When you were back home, growing up in the Transvaal,' she asked, ‘did you confess your sins to the pastor?'

‘No. My sins have always been between my God and me.' He plucked a dog rose from the brambles, twiddled it between his fingers, let it drop. ‘Confession to another person usually ends in betrayal of one sort or another, I've found.'

The three-stepped brick church rose out of the grass and mist; its humble appearance was touching – a lowly snail looking up to its creator. The door was unlocked. The interior was intimate yet open: white wooden boxed pews along the walls of the short nave, a timbered roof that resembled the hull of an upturned boat.

He walked to the chancel and knelt in front of the altar, the Lord's Prayer and the eye of God looking down on him from a painted screen. She opened a box pew, sat on a wooden bench and contemplated the simple beauty of the church, the text boards attached to the roof.

‘
Be ye doers of the word, and not be hearers only, deceiving your own selves. James ch. 1 v 12.
'

The verse played on her mind and she wondered whether she was a hearer only, guided by the voices in her head, the recorded messages on tapes, deceiving herself. She reached into her pocket, touched her penknife and torch for comfort.

‘Will you come and pray with me?' Sonny asked.

Why not, she thought, even though she didn't believe in God. At least, not the God of this church. She went and knelt beside him.

‘I don't know any prayers,' she said.

‘We could recite a passage from the Bible.'

‘To be honest, I don't know many Bible passages.'

‘Ecclesiastes.'

‘Yes, I know Ecclesiastes.'

They said the words together. ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.'

He kept his head bowed and his eyes closed, and the low morning light through the church window shone on the tears rolling down his cheeks. He was right, she suspected, it was safer to know nothing than to live with difficult truths. She sensed he had an urge to obliterate himself, return to dust, unable to live with the things he had seen and done, and he wanted to find a church, recite the Ecclesiastes verses, not because he needed forgiveness or reassurance that there was a time to kill if God ordained it, but because he was preparing to die, the dark shadows engulfing him.

*

Early evening, they decided to approach the research station from the north, avoiding the roads and the coastline where, they agreed, Crawford was most likely to be watching for them. They found a disused track leading into the shingle wilderness between the beach and the marsh and left the Land Rover hidden in a clump of blackthorn.

Sonny tried one more time to dissuade her. ‘I still think it's safer to sit tight, wait for Harry to deal with the file and sort Crawford out.'

‘Yes, but Harry thinks Crawford is OK. A good cop.'

The thought made her shudder. How come nobody, not even Harry, could see through Crawford? He was like a plague-carrying rat that crept from house to house spreading infection; the bodies piling up around him, everybody blind to the culprit in their midst.

She said, ‘Well, whatever Harry manages to do, I still have to find Luke and make sure he is safe.'

‘OK. OK. I get it. But take the Firebird.' He rummaged in his rucksack, produced the pistol.

‘I don't know what to do with it,' she said.

‘Put it in the inside pocket of your overcoat.'

‘No. I mean, I don't know what to do with it.'

‘You do. I showed you.' He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were a natural.' He smiled and added, ‘You just need to remember to take the safety catch off, that's all.'

She took the Firebird, even though she felt stupid with it, placed it in the pocket of her coat.

‘Let's get moving,' Sonny said.

‘Hang on. I want something else.'

She scrabbled around in the back of the Land Rover, located the Dictaphone with her answering machine cassette inside. She wanted the comfort of the recorded voices with her. Luke. Dave. Liz. She fumbled with the machine, flustered fingers unable to remove the tape.

‘Come on.' Sonny was edging to go.

She gave up fiddling, closed the Dictaphone lid, jammed the machine into her coat pocket.

*

The stony desert stretched away before them; the sun beating down and the power station shimmering like a mirage in the glare. They didn't speak for a while; it was an effort to trudge across the pebbles. Cormorants squatted on their untidy nests, balanced on the topmost branches of willow trees that had been submerged in rain-filled gravel pits. They rested in a dip shaded by a stunted hawthorn. The hollow was littered with rusty sheets of corrugated iron, which might once have been somebody's makeshift shelter. A grass snake slithered away as she nudged the debris with her foot. They shared a bottle of water, some bread and cheddar.

‘What's the plan then?' Sonny asked.

‘Well, from what Patrick said, it sounds as if Regan comes just before midnight to pick up the caesium they've creamed off from the Amersham delivery. I think we should try and get into the research station before Regan shows up. Confront the security guard, Vince. Tease some information out of him. See if he knows anything about Luke.'

She sounded more confident than she felt.

‘Let's call in on Alastair first though, and find out whether he's noticed anything going on, seen any more strange boats on the beach.'

*

The hot airlessness of the day brought mist at dusk. The humidity dispersed the light from the setting sun and filled the eastern horizon with a bloody haze. They neared the outlying fishermen's cabins and she focused on the mist, drew it closer with her mind, let its softness curl and wrap around them. By the time they were directly behind Alastair's cottage, the fog had obliterated the sea and was turning the shingle dark with its moisture. They walked along the stack of crates marking the boundary of the cabin's backyard.

‘He's moved the funt,' she said.

‘The what?'

‘The funt. The lamp he had outside his front door.' She pointed. ‘He said he used it as a sign to show whether he was at home or away. I wonder whether he's done a bunk. Let's take a look.'

An untidy pile of not quite clean bones had been left on the doorstep: the toad, the carcass he proposed to throw in a river to strengthen his magic powers. She knocked on the door. No answer. A mildewed curtain pulled across the kitchen window blocked the view of the interior. She called his name. Silence.

*

She remembered what he had said about the back door, the buggered lock. She placed her shoulder against the peeling painted wood, shoved, the door gave way and she marched through the kitchen – noted the cooker and its gas cylinder still standing below the window. The front room had been cleared of nearly all his belongings – boxes, papers, bird skulls, wings, decrepit armchair – all gone. The walnut desk was the only piece of furniture remaining and, sitting on top of it, the school chemistry rack holding three corked test tubes with Alastair's alchemical experiments still fizzing away inside the glass. The door of the cellar was more obvious, she noticed, now the room was empty. She spotted something new – a pentagram chalked on the wall, a folded piece of paper pinned to the top point. She niggled the pin free with her nails, removed the paper, unfolded it; a hastily scrawled doodle of a boat with two stick figures on the deck. She held it up and recalled her last, stilted conversation with Alastair about the smugglers' ghost boat. The one he thought he might have seen the day Luke went missing. He had stalled when she asked him whether he had seen anybody on board. She examined the stick figures; next to one of the single-stroke torsos he had drawn a small circle around a three-pronged symbol, like a badge. Was it a peace symbol? A CND badge? Or perhaps its was a smiling sun nuclear power no thanks badge. Maybe it was an irrelevant detail, a mystical sign from the Magus. She relegated the badge to the back of her mind, focused on the boat. There was a name written in tiny letters along the hull. She squinted. Pluto. She twitched, half gasped, folded and deftly stuffed the paper in her pocket. Pluto, the name on Dave's note. Pluto, the god of the underworld, she had assumed, a bleak reference to Dave's own downward descent. Wrong again. Pluto was the name of a boat.

Sonny appeared.

‘He's vanished,' she said.

‘I told you. He's a sangoma. Has he left anything useful behind?'

‘Only his alchemical experiments.' She waved at the desk.

He selected a tube, examined its golden substance in the last light of the day. She'd had enough, walked out the back door, stooped and examined the toad bones as she waited for Sonny to emerge. They were nearly devoid of flesh, not quite stripped clean; half-worked magic was better than no magic at all, she decided. She slipped the toad bones into her coat pocket.

‘He's gone back to live with the dead,' Sonny said. He pulled the kitchen door shut behind him.

*

The mist was thick enough to hide them as they walked along the shore; the regular beam of the lighthouse diffracted in the vapour, the rays accompanied now by three blasts of the foghorn. The dense veil hung a fraction above the shingle, revealing the lines and colours of the pebbles, the lichen, the spiky sea cabbage – hyper-real below the blanket. They trailed the high tide tangle of seaweed and plastic bottles until they reached a flat finger of land that ran on below the mist, stretching into the sea. Good landing place for a boat, she noted. Up above, the blurred lights of the research lab were visible. Her whole body was cold and aching; a wave of tiredness and inertia descending as they turned inland. The plan had seemed clear and simple in the daylight, but now out here in the near darkness, it felt like a bad idea. Too simple – the research lab was so easy to enter. What had Crawford said?
Leave her to her own devices, see if she manages to do something really stupid.
Was she doing exactly what Crawford wanted her to do? Was she walking into a trap? She looked up, caught a shadow passing overhead, outstretched wings, circling, the gull's shape distorted, elongated in the haze, large enough to be a vulture.

‘What if Crawford is waiting for us inside the lab?' she asked.

‘Run. Lose him. Leave the rest to me.'

She glanced over her shoulder, caught sight of a glint in the mist beyond the shoreline. A signal? The fog closed in again, smothered the sea.

‘And what if he shoots?'

‘He won't be able to aim accurately in this.' He slashed his hand through the white air. ‘Not if there is some distance between you and him.'

Hardly comforting. They climbed the last ridge, reached the flat ground and the head-height chainlink fence surrounding the research station. The white prefab labs were clustered at the far end of the compound, hovering like phantoms in the mist. The fifth building, the one nearest to the sea, was brick-built; its outline loomed then vanished behind a wave of thick dampness.

She tried to remember the layout from her visits with Dave. ‘The red brick building is where they keep all the equipment and supplies.' She stalled, trawling for details. ‘The store room is through a doorway. They lock the caesium 137 and any other radioactive materials in the chest at the back.'

‘What did you say the caesium looks like? Some sort of yellow liquid?'

‘Yeah – yellow liquid in glass tubes. The vials are kept in a lead casing, like a hockey puck. And they put the pucks in the chest. That's lead-lined too. I remember Dave telling me he needed permission from the lab tech to remove a vial.'

Dave. Alastair's sketch of a boat called
Pluto
had jogged something, knocked a piece out of place. Her mind kept tracking back to Dave's message on Patrick's cassette. He'd seen a boat close to the shore. And he'd seen a ghost, he joked. That was in the morning, just before he was killed. She couldn't reorganize the fragments in any way that made sense.