The Salt Marsh Read online

  ‘I’d better go and see if I can find my dad in the beer tent,’ Sam said. She was still holding the cellophane packet. She didn’t want it, but she thought it would be less hassle to pay for it than to hand it back. ‘How much is the willow bark?’

  ‘Take it. It’s yours for nothing.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Sam pulled George’s lead and made her way through the jostle around the roped-off area. A policeman was jigging along with the girls in floaty dresses; the lairy bystanders egged him on – guffawing, cameras snapping. The Morris dancers were warming up their instruments – a violin, an accordion, a penny whistle and drum. The green-cape wearers were huddled in a corner behind the Maypole. One of them lit a bulrush torch, leaned back as it ignited, jabbed the burning wand down his throat and exhaled a leaping flame. Petrol fumes filled the air. The dancing girls shied away from the fire-eater, startled.

  The policeman stopped being jolly, shouted, ‘Oi. Enough of that.’

  The fire-eater shouted back, ‘Fuck off. I’ll do what I want. It’s a free country.’

  ‘This is my fucking patch. You do what I say here.’

  The fire-eater’s mates jeered, closed ranks. The audience surged, eager for a fight, bored with the waltzer, little girls and Maypole dancing. Sam pressed against the flow, dragging George. As she reached the beer tent, a bunch of stick-wielding men with blackened faces burst out through the open flap – ragged black cloaks flapping from their shoulders and top hats decorated with pheasant feathers. Crow-men, she realized with alarm, dancers from the darkness, birds of death. The crow-men hurtled into the crowd, barged over to the Maypole. Sam heard a shout behind – ‘let’s get ‘em’ – quickened her pace and headed to the gate, George straining on the lead. She had almost reached the exit when a man clutching a stick of candyfloss stepped into their path. He turned to face her and she saw his colourless eyes, the scar. She gasped, inhaled the sickly sweet smell of spun sugar. Her gut dropped, her legs tensed for flight, certain now this was the man Jim had been trying to avoid. What was he? A murderer? A terrorist? He smiled.

  ‘Your dad gave me a message for you,’ he said.

  His words caught her by surprise – his voice calm and reasonable. She edged back. Noticed a badge pinned to his windcheater, a peace symbol. CND. She stalled. Her aunt was in CND, she was always going on about Aldermaston, the dangers of nuclear proliferation. She liked her aunt. Harmless commie, according to Jim. Could this man be dangerous if he was wearing a peace badge? Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe he wasn’t the person who had prompted Jim to disappear, perhaps he was a friend of her father’s. Up close he seemed quite normal. Tall, not broad. Mousey hair. Anorak and jeans. His stare made her nervous, and the scythe-shaped scar was scary, but she had a marked cheek too and the bogey-face comments upset her. It was wrong to judge people by their looks.

  He said, ‘Your dad asked me to keep an eye on you and make sure you didn’t leave the fair until he got back.’

  ‘Did he?’

  She couldn’t work it out. If Jim wanted to give her a message why didn’t he just say something to her before he vanished? Why did he ask this man to tell her? But what if he was telling the truth? Jim would be angry if she didn’t wait for him. Maybe it was sensible to wait.

  ‘Do you know how long he will be?’ she asked.

  ‘Not long. Why don’t you stay here with me? Here,’ he pushed the candyfloss stick he was holding at her, ‘have this. Your dad told me to buy you a treat while he was gone.’

  The candyfloss did it. Instant reaction. There was no way Jim would have told some strange man to buy her a treat, he wasn’t like that, he knew she would never accept candyfloss from a stranger. It was totally wrong. The scar-faced man was creepy. She ran. The man reached out to grab her as she passed, dropped the candyfloss on the ground.

  ‘Stop.’

  He lurched at her. She dodged him, broke into a gallop. George was faster, overtook her, pelted down the road, towing her behind, her heart hammering.

  The man shouted, ‘Tell your dad he should take more care of you, otherwise something nasty could happen.’

  They reached the Cortina. Jim was there, waiting in the driver’s seat. He saw her coming, opened the door for her. She clambered in with George; the dog’s rank smell filled the car. Jim didn’t say a word, turned the ignition, accelerator, swerve. Along the bypass, white gypsy caravans huddled on the verge, tatty ponies tethered to the fence. She was still clutching the gift from the green-haired lady.

  ‘What’ve you got in that plastic bag?’ Jim asked, looking in the rearview mirror.

  ‘Willow bark.’

  ‘Makes a change from goldfish, I suppose.’

  He was trying to be jolly. Pretend nothing had happened.

  She said, ‘Why did you leave me?’

  He shifted on his seat. ‘I had to. I thought you would know I had gone back to the car. And you had George with you.’

  The dog stretched his paws across her legs. ‘I worked it out in the end,’ she said. ‘I was scared.’

  He sniffed. ‘You were safer without me.’

  He said it brusquely. She went red, the tears of pent-up fear gathering. She blinked them back because crying always irritated her father, leaned her head against the side window. Watched the world go by. Eventually she sat upright again and said, ‘A man tried to stop me leaving.’

  She noticed the veins on the back of his hand as he gripped the gear stick.

  ‘What man?’

  ‘He was standing by the candyfloss machine and staring at me when I was looking for you. Then he tried to stop me when I was leaving and said you’d asked him to tell me to wait at the fair.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He had a scar on his cheek.’

  ‘Bastard. Fucking bastard.’

  Jim put his foot on the accelerator.

  ‘I hope you didn’t say anything to him.’

  ‘Well, I did because I thought he knew you and he looked normal – apart from his eyes and the scar – and he was wearing a peace badge, you know, like the one Aunty Hazel wears.’

  Jim snorted, shook his head. ‘A badge doesn’t mean anything. Appearances can be deceptive. People aren’t always what they seem. You should know that by now. Anybody can pick up a badge and wear it.’

  He winced when he said that; she wasn’t sure why. She felt upset because it wasn’t her fault anyway. It was Jim’s. Why was he telling her off?

  ‘He tried to give me a stick of candyfloss.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He tried to give me a stick of candyfloss. That’s when I knew he was a weirdo.’

  ‘A stick of bloody candyfloss? Jesus fucking wept. What was he playing at?’

  He shook his head, mumbled to himself. ‘Talk about going for the soft target. A kid. What did he think he’d get from a kid? Wanker. Well, I suppose you don’t always know what you know.’

  She had no idea what he was going on about. You don’t always know what you know. She turned the words over in her mind, thought about the candyfloss, the colourless eyes, the scar face, the tightness in her stomach. She sang to herself while she was thinking, not conscious of what she was singing. ‘The Candy Man Can’. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

  ‘Will you stop singing that bloody song,’ Jim said.

  They drove on in silence, circled the roundabout, past the skinheads hanging out at the bus stop, the fairy-light-bedecked bungalow where the tattooed biker lived with his ageing mother, turned into their street. Jim pulled up, hair plastered to the sweat of his forehead, yanked the handbrake on.

  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

  FRIDAY 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 j
ust 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.