The Salt Marsh Page 4

  Sam saw then that Helen had tears tracking down her face and so did Jess. They were as bad as her, if not worse. As bad as Jim. Never judge a Coyle by their cover. She thought Helen was about to let rip and bawl, but she held it in, wiped her cheek and said, ‘I’ve had enough of this bollocks. Let’s go.’

  Helen looped her arm through Jess’s and walked away from the grave. Sam slunk behind, dragging her feet through the deserted churchyard, her mind on the rotting corpses beneath, liquid mulch, pondering the half-life of a dead undercover cop, the toxicity of his remains.

  ‘Sam, I’m talking to you.’ Helen was scowling at her.

  ‘Sorry. Somewhere else.’

  ‘I was saying I’m off to Ibiza in a couple of days.’

  ‘Oh. Holiday?’

  ‘No. I’m setting up shop. There are all these new nightclubs opening over there. So I’m going to sell clubbing clothes to everybody who lost their suitcase at the airport.’

  ‘Good idea. You should do a deal with the baggage handlers – share of the profit.’

  ‘I don’t think the baggage handlers need any encouragement from me to mislay suitcases. What are you doing now anyway? I thought you were going down to the coast. Weren’t you supposed to be driving down with your boyfriend, old what’s-his-face?’

  ‘Luke.’

  ‘Yes, him. Leftie Luke. What’s happened to that plan?’

  ‘I’m meeting him at six.’

  ‘Isn’t six a bit late?’

  ‘Evening is the best time down there.’

  ‘Really?’

  Jess was assessing her sceptically now as well. Jess liked Luke; she thought he was good-looking and funny, but all men were congenital wankers in Jess’s book, genetically programmed to think with their dicks, so best to keep expectations low to avoid disappointment. She didn’t buy Sam’s attempts to explain her relationship with Luke as meaningful, based on shared interests, a deep bond. More than sex. They passed under the lychgate.

  ‘So which beach are you going to then?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Dungeness.’

  ‘The one with the power station?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Dungeness,’ said Jess. ‘Isn’t that the place where your housemate, what’s his name, works? The one who fancies you.’

  ‘Dave,’ said Sam. ‘He doesn’t fancy me. He was my housemate, but he’s gone to Norfolk for six months and he never worked in the power station. He used to be attached to the experimental research station next to the power station.’

  ‘Research station. Power station. Same difference,’ Jess said.

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘What are you going to do in Dungeness anyway?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Hang out a bit, have a drink. Look at the stars. Camp somewhere.’

  ‘Why Dungeness?’ There was an edge to Helen’s tone.

  ‘I like it there.’

  Helen pulled her you’re-a-crazy face.

  ‘And there’s a good place to buy fish and chips nearby,’ Sam added.

  ‘You’re up to something.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One of your political protests. Ban the bomb. You and leftie Luke.’

  Helen gave the two fingers pointing I’m-watching-you gesture. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of doing anything stupid.’

  Everybody was on her case today. First Liz and now Helen.

  ‘I’m just spending the evening with Luke.’

  ‘You’re a useless liar.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘Well, I hope Luke turns up. Because otherwise you’re going to be pretty bloody miserable sitting on a stony beach in front of a nuclear power station with nothing but a portion of chips for company. Dungeness is such a scuzzy hole, even if the power station did explode it wouldn’t make much difference. It already looks like a bomb hit it.’

  ‘That’s why I like it.’

  They had reached the camper van. Jess stopped, hand on van door. ‘You know, I’m not sure it’s clever to leave that diary on the grave. Somebody might pick it up.’

  ‘It didn’t have much in it. A couple of doodles.’

  ‘It makes me uneasy.’

  Sam was about to argue, took a deep breath and realized it was stupid. She obviously wasn’t thinking straight.

  ‘You’re right. Bad idea. I’ll run back.’

  She took the mossy path along the east side of the church, rounded the corner and spotted a movement, a flicker among the silver birches on the graveyard’s southern edge. She halted. Silence. Yet she could sense a presence. She checked over her shoulder: nothing apart from the ghosts of her imagination and a spit of rain. She stepped cautiously, skirted the grassy hummocks, the diary in view now, lying in front of Jim’s headstone. Exactly the same place as she had left it. Except it was open, its black leather cover uppermost, spread-eagled, fallen angel’s wings. She had closed it when she placed it on his grave. She glanced around the limestone crosses, searched the dark spaces between the bone-white birch trunks. A shadow danced. She edged nearer the graveyard gate. A rabbit darted out from the trees, raced across the field, running for its life. Behind – a weasel, long and brown, gaining on its prey. The rabbit circled, searching for its burrow, confused by the hunter’s zig-zag tactics. The weasel lunged. The rabbit screamed. High-pitched. Tortured. Sam covered her ears. Couldn’t bear it. Stop. Stop. Let it be over. Quickly. The screaming subsided. The rabbit and weasel had vanished, the field returned to emerald tranquillity.

  She walked back to Jim’s grave, legs unsteady, raindrops stinging. She stooped, snatched the diary and examined the pages at which it had been left open. The week beginning 4 June 1984, about three weeks before Jim had died. There was something written in Jim’s unmistakable spidery handwriting. 6 June. Meet Flint 9 p.m. In a pub, if she knew anything about her father. And below the scrawl one of Jim’s doodles. What was it? He wasn’t very good at drawing. A lolly on a stick? She stared at the page, squeezed her eyes, took a deep breath, inhaled something sweet, a fleeting sense of childhood fear, squirming, caught on a creepy man’s gaze. She retched. Jim had drawn a stick of candyfloss. Now she had identified the doodle, there was no mistaking it. Jesus. She jammed the diary in her pocket, strode through the graveyard, the camper van in sight parked beside an oak tree. Habit. That was where they always parked when they took George for a walk in the woods. That was where they had parked the day of the Beltane fair, the day Jim vanished and the candy man had tried to stop her leaving: 1 May 1978. She’d worried he was a murderer, or a terrorist perhaps. The candy man, that was what Jim called him, a fucking evil bastard. Meet Flint 9 p.m. Was that the candy man’s real name, Flint? Had Jim contacted the candy man in 1984, a couple of weeks before he was killed? What had he been playing at? She shouldn’t be asking herself these questions. She didn’t want to know. Fuck it. She had to block it. It didn’t make any difference now. Jim was dead. Finished. Who cared now what he was up to in his last few weeks on earth? She shivered. She would be relieved to hook up with Luke, he would lighten her mood, stop her slipping into the past.

  TWO

  SHE LAY ON the beach, ahead the retreating tide, and behind the marshland stretching away for ever. Only the power station radiated colour, its amber light an artificial sun in the dusk. She summoned Luke’s image in her mind – easy smile, scruffy curls, sea-green eyes – and willed him to appear. She lifted her head, searched the shore, but all she could see were the ribcage hulls of long-abandoned boats. Luke wasn’t there. Where was he? Why hadn’t he turned up?

  Luke loved Dungeness as much as she did, although it wasn’t her who had sparked his interest in its desolate charm. It was Dave, her housemate, who had enticed Luke south with his descriptions of the power station on the shifting beach, the bleak magic of the shore. Luke and she had driven down with Dave one weekend in January. In retrospect, it was that trip to Dungeness that had sealed the awkward angles of the triangle. Dave was her friend, and she was happy that Luke and Dave got on so well, but
Dave’s unexpected snappiness with her that day on the beach suggested the truth of the old adage – two’s company, three’s a crowd. Jess was right even if she didn’t like to admit it; Dave probably did fancy her. After that trip, she and Luke drove down to Dungeness by themselves, drawn back by the winter walks along the wind-blasted shore. The idea of a protest had come later, with the spring.

  The original plan for this weekend had been for Sam and Luke to drive down together. Luke was going to wait in the van while Sam went to the graveyard with Jess and Helen – he didn’t want to intrude on a family occasion – and then on to Dungeness. A treat to lift her spirits. Another recce of the power station, an evening on the beach together, catch the sea bass that swam close to the shore in the warmer months. She was a vegetarian, but Luke had persuaded her to eat the fish he snagged, blackened on a makeshift barbecue when the weather allowed. The plan had changed at short notice that morning. He had called from a phone box. She could hear the conversation in her head, she had replayed it to herself countless times throughout the day.

  ‘Sam, I’m here. I’m in Dungeness.’

  ‘Oh. You’re there already?’

  ‘I’ve just driven down.’

  ‘I thought we were driving down together.’

  ‘I know. Something has come up. I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to call you before I set off, it was too early. I’ve had an unexpected stroke of luck. A contact.’

  ‘Contact? Power station?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m going to meet him in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘I hope so. Let’s meet at six. The usual place. I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll get a fire going.’

  ‘OK. Six.’

  ‘Sam, I’m really sorry. I don’t like leaving you to drive down by yourself, but this is important.’

  ‘I know, don’t worry. The drive doesn’t matter. I’ve done it by myself before.’

  ‘It’s a difficult day for you. I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘Stop apologizing. Really it’s fine. Six. See you later.’

  ‘See you.’

  She had put the phone down, and if she had felt a twinge of anxiety at all, it was because he was doing something without her. Not that she would have admitted it to him, because she didn’t want to appear clingy.

  The darkness was thickening. She sat up, listened to the waves chafing the pebbles, wind chimes carried on the breeze, the low hum of the power station. Slices of light fell from the windows of the experimental research lab where Dave had been based when he was doing his thesis. One of Dave’s old egghead friends, she reckoned, pulling a late-night writing stint. No other signs of life. No footsteps. No headlights tracking along the road. No Luke. She dug her fingernails into her arm, glanced at her watch. Five hours measured in ten-minute intervals of time checking. She had sprinted to the rusted phone box by the pub every half hour and called his home number to see if he had returned to London. But nobody had picked up, not even his obnoxious housemate Spyder. The sun had dropped and the band of crimson sky behind the power station had broadened. Red. Violet. Indigo. She hadn’t even had the sense to buy some fish and chips before the pub stopped serving food. You had to be hardy to survive in this environment, Dave had told her when he introduced her to Dungeness, and he pointed to the salt-eaten sea kale that topped the ridges, long black roots searching for moisture. She used to consider herself a survivor, but she was no longer so certain; she couldn’t sit there much longer, on this barren beach with only the cries of the oyster-catchers for company.

  She skidded down the shingle. Out in the Channel, ghostly terns flitted around the boil – the warm-water discharge from the power station. She crouched, selected a flat pebble, rusty brown, leaking warmth in her palm, high iron content perhaps. Radioactive? Not possible. She dropped it anyway, selected another, held it horizontally between her thumb and index finger. She had always been useless at skimming stones; they invariably sank on first contact, an inconsequential inability that had riled Jim. She curved her hand inwards. Jim sneered. Not like that. Flick. Not throw. You cack-handed lummox.

  She flung the stone. It scudded, fizzed, then sank. Her father scoffed. She ignored him. She didn’t want Jim occupying her mind, dragging her into the shadows, reminding her of his paranoid undercover world, making her worry about Luke when there was undoubtedly a simple explanation for his non-appearance. She twisted around and yelled into the night.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  Her words were consumed by the slope behind. She stooped, groped for a rock, lifted it, hurled it at the waves, smiled as it landed with a satisfying splash and thud.

  ‘Fuck you, Jim Coyle.’

  An emerald moth flitted past her face. She blinked and as she brushed away the fragile wings, the scrunch of footfall caught her attention. Luke. He must have heard her shouting. She had been waiting at the wrong spot. He was searching for her.

  ‘Over here.’

  She ran in the direction of the advancing figure, stumbled on the pebbles rolling beneath her feet.

  ‘It’s me. It’s Sam.’

  Her eyes could see it wasn’t Luke before her brain was prepared to acknowledge that the scrawny figure sloping along the beach was not her boyfriend. Not Luke, but as he neared, she realized she knew him. She smiled, tried to cover her dismay at finding he was not the person she was hoping to see. He spoke first.

  ‘We’ve met. Nukiller trains.’

  She was flattered by his recognition; she was more likely to remember other people’s faces than they were to remember hers these days. She had become invisible since Jim’s death, saying nothing and disappearing.

  ‘Nukiller trains,’ she said. ‘That’s right. The meetings.’

  The meetings had been Luke’s idea. Luke had talked it through with Dave, because Dave had contacts in Greenpeace and he knew about the power station. Dave had said, in his usual dismissive way, that he didn’t think a protest would achieve much, but he could put Luke in touch with a couple of people if he thought it would help. Luke had sweet-talked the landlord of the local pub, persuaded him to let them use the back room. They had stuck up posters and dished out a few flyers in the insular towns scattered around the marsh. Lydd. New Romney. Rye. The meeting had attracted only a handful of people and over half of those had been from the archaeology group Sam had joined the previous June when she first came down to Dungeness with Dave. Not much local interest in protesting against a power station that provided jobs.

  The man with the beaky nose and black ponytail had slipped into the back of the room late, unnoticed except by her, because she was sitting at the front, her mind wandering while Luke held the floor. His oily fisherman’s jumper sagged off his bony frame and gave him the appearance of a scarecrow. At the end of the meeting, as everybody was shuffling around to leave, he had stood and announced he was there because he wanted to protect the ancient powers of the land from the destructive evils of capitalism and the nuclear industry. Luke rolled his eyes. After the meeting, Luke said he distrusted ageing hippies, the sixties generation who talked about revolution and the dawning of a new age while amassing personal fortunes from selling industrially produced natural products to the gullible and guilty middle classes. Softy sell-outs. Luke was concerned that the hippy’s rambling might put other, saner people off – he wanted to stick to the science. She was less doctrinaire than Luke. She saw magic in a kestrel swooping and didn’t see a contradiction between matters of science and the soul. Nature was her spiritual retreat, an escape from her own darkness, solid and real when all else around her vanished. And anyway, she nursed her private, nagging preoccupation with the occult, her dog-eared copy of Daemonologie always close to hand.

  The hippy had reappeared at the second meeting in early May. The room was packed this time – Chernobyl had done a better job of attracting people than their posters. He spoke again. The waste transportatio
n routes were negative leylines, he said, emitting bad energy, destroying the earth’s natural magic. People nodded politely. Luke repeated the rational arguments, the risks of nuclear waste transportation, the impacts of exposure to radiation. Accidents happened at nuclear power stations – look at Chernobyl – so why should anybody believe the promises that transportation of nuclear waste was safe? He proposed a local protest at the railhead where the spent fuel rod containers were transferred from the lorries with their sinister black and yellow radioactive symbol to the train heading north to the Sellafield reprocessing plant. A small crowd, a few placards and, if they were lucky, a journo from the local newspaper. There wasn’t much debate; everybody was in favour of the protest. Why not? It didn’t require much effort, there was nothing illegal about it. The lorries weren’t even well guarded. After the meeting, she and Luke had joked about the hippy and his leylines. But in her head, she had marked him down as interesting, tried to classify him. Two types of dark worshipper existed, according to King James and his Daemonologie: the treacherous witches that he despised so much and who were nearly always women, and then the male practitioners of magic – the Magi and necromancers who studied the heavenly sciences and summoned the dead. She had decided that the hippy was a Magus.

  Up close, his eyes were solid black, iris and pupil indistinguishable. Stoned, undoubtedly, but something deeper there as well, a magnetic pull.

  ‘Are you...’ The endings of his words dragged. ‘OK?’

  She nodded, wiped her nose on her finger, sussed him out over the white line of her hand. About the same age as her father, she reckoned. Late forties. Or, at least, about the same age her father would have been if he were still alive.

  ‘I thought you were somebody else,’ she said.

  He seemed thrown by her statement – as if he half thought he was somebody else too – and he turned away, waved his hand at the silver Channel. ‘I’d be a bit careful down here at night. It can be confusing, the sand, the water. And the tide is...’ His sentence drifted off.

  ‘I’m not staying much longer. I just came down to see a friend.’ She was wary of giving too much away. ‘I’m driving back to London soon.’