The Salt Marsh Page 6

  ‘A different meeting place,’ he repeated. ‘Of course. Let me see if Allin can help.’

  He took a deep breath, flicked the white wing in front of his face in rhythmic sweeps, stared at her through the feathers, mumbled, ‘He’s not on the beach. He is somewhere else.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s in another place.’ He paused. Flicked the wing. ‘I can see a boat.’

  Her stomach tightened, her eyes caught his; all pupil, no iris.

  ‘A boat?’ she demanded. ‘Where?’

  He fanned the wing again, stalled, looked embarrassed. She wondered whether Allin had let him down this time, failed to deliver any useful information.

  ‘On the flatland.’ He whispered the words.

  ‘The flatland? The marsh?’ A starburst flashed in her head, she shouted, ‘The Lookers’ Hut.’

  Obvious. Now she understood. The Lookers’ Hut on Romney Marsh, that’s what Luke meant when he said they should meet at the usual place. Not the beach.

  ‘I can taste saltwater,’ he said.

  She wasn’t listening, eager to leave and drive to their secret camping spot, filled with a certainty Luke was waiting for her there. Alastair replaced the wing among his table-top mortuary, carefully avoided her eye.

  ‘Did that help?’

  ‘Well, you confirmed what I half knew anyway.’

  He smiled, seemingly relieved by her answer.

  ‘Sure. Communicating with the spirits is almost a way of accessing the subconscious. Our sixth sense. Things we instinctively know to be true but can’t trust ourselves to believe.’

  She couldn’t be bothered with any more dope-fuelled hocus-pocus, she was back on firm ground, wanted to get going, find Luke.

  ‘I see what you mean. Thanks.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘I’d better be leaving. Check out the Lookers’ Hut. It’s where we usually go.’

  ‘You’re going to the marsh now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the dark?’ He wrung his hands. ‘No, don’t do that. Crash here if you like. Wait until morning.’

  She stood, her legs wobbled. ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks.’

  ‘You can come back if you don’t find him.’ There was something pleading about his tone that put her on edge. What was he after?

  ‘I know my way around the marsh,’ she said. ‘I’m not scared of the dark.’

  He gave her a tentative nod, shrugged, crossed to the door, held it open. A low black car was parked outside the next cabin along the track – a scarab in a clump of viper’s bugloss.

  ‘Porsche,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it a couple of times recently. There’s lots of new money around here these days. Dungeness is becoming too fashionable for the likes of me. Time to be moving on.’

  He hunched his shoulders and stuck his hands in the front pockets of his fading jeans.

  ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘You got the power, you just gotta learn to channel it. Don’t forget the barn owl.’

  ‘Right.’ She smiled glibly.

  ‘The birthmark,’ he said. ‘I spotted it. You can’t escape your legacy.’

  She opened her mouth, couldn’t find a response, turned and walked away.

  THREE

  SHE HAD LEFT the camper van in the pub car park, Belisha beacon tangerine in the darkness. She clipped a kerb as she swung on to the road and headed north into the marsh, her head more befogged than she had realized. She wound the window down to clear her brain, inhaled sea air – brine, kelp, dead fish – and saw stars reflected in the obsidian waters of the flooded gravel pits. Her eyes drooped, lids dope-heavy, the tarmac dissolved in the lapping roadside shrubs. Bright light behind made her start. She gripped the wheel, blinded by the dazzle, swerved, left tyre hitting uneven verge, van tipping at a mad angle before she found the tarmac again. She slowed, allowed the black Porsche to overtake, a fleeting impression of a thick neck and a shaved head behind the steering wheel as the driver sped away. Jerk. Probably the Porsche from the spit; there weren’t that many flash cars down here, whatever Alastair’s concerns about the tide of new money. Most of the marsh was takeaway and trailer-park country. Isolated, run-down houses with Alsatian dogs, pick-up trucks and boundaries marked by chainlink fences to keep out the bleakness. Southern badlands, nothing quaint nor pretty here. An owl shrieked as she crossed the Rhee Wall causeway into the waterlogged meadows of Romney Marsh. Alastair was right, at night the marsh felt like a place where death hung close – spirits easily summoned from the drifting vapours and black waters. She had said she wasn’t scared of the dark, but she hadn’t been out on the marsh at night before without Luke, and now she was travelling alone through its morbid contours.

  She pulled up by the narrow turfed bridge, certain she would see Luke’s dented blue Polo squatting on the tyre-rutted verge. It wasn’t there. He could have parked on the other side of the field for some reason. She checked her pocket for her torch and penknife – the talismans she always carried – then fished around in the back of the van for her sleeping bag, water bottle. She stood and listened: sheep bleating, breeze rustling the willows, toads croaking. She knew in her gut she wouldn’t find Luke waiting for her in the Lookers’ Hut. She half wished she’d taken up Alastair’s offer and stayed at his place, left it until first light to look for Luke. Too late, she was here now. She might as well investigate, see if there were any signs that he had been there earlier.

  The Lookers’ Hut was in a field surrounded by deep drainage ditches – sewers they were called locally – treacherous at night unless you knew where you were going. The barn owl swept over her head as she crossed the bridge, quartered the meadow, flying low, top-heavy body transformed in flight to silent grace. She held the owl in her mind, focused. For a moment she floated, looked down on the marsh from above; the silky backs of bats falling away as they swooped above the grid of water channels, wheat fields criss-crossed with muddy tractor trails. An emerald glint caught her eye – what was it? The roof of a car? She couldn’t see clearly and felt herself falling. The night engulfed the barn owl and she released the bird from her mind. She fumbled with the torch. The thin beam cut a path through scattering lambs to the blackthorn-shrouded island rising from the meadow.

  She had discovered the dilapidated shepherds’ huts through the archaeological group she had joined the previous June – nudged, in some way, by the hand of her father. Archaeology was the career that Jim had suggested the night before he died.

  *

  Digging up ancient bones in the middle of nowhere, he said, had to be more rewarding than dealing with the skeletons in the office cupboard. The first time she travelled down to Dungeness with Dave to visit his research lab she had gone for a walk across the marsh while he yacked with his mates. She had spotted the line of cagouled figures pacing a fallow meadow, bamboo canes in hands, heads down, and thought it was a police search – murder, missing person. Curious, she had asked what they were doing. A woman said they were field walkers, looking for artefacts, signs of a medieval site below, and had invited Sam to join the higgledy line. Coins, cheap brooches, worked stones, bottles, buttons, pottery sherds, all churned up and thrown together on the meadow’s surface. The mishmash of old and new had intrigued her; the ghosts and relics lying among the mundane and modern. After that day, she had travelled down with Dave regularly so she could join their excavations – a way of staying sane and maintaining her academic interests in the year out from her history degree.

  When the weather became too bad for digging, she had initiated her own project – mapping the remains of the Lookers’ Huts. It had become something of an obsession. The Lookers’ Huts had first sprung up in the seventeenth century when nobody dared live in the malaria-infested lowlands. The isolated buildings provided shelter for the shepherds who had to keep an eye on the flocks during the lambing season. They were simple structures – red brick, rectangular, one room, one window, one door. Sam suspected the simplicity was deceptive; she reckoned they were two-
faced – sheltering the Lookers while they watched the flocks, but also providing cover for late-night deals with the smugglers – owlers – who ran the wool to France.

  This hut, the one she camped in with Luke, was more complete than most; roofless and open to the sky, but its wooden frames weren’t rotten and the walls were complete, breaking the bitter winds that swept in from the sea. She pushed her way through the nettles, paused on the threshold and cast the beam around the bare earth floor. No Luke. Her light swept the ash and charred branches of their successive campfires, illuminated the willow stems drooping through the glassless window, the dark corners. Maybe Luke had waited here for an hour or so then driven home when he realized she wasn’t going to appear. She sighed with frustration. Doubt.

  She checked for signs to confirm her explanation of events. There were none. But they had been here so many times together she could sense his presence, his warmth, and it comforted her, made her feel safe enough to stay despite being alone. She wasn’t in a fit state to drive back to London anyway. She unrolled her sleeping bag on the patch of ground she knew from previous trial and error to be the most comfortable place to rest, extinguished her torch, lay back, linked her hands behind her head. A shooting star fell down the blackness above. A fox screamed. She couldn’t settle; she reached for her torch again, dug in the back pocket of her jeans and removed a photo, examined it in the beam. She had snapped it in the light of the campfire, sideways on, his face shadowed, mysterious smile, eyes half closed, the dreamy, unfocused gaze of the short-sighted. And the stoned.

  They had ended up camping in the Lookers’ Hut almost by accident. May Day bank holiday. Luke was driving the kombi – she had put him on her insurance. The road south had been slow, packed with Londoners heading for the coast, and when they reached the outskirts of Hastings, they came to a near standstill. Hastings was depressing. The once grand sweep of white Regency homes had been reduced to rotting social security B&Bs, clinging to the southernmost fringe of England. The Channel dishwater swirled around the beach, flecking shingle with brown foam. The promenade was awash with teenage girls pushing prams, men in vests hanging out drinking Tennent’s. As they inched past the Old Town, she spotted a knot of people dressed in green, dancing – a spark of life, excitement, a parade. The traffic was at a standstill and the revellers were weaving around the cars. Her mind was wandering when she was startled by the hard thump of a fist on the van’s front.

  ‘Oi,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t do that to my van.’

  A blackened face snarled at her through the windscreen, red mouth gaping, arms flapping to reveal his rag-feathered cape before he vanished into a backstreet. Crow-man. The grotesque figure jolted her memory, knocked her back to the Beltane fair she had visited with her dad when she was eleven. Eight years ago. She hadn’t thought about the fair for a long while, hadn’t wanted to remember the events of that odd May Day. The van stopped and started, inched along the traffic-jammed road, and she had an uneasy sense of her past spiralling around, catching up, her father forever appearing and disappearing. Where are you going? Over the hills and far away.

  The delay in Hastings meant they arrived in Dungeness at dusk. They attempted to light a campfire on the beach, but the mist was rolling in from the Channel and the flames spluttered and died. They decided to drive back to London across the marsh. Bad call. The mist followed them inland; curling wraiths in the weak halogen headlights becoming dense and impenetrable. They took a wrong turning, ended up in a breaker’s yard full of rusting double-deckers and guarded by a couple of snarling ridgebacks. Luke reversed the van, the dogs snapping at the tyres. She searched the map and located the nearest Lookers’ Hut that would, at least, provide them with some shelter for the night.

  There were no farm buildings around, so they didn’t have to worry about being spotted as they humped their gear across the wet grass. They gathered the dropped branches from the overhanging willow, piled them on the soil floor of the hut, wary of using the old fireplace in case the chimney was blocked by birds’ nests, managed to ignite the wood by scrunching up the pages of a newspaper and using it as kindling. ‘Beltane fire,’ she said, without thinking. As she spoke she pictured the green-haired woman and her herbal remedies – the packet of bitter withy – found herself slipping from the melancholia that had dogged her all day to something bleaker – childlike powerlessness, events she could not control. She rescued a thin willow branch from the campfire, waved it in the air like a wand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Luke asked.

  ‘I’m fighting off the curses with my withy wand.’

  ‘Withy?’

  ‘It’s another name for the willow.’ She swished the stem above her head, wrote her name in the night with its tip. ‘The willow is the only tree to perish from the inside out. Heart first. That’s the curse of the bitter withy.’

  She pointed the wand at Luke.

  ‘Are you cursing me?’

  ‘No. I’m blessing you, protecting you from the darkness.’

  A branch on the campfire flashed green and he jabbed the flames with his boot, sent a puff of burning ash skywards. She watched the smoke mingling with the mist, spotted the shadow of the barn owl as it circled, drawn by the glow of the campfire, wings spectral in the night.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.

  He said, ‘I believe people can be haunted, have ghosts in their heads. What about you? Do you believe in ghosts?’

  She hesitated. ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts. But sometimes I think I see my dad. Glimpses. I’m sure he’s there and then he’s gone.’ She found it easy to tell Luke about Jim; he wasn’t judgemental. ‘Seeing him makes me wonder whether he is dead after all, whether it was his corpse in the morgue.’

  ‘Wasn’t it you who identified him?’

  ‘Yes, but I was in total shock, out of my mind. Scared. I felt like I was tripping, I couldn’t tell what was going on. When Liz saw the body in the morgue she gave him one look, said he was an imposter and walked off.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was an emotional reaction. I think. But maybe his death was a fix after all and I didn’t spot it. A con job, like everything about his life.’

  She hadn’t realized how much she censored everything she said before she met Luke. How much she had never said, to anybody. When she was with Luke, she could speak and watch her words fly away; bonfire cinders in the night, red sparks fading to grey then vanishing. Being with him was a release. He accepted her for who she was – spikes and all – she didn’t have to explain, apologize.

  ‘I suppose it’s not impossible that his death was a fix,’ Luke said.

  He was never dismissive of her fears, never suggested she was a fantasist, which made her less defensive. Hearing somebody else accept her darkest anxieties made it obvious they were improbable.

  She said, ‘Well, it’s hard not to think that anything is possible. He was a spy and the state asked him to fake another life for himself, so why shouldn’t the spooks also fake his death and then resurrect him? But, when I think about it rationally, I know it’s my anxiety. Not real. It must have been his body in the morgue.’ He definitely had been killed by a hitman behind Vauxhall Bridge, she told herself. ‘I know it’s mad to think he’s still around,’ she added.

  Luke said, ‘It’s not mad. It’s grief. Although, I think grief is a form of madness, an infection.’ He should know – he was an orphan; his father had died when he was six and his mother, Monika, had died of cancer when he was twenty. ‘It’s temporary. It’s not who you are, it’s something that lands on you, a cloud. Grief smothers everybody at some time or another. Everybody has to deal with death, it’s part of being human.’

  It was a relief to hear him talk about grief in that way, not a regimented process in five stages, but something that descended and then moved on, lapwings flying to the next field.

  ‘Time doesn’t heal,’ he said. ‘But it makes loss easier to live with. Makes you feel less mad.’

/>   He had more emotional intelligence than she did. Liz had once told her that relationships weren’t like the crosswords she so obsessively completed. But as far as Sam was concerned, relationships were like cryptic clues. She had to work them out, stand back, parse the words, twist the letters around. Luke was the opposite; he wasn’t a navel gazer, didn’t spend hours analysing how he felt, but he had a knack of solving the emotional anagrams churning in her brain. He lay back on the ground and she could see his eyes searching the night sky.

  He said, ‘Ghosts are like projections of your own feelings. Maybe you see Jim because you are feeling guilty.’

  ‘Guilty?’ She turned the idea over in her mind; testing whether his suggestion fitted her emotional space. ‘Why would I feel guilty?’

  ‘Because of your father’s work. You don’t know exactly what he did, but you must worry sometimes that he crossed the boundary, walked on the far side. Anybody with a conscience would worry about that.’

  He was right, she did worry about what Jim might have done. ‘Sins of the father,’ she said.

  She skinned up. Lay on the ground next to him, the warmth of his body seeping into hers, and her mind traced the ghost of Jim in the mist and smoke.

  ‘It’s not usually the guilty who feel guilt,’ he said. ‘And it’s often the innocent who are accused, by implication or otherwise. But you have to ignore the finger pointers. They’re mindless wankers.’

  His words reminded her of the man who had approached her on Oxford’s Cornmarket, whispered in her ear, You are Jim Coyle’s daughter, sent her tumbling, left her feeling marked. Accused.

  Luke rolled over, his face comfortingly close to hers.

  ‘You know what, though, you should probably be careful.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to protect yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re probably on the Force’s radar because of your dad. And he isn’t around any more to dig you out of trouble if somebody decides to take a shot at you.’