Read The Salt Marsh for Free Online Page B

it was stupid. She obviously wasn’t thinking straight.
    â€˜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
    S HE 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