Salt Lane

by William Shaw

  ‘You really from Tripoli?’

  ‘Refugees,’ the younger man said.

  ‘Speak English?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t believe it,’ said the Border Agency man quietly. ‘They probably understand every word you’re saying. They just don’t want to answer any awkward questions.’

  Cupidi sat in a chair next to them. ‘Where were you planning to go, if you’d have got through without being found?’

  The men smiled pleasantly, but said nothing.

  ‘I used to imagine they think it’s all a joke, them smiling like that,’ said the Border man. ‘They all do it. It’s just the way they are. Something about a situation where nothing makes sense anymore.’

  Cupidi reached down into her bag and pulled out a plain envelope. ‘I’m going to show you a photograph of a man. He’s dead. He was killed. OK?’

  She was talking loudly, she realised, as if to children. As the Border Agency man said, they probably understood everything.

  The younger man took the poster she had made and frowned at it.

  ‘Do you recognise him?’

  ‘No,’ said the man.

  ‘Would you know where he was from, by looking at him?’

  ‘He’s just a man,’ said the migrant. ‘Like me. Like him,’ he pointed to the customs officer. ‘Like them,’ he said, pointing at the men from Niger. ‘We are all men.’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Cupidi, standing.

  ‘Except, mate, you’re a man without a British passport,’ said the Border man. ‘Or any passport, for that matter, worse luck.’

  ‘I have passport,’ said the young North African. He pointed at the agent. ‘This man took it.’

  ‘Because the photograph on it looked more like your ruddy granny,’ said the Border man. ‘We’re getting so many forgeries these days. Some are pretty good. Yours was an insult to my profession.’

  ‘It was a good passport.’

  ‘You should ask for your money back. It was crap. Just ’cause you’ve a bit of paper doesn’t mean nothing. Half these people aren’t what they say they are. Are we done here?’

  As she followed him out of the room, she asked, ‘What’ll happen to them?’

  ‘They’ll be kept in a detention centre and they’ll get an asylum hearing. Fifty-fifty they’ll be sent home again. If not, then they’re on your street corner on handouts. The whole thing is a giant farce.’

  ‘Tragedy, more like.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  Cupidi showed a couple of her posters to the man. ‘Can I pin these up, in case anybody recognises him?’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ he said in the kind of voice that suggested she would need it.

  On a noticeboard by the toilet, she spent a minute rearranging all the leaflets to make space.

  She took out her phone to take a picture of the number of a refugee support agency, when she saw she had a text message. It was from her mother: ‘Where are you?’

  She looked at her watch. It was twenty past five. ‘Oh shit,’ she said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said the Border agent.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit. I forgot my mother,’ she said. ‘She’s at the station. I’m supposed to be picking her up.’

  ‘Running late,’ she texted, as she made her way back across the huge empty car park to her car. The sun had gone. Cumulus clouds were swelling above the Channel, blocking the light.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘No,’ said her mother, standing outside the metal and glass of Ashford International with her small suitcase. ‘I completely understand. You’re busy.’

  ‘I texted you to say I was running late.’

  ‘You did. Is this a police car?’ her mother said, peering inside.

  ‘I know. I didn’t have time to go back to the station and pick up my own.’

  It was a short distance back to the station. Cupidi pulled into a loading bay outside the TSB, far enough from the nick. In the old days, nobody would have minded bending the rules a bit, but you weren’t allowed to give anyone lifts in a police vehicle. ‘I have to go and swap. You mind waiting here? Only for a minute, I promise.’

  Her mother got out and stood by the front of the bank. Helen drove the fifty metres to the police station and turned right into the car parking area. She had just returned the keys and was walking to her own car when she saw McAdam striding towards her.

  Hoping to avoid getting caught up in a conversation, she pretended she hadn’t seen him, but he called out, ‘Alex. Anything on the Eason situation?’

  ‘Nothing new from the scene of crime.’

  McAdam looked gutted. ‘We’ve been bounced into a press call on the murder of the unidentified man. Politics.’

  The local MP was under pressure on illegal immigrants and had started talking tough about anything he felt he might lose votes on.

  In spite of wanting to get away to pick up her mother, Cupidi found herself saying, ‘Thing is, the dead woman. I’ve been thinking. How do we even know she’s Hilary Keen?’

  ‘What?’

  The darkening sky above them dropped spots of rain. Cupidi held her handbag over her head to keep her hair dry.

  ‘The dead woman. Our confirmations of her identity are a doctor and a dentist. We’ve found nobody who knew her in her ordinary life. No friends. No work colleagues. Apart from Stanley Eason.’

  Suddenly a gust of rain swept across the yard. She had to raise her voice at the sudden noise.

  Something the Border Agency man had said had swung un-expectedly into her head. Half these people aren’t what they say they are.

  ‘There were two Hilary Keens. Remember? What if our one is the imposter, not the other one?’

  He pulled up his jacket over his head. ‘Jesus. Tell me about it tomorrow.’

  ‘And that photograph. Who are those children? If she was Julian Keen’s mother, wouldn’t she have had a photograph of him, not the other children? It doesn’t fit.’

  The rain was hammering now.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he shouted back, above the din of drops hitting the cars around them.

  Inside her own Micra, she switched on the windscreen wipers double-speed and realised that her mother would be waiting for her again; there was no shelter on Tufton Street.

  ‘Oh fuckity hell!’

  And the police station was on a one-way street. In her hurry to drop her mother out of sight of the station, so that no one saw her using the car, she had left her waiting in a place where it wouldn’t be easy to pick her up. Cupidi would have to drive round the whole block.

  And, typically, at the end of Vicarage Lane the lights weren’t working properly. There was a temporary traffic control which seemed to be stuck on red as the rain drove down. When she finally got through, a van courier delivering a package had parked in the filter lane on the next right-hand turn. Cupidi leaned on her horn, for all the good it would do. Other drivers joined in.

  She found her mother standing next to a young man who was holding his small umbrella over her while the rain soaked him. ‘Thank you so much,’ said Cupidi to the man, putting her mother’s sodden suitcase into the back of the car. ‘You’re a godsend.’

  ‘You got caught up again, I expect,’ said her mother.

  ‘God, I’m so sorry, Mum. I’ve messed this all up, haven’t I?’

  ‘I’m going to need to change,’ said her mother. ‘I’m quite wet.’

  Cupidi put the heater on, but that just made the windscreen steam up, and she had to open the window a crack, letting the spitting rain in on her side of the car.

  As soon as she turned onto the road to Dungeness it stopped, sun suddenly golden, shining on the wet tarmac.

  ‘Is this it?’ said her mother as they approached the the end of the shingle promontory.

  ‘I love it here,’ said Cupidi. ‘We both do.’

  Her mother said nothing more until they were inside the house.

  Zoë flung her arms around her grandmother. ‘N
an. You’re soaking.’

  ‘Your mother abandoned me on a street corner while the heavens opened.’

  ‘Mum,’ scolded Zoë.

  ‘I’ll show you to your room,’ said Cupidi. ‘So you can change.’

  Hers was to be the third bedroom, an oblong room with a single bed, a bookshelf and a desk. ‘I’ll move the computer downstairs in a minute. And the books. Then you can have some space.’

  The bedroom looked out at the front of the house, towards the power station. Her mother looked in the small wardrobe. ‘There are no clothes hangers,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get you some from my room. Will you be all right in here?’ she asked, suddenly conscious of how small the room was.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said her mother. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said, going to her bedroom and opening the wardrobe.

  ‘And Zoë?’ asked her mother, following her.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just teenage mood swings,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘I don’t mean that. I meant… God sake. Is she ill? She’s got so thin. There are bones everywhere.’

  Cupidi drew her head back a little. Had she? ‘I suppose she has. I feed her and she eats. She’s just active all the time. She’s changed.’

  In her room, she took a dozen work blouses off hangers and laid them on the bed. She looked at them and decided they were all horrible anyway. She should throw them all out and start again.

  While Cupidi made supper, Helen disappeared into Zoë’s bedroom. When the pie was cooked, she had to shout up the stairs for Zoë to come down and lay the table.

  ‘What were you two talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ said Zoë.

  ‘You’ve been in there an hour.’

  ‘All sorts,’ said her mother vaguely.

  They ate together round the dining-room table; after weeks of sitting in front of the television it seemed oddly formal.

  ‘Wine, Nan? I don’t normally drink during the week, but…’ said Cupidi.

  ‘I do,’ said Helen.

  ‘Yes you do, Mum,’ said Zoë. ‘All the time.’

  ‘Not every day.’

  ‘Most. Can I have a glass?’ asked Zoë.

  ‘Of course she can, can’t she, Alex? What’s for supper?’

  ‘Fish pie.’

  ‘How very coastal,’ said Helen, and Zoë burst out laughing in a way Cupidi hadn’t heard her laugh for so long, and for the first time Cupidi was glad to have her mother here. Three generations. Her mother, her daughter and her. However much they rubbed each other up the wrong way sometimes, it felt good. Maybe everything would be all right, here on the edge of the world.

  And then the house phone started ringing again. Cupidi looked at the handset, its keys lit up, lying on the table in front of her.

  EIGHTEEN

  Before she could reach it, Zoë snatched the handset up from the table. ‘Hello? Who is it?’

  Cupidi watched her.

  ‘I think it’s a pervert. I can hear him breathing.’

  ‘Don’t,’ mouthed Cupidi.

  ‘I can actually hear you breathing,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Someone’s there?’ asked Helen.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Zoë. ‘Do I actually know you?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He put the phone down when I said that,’ said Zoë, holding the dead device.

  ‘He, you said?’

  ‘Yeah. He. He didn’t say anything, but I could hear him there.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Cupidi.

  ‘I get those all the time,’ said Helen. ‘People from India mostly.’

  ‘Do they breathe like this?’ said Zoë, panting.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘Do you know who it was, Mum?’ asked Zoë, a hint of accusation in her voice.

  Cupidi didn’t answer.

  ‘You should call the police,’ said her mother, only half as a joke.

  Cupidi woke, thick-headed, long before the alarm went off. Pulling open the curtains, she looked across the land. To the left stood the lighthouses, to the right the power station. She squinted; the sunlight outside seemed too bright.

  Her mother was already in the kitchen, making tea. ‘I don’t sleep so well,’ she said.

  ‘Nor me. What are you going to do today?’

  ‘I’ll see what Zoë wants to do. She can show me around. Is she still crazy about birds?’

  ‘Insane.’

  ‘God help us,’ said her mother, looking out of the kitchen window.

  ‘Thanks for coming down, Mum. It means a lot. I know you and me don’t always get along.’

  Her mother wrinkled her nose. ‘What are you working on?’

  Cupidi, putting on her boots for her early morning walk, hesitated. ‘That woman I told you about. And a man was murdered on a farm just north of here. We don’t know who he was, but we think he was probably an illegal immigrant. It makes it twice as hard to solve if we don’t know who he was.’

  Still looking out of the window, her mother said, ‘These days, there are so many of them, everywhere. They should have done something about it ages ago.’

  ‘What?’ Cupidi was looking for her phone.

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

  Afterwards Cupidi drove to work. Traffic on the Dymchurch Road was slow. As she passed the Warren Inn, she noticed half a dozen people waiting in the car park. They were white, young, ordinary but unmistakably foreign, out of place. Four men and two women, both with brightly dyed red hair. She realised that she drove past them most mornings on this road. Stationary for a minute, she gazed at them. They were staring down a line of traffic, as if waiting for someone. One of the women turned, looked Cupidi in the eye for just a second, then looked away.

  She wondered if she should try talking to them. There seemed no other sensible place to start, looking for a man with no identity. But the traffic ahead of her started to move, so instead she put the car back in gear and drove on.

  The offices of the Romney Marshes Internal Area Drainage Board were on the top floor of a low converted barn in the middle of flatland just outside the town of Rye. The windows looked east out over the Folkestone Road, and beyond onto the land it was responsible for.

  Cupidi was standing, looking at a large map pinned to the wall, which showed a blue spidery pattern of watercourses that had been had dug from the mud and silt over centuries.

  ‘Where exactly was it found?’ The engineer corrected himself. ‘I mean, she found?’

  The man’s elderly dog stood by Cupidi’s side, watching her as she orientated herself on the map. The higher ground, the older coast, formed a huge C-shape that curved for about twenty miles inland. It ran from Rye in the west, all the way up to Hythe in the east. Below that were the huge flat acres of marsh, stretching out in a giant triangle into the Channel, uninterrupted by a single contour. The land lay at sea level, or lower. How precarious it looked. She traced her finger down to the house she shared with Zoë, sitting on the most exposed extremity, the headland at the end of the marsh that pointed into the Dover Straits.

  She moved her finger northwards, following the black line that indicated the railway track that carried nuclear waste away from the power station. The body had been a few metres from the track, close to the culvert that allowed the water to flow under it.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Salt Lane.’

  The man peered at where her finger was pointing. A small kink in the road, just by the unmanned crossing, with the thin blue line that represented the drain running through it.

  ‘Not one of ours, though, that sewer. One of the smaller ones running off Jury’s Gut.’

  ‘I thought you did all of this.’

  ‘We couldn’t do all of this on our own. A lot are maintained by the riparian owners – it’s an obligation that comes with the land. Know the spot, though.’

  She gazed at the map, mesmerised. Riparian. A
lovely word; the land by a river.

  ‘Sewer?’ she said. ‘That what you call them?’

  ‘Old English. When you dug a ditch to drain a field, you were sewing,’ he said, pronouncing it as if he were talking about needle and thread, not mud and water. ‘Sewing in the land.’

  A vast, natural patchwork, hand-sewn, entirely created and maintained by riparian owers, people with shovels, people operating pumps, sluices and diggers, drawing the land from the water. A purposeful landscape, she thought.

  Every year, the man explained, the whole network, hundreds of miles of drains, had to be dug out and cleared of weeds, over and over again. It was an amazing structure; a hidden wonder, a massive complex system of arteries that had been working precariously for centuries. If they stopped their activity for just a few years, it would go back to marsh, or to the sea itself.

  She thought of the town beneath the waves.

  ‘All this. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said sombrely. ‘It is.’

  Water attempts to find its own level. On her morning walks she had seen the leaking sluices, dribbling water that had escaped their barriers. To look at all this was also to imagine it overwhelmed. Man could attempt to hold back its force, but one day it would fail.

  ‘The body had been there at least a couple of weeks. What I need to know is, could it have moved, or did we find it where the killer put it? Does the water flow much?’

  The dog gnawed at something in its paw. ‘In winter, our job is to stop the water from coming in, prevent the land from flooding. In summer, the farmers like us to keep the levels high for wet fencing. Stops the sheep from straying. It’s been a dry month, up until yesterday’s storm. Risk is, the water levels get too low. Two weeks back we had to top up the levels from the canal. Might have caused a little movement where she was, but not much. A few yards at the most. Not for a body in a ditch that shallow.’

  Cupidi looked for Speringbrook House, then traced her finger up the Hamstreet Road until she found the point at which it crossed the Military Canal; it was on the far side of the Rhee Wall, the thirteenth-century earthwork that had once marked the western edge of the marsh.