The Salt Marsh Read Online Free PDF Page B

pinned the Che Guevara badge on her coat, next to her yellow and red smiling sun nuclear power no thanks badge, stuck her hand in the bag again. Lucky dip. Her fingers closed on a pile of small black soft leather-bound notebooks squished together with a rubber band. He must have been handed them for note taking, observations on objects of surveillance. There was nothing obvious to indicate they had been issued by the Force, but they were all the same and she couldn’t imagine Jim going out and buying one diary, let alone the same diary every year. She extracted one from the bundle and opened it at a random page. A doodle; Kilroy, the bald man with a big nose poking his head over a wall. Jim had scrawled ‘Kilroy was here’ below the picture. So much for diligent surveillance notes. She was touched by the casual scribble, a reminder of Jim’s errant schoolboy side, a trace of the real person below the cover of cop bravado. She closed the diary, spotted the gold embossed date on the front cover: 1984. The year of his death.
    â€˜Are we going to do this or not?’ Helen had appeared from nowhere, leaning against the front door, tapping her foot.
    â€˜Coming.’
    She stuffed the diary in her pocket, and returned the others to the rubbish bag, jammed it back under the stairs.
    *
    Crow trap country, that was where Jim was buried, out in the grubby edgelands among the gypsies and the criminals. May Day fairs she’d rather forget. They walked together, the three of them, paused under the lychgate – the first time she had been back here since her father’s funeral two years previously. She pulled her Oxfam raincoat tight, a comfort blanket she needed even when it was sweaty. Jim was buried on the north side of the church. A vast black bird was writhing on his grave, wings spread, lost in some avian anting ecstasy and oblivious to their approach. The crow lifted its head, caught Sam in its beady stare, flapped into a stunted rowan tree from where it continued its scrutiny. The bird’s eye drew Sam in until she was the crow, the bird on the branch, watching herself down below. Helen pinched her arm.
    â€˜It wants to be your friend.’ She sounded jealous.
    The limestone tomb was already lichen-starred, the hard edges of his epitaph softened. ‘Jim Coyle. 10th August 1937 – 23rd June 1984.’ A shiny churchyard beetle was feeling its way across the engraved letters backwards, like a witch’s curse, a name invoked the wrong way round. elyoC miJ.
    She turned to Helen. ‘Do you think Mum should have put something more on the tombstone?’
    â€˜Like?’
    â€˜Dunno. Rest in peace?’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Might have helped.’
    â€˜Helped what?’
    â€˜The transition. The passage towards the light.’
    Helen scoffed. ‘The light? What light? There was no light with Jim.’
    Jess lit the spliff she had been busy rolling. Sam traced the cracked earth on the grave with her plimsoll, jabbed the loose soil. ‘How do we know he’s still down there?’
    â€˜Where else would he be?’
    â€˜Maybe somebody dug him up.’
    â€˜Don’t be a wally.’
    â€˜The earth has been disturbed.’
    â€˜Must have been the crow. And anyway, why would anybody want to dig up Jim?’
    Sam didn’t have an answer to that.
    â€˜You’d have to be bloody stupid to dig him up,’ Helen said. ‘Lord knows what’s buried down there with him.’
    Jess puffed blue smoke, passed the joint to Helen. ‘What do we do now?’
    Helen glared at Sam. ‘Search me,’ Sam said.
    â€˜It was your idea.’
    â€˜I know.’
    She had suggested it months ago, marked in her head as the line under her father’s death. And now they were here, it seemed pointless. Worse than pointless. She had no idea how to proceed. She squatted, eyes level with the yellow ragwort sprouting from the soil’s fissures,