Salt Lane Read online

  She sighed, stopped the car and checked her phone to see if her daughter was back at the house already, but no, she hadn’t called. U-turning, she made her way back out to Dungeness Road, more anxious now.

  She thought of the empty rib boat she had found. What if Zoë had come across men like that? No. They would be arriving at night, wouldn’t they?

  Would they?

  The road was straight and clear. She drove fast, missing the turning the first time, then reversing back to it; a sandy track that crackled beneath her tyres.

  There were still two dozen cars parked in the car park of the bird reserve. The visitors’ centre was brightly lit, full of people gazing at chintzy tea-towels and porcelain mugs.

  There was a small table and chairs by the huge window that looked out over the wetlands. The evening light pouring across the flatland from the west had turned the reeds that fringed the water a rich red. The water beyond was almost ridiculously full of bird-life.

  Cupidi marched across the room, past the people browsing bird books, and climbed onto one of the chairs, noticing as she looked down at her blouse that there was still a black smudge on it that must have been there all day; one she must have missed when she had tried to clean up.

  Close by, a woman wearing a headscarf covered in horseshoes looked at her, startled.

  Cupidi was too tired to mind making a fool of herself. Above the quiet chatter of the room, she called out, ‘Has anybody here seen a fifteen-year-old girl on the reserve? Bleached hair with purple in it. Possibly with binoculars.’

  People turned. The room was silent, baffled by her outburst, until the woman behind the till said, quietly, ‘Zoë, you mean?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Little Zoë? Is she your daughter?’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said the woman. ‘Not today. She doesn’t usually come in this way. She’s not actually a member. She just sneaks in over Springfield Bridge. We don’t mind.’

  ‘You let an unaccompanied teenager just walk about?’

  ‘We encourage it, really,’ said the woman, smiling at her. ‘Are you OK?’

  Cupidi climbed down from the chair. ‘Not really.’ She looked around. Everyone was looking at her like she was mad. ‘So. Where is Springfield Bridge?’

  The woman picked up a printed map of the reserve.

  ‘Thin-looking strip of a thing?’ said an elderly man in corduroy trousers.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Down by Christmas Dell an hour ago. Nice girl. There are spoonbills there today. I expect she’s been watching them.’

  ‘You spoke to her?’

  ‘She didn’t really talk very much,’ said the man. ‘Fine by me.’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Cupidi, and by now people were crowding around the till with fingers pointing at the map.

  ‘I saw her down here,’ said one woman, gesturing through the glass towards another of the ponds.

  ‘She was definitely at the Dell hide an hour ago.’

  ‘Do you see her here often?’

  ‘Quite a lot, yes. She’s no bother.’

  ‘Is she in some kind of trouble?’ someone else asked.

  ‘God, yes,’ muttered Cupidi.

  Clutching the map, Cupidi pushed out of the door beyond the till and walked fast down the tracks, passing streams of birdwatchers who had called it a day and were coming the other way, towards her.

  ‘I’m looking for a teenage girl. Have you seen her?’

  Spooked by the way she stomped down the pathway, a huge flock of geese erupted noisily from one of the black patches of water, slapping wings on the water, honking as they rose into the air.

  Cupidi paused, amazed by the number of birds suddenly filling the sky. She looked up at them as they wheeled in the dark blueness above her head. The sheer scale of nature here was awesome; disturbing.

  Setting off again, sweating in the evening heat, she broke into a trot as she found another sign pointing to Christmas Dell hide.

  ‘Zoë!’ she called.

  More birds flapped away, startled by her shout. A young man in army fatigues glared at her angrily as she passed.

  She burst into the hide, expecting to see her daughter inside. It was like a long wooden railway carriage with a thin window down one side, overlooking a huge marshy lake dotted with birds, but the benches were empty. No one was here.

  Running out again she paused to look, and saw a slender figure on the far side of another stretch of water to the east. ‘Zoë!’ she called.

  The person continued tramping away along a track that headed towards the coast.

  ‘Zoë!’

  The girl stopped. Turned. Raised binoculars, then after a couple of seconds, waved.

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘I was worried. What if something happened?’

  ‘It didn’t. It never does.’

  She couldn’t help it. She tried not to lose her temper with the girl, but sometimes it was hard.

  ‘You’re infuriating.’

  Zoë just tramped silently alongside her mother as they returned to the visitor centre. Cupidi’s feet hurt; she was wearing the wrong shoes for walking over this uneven ground for what felt like bloody miles.

  ‘Look, love. I’ve had an ultra shitty day, and all I want to do is sit on the sofa. If you’d taken your phone…’

  The last of the low sun was casting a rich purple light across the reedbeds and stones. That only made it worse.

  When they reached the visitors’ centre, the woman behind the till smiled. ‘You found her, then? Good. See anything much, Zoë?’

  ‘Arctic tern.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zoë. ‘I was watching it for an hour.’

  ‘Gosh. How exciting. I’ll add it to the record.’

  ‘Yes. Flew off when my mum got there, though, she was making such a racket.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Cupidi. They looked at her as if she were the one who had behaved badly, not her daughter.

  When the car door was unlocked, Zoë got in silently and pulled her seatbelt across.

  They drove in back towards the cottage without saying another word. Cupidi stopped outside the Britannia. ‘I haven’t had time to cook,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t like pubs,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Well I do,’ said Cupidi, getting out. ‘Come on.’

  The decor was faux nautical – pine walls and brass fittings, a ship’s wheel hung from the ceiling with a specials board attached to it. She chose battered cod and chips and a large dry white wine. Zoë said she just wanted tomato soup.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ She was starving, herself. She was desperate for a shower, but needed to eat even more.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to drink wine during the week,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Today is an exception. I have had the crappiest day imaginable.’

  Zoë scowled. ‘You shouldn’t drink so much.’

  ‘I don’t.’ A gale of laughter came from a group standing at the bar. They were talking about something funny and trivial. Cupidi envied them right now.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else, shall we? You said you were watching a bird. For an hour. You have so much patience.’

  Her daughter made a face. ‘Arctic tern,’ she said.

  Cupidi pulled her phone from her and googled it. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘It says here it migrates almost fifty-five thousand miles, from the north of the planet, right down to the south, and then back again. It’s the longest migration known in the animal kingdom.’

  Zoë said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cupidi pinched out the picture. ‘And it’s so tiny.’

  Zoë shrugged.

  ‘I mean. Don’t you wonder why? It’s crazy. Using all that energy.’

  ‘No.’

  Cupidi leaned forward and
took a large mouthful of wine. ‘Surely you’ve got to wonder. Why it does it?’

  ‘I don’t wonder. I know,’ said her daughter wearily. ‘It’s not crazy at all. It’s just nature. It’s to do with food and daylight length. The Arctic tern needs to feed every hour of light there is. Close to the Arctic Circle, where it would have been coming from, the days are longer in summer.’

  Another burst of laughter from the group by the bar.

  ‘About fifteen hours here, this time of year. In the Southern Ocean they’re longer in winter. They need to be where the days are longest so they can feed for the longest time. It’s simple. So they go up and then down. And up again.’

  ‘OK. That’s amazing,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘Yes. Amazing. Wow,’ said Zoë, unsmiling.

  ‘I’m just trying to be interested in what you’re interested in.’

  ‘Now that is amazing,’ said Zoë.

  ‘That’s mean.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  They sat together in silence. Cupidi said, ‘The food is taking ages. What’s wrong, pickle?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Something has to be,’ said Cupidi. ‘You’re being weird.’

  ‘You’re being weird.’

  ‘OK. I’ll leave it.’

  Cupidi stood and went to the bar to ask about when the food would be there. While she was there she ordered another glass of wine.

  ‘You’re the copper, in’t you?’ said one of the men by the bar.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Found out who that woman was yet? The one up Salt Lane?’

  ‘We think so, yes.’

  ‘Found out who killed her yet?’

  She gritted her teeth, smiled. ‘We are working on several lines of enquiry,’ she said.

  ‘What’s taking so long?’

  The laughter had stopped now. They were all looking at her seriously, as if waiting for her to say something important. What could she say? They would charge the man if he regained consciousness, though there was a good chance he wouldn’t.

  But when she looked back to her daughter, sitting alone at a round wooden table with a glass of Coca-Cola in front of her, she saw tears pouring down the girl’s face. In the middle of the pub, her daughter was crying.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said and strode back across the room, to her daughter. Cupidi pulled her chair round next to her and wrapped her in her arms.

  ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ Zoë was shaking now, big drops rolling down her face onto her T-shirt.

  ‘I want to go,’ said Zoë. ‘I don’t like it here.’

  Cupidi looked up. The group of men and women at the bar were all staring at them. The food she had paid for had not arrived yet, but she stood, taking her daughter’s hand and leading her outside.

  It was dark now. Far away, waves rippled on the stones. The tide must be low.

  ‘What is it?’ They stood on the shingle on the other side of the road from the pub. ‘Just talk to me, Zoë. Please.’

  Between sobs her daughter said, ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s just that all the time I feel so sad. And it’s just so big.’

  ‘Are you lonely?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is someone being cruel to you? Someone from school?’

  Shaking her head, Zoë said, ‘No. It’s not like that. It’s nothing like that at all.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

  Cupidi holding her girl’s arm, they walked past the odd cabin and shack. The beam from the new lighthouse swept over their heads.

  ‘Are you missing London? Your old friends?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you missing your dad? You know you can see him whenever you want.’ Her father lived in Cornwall with his new girlfriend and their children.

  ‘No. It’s not that.’

  ‘I just want to know.’ Cupidi tried not to let her frustration show. She had always blamed her mother’s brusqueness for finding it so hard to communicate with her; but here she was, floundering just as badly as her mother had. She loosened her grip on the girl. ‘Have you done something wrong?’

  ‘Mum. Why on earth would you think that?’ Zoë wailed.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to help.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is. You always think there’s got to be an answer. Maybe there’s not. I just feel so sad all the time.’

  ‘You’re a teenager,’ tried Cupidi.

  Zoë grasped her arm again; clung on tight.

  She had always believed she would be so much better at this than her mother had been. And she had always blamed her mother for everything that had gone wrong between them.

  Zoë leaned against her, then recoiled. ‘Oh God. You smell,’ her daughter said, stepping away. ‘Your hair stinks.’

  ‘Long story.’

  Ahead, the lights of the power station blared in the darkness. When had she stopped being able to talk to her daughter? Without her noticing, a gulf had grown between them.

  That night, after she’d showered to get the stink of the fire off her, she opened the wine. After two more glasses she was ready to call her mother.

  ‘Are you still awake? I need to talk to you,’ she said.

  ‘Of course I’m awake.’

  Why did she find it so hard to tell her mum that she needed her?

  Afterwards, she tried to start the novel that her book group had chosen. It was crime fiction of some kind set in Sweden. The plot was grisly and ridiculous and she found herself picking apart inaccuracies in basic procedure. She had promised herself she would finish it.

  But she couldn’t concentrate. Zoë was in the next room. Cupidi could feel her unhappiness pulsing through the walls.

  After ten pages she found the book dropping from her hands.

  FOURTEEN

  The incident room was empty when she arrived; it was early. She checked the corridors. No one was in. She wouldn’t be disturbed for a while. So, alone at her desk, she dialled Whitechapel CID.

  ‘Oh,’ said David Colquhoun, when she was finally put through. ‘It’s you.’ Then, to someone else in the room, ‘Excuse me a minute. I just need to take this call.’

  ‘Is it a bad time?’

  ‘Diary meeting with the Commissioner’s office.’ He lowered his voice and added, ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Superintendent now, I hear? Things must be bad there, then?’

  ‘Let me just close the door,’ he said, and the noise of the office behind him vanished. ‘How great to hear from you. I’ve been wondering how you are. Pretty much on a daily basis. How are you settling in down there?’

  It was good to hear his voice again as well. It was always full of warmth and enthusiasm; she used to mock it, saying he sounded like a vicar. ‘It was you calling the other night, wasn’t it? Zoë picked up the phone.’

  A short pause. ‘God, yes. I’m sorry. I’d had a couple of drinks. Normally I resist. Did she know who was calling?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Daft. Sorry. Shouldn’t have.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t.’

  ‘Neither should you.’

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is work.’

  ‘If it was work, you’d have called my assistant.’

  ‘What’s the use of friends in high places?’ she said.

  When she’d split from Zoë’s father she’d slept with a few men. None were real relationships. They were just a series of one-night stands, sometimes with the same man; the kind of life it was easy enough to fall into on the force, when the hours were long and the days intense. But David had been different. As with so many affairs between coppers, alcohol had been involved. They had both been at an excruciatingly dull, day-long Home Office seminar on digital crime, and in the bar afterwards they’d waited side by side for ten minutes to be served. All she’d said was, ‘Denial of Service Attack,’ and nobody had got it but David Colquhoun, who’d laughed so loudly, even though the
joke was pretty thin, that she insisted on buying the drink for him when the barman finally arrived.

  David had been a rising senior officer in a different department. He had a boyish face she found oddly sexy and claimed to know the words to every Black Grape song. He was kind, understanding and discreet. And because he was happily married to Cathy, who regularly posted photos of them and their three children on Facebook, he’d wanted to keep it that way – which just how Alex had liked it. At first he would say how guilty he felt about the affair. ‘End it then,’ she had said. But he hadn’t. He enjoyed catching her eye in the canteen, or passing in a corridor, sharing a space in a lift, knowing that nobody knew. She had enjoyed it too.

  They had been careful. The weekends that Zoë visited her father, he would sometimes come over and they would drink wine and have sex. They would go and see Xavier Dolan films at the Renoir, knowing that there was little risk of colleagues being at an art house movie.

  But somebody had found out. Somehow. No surprise, really. They were working in a job where everyone around them was paid to suspect and to see through lies and deceptions.

  One day, her boss called her into the office, and there was some woman from the Practice Support Team standing next to him. She asked if Cupidi was having an affair with a married officer. In front of the DCI, she had had to deny it. And that had been the end of it. She never knew how they’d been found out, but because he was married and a senior officer, they had ended up deciding it was too risky. The best thing would be for her to move away. They ended it, and that was that. She was not sorry. It was done.

  ‘I need a favour,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m looking for a homeless woman who’s been seen on your patch. Mid-forties. May have given her name as Hilary Keen, but that’s not her real name.’

  ‘What is, then?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  Cupidi gave him the description of the woman Julian and Lulu Keen had given her.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. If she’s still around here it shouldn’t be too difficult.’ He paused. ‘It’s actually good to hear your voice.’

  ‘Yours too.’

  ‘Tell me why you need this. It’s not just about a homeless woman, is it?’