Free The Salt Marsh by Clare Carson

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