The Missing Marriage

SARAH MAY

The Missing Marriage

This book is dedicated to George Gowans and Robert Hutchinson, who spent too long underground . . . and to the women they left behind.

Contents

 

 

Anna Faust saw Bryan Deane three times the day he disappeared – twice on land, and once in the sea. There was nothing remarkable about this. A lot of people saw Bryan the day he disappeared – people who knew him as Bryan Deane, and people who didn't. The fact that Anna saw him six months later near the old bandstand on South beach – newly painted in a retina jumping white –
was
remarkable. It was remarkable because only the day before the Blyth coroner had announced an open verdict on the disappearance of Bryan Deane on Saturday 11 April 2008 – Easter Saturday – age thirty-five.

Bryan Deane was officially missing presumed dead the day Anna saw him on South beach.

His brown hair, which used to have natural auburn highlights when the sun caught it, had been bleached Scandinavian blond. He'd lost about two stone in weight as well, which had the effect of making him look taller.

The man Anna saw that day – the only other person on the beach apart from herself and a bundled up woman yelling at a black Labrador standing motionless in the long rolling sea – looked nothing like Bryan Deane, but she recognised him immediately despite the distance between them. She felt him in her stomach and lungs as a rising nausea, which was where she had always felt Bryan Deane ever since she first laid eyes on him in the summer of 1985 when she was eleven and he was twelve. It was how she felt him six months ago after seeing him for the first time in sixteen years, stood next to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, the day he disappeared.

And when she saw him on South beach, the day after the coroner's verdict was given, it didn't surprise her; it was confirmation of what she had somehow known all along – Bryan Deane hadn't disappeared so much as failed to return . . . as Bryan Deane, anyway.

But then men – and occasionally women – have disappeared under circumstances far more infamous than those surrounding Bryan Deane; so infamous, in fact, that they have gone down in history.

Take Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who mounted his donkey one night as sixth Fatimid Caliph and sixteenth Ismaili Imam, and rode into the al-Muqattan hills outside Cairo – only to dismount from the same donkey as somebody completely different. Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was never seen or heard of again.

Tsar Alexander I went so far as to die at Tagarog and be interred at the St Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg – all so that he could go on living life, in one version of the story anyway, as Feodor Kuzmich in Siberia. When Soviet authorities opened Alexander's tomb in 1925, it was empty.

Who knows what prompted Ducat, Marshal and the Occasional – all three of them lighthouse keepers on Flannan Isles – to vacate their lives so suddenly one day that they left their beds unmade, the clocks stopped, a chair overturned by the kitchen table, and one set of oilskins hanging still from their peg? And who thought to ask John Stonehouse whether he preferred life as John Stonehouse, Labour MP, or – following the collapse of his companies, revelations about his extra-marital affair, and his own drowning – as a man called Joe Markham?

As Anna Faust walked into the Deanes' house – and marriage – on Easter Saturday 2008, she knew that disappearances were classified as victimless crimes. But where did that leave Bryan's stunned yet immaculate, highlighted blonde wife, Laura? Or his daughter, Martha?

Even the Spaniel, Roxy, sprawled impartially over Laura Deane's carefully positioned feet, had rolling eyes as she attempted to grapple with the notion – both instinctive and observed – that an event of such seismic significance had occurred that Laura had forgotten to feed her. Laura had also sat on her where she lay curled up and blinking in the corner of the sofa, waiting patiently for
Strictly Come Dancing
to be switched on. Not only sat on her, but become uncharacteristically furious. Laura really wasn't herself tonight, Roxy thought.

Then the police arrived.

It was almost midnight when Doreen Hamilton stepped through the front door to number seventeen Parkview and pulled it shut behind her. Holding onto the latch, she swung her body – buttoned up from throat to ankles in a quilted dressing gown that had been a Christmas gift from her daughter, Laura – away from her home of over fifty years into the night. Panting, she peered blindly through the retreating fret at the only thing she could see – the streetlight growing out of the pavement on the other side of the garden wall – and let go of the latch.

Keeping the orange streetlight to her left, she shuffled in slippers – which predated the dressing gown by a year and which had a navy blue fleur de lys Doreen had never seen embroidered on them – along the front of the house, feeling her way.

When she ran out of house, she turned left – the orange light was ahead of her now – following the path until she reached the gate. It was a relief to feel its solid wood beneath her hands, and she stood there for a moment running her fingers nimbly over the edges of a sign made for them by their granddaughter, Martha, in more innocent times. She'd never seen the sign – she'd never seen the pink and yellow patio tiles paving the garden either or the stone wishing well and oak barrel planter where a relatively robust looking dwarf conifer was growing, circled by primroses – but she knew what it said:
No leaflets or junk mail
.

Her breath was quick and hissing. She could hear it – a sound close by – as she clicked up the latch and opened the gate. Out on the pavement there were other sounds – sounds that didn't belong here on the edges of the Hartford Estate where families wanting to stay afloat above the tide of social debris put in for transfers to; where vegetables were grown, laundry dried outside, and windows cleaned. The sounds came from the centre of the estate – a primitive black hole with severed amenities, boarded-up windows and bonfires burning day and night – where things had gone bad.

Feeling suddenly fretful, Doreen felt out the gate to the house next door, number nineteen, where the Fausts lived. The Fausts and the Hamiltons had been among the estate's first residents in 1954, and so proud of their new council homes that they threw parties for less fortunate friends and family still consigned to the damp, crowded miners' rows.

There was a nail on the left hand post she remembered not to snag the sleeve of her dressing gown on; she also remembered that the Fausts' gate had sunk on its hinges and needed lifting slightly. She remembered all this despite the succession of low-strung whimpering sounds she was making as she shuffled blindly – the orange streetlight was behind her now – up the garden path to number nineteen Parkview, her hands moving in slow nervous arcs.

She had no idea how long the journey between houses had taken her. Since losing her sight, things needed to be sought out, felt out . . . translated. Things took time.

She rang on the bell to number nineteen, her right palm flat against the door, overcome by the physical reverberations of relief at reaching her destination. She listened – and thought she heard the sounds of a bed giving up its sleeper; uncertain footsteps. Crouching down awkwardly, she opened the letterbox and shouted hoarsely through it – ‘Mary, it's me – Doreen!'

She could smell the new gloss on the front door; she could even smell the green in it as she straightened up slowly, her left hand pulling on the collar of her dressing gown. The last time she'd knocked on Mary Faust's door at midnight – on anyone's door at midnight – was the night Laura was born. She'd been told she couldn't have children, then in 1974 – unexpectedly at the age of forty-two – she became pregnant. She never did make it to the hospital. Laura was born on the bathroom floor at number nineteen – delivered by a shaking, incredulous Mary.

The door to number nineteen opened then and the quality of light changed.

Mary Faust, in a dressing gown not dissimilar to Doreen's – the small tight curls on her head flattened by the hair net she was wearing – peered with concern, and just a shiver of hostility, at her virtually blind neighbour.

Doreen was clutching the collar of her dressing gown. Her mouth looked like broken knicker elastic and the hair on the right-hand side of her head – hair tinted with just a suggestion of purple – was flat with sleep still. Mary wanted to ask her why she wasn't wearing a hair net, but it was midnight and Doreen didn't look like she was up to having an opinion on hair nets right then.

‘Doreen?' Mary patted her own hair, satisfied. Doreen was staring straight through her, panting strangely. ‘Doreen, pet?' Mary prompted her. The ‘pet' was condescending, but she felt that Doreen's frailty, virtual blindness and possible dementia warranted it.

‘It's Bryan –' Doreen said at last.

Mary stared at her, trying to work out whether she was sleepwalking. It was difficult to tell with a blind person. ‘Bryan?'

‘Laura's Bryan. He's gone missing. She's just phoned. The police are there now.'

‘Bryan?' Mary said again. It seemed impossible to her, given all the Deanes had achieved – Laura Hamilton had become Laura Deane when she married Bryan. Achievements such as theirs – they owned and lived in a four-bedroom detached house, and ran two cars – were meant to safeguard against tragedy. ‘Missing how?'

‘I don't know. Laura said he never came home.'

‘From where?'

‘I don't know. Something to do with a kayak. He was in the sea, and – I can't help thinking –.'

‘Don't think,' Mary commanded. ‘It'll give you vertigo, and you'll feel it in your joints. Where's Don?' Mary couldn't see the car where it was usually parked beneath the street light.

‘He's driven over there. He took Martha with him.'

Martha was Laura and Bryan's fifteen-year-old daughter. She stayed with her grandparents most weekends.

‘You'd better come in,' Mary said, taking hold of Doreen's arm and pulling her into the house.

‘I didn't mean to bother you. Not with Erwin ill . . .'

‘He's out cold. Morphine.'

Mary was almost cheerful now as she pushed Doreen gently into the living room, guiding her to the sofa beneath the copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle.

Doreen poised rigidly on the edge, her left hand curled in her lap, her right hand gripping the armrest as if anticipating motion. She could smell carpet and the wood of the sideboard – as well as Lily of the Valley vapours from a bath Mary had taken earlier. She was breathless with disbelief still – even after telling Mary, who she could hear now making tea in the kitchenette.

There were other sounds – a man and woman making love – coming through the wall behind her from next door where a young family lived; a nice family, just trying to make their way in the world. Doreen felt briefly glad for them, then the panic set in again as she thought about Laura, who used to be such a happy little girl. Shocked, Doreen realised that subconsciously she must have noticed that lately Laura hadn't been happy; Laura hadn't been happy at all, but this wasn't something they ever talked about because they didn't talk about much these days.

She felt a sudden, inexplicable resentment towards Laura then, which had something to do with the dressing gown she was wearing and how much she'd always disliked it. She'd disliked it for being exactly what it was – an ugly, synthetic body bag she was meant to express senile thanks for because she was at the end of her life. It had been chosen carelessly and at the last minute – from the racks of a shop Laura would never have bought anything for herself in. When had she, Doreen, ever given the impression that silk had lost its meaning now she was over seventy? Doreen started to cry.

Mary stood in the kitchenette – her hand on the teapot; about to pour – on the phone to her granddaughter, Anna. Not only because Anna was police, but because she, Laura and Bryan had all grown up together here on the Hartford Estate.

Laura and Anna had lived next door to each other since birth, and as both of them remained only children a friendship would have been natural enough, but it had been more than friendship. They sought each other out intentionally and, growing up, they were inseparable – their own world – until the summer after the eleven plus, which Anna passed and Laura didn't.

Mary had been telling herself for the past twenty-three years that it was the eleven plus that came between Laura and Anna, but it wasn't – that same summer, the summer of '85, the Deanes moved onto the Hartford Estate. They moved into number fifteen Parkview, next door to the Hamiltons. Bryan Deane was twelve at the time – a year older than Anna and Laura.

As she came off the phone, she heard crying on the other side of the frosted glass door separating the kitchenette from the living room.

She went through, her feet silent in the carpet's thick pile.

Doreen's skin was too loose and thin to absorb the tears whose run-off was cascading from the edge of her chin onto her dressing gown.

‘I've come out without my keys and there's nobody at home. I'm locked out, Mary,' she said – as if this failing on her part far outweighed her son-in-law's disappearance. ‘Stupid – stupid,' she moaned, distraught with anger, thumping her left fist into her lap.

Anna Faust slowed down, steering the yellow Ford Capri, in which she'd driven north the previous Saturday, into the small Duneside development outside Seaton Sluice where the Deanes lived. A wind was picking up, making the flags ring on their masts at the entrance to the estate while shifting the sea fret that had come in with the tide that afternoon – a dense, rolling blanket of fog this stretch of the north-east coast was famous for.

It was Easter Saturday and unnaturally quiet after London – something she hadn't got used to yet.

Marine Drive was a road of four- and five-bedroom detached homes whose uniform banality could only be described as ‘executive' – a marketing ploy that explained nothing and promised everything. The houses backed onto the main road, but had sea views.

The Deanes' house – the first one, number two – was as honey-coloured as the rest of the houses on Marine Drive, which all gave the impression that they'd been tailored to suit the needs of their owners when in fact it was the owners who'd been trained – by forces far greater than themselves – to fulfil the requirements of the houses. Requirements including, but not limited to – Anna took a glance at number two and its immediate neighbours – a household income of at least eighty thousand, and a minimum of two cars to fill the double garage and drive. Preferably children – definitely pets.

After more than a decade in London ‘eighty thousand' had lost its meaning, but up here it was still hard to come by – still currency.

She cast her eyes instinctively over the puddles of architectural foliage in the front garden of number two, then back up at the honey-coloured façade, aware that she was looking for signs of Bryan in all this.

Anna hadn't seen Bryan or Bryan's wife, Laura, since she and Laura were eighteen when Laura Deane had been Laura Hamilton still. But she knew all about the Deanes and their house at number two Marine Drive – Mary had described it in such breathless detail – because Mary approved of the Deanes and the way the Deanes lived their lives in a way she didn't approve of Anna.

At Friday's Methodist Church coffee morning, Mary would talk loudly and insistently about her granddaughter, Anna, and while she was talking, still loudly, still proudly, she was trying simultaneously to fathom why it was Anna lived so far away, and why it was Anna lived alone.

She'd always been ambitious for her granddaughter, but Anna's achievements didn't translate into anything she – or anybody else at the Methodist Church coffee morning – understood. While Laura Deane had a four-bedroom house with a conservatory and separate utility room. She had a beautiful kitchen with an in-built microwave the size of an oven. People understood these things, and such recognisable achievements were given their due reverence by the Friday morning audience.

Unlike the Hartford Estate – where Anna, Laura, and Bryan had all grown up and where Anna's grandparents and Laura's parents still lived – Marine Drive didn't often see police squad cars, but tonight there was one parked on the drive to number two, sandwiched between two other cars. One of those Anna recognised as belonging to Laura's father, Don Hamilton, and the other one had to be Laura's.

Don – like Erwin Faust – used to work at Hartford Pit, and when that closed down Don got work at Bates and Erwin, who was near retirement, got work cleaning the buses at the Ashington Depot. He was still referred to locally as ‘the German' by the older generation because he'd spent most of the war as a POW in Camp Eden, Stanton.

As she got out of her car, sensor-triggered security lighting suddenly illuminated the driveway and front garden of number two and she saw Don Hamilton walking towards his car.

‘Don!'

He stared at her, not recognising her for a moment. ‘Anna?'

‘Nan's just phoned – about Bryan.'

As if embarrassed at this disturbance of the peace his family was responsible for, Don shook his head, which had been sporting the same Teddy boy haircut for as long as Anna had known him.

He'd put on a shirt, pressed trousers, sports jacket and loafers – with buckles that shone under the security lighting – in order to face the unexpected tragedy of his son-in-law's disappearance. It disturbed Don profoundly because he didn't think things like this happened to people who lived in four-bedroom detached houses. He thought his daughter was safe from harm inside number two Marine Drive, but here was a police car parked on the drive where Bryan's 4x4 should have been.

‘You didn't have to come over.'

‘Don, it's fine.'

Anna didn't tell him she'd come to give a statement because when Mary phoned just after midnight, it occurred to her – beyond the shock – that she was probably the last person to have seen Bryan, that afternoon on the beach.