The Missing Marriage (17 page)

There in front of her was the coffin containing the remains of a man who'd last been in the church as a groom, and it was at the realisation of this that Mary started to cry. She wasn't crying at the thought of Erwin in particular, but at the terrible inevitability of growing old and how awful it was that the girl she'd once been should be trapped inside the old body she'd seen in the mirror that morning, and that there was nothing she could do about it.

They started to sing the first hymn, which wasn't a hymn at all, but a carol – ‘Silent Night' – and they sang it because it was Erwin's favourite. Anna never forgot him telling her that the third Christmas he spent as a prisoner of war, they'd been given permission to walk to the small village church near the camp, and stand at the back for midnight mass. The priest giving the service allowed them to sing ‘Silent Night' in their own language, and there wasn't a single protest from the congregation, who turned round when the prisoners started to sing, and saw nothing but row after row of homesick boys.

*

The sunset that evening was long and vast. Winter's solitary dog walkers and runners, who remained loyal to the beach throughout the year's coldest days, suddenly found themselves making way for people wanting to hold onto a day that had at last felt like the first day of summer. The anaesthetist who found the kayak that morning at Whitley Bay, had to call Flo to heel three times as children – and some adults – ran wildly towards the incoming tide.

The wind was strong enough for kites, surfers and wind-surfers and at the café where Laviolette bought his coffee – run by the descendents of Italian immigrants – there were queues for ice cream. The anaesthetist stopped and looked around her, trying to remember where it was exactly that she'd found the kayak because there was no sign of it now.

As she stood on the beach, trying to remember, Laura Deane drove along the coastal road through Whitley Bay towards Seaton Sluice, a Neil Diamond CD that Bryan had bought her for her last birthday playing loudly. She had the window open and as she sang along, the wind blew strands of hair into her open mouth.

The last time she'd listened to the CD had been on the way to work the Saturday Bryan disappeared – Easter Saturday – but Laura wasn't conscious of this fact. It was a beautiful evening, and tomorrow morning she was flying to Montevideo. She felt suddenly younger than she had in years.

An hour after Laura drove north along the coastal road, Anna, still in black – she'd exchanged her funeral suit for running clothes – ran south through the rapidly greying twilight along the last line of beach not yet covered by the tide. The wash of the waves was loud and the air felt cold now on her skin.

Mary had fallen silent around half seven, lowering herself stiffly onto one of the dining chairs that had been pushed back against the lounge wall, and staring across the room at a spot of carpet near ‘the shrine' as Erwin used to call it – a coffee table with a collection of photographs on it chronicling the triumphs and highlights of Anna's life and career. In most of them she was either holding an award or shaking somebody's hand, and the photograph in pride of place – the one that came closest in Mary's mind to compensation for the absence of snapshots of babies and husbands – was the one of Anna shaking Prince Edward's hand.

Mary wanted to be alone.

‘Do you want me to bring the bedding down before I go?'

She shook her head. ‘I'm sleeping upstairs tonight.'

Anna hesitated then, for the first time in weeks, drove back to the Ridley Arms – glad to be alone herself. She lay along the sofa in the clothes she'd worn all day and, exhausted, fell asleep.

By the time she got to the harbour at Seaton Sluice, it was almost dark so she cut up onto the headland and ran back along the road. As she passed the Duneside development, she thought about the Deanes, and about Martha, who she hadn't been in contact with for weeks.

She carried on running, past the bandstand and harbour sheds on the outskirts of Blyth, aware that she hadn't eaten properly all day, that she felt lightheaded, and that her heart was pulling in a way that made her stop suddenly, worried that she was about to black out. She walked until her breathing became more regular then, when she got to Ridley Avenue, broke into a slow, even run again.

She could hear her phone ringing as she opened the street door to the apartment and, thinking it might be Mary, took the stairs two at a time, but it wasn't Mary.

‘Is now a good time?' Laviolette said.

‘Not really,' she answered heavily, walking to the fridge and getting a carton of milk out. ‘My grandfather died. The funeral was today.'

‘I'll phone another time.'

‘No – it's fine.' She fell onto the sofa and lay, staring out the window at the Quayside lights. ‘It's fine,' she said again.

‘You're sure?'

‘What's happened?'

‘Bryan Deane's kayak was washed up this morning. We got a call at six from a woman out walking her dog on the beach at Whitley Bay.'

Anna felt something wet spreading across her chest. ‘Shit.'

‘You okay?'

‘I just spilt milk everywhere. Shit. Can I phone you back?'

‘It doesn't matter. I just wanted you to know – about the kayak. And I'm sorry, really sorry, about your grandfather.'

After coming off the phone to Laviolette, Anna stood under the shower for twenty minutes before collapsing into the bed that had remained unmade for weeks.

She slept so heavily that she woke up the next morning in the same position she'd fallen asleep in.

She spent the morning cleaning the flat – something she hadn't done properly since moving in – and putting various loads of washing through the machine, and it wasn't until she stopped for lunch that she became aware of the fact that she'd lost her reason for staying up north.

On her way out to see Mary, she pulled a flyer out the letterbox.

‘Sorry to hear about your grandfather.' Roy the Harbourmaster was standing smoking in the office doorway, one hand pushed in his trouser pocket. ‘My wife's cousin was at the funeral.'

He looked away, distracted, down Quay Road towards the roundabout where a lorry was trying to reverse.

Anna screwed up the flyer and was about to throw it in the bin next to where she'd parked the Capri when her mind – which had been running ahead and drawing conclusions without her being aware of it – concluded that the paper was too good a grade for it to be a flyer. She smoothed it out on the roof of the Capri, which was hot from the sun, her heart pulling in the same way it had towards the end of her run the night before.

This was no flyer.

Somebody had drawn a butterfly, intricately executed in pen and ink, and written ‘Erwin Faust R.I.P.' underneath.

‘You alright?' she heard Roy's voice, calling out.

She turned round, her hands over her eyes to shield them from the sun, and waved at him before walking over to the office.

‘Did you see anybody other than the postman put anything through my door?'

Roy thought about this. ‘There's been nobody round here.'

She felt him watching her as she walked back to the car, putting the drawing in the glove compartment.

She should destroy the drawing, but not right now.

Right now, it gave her something to hold onto in a world that had been empty for too long.

Bryan wanted her to know he was still alive.

An hour after checking into the Hotel l'Auberge at Punte del Este, Laura Deane left her room and – despite several wrong turnings along uniform corridors that epitomised everything everybody who came here had paid for: the luxury of forgetting – eventually found what she was looking for: Suite 87. She knocked three times, her left hand and forehead pressed against the door, her eyes shut. There was no answer so she knocked again, her breath caught in her throat as she waited for the door to open – unable to hear any movement on the other side.

Then, without warning, a voice called out from inside, ‘Come in.'

She pushed the door open slowly, looking around her with scared eyes.

A man with blond hair – thinner than she remembered – was sitting by the window staring at her. He didn't look like he was waiting for anything or anybody.

‘You're here,' she said, hesitant, shy and tearful.

‘You thought I wouldn't be?' he sounded half amused; half sad, and she knew – from the way he said it – that he'd thought about not being there.

Despite his utterly changed appearance, the man in front of her bore remarkable similarities to Bryan Deane – gestures, the voice – and her eyes would have found him immediately in a crowd, but nobody here in this hotel in Uruguay had any idea who Bryan Deane was. The name on the passport he'd handed to the Ukranian on reception gave his name as Tom Bowen, and over the next ten days – despite starting off afraid of each other – Laura found out a lot about Tom Bowen.

Unlike Bryan Deane, Tom Bowen didn't get tired or depressed; he didn't talk about suicide or come home on a Friday night and announce that he was spending the weekend walking in the Lake District, alone. He didn't spend hours sitting on the edge of the bed holding a sock in his hand, staring at the wall; he didn't scream down the phone at people in call centres thousands of miles away trying to manage his credit card debt; he didn't sit in silence over a plate of trout and broccoli then start to quietly and inexplicably cry; he didn't get out of his car and kick in a van's door because it had taken his parking space; he didn't sit in the ensuite in darkness, pretending not to be home. Tom Bowen didn't look at her with hollow eyes or wake up sobbing or go on walks that lasted days.

Tom Bowen looked at her and held her and was there.

Tom Bowen made her feel weightless.

Tom Bowen made her laugh.

Tom Bowen made her not care about anything other than Tom Bowen.

Laura had been waiting for Tom Bowen ever since she first laid eyes on Bryan Deane at the age of thirteen.

The next morning, a Ukranian cleaner – sister to the Ukranian on reception – went into Suite 87. She'd been cleaning in hotels since she was fifteen and knew that licit and illicit love made rooms smell different. Suite 87, which she cleaned thoroughly and without expression – the lack of expression itself an expression of her experience – smelt illicit. The people who had spent the night here were not married – to each other anyway. These were her observations, made without judgement, but with a momentary wistfulness that gave her face – for less than a second – a thin brightness.

It was a hot day in mid September. Martha left the music block where she'd had her last lesson of the day and joined the flock of girls in blue shirts heading down past the tennis courts towards the school's main gates as the bell for the end of school rang. She was sweating – had been sweating all day in the airless classrooms whose open windows brought in nothing apart from the occasional bee – and the strap of her bag, heavy with books, was digging into her shoulders.

The school coaches were lined up on the road outside the gates ready to take girls back to Hexham and Alnwick where they were picked up by parents and driven to outlying villages. The grammar school had a county-wide catchment area. The coach drivers in wing-tip sunglasses and shortsleeve shirts – all short; all balding – stood talking and laughing, hands in pockets, as girls ate ice creams in small groups by the coaches' open doors, catching the cold air from the air conditioning.

Martha used to get the coach home in year seven – there was one that ran to Tynemouth where she'd wait in the salon for Laura to finish. There were coach prefects, but they did little to make the journey any more endurable for girls like Martha so she'd been going home on public transport since year eight – the metro to Whitley Bay then the bus.

By the time she got to the gates, the coaches were starting to leave, and that was when she saw him – while waiting to cross the road.

The dog standing beside him – in the shade under a dusty horse chestnut – was white. His hair was blond and he was thinner. He had on a Pogues T-shirt she'd never seen before, but it was definitely him.

He wasn't looking at her – he was looking at a group of girls in her year standing about a hundred yards away, laughing and making frantic arrangements for the weekend with friends. Why was he looking at them? He knew her; knew she wasn't one of those laughing girls.

‘Dad!' Martha cried out.

She saw the laughing girls turn and stare, but she didn't care.

Her arm was up in the air – she felt the underarm seam of her shirt split – waving wildly.

He saw her then.

Suddenly he was looking straight at her, and the dog by his side, restless, let out a bark.

He didn't react – he just looked scared then worried before starting to walk away.

‘Dad!' she screamed this time, running into the road as one of the coaches pulled away. She was forced to stop, and as the coach drew heavily past her, she saw her reflection slipping along the length of its white body.

By the time the coach accelerated – taking her reflection with it – he'd disappeared.

She ran across the road and got to the chestnut tree where he'd been standing, staring about her, helpless. She stayed there for another hour before eventually starting to walk in the direction of the metro station, her eyes everywhere.

But she didn't see a blond man in a Pogues T-shirt with a white dog walking beside him.

Laura left Starz Salon at around four, statuesque in white linen. Between the salon and the car, she saw three people she knew and passed through them in a bright hurry, waving energetically and pulling Roxy after her.

These people – who had sent flowers, personally delivered their condolences, expressed sympathy, offered support, and held onto Laura when words gave way to tears – stopped and stared. She'd moved through them so fast she left a wind blowing behind her that ruffled the feathers of decency. Her brightness took the warmth out of them and their feelings towards her.

They started to talk, making whispered observations that were as brief as they were insidious: Laura Deane looked like she'd found something rather than lost something.

Sitting on a stool on the other side of the salon window, Kirsty on reception drew a series of concentric circles absently round that day's date in the appointment diary then glanced up at the clock on the wall in front of her and wrote down the time. After this she flicked back through the last couple of months. There were times written against all the days, including Saturdays but excluding Sundays when the salon was closed: since getting back from Uruguay Laura left the salon every day at around four o'clock with the same air of nervous anticipation.

After getting in her car, Laura drove through heavy after-school traffic towards North Shields, singing along absently to songs that came onto the radio until she reached her destination: Royal Quays Marina. She parked the car in the usual bay – number 87 – because she'd always been superstitious and like most superstitious people, enjoyed the resonance of pattern and order that superstition gave to the seemingly random act of life.

Leaving Roxy in the car with the shower radio tuned in to Planet Rock, Roxy's favourite station – she bought the shower radio specifically for Roxy to listen to in the car because Roxy liked to lick the speaker when songs she recognised were playing – Laura crossed the car park, instinctively looking up to see if there was anybody on the balcony of their flat – flat fourteen – but there wasn't.

On the balcony next door, she made out the head of the Polish woman who lived at number twenty-three, bent over a book, but she lost sight of her as she disappeared into the lobby of the Ropermakers Building.

The lobby had a communal smell to it that reminded her of school, but she didn't have to wait there long because the lift was always on the ground floor. She'd been coming here nearly every day for the past two months and never yet seen anybody either getting out of or into the lift, but then that was hardly surprising given that only forty percent of units had been sold, and most of these – their own included – were running into negative equity.

It was their friend, Greg – Bryan's colleague at Tyneside Properties – who'd talked up the Royal Quays development and put the idea of an investment property into Bryan's head – initially proposing joint ownership then backing out at the last moment. Wise Greg.

They only managed to let it for six months before the property market crashed. Last year they put it on the market, but withdrew it in January when they realised that they weren't going to sell the flat in the foreseeable future, and anyway by then Laura had conceived of a different use for it.

Flat twenty-one in the Ropemakers Building at Royal Quays Marina was where Tom Bowen was going to live.

She stared at herself for a moment in the lift's mirror before the doors jolted unevenly open onto an empty corridor, lit by a south facing window at the end with a view over the marina. A door slammed shut somewhere in the building then there was silence, cut through by her footsteps as she walked down the corridor to flat twenty-one, letting herself in.

The windows in the flat were shut.

It was hot, smelt of food and sex from the day before, and felt empty.

It was also a mess, but Laura never felt the compunction to clean here that she did at home. Part of her liked the mess.

The flat had estuary views – views they'd paid a premium for, but that failed to retain their leverage during the economic downturn.

Leaving the windows shut, she moved through the rooms of the flat to confirm what she'd somehow instinctively known as soon as she walked in – Tom wasn't there. The reason she left Roxy in the car when she came here was that Tom often looked after the Husky belonging to the Polish woman next door and Roxy and the Husky didn't get on, but there was no sign of the Husky today. There were drawings across the sofa and coffee table – the ones on the coffee table pinned down by cups. Tom was taking a life drawing class on Tuesday and Thursday nights and his drawings covered most of the available surfaces.

She let herself out onto the balcony, saw the Polish woman reading still – and a cargo ship in the distance, moving through the mouth of the Tyne – and went back inside. She put the kettle on, watched it boil, then opened the fridge and took out one of the bottles of white wine she'd brought with her the day before, pouring herself a glass. She stood drinking it, anger passing to worry, passing to anger again. Where was Tom? The romance of the past few months, which had started at the Hotel L'Auberge in Punte del Este – a glorious, rolling, all consuming romance – broke suddenly as she stood silently drinking her glass of wine in the flat's tiny kitchen.

For the first time since Bryan's disappearance, she found herself thinking – what would happen if Bryan really did decide to disappear?

Anna was asleep on the sofa when Laviolette rang, the sun falling across her back. She'd fallen into a habit of going to bed around ten and sleeping until two or three in the morning when she'd get up and maybe eat something then go onto the computer for a while before going for a run at six. After the run, she had breakfast and drove over to see Mary. She came home in the afternoon and slept.

Laviolette had left three messages for her since Erwin's death – nothing to do with Bryan Deane, just well intended enquiries after her general health and state of mind, neither of which were good.

She hadn't returned any of them, but he didn't bring this up – he didn't ask her how she was feeling either, he just said, ‘Can you help me with something?'

‘What?'

‘I'm heading to fifty-one Perry Vale, Whitley Bay – following up a Missing Persons.'

She laughed. ‘They've assigned you another one?'

‘OAP – sixty-two – reckons his wife's gone missing. He says she went out for a walk yesterday morning and never came home. Uniforms went round yesterday and took a statement, but there's something . . . I don't know.'

‘I don't work for Northumbria Police, Inspector.'

‘I just want you to observe, Sergeant.' He paused. ‘Where are we now? September? You're into month six of your one month's compassionate leave – that's very understanding of the Met.'

‘They want me to have an evaluation before I go back to work. At the moment I'm not even up to the evaluation.'

‘So what are you going to do?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Come on – it's a beautiful day. You need to get out more – it'll help you sleep at night.'

Anna knew she was going to go.

Laviolette knew she was going to go.

She walked heavily over to the windows, her back and upper arms aching from the position she'd fallen asleep in on the sofa. She'd become dependent on the North Sea being outside her windows, and even though the Thames flowed past the new development in Greenwich where she rented a flat, it had none of the angry restlessness or empirical unpredictability of the North Sea.

‘How do you know I'm not sleeping at night?'

‘I can hear it in your voice.'

‘What did you say the address was?'

‘Fifty-one Perry Vale, Whitley Bay.'

It was Constable Wade who answered the door.

She looked surprised to see Anna.

Laviolette obviously hadn't said anything, and Anna wondered if this was the way he worked – keeping people in the dark. In evaluations it was the kind of behaviour they linked to paranoia and an inability to communicate – she'd worked in an investment bank's Personnel department running employee risk assessment profiles for six months when she first left university.

‘The Inspector wants me to observe,' Anna explained, trying to put Constable Wade at her ease.

Constable Wade would never have openly criticised the Inspector – and made an effort now to neutralise any facial expressions – but she couldn't help repeating, ‘Observe?'

Anna smiled and nodded, and the next minute DC Wade – who could only have been in her mid twenties – was grinning back at her.

Fifty-one Perry Vale smelt as if old people lived there. Anna followed DC Wade into a lounge where the Inspector and an elderly man – Mr Larcom – were sitting on a red three-piece covered in raised velveteen flora. There was a red and gold coffee table with a plate of Rich Tea biscuits on it and some cups of tea.

Sergeant Chambers was standing by an electric organ in the corner of the room, holding a cup of tea awkwardly in his large hands, and looking unhappy.

‘You made it,' Laviolette said, smiling at Anna and introducing her to Mr Larcom simply as, ‘another colleague – Anna.'

Anna didn't look at Chambers and Wade, instead her eyes swept quickly round the room and the thing that struck her was the lack of photographs. There was a sideboard, but there were no photographs on top of it.

‘D'you want to take a look round the house?' he said to her over his shoulder before turning back to Mr Larcom and helping himself to another biscuit.

This time Anna saw Chambers and Wade exchange glances, which the Inspector also saw but chose to ignore.

‘They searched the house yesterday,' Mr Larcom said, aware that Anna was watching him. ‘And these two,' he jerked his thumb at Chambers and Wade, ‘they did it just now.'

All the Inspector said in response to this was, ‘Don't worry – we'll just carry on talking down here.'

Anna went into the kitchen and started opening cupboards as quietly as she could: instant coffee, Bistro gravy granules, mustard powder, Oxo cubes, Saxo salt – the war generation's staple store cupboard ingredients. She wasn't enjoying herself – why had she agreed to come?

She went upstairs.

The lilac bathroom was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house, the bathmat damp still – with talcum powder impressions of what must have been Mr Larcom's feet.

The Larcoms' bedroom was silent and gloomy despite the sun outside, and the spare room smelt damp, and felt as though it hadn't been slept in for years. The whole house, in fact, felt strangely vacated.

She thought about Mr Larcom downstairs. There was no urgency to his worry over his wife's disappearance. He only seemed mildly disorientated and confused – probably at the number of strangers he'd had in his house over the past two days.

The Inspector was right, there was something . . .