The Missing Marriage (22 page)

‘Do you want to believe her?'

Anna didn't say anything. ‘What did Laura say?'

‘That Martha lies a lot; that she didn't want me wasting time and resources chasing a ghost.'

‘Only you don't think it's a ghost Martha saw.'

‘I think Martha wasn't meant to see Bryan, but she did.'

‘That's one way of looking at it, I suppose.'

‘Here's another way – Laura phoned the school this morning and had Martha referred to the psychologist. Assuming Laura knows that Bryan's still alive – she also knows that Martha's telling the truth. Do you see what I'm saying?'

The boy on the table next to them, reading a book and waiting for a girl, glanced up at them – then at his watch, then back down at the book.

‘There's a child somewhere in the middle of all this, and she's losing ground as we speak,' Laviolette explained in a strained undertone, ‘so whatever it is you know; whatever it is you're thinking; whatever it is you're feeling even – now's the time to share.' He was leaning forward, watching her intently. ‘D'you want to have dinner with me?'

Anna stood up. ‘Not tonight.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Let's carry on walking.'

He followed her up the road beyond Crusoes that led onto the cliff top, and they carried on walking uphill towards the headland where the priory was.

They passed a group of school children sitting propped in the shade against the wall of the new public conveniences, eating chips and ice pops – using them as props to flirt with.

‘When we were children,' Anna said, ‘Bryan used to draw. He was a brilliant draughtsman. It's a damning testimony to the school he went to that they never picked up on it. After his mother died he used to draw in our garden – insects and stuff; mostly insects.'

They walked past the entrance to the priory and turned down Pier Road onto the Spanish Battery.

‘They really were brilliant – the drawings. I mean, he had a real talent,' Anna insisted, as if Laviolette was disputing this. ‘The day of Erwin's funeral, somebody posted a drawing through my door – of a butterfly.'

‘Bryan?' Laviolette said, looking straight at her. ‘It had to be.'

‘And since then?'

‘Nothing.' She met his gaze. ‘Nothing.'

‘He wanted you to know he was alive,' Laviolette stated, feeling the tension and aggression that had been building up, release, as he paused for a moment to watch a group of rowers from the Tynemouth Rowing Club launch an eight-man boat into the sea from the small bay on the south side of the priory. The rowers' silent collaboration gave a grace and coherence to the launch that made Laviolette feel calm to the extent of peaceful.

He could feel Anna beside him on the pavement, but she'd lost her relevance as he watched the departure of the rowers, wishing he was among them; one of the eight men. The desire was so strong that he felt like the one who'd been left behind once they'd gone.

Disorientated, he turned back to Anna.

‘Why didn't you tell me about the picture?'

‘It came the day of Erwin's funeral, and –'

‘And?'

‘I'm not convinced it's Bryan. It could be Martha.'

‘If you thought it was Martha, you would have told me sooner. Have you got the drawing still?'

Anna nodded.

‘Why don't you want anybody else knowing Bryan Deane's still alive?'

‘I don't know.'

‘How did he know you were at the Ridley Arms?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Where d'you think he is?'

‘I've got no idea.' This time she held his gaze. ‘I know how this works. The kayak's been washed up – there's been nothing new since –'

‘Apart from the drawing.'

‘The drawing might not have been him. Everybody presumes Bryan drowned – nobody's interested and they're not going to give you any more resources.'

‘So we're on our own.'

‘With what?'

‘The fact that Bryan Deane faked his own death – with the co-operation of his wife – because the life they've been living didn't work out and they need the life insurance payout to start over again.'

‘You're probably right.'

‘You know I'm right.'

‘Nobody cares.'

‘I care. You care – and Bryan Deane cares enough to jeopardise everything in order to let you and Martha know he's still alive, that's how much Bryan Deane cares.'

‘And why do you care so much?'

‘Because I'm tired of people lying,' Laviolette said before starting to walk again, taking the path that led down from the Battery onto the pier.

‘Ice cream?' he asked as they passed the van parked in the small car park on the lower slopes of the Battery.

Anna stared at him as if he'd said something profane then shook her head.

The pier at Tynemouth wasn't a resort pier; it was a long curving cement barricade with a small automated lighthouse on the end. It took a lot of battering from the sea, but renowned feet had walked its length – Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle – as well as those less renowned who came, regardless of age, because the sea didn't care who they flirted with, who they groped or what they shot up on.

Laviolette and Anna walked the pier in silence, the incoming tide wetting them with spray as it hit the man-made defence. They passed a couple heading back towards land, who they smiled at and exchanged greetings with. The only other people on the pier were two Russians from a ship docked at North Shields, who asked them to take their photograph – standing against the rusting railings surrounding the lighthouse at the pier end, their arms around each other.

When the Russians left, Anna and Laviolette sat down on the warm cement – their legs hanging over the side only metres above the churning water.

‘Why did you come back up north?'

‘My grandfather was dying.'

Laviolette nodded. ‘And?'

‘You really want to know?'

‘I really want to know.'

Anna breathed in deeply, watching the swell on the thick dark water beneath her feet. ‘Someone I was working with – I'd been working with him for two years on the same case – committed suicide. Afterwards, I started suffering from these attacks. I knew what they were – I've seen it happen to people I've been close to. I could be sitting in front of the computer and without warning I'd be overcome by . . .' she tried to find the right words, ‘this sense of imminent collapse. When this happened I knew I had to get somewhere where I could be alone – usually the toilets.' She saw herself in one of the sickly pink cubicles where she would either chew on her knuckles as she sobbed, hoping to stifle the sound or – when the attack was acute – find herself vomiting down the toilet. ‘It's like being in a permanent state of grief – with nothing to grieve over. The attacks didn't go unnoticed.'

‘You're too good at your job, aren't you?'

‘They didn't put it quite like that, but that's pretty much what it amounted to.'

‘And did you feel better, coming north – in spite of the cancer that brought you?'

Anna's lips had gone thin, in the way they did when she was concentrating. ‘I felt better until the morning I saw Bryan Deane for the first time in sixteen years. That's when I knew –' she broke off, seeing herself again sobbing behind the wheel of the Capri while watching a toddler play with a Doberman in the house opposite number nineteen Parkview, ‘that what was happening to me had been sixteen years in the making. Everything I'd purposefully walked out on; everything I thought I'd left behind had been secretly keeping pace with me all along, and I'd run out of storage space.'

Laviolette didn't say anything.

They watched the sun go down in silence, spreading a lazy line of orange along the surface of the sea.

‘I saw you once – you and Bryan. A long time ago.'

Anna, whose head had fallen unconsciously against his shoulder, pulled herself up straight. ‘Easter Saturday was the first time I ever saw you in my life.'

‘I said
I
saw
you
, I didn't say you saw me – you couldn't have been more than eighteen both of you. It was a Friday afternoon, and it must have been raining outside because you walked into the Clayton Arms soaked through.'

‘The Clayton Arms?'

‘Up at Bedlington station. Friday afternoon used to be strippers and that's how I know it was a Friday I saw you – because there were two girls on stage that day wearing nothing but their tits.'

‘What was I doing at the Clayton Arms?'

‘You came in with Bryan, and you were the only other girl there. You looked at the stage for a bit then you went running out.'

Laviolette didn't tell her the rest of it: how he'd run outside after her that afternoon, straight past Bryan Deane and into the rain; how he'd seen her in the distance, running away from them all.

‘How the hell d'you remember that? And h-h-how d'you know it was me?'

‘I recognised you as soon as I saw you Easter Saturday at the Deanes. The first time I see you, you're with Bryan Deane. The next time I see you, sixteen years later, you're looking for Bryan Deane. Only this time I'm the one coming in from the rain.'

‘Who said I was looking for him?'

‘Isn't that why you came north?' he said, getting awkwardly to his feet with the support of the railings round the lighthouse where the Russians had stood to have their photograph taken.

Anna didn't say anything – she was too preoccupied still by the memory of Bryan and her at the Clayton Arms.

‘Where d'you think he is?' Laviolette asked after a while.

‘I've got no idea.'

‘Close enough to wait for Martha after school.'

Laviolette looked down at his feet as a high wave colliding with the pier left a trail of spume over them. ‘You said – Easter Saturday – that all of us are involved one way or another,' Anna said.

‘The living and the dead.' He gave her a quick, shy smile. ‘Bobby Deane. Rachel Deane.'

The waves were getting higher and the pier was wet from sea spray with small rainbows bouncing off it where the sun still reached.

‘Rachel Deane was having an affair with my father – you knew that?'

‘Not until recently. Nan told me.'

‘People said that's why she killed herself – because she couldn't leave Bobby Deane and she couldn't leave my dad, and she had to leave one of them. The mathematics of staying with both of them was –'

‘Inappropriate,' Anna suggested softly.

‘Hellish,' Laviolette corrected her. ‘Bobby came to see us after Rachel died, I'll never forget that. He came round the back, straight through the door into the kitchen, drunk but not dead drunk. Dad had the radio in pieces on the bench – he was in the middle of trying to mend it – and when he turned round, the screwdriver in his hand still, his face just dropped. Bobby was huge – felt huge then anyway and dad was a lightweight. The thought of what Bobby had come to do to him terrified him, you could feel the fear coming off him and the violence coming off Bobby, and dad was sort of crumpling up before Bobby even got close.

‘I remember thinking, this is it, and feeling relieved. I also remember realising that dad was far more afraid of Bobby Deane than he'd ever been in love with Rachel Deane.'

‘How old were you?'

‘How old?' He stared at her for a moment, too lost in the memory to respond. ‘Nineteen? Twenty?' he said, seeing himself standing by the bench next to the dismembered radio, as if it was that Bobby Deane had really come for and he was meant to be guarding it. ‘Twenty,' he decided, staring at her but not really seeing her. ‘Just married, and new on the force, but it never occurred to me to do anything about Bobby Deane standing in our kitchen because right then all I was thinking was – what did Rachel see in him? And I'm not talking about Bobby.

‘So there I was thinking, this is it, then the next minute Bobby just flopped, pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down in it – lifeless – and started sobbing. He wasn't crying, he was sobbing. It was as if, somehow, we'd been his last hope and he'd been expecting to open our kitchen door and find Rachel in there with us, but she wasn't and when he saw she wasn't he finally gave up.

‘I'll never forget the sight of his hand curled on the table as he sat there motionless, sobbing. After a while – it seemed like hours, but it couldn't have been – he started wiping at his face, and he said to my dad, “Why did you give her a choice? Why didn't you just take her away from here? You should of just taken her away – she'd of been alright then.”

‘I can remember him saying it – I can remember him saying every single one of those words, at a loss.'

They stared at each other for a moment before Laviolette turned and started to walk away.

Anna followed, drawing alongside him again.

‘I knew then that Bobby Deane had said everything he'd ever have to say to my dad, which was why – when dad was murdered – I knew it wasn't Bobby Deane. He was taken in for questioning and when he realised they were holding Jamie as well, he tried to plead guilty.'

‘To protect his son,' Anna put in, aware that she'd become cold in the past ten minutes. The heat had gone out of the day and the air was cooling rapidly.

‘They thought about letting him frame himself for it, but he had too many alibis – even for them. So they went for Jamie instead.'

She thought about Jamie and Martha on Tynemouth Longsands earlier. ‘Jamie was inside for twenty years!' Anna shouted.

‘And guess who put him there?'

‘His alibi – Laura.'

‘Some alibi.'

A wave crashed over the pier then, soaking Laviolette's back and Anna's right hand side. The water was cold, running off her face.