The Missing Marriage (23 page)

‘How did you know Laura was his alibi?'

‘I didn't – until today. I met Jamie and Martha on Longsands earlier – just before I met you.'

‘So that's where they went.'

‘You were following them?'

Laviolette shook his head. ‘I tried to meet with Martha – after school. I saw her get into Jamie Deane's van.'

He carried on walking.

‘Where are you going?' she demanded.

‘Home.'

‘Where's home?'

He pointed to the headland rising above them where the pier joined the land. ‘On the Battery.'

He could see Coastguard Cottages, and Mrs Kelly's car parked outside. Harvey would be in the house, drawing one of the thousand cuboids he drew every day – that none of the line up of professionals who'd seen him could explain. It was enough for Mrs Kelly – who didn't need an explanation as to why Harvey drew cuboids all day long – to ensure that he had a constant supply of pens and paper and therein, Laviolette thought, lay the answer.

He was aware that he wanted to take Anna up to the house.

Anna was eroding his need for privacy.

She was doing it unconsciously and inadvertently, but she was doing it and he wasn't sure where this left him.

‘Are you going to invite me up?'

‘I already did. I invited you to dinner. You said no.'

He walked away and she watched as, in between waves, he got smaller.

A few more seconds passed before she broke into a run – along the pier through the breaking waves after him.

As they walked into number four Coastguard Cottages, Anna realised that she had no idea what to expect. She knew, from the conversation they'd just had, that Laviolette had married at twenty and that there was at least one child because she'd heard a child when they'd spoken on the phone. Which was why, when they entered the kitchen, she interpreted the scene in the way she did.

It wasn't until she was introduced to Mrs Kelly – rolling pastry on the bench next to the oven, flustered by the interruption and more shocked by Anna than Anna ever could have been by her – that she began to realise what Laviolette's life was.

Harvey was about six feet tall, in his early twenties, and sitting at the kitchen table with a box full of striped drinking straws and a sellotape dispenser. There were three identical 3-D cubes lined up in front of him and he gurgled, distracted, when he heard Laviolette mention his name. He didn't look up.

Anna thought back to the Easter Sunday when Laviolette had phoned. The child he'd been trying to feed while on the phone to her – the child she'd mistaken for a toddler – must have been Harvey.

Once Laviolette had established with Mrs Kelly – shy to the point of silence now in Anna's presence – that there would be enough steak and kidney pie to go round, he led Anna upstairs to the study at the top of the house.

‘How d'you manage?' she said, taking in the small box-like room crammed full of books and files that she guessed Laviolette spent most of his time in when at home. It smelt of carpet, sunlight, coffee and elastic bands.

‘Mrs Kelly.' He smiled flatly, preoccupied – trying to work out whether he'd made the right decision bringing Anna here; whether or not he wanted her here. ‘She had to have a knee arthroscopy this time last year and I paid for her to have it done privately so that she could be out in three days,' he heard himself saying automatically, still preoccupied.

Anna, about to sit down on the sofa, hesitated. ‘It's okay,' she said.

He looked at her startled.

‘I don't have to stay.'

‘It's fine,' he said, shaking his head. ‘I wanted to show you something.'

She sat down on the edge of the sofa as Laviolette got the tapes out from their usual place – aware that this was the first time he'd ever listened to them with anybody else; aware of Anna's eyes on him, and deciding against any sort of introduction.

‘Where's Harvey's mother?' she said, watching him.

Laviolette stopped and turned towards her, the tapes in his hands, staring at her as if she'd said something in a foreign language he used to speak and that he hadn't heard spoken since he was a child.

‘I don't know,' he said, still staring at her. ‘We separated

– a long time ago. Actually, it wasn't even that formal – it just got to a point when she was no longer with us.'

Anna knew, from the way he said it, that he hadn't tried looking for her, and that this was something – as he grew older – he'd come to regret. Not necessarily for his sake, but for her's.

‘I can't even remember when she left.'

‘What was her name?' Anna didn't know why she was asking – it was irrelevant, but for some reason she wanted to know.

He paused before answering. ‘Lily. It wasn't Harvey. I mean, Harvey was a shock and we were young, but it wasn't just Harvey. There was other stuff.' He paused again. ‘My father was brilliant with Harvey. I was closer to him the two years before he died than I ever was – because of how he was with Harvey. He was only two when dad died – he was there when he was killed.'

‘So Harvey knows,' Anna said, quietly.

Laviolette looked at her, realising this for the first time. ‘He does, doesn't he?'

Then he pressed ‘play' on the machine and the small room at the top of number four Coastguard Cottages was full of the sound of a child's voice – Laura Hamilton, age thirteen.

It was also the voice of Anna's own childhood; the voice that had chattered with her as they'd turned cardboard boxes and old curtains into ships with sails, the voice that had suggested they swapped leotards for the weekly tap and ballet classes they went to at Mrs Miller's Academy; the voice that had discussed in detail whether they should spend the ten pence they had between them on two sherbet dips or ten one penny sweets in Mo's shop. She remembered the way their hands smelt after a ride on the park's iron horse and how that last summer they went camping together, they'd practised kissing in the green tent at night so that they'd know how to do it when it came to the real thing.

Anna sat on the edge of Laviolette's sofa, neither of them looking at each other, thinking all these things and feeling a thick, ebbing sorrow because the child on the tape – her best friend, Laura Hamilton – had already forgotten these things. The two adult male voices aggressive, cajoling, tittering, were asking her how many times she'd had sex before with Jamie Deane. Where did they do it? Did her parents know? She was underage. It was illegal. Anna couldn't picture the interview room or the officers conducting the interview, all she could see was Laura – perched at the top of the flight of stairs inside number fifteen Parkview, her hair hanging over her face.

‘It happened that day – the day he locked me in the wash house – where Rachel Deane committed suicide,' she said to Laviolette, unaware until she spoke that the tape had stopped. Laura's voice was no longer filling the room.

Jamie and Laura had probably spent other days that summer doing the same thing, but somehow Anna knew it was that day – the day she'd gone round with the magnifying glass to number fifteen Parkview – that Roger Laviolette was murdered.

‘I went round to return something of Bryan's, but he wasn't there. Laura was though, and that shocked me. We weren't friends any more by then.'

Without saying anything, Laviolette slid one of the desk drawers open and pulled out a bottle of Nicaraguan rum, pouring them both a glass.

Anna sat absently tilting the amber liquid. ‘There was a dead deer in there, hanging upside down – its eyes staring.'

She drank the rum and held out her glass – it had a white banner painted on it with the words ‘Good Luck' in red.

‘Who let you out?'

‘Of where?'

‘The wash house.'

‘That's the only thing I can't remember.'

‘Jamie?'

‘It could have been. I don't remember.' She drank the second glass of rum. ‘Who gave you this case?'

‘The man who conducted that interview we just listened to. Superintendant Jim Cornish.'

She kept her eyes on him as he filled their glasses again. ‘You've got other tapes?'

‘I've got all the tapes.' He wondered if she knew Mary had been interviewed.

The Jamie Deane interview was as unbearable as always to listen to.

Halfway through Anna got up and turned off the machine. ‘He didn't do it, did he? Where was he interviewed?'

‘That wasn't an interview – it was an interrogation.' Laviolette paused. ‘Berwick Street.'

Anna thought he was going to add something to that, but he didn't. He carried on swinging lightly in his chair from side to side, staring at the spot on the sofa where she'd been sitting.

She knew about Berwick Street – whether you'd been there or not, everybody growing up on the Hartford Estate knew about Berwick Street.

‘You said they brought Bobby in?'

After listening to the Bobby tapes, they sat in silence.

Anna felt one of the waves of depression she often got after conducting interviews herself when the answers she got didn't collectively amount to a resolution. If Bobby Deane didn't kill Roger Laviolette – and Jamie Deane didn't – then who did?

Stretching, she got up slowly from the sofa and crossed the room to the desk where Laviolette was sitting. She stared at the tape machine for a moment before rewinding the Bobby Deane tape. She kept stopping it and pressing ‘play' until she got to the right spot.

Unsure what she was doing, Laviolette listened for about ten minutes before Anna pressed ‘stop' again.

‘There,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Listen.' She rewound it and pressed ‘play'. This time she let the tape run for five minutes before stopping it.

He could feel her watching him.

‘Did you hear it?'

He shook his head and she played the same five minutes again.

‘He stops claiming he's guilty.'

‘Yes, but before he changes his mind they stopped the tape.'

‘I can't hear it.'

She rewound it another three times. ‘You hear the cough?'

Laviolette nodded.

‘The dynamic of the interview changes after that cough. Somebody coughed to cover up the sound of the tape going off. What did they say to him when the tape stopped running?'

‘They must have been making a deal.'

Anna nodded, thinking. ‘Listen to the way he's speaking after the break. His tone –'

‘He's still lying,' Laviolette commented after they'd listened to the five minutes for the tenth time.

‘I agree. But he's lying in a different way.'

‘Different way – how?' Laviolette yawned, unaware until then of just how exhausted he was.

‘When people lie to protect themselves, it's different to when they lie to protect others. After the break in the tape, Bobby's lying to protect someone else – he knows who did it. He knows who killed your father.'

Laviolette thought about the last time he'd visited Bobby Deane in his bungalow on Armstrong Crescent. ‘Bobby Deane doesn't know his own name any more,' he said.

Mrs Kelly brought their supper upstairs on a tray. She didn't come into the study – she left it outside the door.

They ate in silence, and afterwards – with a bottle of wine drunk and onto rum again – found it easier to talk about things they would have found it hard to talk about sober; things they carried around with them every day; things that made them who they were, and that it was a relief to acknowledge.

When Laviolette asked her what she was doing that day in the Clayton Arms with Bryan Deane, it wasn't painful to remember or an effort to talk.

She settled back in the sofa – the square of sky visible through the skylight, dark now.

‘That day . . .' She shook her head. ‘I hadn't spoken to Bryan since I was thirteen. It was summer – the last summer. I was leaving in September for London, and Bryan had become nothing more than the boyfriend of the girl next door.' Anna laid her head on the sofa's armrest.

‘I was in the final stages of re-inventing myself that summer – nobody from nowhere. The accent had gone even then, before I left – eroded. I'd gone from running
back
home from school as fast as I could – to running
from
home to school as fast as I could. None of my friends were ever invited back to number nineteen Parkview.

‘Laura was working at Mo's sister's salon by then, and Bryan . . . I heard he was working as well, but nobody knew what it was exactly that he did. We hadn't spoken in years. I think it was only just this side of legal – was he collecting rents for somebody? I don't know. Put it this way, he acted like he'd lost his boundaries, like he was operating beyond the opinion of others. I never saw him with anyone apart from Laura at that time. He felt . . . contaminated in some way. I'm surprised he managed to keep himself clean – has he never had a record?'

‘Nothing,' Laviolette said.

‘He drove a car nobody in a hundred-mile radius could have afforded, and it's the car I remember because it was outside Laura's house that day and Bryan was sitting in it. He must have been waiting for her. I was walking back from Mo's and he asked if I wanted to go for a drive . . . after five years never saying a word to each other.'

‘You said yes.'

‘Without thinking. I didn't ask where we were going. I didn't say anything.'

Anna fell silent, remembering how the breeze – and Bryan's eyes – had felt on her face.

‘He felt much older than eighteen,' she said. ‘We drove into Tynemouth as the storm clouds rolled in, got some beer from an off licence on Front Street, an went down on the beach.'

‘Which beach?' Laviolette asked.

‘Longsands.' She hesitated. ‘There's no connection. We haven't tried to contact each other – not once – in sixteen years.'

‘What happened on Longsands?'

‘We talked – that's all. We talked about everything in the way people do maybe only once or twice in their lives because . . .' her eyes slid away from him, round the room and up to the skylight then back again, ‘those are the kinds of conversations that make or break lives.'

They were silent for a moment, aware of a faint ticking sound coming from somewhere in the room.

Laviolette guessed that it was one of the clocks in the repairs box. It must have started working again of its own accord. Distracted by the clock, he heard her say, ‘I've never really felt whole again since that afternoon. Can one afternoon do that to a person – break them in that way?'

Laviolette was contemplating her – aware that he was probably the only person she'd spoken to about that afternoon on Longsands.

‘Why did you never try to contact him afterwards?'

‘I don't know. He never tried to contact me either.' She fell silent again, already regretting haven spoken to Laviolette. It was uncharacteristic of her, and she wasn't that drunk. Lying along the sofa, she continued – silently – to track her way back into the memory of that afternoon.

The storm never broke, but the threat of it was forcing people off the beach, and the beach was emptying – something they only noticed when they finally stopped talking and looked around them.

A few minutes later, they got to their feet and, taking hold of each other's hands, walked down to the water.