The Missing Marriage (27 page)

‘So you've got no idea when would be a good time to catch your neighbour?' he said, startling the woman from her crouching position on the kitchen floor where she'd been looking for an empty water bottle in the cupboard under the sink.

She stood up. ‘Not really, no.'

‘Is he around in the evenings?' Laviolette persisted.

‘I'm sorry – I really have no idea,' she said, exasperated.

They watched each other for a moment then Laviolette swung away from her with a smile, taking in the room behind him while she poured him a glass of water from the tap.

‘I thought I had a spare bottle, but I couldn't find one.'

She gave the benches a quick wipe with a yellow cloth while he drank the water, drifting over to the fridge where there were a couple of drawings held up by alphabet magnets.

They were life drawings – in pen and ink – of a woman lying on her back with one leg hooked up and an arm flung over her head. Laviolette looked from the drawings to the woman cleaning the benches.

‘That's you?' he asked.

She nodded.

They're good,' he said, adding, ‘Anna – come and take a look. You don't mind?' he said to the woman.

She shook her head.

‘Somebody gave you these?' Laviolette asked, watching Anna, who was staring thoughtfully at the drawings.

‘Somebody in the class. I do four classes a week – it's good money,' she said quietly then, in the same quiet voice – before he had a chance to ask any more questions – she said, ‘what did you say your name was?'

‘I didn't. Detective Inspector Laviolette.' He didn't introduce Anna. ‘If you see Mr Bowen, will you tell him I need to speak to him?'

She nodded, moving past them towards the front door.

After taking one last look around the lounge diner, he followed her.

There were no tell-tale signs of male occupancy in the flat – the blond man and purple haired Pole weren't a couple, of that he was sure; so either she was cheating on someone, or he was cheating on someone, or they were both cheating on someone.

When they got back to the car Anna said, ‘She was telling the truth,' echoing Laviolette's earlier sentiment.

Laviolette nodded. ‘I agree. So why don't I believe her?' He stared up at the balcony, whose doors were open – the curtains blowing still. ‘What were you thinking – when you were looking at the drawings?'

‘That they could be Bryan's.'

‘And?'

‘They could be Bryan's.'

‘You think it's worth checking to see if Tom Bowen's enrolled in any life drawing classes?'

Anna nodded, but she wasn't thinking about the drawings any more – she was thinking about the man she'd caught a glimpse of, disappearing into the bedroom inside flat twenty-three. He'd looked at her – only for a split second – but he'd definitely looked, and she'd felt the look across the back of her shoulders.

‘What are you thinking?' Laviolette asked, watching her.

She turned to face him. ‘Nothing.'

The viewing at number two Marine Drive had finished and Greg was just leaving when Laura pulled up on the drive. The strain of the day was taking its toll, and she felt as if she'd been wearing herself for too long. For the first time since reporting Bryan missing on Easter Saturday she wanted the one thing that up until then she'd been most afraid of: to be alone.

She turned off the engine and stared at the dashboard of the Lexus she'd insisted on, aware of a sudden, overwhelming sadness. She felt sadder than she'd ever felt in her life before and with the sadness came a sense of lifelessness.

There was a knocking sound on the car window and, looking round, she found Bryan's former colleague, Greg, smiling in at her.

Reluctantly she wound down the window. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘There was a viewing,' he said, uncertain. ‘I spoke to the receptionist at the salon – told her to tell you.'

Laura continued to stare at him without speaking.

Then without warning, she hooked her hands under the bottom of the steering wheel and, shoulders shaking, started to cry.

Greg stood looking awkwardly around him. He couldn't just leave her like this, alone in the car, crying. Her hair was hanging forward, concealing her face, and the ends of it were trembling. Her knees were pressed together and the fabric of her trousers had gone dark in the places where tears had fallen.

‘Come on,' he said, made suddenly decisive by a pity he felt in his lower abdomen. ‘Let's get you indoors.'

Numb, she let him pull her gently out of the car.

‘My handbag –'

‘I've got your handbag,' he said, steering her towards the front porch. He put the keys he'd used for the viewing into the lock and opened the door.

Without another word, she walked down the hallway and disappeared into the lounge.

After a moment's hesitation, he shut the front door behind him and followed her.

She was lying in the corner of one of the sofas, her head flung back, staring at the pelmets that framed the heavy curtains.

At a loss, but unable to leave, he hung in the centre of the room he'd stood in barely fifteen minutes ago pointing out the solid oak floor and fireplace to a Mr and Mrs Reddington.

‘I went to the mortuary this morning – a body was washed up in Cullercoats Bay and the police wanted me to identify it.'

‘Shit, Laura – I had no idea,' Greg mumbled – running a hand through his hair – helpless. He didn't have the words or emotional palette to deal with this, but Laura's collarbone along with most of the skin around it – revealed to him because of the way her shirt had fallen open at the neck – had gone red after the outburst of tears in the car, and he couldn't take his eyes off it.

‘I'm so tired,' she said, more to herself than Greg, shutting her eyes and letting her head fall even further back, her throat long.

For some reason, as soon as her eyes shut, Greg felt a sense of entitlement he'd never felt before. It was as if eight years of longing combined with eight years of dissatisfaction with his own lot in life came suddenly to a head in a moment of stillness that contained all possibilities.

Why not?

Laura remained motionless on the sofa with her eyes shut, and he continued to watch her – intently now.

Neither of them made a sound.

Did she know he was watching her?

There was something abysmal about all of this that didn't suit Greg – or the neutral tones of the décor for that matter – but it was too late now.

Laura had become so still that he wondered if she'd actually fallen asleep, and felt a brief sense of relief that vanished immediately as she arched her neck even further back before dropping her head to one side and opening her eyes to observe him.

Without thinking, he crossed the room, knocking his left knee on the corner of the coffee table as, crouching he pulled her roughly off the sofa and onto the floor. When she didn't resist or even react, he felt a brief anger – absurdly – towards his wife, Patsy, as if she had failed to protect him from this.

Then grunting and later whining, he laid bare the bones of an ultimately banal fantasy he'd nurtured for eight years – while still wearing his suit. He didn't even take his shoes off. It took three meaningless minutes and yet its horrible intimacy would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Their failure to exchange a single word or look afterwards.

The sight of Laura laid out on the lounge carpet.

His clumsy attempt to wash himself at the sink in the downstairs bathroom.

The rush to leave.

The vague sense of having committed a crime, but against whom, he couldn't have said.

Hearing crying from the other end of the hallway and knowing he wasn't going to do anything about it.

Knocking over the vase of dried flowers by the front door then the front door opening without him having to touch it.

Thinking he was about to see Bryan walk through the front door only to be confronted by someone who looked remarkably like him, but whose neck was covered in a web of tattoos . . .

Greg ran.

He got into his car, locked the doors then started the engine, his hands shaking as he drove out of Marine Drive.

Ever since that first time, there had been a complicit understanding between them that Jamie would pick Martha up from school. The arrangement gave his days a shape he hadn't been able to give them himself after twenty years inside.

When he first started work, he took whatever shifts they gave him, but after meeting Martha he always requested the six to two so that he could pick her up from school. His request for specific shifts was something Janet, the counsellor, was told about, and when she brought it up in one of their meetings and he said that an old friend of his needed someone to pick her kid up from school, Janet looked pleased. When she asked how old the child was and Jamie said fifteen, she didn't look so pleased. He tried to think of something to say that would make her look pleased again, but became so agitated, he knew the only favour he could do himself was to remain silent.

Since Martha, he woke up in the morning without the paranoid feeling of invisibility.

He was real.

He was alive.

He knew the names of all her teachers, and who took her for which subjects; the teachers she liked, and those she hated.

He knew her timetable – and that on Tuesdays when he picked her up, her hair would be wet because Tuesday afternoons she had swimming squad.

Laura had no idea any of this was happening.

He'd never once anticipated Martha when he was inside, and now he couldn't imagine having any sort of life without her.

She was waiting for him in the usual place – on the low wall circling the chestnut tree where she was convinced she'd seen Bryan that time.

She smiled when she saw him – she always smiled – and did her funny running shuffle towards the van, pulling her various bags after her.

‘What are these?' she said as she got in, picking up the brochures on her seat.

He flashed her a smile as she pulled her hair back over her shoulders and started to flick through them.

‘You said you wanted to go to Norway.'

‘When?' she demanded, excited.

‘I don't know yet. I need to see about money and . . . stuff.' They drove slowly towards Seaton Sluice, Martha commenting on the brochures, reading bits out loud. Then she asked him about his day, and John – who he worked with. He'd once told her that John had an artificial limb, and after that she always wanted to know about John. Sometimes he told her about things that had really happened; sometimes he just made stuff up. It didn't really matter as long as he made her laugh – he loved making her laugh.

Then there were the dark days when he lost sight of himself; the days he couldn't face that he spent in his room sitting on the floor with the curtains drawn. On those days he had to set the alarm to remind himself to pick her up from school. He'd be silent and unable to talk and she'd know not to try to speak to him.

Tonight as they turned into Marine Drive – he always drove her to the front door and waited until she was inside – she slipped the brochures into the pocket in the door and was about to say something when she noticed Laura's car parked on the drive alongside another unfamiliar one.

‘Mum's home,' she said flatly, her eyes skirting over the Lexus. The presence of the Lexus was strange in itself – Laura was never home at this time.

Martha looked at him, scared. ‘Are you coming in?'

Jamie nodded as she picked up her bags, opened the van door and slid uncertainly to the pavement.

What happened next, happened fast, and even though everything around her looked the same as it always did, nothing felt right. She put her keys in the lock, but it was already being pulled open from the inside and there was a man standing in front of her she recognised, and the man was looking at her but not really seeing her. Then Jamie pushed past her and the man just ran out of the house like he was running away from something.

Without moving from the spot, she turned and watched him bundle himself into his car while trying to remember his name. Greg – the name came to her as his car reversed off the drive.

Indoors there were muffled, indistinct sounds coming from the other end of the hallway, which suddenly seemed much further away. She called out, ‘Jamie!', and he appeared a few seconds later, framed in the lounge doorway.

‘It's okay,' he said, and even though his face didn't look as if it was okay, she let herself be pushed up the stairs by him and into her room because instinct told her she didn't want to see what he'd seen.

‘What's happening?'

‘Nothing's happened – just stay there.'

She nodded and sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, holding her school bags still as images of Norwegian fjords from the brochures she'd been reading in the van on the way home slipped through her mind.

Jamie stood staring down at Laura, who was lying on her side with her trousers round her ankles, her arms and legs useless looking, her head turned to one side. For a moment he felt nothing then with a rush that was almost audible, everything caught up with him and he let go suddenly of something he'd been holding onto for twenty years. In that instant he felt such an overwhelming mixture of fury and pity towards the woman lying at his feet, who had once been Laura Hamilton, that he could have killed her.

Checking the hallway behind him to make sure Martha wasn't there – it was Martha now, he realised, that he needed to protect at all costs – he knelt down awkwardly beside her as she rolled onto her back and stared up at him, her face older, swollen and unreadable.

She wasn't shocked at finding him kneeling beside her, and made no attempt to help as he pulled up her pants and trousers.

‘You're her mother,' he hissed angrily.

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘Martha. Martha can't see you like this.'

‘Martha?' Laura started to raise herself on her elbows, her head swaying, but Jamie picked her up suddenly, balancing her momentarily on one knee before standing up, the muscles in his neck thick with the effort.

She hung onto him because there was nobody else to hang onto.

‘I feel sick.'

‘You're drunk.'

‘I'm always drunk.'

‘Who was he?'

‘Greg. He's called Greg.'

‘Who's Greg?'

She shook her head, clinging onto him as he carried her upstairs. ‘It was horrible –'

He carried her into the en-suite and told her to get undressed.

She stumbled obediently out of her clothes and let herself be pushed into the shower.

Jamie sat on the edge of the bath as steam started to fill the bathroom and Laura disappeared into it.

Pulling a large white towel off the rail, he stood up and opened the shower cubicle doors.

She was propped in the corner, her head against the tiles and her eyes shut, water from the shower streaming over the left hand side of her body. He didn't know if she was crying or sleeping. She was beautiful, but the woman's body didn't make him feel powerless in the way the girl's had – not because the skin was different or the shape was different but because the innocence which had been her glory had forsaken her.

She came to, sliding her head round on the tiles and peering at him through the jets of water with panda eyes where her eye make-up had run. Leaving the shower running, she stepped out into the towel, let herself be wrapped up in it then led into the bedroom where she stood shivering as he pulled down the blind.

Laura continued to stand there as he rubbed her body and hair roughly with the towel then, holding up the duvet, motioned for her to get in. She lay in bed staring at the radio clock whose red digits told her it was 17:57, but this didn't really signify much apart from marking the twenty minutes that had passed since Jamie picked her up from the lounge carpet.

They looked at each other carefully then looked away.

‘You should sleep,' he mumbled.

She turned onto her back for a moment before sitting up and pulling the duvet around her, her hair sticking to her shoulders in thick, wet strands.

He cast his eyes quickly round the room, looking for something he might recognise – other than his brother's wife – but there was nothing.

His eyes came to rest heavily on her again.

‘Are you going to kill me?' she asked in a small, flat voice. Jamie laughed. ‘If I was going to kill you I'd of done it by now. No,' he said, slowly shaking his head as if it was too much of a burden for his body to carry. ‘Twenty years, Laura,' he exploded suddenly, the veins on his neck standing up as if those twenty years had come rushing in to choke him. ‘And you forgot all about me.'

‘I didn't forget – I put you out of my mind. When you're thirteen, twenty years is forever and thirty-three is never meant to happen.'