The Missing Marriage (28 page)

‘But it does happen, and here we are.'

Laura sat rigid not daring to move. ‘I was thirteen, Jamie,' she whispered.

‘And because you never came to visit me – because I never laid eyes on you once in those twenty years, you never grew up. You stayed thirteen, and you stayed with me. You've been wearing that pair of red shorts and that yellow blouse you wore that afternoon for twenty years. I've been in that afternoon for twenty years because you never came to see me . . . you never came to tell me that you'd grown up.

‘No matter where they put me, it was always the same – as soon as it was lights out, I could hear Iron Maiden playing, and the crackle of the posters on the wall because of the breeze coming in through the window catching at them. I spent every night beneath the Paddington Bear duvet cover my mum never got round to replacing, and that none of us thought to after she died.' He stared at her as he walked slowly across the room and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I've been smelling you on me for twenty years.'

‘I was frightened. I was so frightened of you.'

‘I'd never of hurt you, Laura. I never hurt you, did I? Did I?' he insisted.

‘I don't know any more,' she said tearful and confused, ‘I was just so frightened. All the sex stuff . . . I didn't want anybody knowing about that. I was terrified of mum and dad finding out and when the police interviewed me they told me what you'd said about us – what we were doing that afternoon. They said I'd have to stand up in front of all those people and tell them what we were doing, and I couldn't do that Jamie. I couldn't do it. I was a child.'

Jamie sat rubbing at the duvet cover, trying to understand the implications of this. ‘We were both children.'

‘I didn't know what was going on; I didn't know what I was saying.'

‘But you said enough –' He sat up and stared straight at her.

‘I just wanted the police gone. I wanted you gone – the whole afternoon gone,' she whispered.

‘But you kept coming round to the house that summer.'

‘Bryan,' she said helplessly, lifting the right hand up in the air then letting it fall back to the duvet again. ‘I was forever hoping to see Bryan, but he was never there. It was hopeless.'

He looked at her, amazed. ‘So Bryan was there – even then?'

She nodded slowly at him, her eyes expecting him to understand.

‘I thought he came after, but he was there before me? So we never had that afternoon? We never even had that?'

‘It was easier to pretend it never happened.'

‘I used to hold onto the memory of you so tightly I thought you must be getting short of breath out here. Twenty years,' he added in disbelief. ‘Twenty years of pretending you weren't in my bedroom with me that afternoon? Twenty years of pretending I never took those red shorts and yellow blouse off you? You lied to yourself.'

Watching him, Laura felt a horrible sort of wonder take hold of her as she finally realised. ‘You were in love with me that much?'

‘And you lied to the police,' Jamie carried on, ignoring her now.

An impatience she couldn't risk flickered across her eyes. ‘Stop it. Stop saying that,' she demanded, quietly.

‘They knew you were lying. You knew you were lying. Who was it? You know, don't you?'

Neither of them had seen Martha, standing in the bedroom doorway.

‘Stop it!' Laura shouted, putting her hands out and holding onto his arms, knowing the gesture wouldn't stop him.

Jamie stared at her. ‘You know who it was, don't you?'

Then he realised that he knew as well – that he'd known all along.

Laura saw him realise. ‘It doesn't matter any more,' she shouted, scared. ‘They found Bryan.'

‘Who found him?'

‘He drowned – I identified him this morning.'

‘She's lying,' Martha said in a clear voice from the doorway as Jamie, who hadn't realised she was in the room until then, saw the reflection of her in the doorway.

‘She's lying,' Martha said again.

She'd changed out of her school uniform into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and her hair was loose round her shoulders.

He looked from the woman in the bed to the girl in the doorway – then himself, in the mirror.

For a moment the woman and girl became one and the same person before separating again, and he made his choice. He never wanted to do anything that would compromise the trust of the girl standing in the doorway whose reflection he couldn't take his eyes off because her trust in him was
his
glory.

‘I saw him,' Laura was saying loudly. ‘It was him.'

But Jamie wasn't listening as he stood up to take hold of Martha, who was running across the room towards him. He saw himself, in the mirror, with his arms wrapped round her, buried under the hair that had filled his dreams for twenty years. Only Martha was real. He was holding onto somebody who was real.

Jamie had gone. It was 3:00 a.m. and Laura was dreaming. She was in the small, tiled airless room she'd been in that morning, and the drowned body was on the table in front of her. She was just about to speak to someone who was in the room – someone she couldn't see, but who she knew was standing just behind her; whose presence she felt – when a shiver passed through the bloated, discoloured remains in front of her. She didn't see the body shiver, she felt it – in the same way she felt the presence of the person standing behind her, but just as she was about to turn to them and ask if they'd felt it too, she became aware that the other person had gone. She was alone in the room with the body and the body was slipping sideways off the table it had been lying on and attempting to half slither, half crawl across the tiled floor towards her – something amphibian that should never have been brought up out of the water, and that was now attempting to get back, taking her with it. She could hear it slapping against the tiles then the next minute it went dark and the creature disappeared – there was only the sound of it. Then the sound stopped and the lights came back on. She kept checking her feet and legs half expecting to see the creature grasping wetly at her, but there was nothing on the floor. Instead, she felt the presence of the other person behind her again – the same presence she'd felt before.

It was 3:00 a.m., and it was all still here Bryan thought, using keys he hadn't used in months to let himself into his home. He walked into the kitchen and peered through the patio doors at the garden. It had been here all along.

Up until that morning – when Laura told him about the body she'd identified – returning to life as Bryan Deane remained a possibility. If Bryan Deane was officially dead, that was no longer an option. He'd had the idea, this afternoon, of walking into the nearest police station and announcing that he believed himself to be a missing person. It was the third time he'd almost turned himself in – the first time was only weeks after his disappearance when he was living rough up near Rothbury, and the second time was after seeing Martha outside school, which had broken his heart.

He'd gone to Martha's room first and, resting his head against the doorframe, contemplated his daughter while trying to overcome an urge to wake her so that he could feel her eyes on him and watch her face when she saw him. He remembered her sleepwalking as a child between the ages of nine and twelve – something they'd never found an explanation for – and how he'd followed her eerily slow moving, unconscious figure through the early morning hours half expecting her to lead him straight out of this world.

Then he saw the photograph propped against the window – the one she'd taken of him in Cephalonia – and the candle burning beside it, and for the first time began to have some real sense of the magnitude of what it was they'd done.

He'd come to warn them – wake them.

If he woke them now, they could all leave together, and yet here he was creeping about the house, terrified of doing precisely what it was he'd come to do.

Here he was standing over his wife, in their bedroom, watching as she turned her head on her pillow. She was dreaming; had always been a heavy dreamer – he'd forgotten that and, standing motionless beside the bed he used to sleep in, in the bedroom he used to fall asleep in every night and wake up in every morning, he felt a prick of tenderness towards her he hadn't felt for years. Crouching down until his face was on a level with her, he traced over the lines and shades of her unconscious face, which had a softness to it he never saw when she was awake.

A softness that enabled him to glimpse the girl he'd turned to when there was no-one else left to turn to – the girl he'd abandoned himself to before marriage – before the rest of their lives. Things went wrong after that – things they never thought about let alone spoke about because there was never time, and over time it became easier to just carry on. So that's what they did because that's what people do . . . they carry on and on and on.

There were moments over the years whose insignificance had an eerie vastness to them, when – standing in a supermarket queue or drying his hands in some public toilet somewhere or filling the car at a petrol station while watching the digits on the screen flicker and lose meaning – he recognised what was going on. He had two lives inside him – the one he was living and the one he could have lived, but wasn't that the same for everyone? How did that help and what on earth was he meant to do about it?

Then there were the debts, which had worked like a corrosive on the building that was their marriage – a building which had somehow managed to stay up despite the absence of any blueprint; a building which, throughout the years, Laura had been constantly adding rooms to in order to ensure that he never found his way out.

A better man could have loved her for that alone.

He stood up, pausing as his knees cracked loudly and looking around him at the outlines of familiar furniture in the light coming under the bedroom door from the hallway. Everything was the same as it had always been – the only thing that had changed was that he was missing from it.

He caught sight of himself then in the mirrors on the wardrobe doors and wondered who that man was standing in his bedroom – the blond hair shining strangely in the light from the hallway.

He remained in the doorway a minute more before turning away and walking back downstairs.

He left number two Marine Drive, and the Duneside development, crossing the road and walking past the play park and into the dunes, lying on his stomach in the damp sand and grass. He could just make out the candle burning in Martha's bedroom window, and a few seconds later the candle reached the end of its burning time and flickered out. He rolled over onto his back, staring up at the threads of cloud moving fast across the night sky – and the stars, which Martha once told him had already died by the time they came to lay eyes on them.

He'd made up his mind.

Laviolette was in his pyjamas still when Mrs Kelly arrived that morning. She ran her eyes over him – surprised then concerned – but didn't say anything. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, aimless, watching her get Harvey's breakfast together while chatting nervously to Harvey who was drawing cubes with a neon marker at the kitchen table. She was nervous because Laviolette was watching and making an effort to understand the scene so that he could find some part to play in it.

Once Mrs Kelly had handed him his mug of coffee, he gave up and went back upstairs to his study where he phoned DC Wade to say he'd be in late. He didn't give a reason and, despite the hesitation in her voice, she didn't ask for one. Afterwards, he sat blowing on his coffee and contemplating his downfall – something he found curiously satisfying; cathartic, even.

He wasn't surprised that such an inauspicious career made up of seemingly insignificant incidents – failure to take a bribe here, failure to tamper with evidence there, failure to intimidate a witness here, failure to get blood on his fists in a dark room there – should culminate in this moment because a fact he'd come to realise over the years was that the more trustworthy he became the less likely those he worked for were to actually trust him.

Given his case record, they had to give him Detective Inspector, but they made it clear at the time that he'd reached his ceiling.

The way he'd handled the Bryan Deane case – the fact he'd been given it at all – had been pivotal, and it had been clear after yesterday's meeting with Jim Cornish that someone somewhere had decided his moment had come.

He sat in his old office chair, gently swinging it from side to side while starting to idly scrawl a frame round the bits of sellotape stuck to the surface of the desk – with a biro advertising a local insurance company. He thought about the day his father died – how he'd got the call and how he'd gone home to find Jim Cornish standing in the burnt out kitchen, and how his standing there had shocked and infuriated Laviolette almost more than what had happened.

The fire brigade was still there cleaning up when he arrived.

The smells of his childhood had vanished under the smell of smoke, burnt MDF, burnt lino, burnt vinyl and burnt flesh – his father's remains were under sheeting on the floor.

There were people everywhere, but wherever he turned the only face he saw was Jim Cornish's.

Turning away from him, Laviolette saw – through the door leading to the garden – Harvey's blue buggy tipped on its side.

‘Harvey?' he said, to nobody in particular, feeling sick.

‘Ambulance took him to hospital – burns unit,' Jim Cornish added, shaking his head.

‘It's not serious,' another officer put in. ‘He's fine – it's just routine. I can drive you there.' He swung, uncertain, towards Jim.

‘What happened here?' Laviolette said at last. ‘Who did this?'

‘It could have been anyone,' Jim said, fixed on Laviolette now, ‘I mean – given the state of things round here. The tensions –'

‘The tensions,' Laviolette repeated stupidly.

‘Everyone knows you've got two wages coming in here – and what with you in uniform.'

‘Dad's a safety engineer,' Laviolette said. ‘He's not NUM, he's NACODS. The National Union of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers decided not to strike.'

He remembered his father telling him, explaining patiently that if maintenance below ground wasn't kept up geological conditions would deteriorate to a state that would make it impossible for the pits to re-open. Going on strike would work against the cause.

Jim Cornish closed his mouth and puffed out his cheeks and didn't say anything – as if Laviolette wasn't getting the point.

A corner of the sheet covering Roger Laviolette's charred remains was caught under the toe of his boot.

‘A neighbour says she saw a boy come in the back door here this afternoon, and we think we've got a match – to the description.'

‘Who?'

‘Jamie Deane.'

‘Jamie Deane?' Laviolette repeated in the same stupid way as before.

Everybody standing in the burnt-out kitchen knew who the Deanes were, and everybody knew about Rachel Deane and his father. He could tell from the other officer's face that Jim Cornish wasn't meant to tell him about the neighbour's allegation, but it was too late now.

Laviolette knew that if Bobby had got to Jamie first, he would have told him to say he was with him that afternoon, but Bobby didn't get there first.

Jim Cornish took Jamie Deane to Berwick Street station and Jamie told him the truth – that he'd spent the afternoon with Laura Hamilton; he could smell her still on his skin, crouched in the corner of the room with his arms wrapped round his head.

Laviolette was driven to the hospital to see Harvey, who they were keeping in overnight for observation. Everything had been choreographed to perfection. After the hospital, he was driven in the same car straight to Berwick Street station – in silence, with nothing to distract him from the image of Harvey lying curled in his hospital cot clutching the Sooty puppet he always slept with, the side of his face covered in a dressing from where he'd fallen against something or been pushed – nobody was clear about this.

Jamie Deane was lying in the same position as Harvey when Laviolette got to the station – only Jamie Deane was sandwiched between a large mattress and a brick wall in a dark room, and the team looking after him was headed by Jim Cornish.

The boy was all smashed up and Laviolette knew that he'd been brought to Berwick Street to smash him up some more; that it was permissible – expected of him, even. And that Jim Cornish desired this particularly.

On his way to the cells past the badly painted blue walls and dusty pot plants living out suspended life sentences, he passed Laura Hamilton and her parents – he didn't know then who she was, all he saw was a girl of about thirteen with long blonde hair, supported on either side by her parents – all three of them looking terrified.

‘It's him,' Jim Cornish said, when Laviolette walked into the room, scraping his hair back into position. ‘He just lost his only alibi.'

The face that peered up at Laviolette from behind the mattress had long ago stopped trying to differentiate between friend and foe, and was now working on the premise that anybody who walked into that room was foe.

Fifteen looked smaller than it sounded – especially lying crumpled behind a stained mattress on the floor.

The face was pale and discoloured.

It didn't look like a face that could have done what it was meant to have done to his father, but at that moment Jamie flinched and Laviolette felt a sudden charge of exhilaration – the sort he'd often seen on other men's faces during the Strike, whatever side they were on.

He'd never seen anyone flinch from him before, and it gave him such a rush that he finally let go of the parts of an upside down world he was still valiantly trying to hold onto.

It got to the point where Jamie Deane's body was no longer moving of its own accord, but only in response to his blows, and nothing had ever felt so good.

At some point Bobby Deane arrived at the station with a group of men – there were twelve of them altogether. Laviolette heard them as a distant roar, but had a sudden, clear picture of Bobby Deane in a corridor out there somewhere while only metres away, his son . . .

He looked down then at Jamie Deane – a long way down by his feet as if he was seeing him now for the first time, and seeing him, he was violently sick over the mattress lying on the floor that he'd asked Wilkins to take away.

Laviolette looked down at his desk in the study at four Coastguard Cottages – surprised to see that he'd scribbled a sequence of numbers, and even more surprised when he recognised them as his mother's Co-Op account number. The number he used to give the cashier when he was sent out for the groceries.

He was still staring at the numbers when his phone rang five minutes later.

It was Yvonne.

‘They've got a problem,' she said, toneless. ‘I ran a check on all missing persons –'

‘And?'

‘A couple of months ago, a girl called Alison Marsh had an argument with her boyfriend. He walked out, and she didn't hear from him so left it. After a while, she started leaving messages, which he never returned. She cried herself to sleep every night for weeks –'

‘You just made that up,' Laviolette interrupted her.

‘Yeah,' Yvonne agreed, ‘I just made that up. But she did start phoning his friends only they reckoned they hadn't seen him either. Alison thought they were lying – covering for him – and was on the verge of dying of a broken heart when the boyfriend's mother phoned asking if Alison had seen Brett, because she hadn't heard anything from him in weeks. Alarm bells started ringing then, and a couple of days later Alison and Brett's mother filed a Missing Persons with Newcastle police. Friends and family have heard nothing since then.

‘Tell me about Brett,' Laviolette said, his eyes fixed still on the numbers he'd scrawled into the desk.

‘He shouldn't have argued with his girlfriend.'

‘Something else.'

‘Male – Caucasian – thirty-three years old on his last birthday.' Yvonne paused. ‘You're smiling.'

‘Did Brett have any defining features?'

‘Defining as in features that would clarify, beyond a doubt, that there was no way Brett could be mistaken for Bryan Deane – or vice versa?'

‘Yeah, those kind of defining features.'

‘He had a moth – not a butterfly, a moth, Alison was particular about that – tattooed on his left ankle over the Achilles tendon. Laviolette? If you're going to do what I think you're going to do –'

‘Yvonne,' he said, ‘can you still remember your mother's Co-Op account number?'

She responded, without hesitation, ‘Five-one-six-two-five.'

Then the line went dead.

Bull & Dunnings offices – where Alison Marsh worked – were in a moderately sized building of steel and blue glass that already looked outdated, on a side street behind the Laing Art Gallery. On the rare occasions that he found himself in Newcastle with time to spare, Laviolette always did one of three things – went to the Hancock Museum, took a walk down Grey Street to the Quayside or went to see the Winslow Homer paintings at the Laing. There used to be a Mexican restaurant nearby that he ate at regularly with a social worker he dated seriously in his early thirties, but the social worker and Mexican restaurant had since disappeared.

A young woman with a pair of scissors in her hands was on reception, behind an elaborate flower display. When he got close enough to ask for Alison Marsh and explain that he worked for Northumbria Police, he saw that the woman was around eight-months pregnant and that she was cutting out a frieze of teddy bears – presumably destined for a nursery wall.

She didn't ask to see his badge and, after watching him for a while from under her fringe, asked if he wanted something to drink.

He shook his head, smiling, and continued to shuffle restlessly round the shabby lobby waiting for Alison Marsh to appear.

Behind the security door to the left of reception, Alison left the safety of her carpet-lined booth decorated with reminders scribbled on neon post-it notes, and tokens from a life more personal – and went into the lobby where Laviolette was waiting for her.

They shook hands and Alison's eyes, which looked scared, remained fixed on him as he introduced himself and asked to speak to her in private.

‘It's bad news,' the pleasant dependable-looking girl who was Alison Marsh stated, quietly, turning to the receptionist. ‘Lindsay, can you book meeting room three for the next . . .' she turned back to Laviolette, ‘thirty minutes?'

‘We won't need thirty minutes.'

‘I might.'

‘It's booked,' Lindsay announced.

Laviolette could tell from the way she walked through the maze of hollow corridors lined with old black and white prints of Newcastle landmarks that she was fairly certain why he'd come.

‘What d'you do?' he asked her.

‘I'm a conveyancer. I work with a team of conveyancers,' she added, unnecessarily, speaking in the way Laviolette was used to hearing people speak when they were in shock.

‘This is about Brett,' she said, standing just inside the door to meeting room three, holding the handle still.

‘I'm afraid so.'

She sat down at the long beige table with a tray of glasses in the middle and a plastic folder someone somewhere was probably looking for. She sat turned slightly away from him, her left hand on the table, her right in her lap, and started to cry.

‘D'you mind getting me something for my face?' she said after a while, unevenly.

He left the room, found a ladies toilet, knocked loudly on the door, and walked in past a woman doing her make-up who watched him in the mirror, outraged, as he disappeared into a cubicle and emerged with a roll of toilet paper.

Although she was in exactly the same position he'd left her in, Alison was no longer crying when he got back to meeting room three – she was sitting very still, and the room felt emptier than if there was nobody there at all. This moment had changed her forever, and Laviolette was tired of changing people, he realised.

She turned to him, looking to him for guidance because she had no experience of moments like these. He could tell, from her face, that she already felt marked – set apart. The usual rapid, random thoughts ran through his head, prompted by a curiosity that had remained intact, unlike a lot of officers who'd been on the force as long as he had. Was it Brett who'd bought her the necklace she was wearing? What time did she set her alarm for in the morning?

‘This isn't over yet, is it?' she said, already sounding a little less lost.