The Missing Marriage (29 page)

Laviolette shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not – I need you to come with me.'

‘Now?'

She got unsteadily to her feet and allowed him to take hold of her left elbow, which he could feel through the fabric of her shirt. They went back into the corridor where she looked around her, bewildered, as if the layout of the building she'd worked in for eight years had been reconfigured while they were inside meeting room three. The familiarity had been taken out of her world and now she was looking at him as if he was the only thing she recognised.

‘Where are we going?'

‘I'm sorry, but we need you to identify Brett for us. You might want to pick up your things – tell someone you're going.'

She stared at him flatly, no longer horrified.

Laviolette knew what was coming next and he was tired of this as well, he realised – tired of being the one who always knew what was coming next.

DC Wade was waiting for them at the mortuary.

He'd asked her to be there.

At this point, she either went to Jim Cornish to clear the request because she knew that Laviolette shouldn't be doing an identification on a body that had already been identified – or she kept quiet and showed up when and where he told her to show up.

She'd chosen to keep quiet and show up, and he couldn't pretend not to be happy about this.

Alison Marsh, looking as if she'd been rushed out of one life and into another she never knew existed, let DC Wade hold her as they went into the small, tiled windowless room Laura Deane had walked into the day before.

He'd told her on the drive over that the body had been washed up at Cullercoats, and the only thing she'd said in response to this was to comment on the rain, which had started suddenly – breaking violently over them just outside Gosforth.

Alison remained pressed close to DC Wade as an assistant called Shona showed her the left ankle.

They all saw the moth attached still to skin that no longer looked like skin.

Alison nodded, her hand gripping DC Wade's forearm.

‘D'you need some air? D'you want to take a breather?'

Alison nodded again, but remained where she was.

After a few moments silence, and without saying anything Laviolette nodded at Shona to uncover the face.

‘That's not him. Brett,' she said, in the same breath.

There was a suspended sense of relief in the room that Laviolette often felt at positive identifications when something no longer identifiable as human, was given a name.

‘We argued,' Alison said, starting to cry, looking helplessly round the room at all of them for some sort of atonement.

The weather had turned.

Autumn, which had felt more like a late summer that year, was passing into winter and Anna felt the pinch of it with a quiet exhilaration as she ran down onto the beach. A grey sky was hung out over the sea, the wind picking up the waves and dropping them. She knew what seas like these felt like because they were her seas; the seas she'd grown up with. These were seas you fought with.

As the wind ripped through her now, grazing her face with sand it had lifted from the dunes and spray it had skimmed from the breaking waves, she started to feel – finally – that elusive sense of belonging she'd been searching for since Easter. This grey country with its occasional days of respite when it felt as though someone had unearthed stockpiled boxes of sunlight and, overjoyed, emptied them all at once, might just be her country after all.

She didn't know whether it was the oppressive bleakness she remembered from childhood, so often mistaken for being inarticulate by outsiders – or the growing intimacy with Laviolette – but she'd never told anybody the things she told him –

She carried on running, wiping at her face which was wet with sea spray and the drizzle now starting to fall.

The only other person on the beach was a bundled-up woman down at the water's edge, yelling at a black Labrador standing watching her, motionless.

Then she saw him – the blond man who'd been in the Polish woman's flat yesterday when she and Laviolette went to the Ropemakers Building.

Then she recognised him – and it was confirmation of what she'd somehow known since then even though it was only a glimpse she'd caught of him, passing through the hallway.

Not knowing what to do, she carried on running, feeling sicker each time she landed on the sand, the wind in her ears hurting and disorientating her.

The man walking along the edge of the dunes towards her had blond hair and was taller than she remembered. He looked nothing like Bryan Deane – who used to have brown hair with auburn tints when the sun shone down on him. She'd seen the auburn standing next to him outside number seventeen Parkview, Easter Saturday.

But she knew it was him.

She kept on running.

Jim Cornish and Laviolette were in Jim Cornish's office. Jim was sitting behind his desk in the same position as the day before while Jim's wife and children, encased in various combinations inside various frames, were staring at Laviolette in the same unnerving, unsmiling way: rugby playing Richard, suicidal Dom, and the nameless girls referred to simply – by Jim himself – as ‘the girls', denoting their supporting role within the family.

Laviolette was regarding Jim, who didn't look as if he'd moved at all since the day before, which had the odd effect of making Jim himself as well as Jim's accessories – the photographs and golf trophies – seem somehow less real; caught out, almost.

Jim was furious.

He didn't show it, but Laviolette could feel it as he watched Jim rub his thumb slowly backwards and forwards along the edge of the desk.

Laviolette had come straight from the mortuary to torment him.

It was a long time since anybody had attempted to torment him, and Jim was having trouble working out why it was that Laviolette had chosen this particular course of action.

After a while, aware that one of them had to speak otherwise the moment was at risk of slipping silently out of his grasp, Laviolette said, ‘Brett Taylor had a tattoo – a moth just above the Achilles tendon on his left foot.'

‘Says who?' Jim demanded, quietly, from the middle of a migraine that had been brewing since yesterday, and started in earnest about thirty minutes ago.

‘The Missing Persons report.'

‘Which you . . . just happened to have to hand?' Jim moved his lips into a long, narrow smile, which made them change colour.

He jerked his hand instinctively to his forehead, pressing down hard on the bridge of his nose with his fingertips, and momentarily shutting his eyes.

‘Brett Taylor and Bryan Deane were the same age, same height, and matched similar descriptions, living. Worrying similarities –'

‘Worrying,' Jim echoed, laughing. He carried on laughing for what felt like quite a while after that, his eyes on Laviolette.

‘For the purposes of identification,' Laviolette finished. ‘How many drowned corpses have you seen?'

Jim started at the question before giving it some serious thought. ‘Two,' he said almost a minute later. Jim had always been precise, and particular about precision not only in himself, but in others as well – regardless of whether or not they were telling the truth. There was nothing vague about Jim.

‘They all look the bloody same,' he concluded loudly.

Laviolette nodded. ‘That's why I was concerned about Laura Deane's positive ID. A defining feature – like Brett's tattoo – helps. Laura was probably too upset to notice. It happens,' he added, expansively.

Jim stood up suddenly, shunting his chair back harder than he'd meant to so that it travelled across the carpeted floor fast, just reaching the wall behind Jim's desk where one of the wheels gave a faint tap on the skirting board, which Laviolette noticed was badly chipped.

Jim observed him with his mouth open, sinking his hands in his pocket and making an effort to control his breathing, but his face didn't relax and his eyes remained protruding without expression fixed on Laviolette.

He said, ‘What d'you want?'

‘Why did you assign me this case?' Laviolette surprised himself; this wasn't what he'd been going to say.

Ignoring the question, Jim said, ‘We've got two missing persons – descriptions match – and only one body. We can work it out mathematically.' He raised his head slightly and jerked it towards the corner of the room as if there was a third party with them. ‘What d'you want?' he asked again.

‘I want you to tell me who killed my father.'

Jim started laughing again – loudly, genuinely.

Bryan watched Anna run past, a feverish smile on his face that nobody was there to bear witness to.

He'd spent the night on the beach, in the dunes, and his body told him he was unwell. There was sand in his hair, his clothes were damp and he was varying between hot and cold – intermittent shudders passing through him. He'd woken in a hollow in the dunes well after first light to a grey, inhospitable day and the sound of children playing nearby. After using the car park toilets, he watched a woman turn a roundabout with two children on, laughing – until the woman became aware of him. There were many things lonely men weren't meant to do, and staring at children in a play park was definitely one of them.

He started to walk, heading along the dunes north towards Blyth, the Alcan towers and wind turbines at Blyth Harbour becoming closer. Even this far from the waterline, the air was full of sea spray – he could feel it on his face and hair. There was nobody on the beach apart from a woman with a Labrador, the dog standing expectant in the rolling waves, which were churning and breaking continuously – an even heavier grey than the sky. He pushed his hands in his jacket pocket, cold, only to find himself sweating a minute later.

Then, looking up, he saw her running along the beach towards him. It had to be her – it was right that they should meet on the beach like this. He saw her head turn in his direction and stopped, waiting. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then carried on running. He stood watching her, and it was how she'd always made him feel – like nothing more than an observer. The smaller her retreating figure became, the more bereft he felt. He'd been lonely most of his life since losing his mother, but it was only ever Anna who'd had the ability to remind him of this loneliness that had, over the years – and without him being aware of it – come to define him.

It occurred to him, standing there in the wind and drizzle that was starting, that all he had to do was run after her; catch her up, but he knew he wasn't going to do that. She had to turn and come back to him – retrace her steps – at some point. Nobody could run in one direction forever. The world might no longer be flat, but there were still edges a person could fall off.

He turned and carried on walking north, in the opposite direction – convinced, at last, that this was the only way they'd ever meet.

‘You knew Jamie Deane was innocent – he had an alibi you chose to break. Why?'

Laviolette watched Jim slide some papers with his forefinger across the desk and scan them with a heavy sigh.

‘D'you remember Laura Hamilton – before she became Laura Deane?'

‘Of course,' Jim said, pleasantly – it was no effort to him; he didn't begrudge Laviolette demanding this memory of him. ‘She was a sweet thing – a very sweet thing. I imagine she still is – from her voice. I've only spoken to her on the phone.'

Laviolette saw Laura, walking up the corridor towards him at Berwick Street station, propped between Don and Doreen. ‘She was only thirteen.'

Jim didn't dispute this; he just carried on smiling pleasantly at Laviolette, waiting for him to make his point.

‘You forced her to lie – about being with Jamie that afternoon. Why? Why did you want it to be Jamie Deane that badly?'

As he sat down again Jim shook his head, pulling his hands up and clasping them behind it – with an affected boredom Laviolette could almost have believed if the eyes hadn't remained so alert. ‘We didn't. That wasn't our choice.'

‘So whose was it?'

‘Bobby's – Bobby Deane's,' Jim said, distracted, his eyes running over the photographs on his desk. He flicked a quick look at his watch. ‘I've got somewhere to be in six minutes.'

Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘How?'

Yawning, Jim let his arms fall. ‘We thought about nailing it on Bobby for a while, but it wasn't going to stick – not even when he realised we had Jamie, and he wanted it to stick.'

‘The neighbour said she saw a boy go into the house through the kitchen door.'

Jim waved this to one side. ‘And her description matched at least one of the Deanes. It made sense – everyone knew your father and Rachel Deane were screwing around. Everyone –' He was staring straight at Laviolette now, his arms laid out on the desk in front of him. ‘Motive was never an issue; it was more a question of which Deane? We rounded up Bobby and Jamie, but we couldn't find the other one – Bryan. Nobody knew where he was, but we had two of them and we only needed one. We put the situation to Bobby – told him what had happened with your father, and that we were thinking of charging him. He gave us the name of at least twenty alibis. I can still see his face as he listed them, name after name – angry; triumphant. He thought he'd won.'

‘It should never have been a game.'

‘Maybe not,' Jim conceded, pushing his lips together. ‘But we were young, and –' He gave a short laugh. ‘The opportunity presented itself.' He looked at his watch again. ‘I've got to be somewhere in three minutes. We called his bluff. We had Jamie in the other cell, and we put it to Bobby then, after he'd drawn over twenty alibis out the hat – that if it wasn't him, which it couldn't have been, it must have been Jamie who killed your dad.'

‘He didn't know you had Jamie until then?'

Jim shook his head, laughing. ‘He went – Fuck, you can imagine – broke Kyle's nose and started to tear his ear off. . . .' Jim was laughing uncontrollably now, ‘before we managed to restrain him. He'd walked right into it.' Jim rubbed at his eyes, wheezing as the laughter came to a halt. ‘God, that feels good – can't remember the last time I laughed like that.'

Laviolette stood motionless, staring at him. He could almost feel Bobby's fury – the horrible realisation of his own impotence – across a distance of over twenty years; the realisation that he'd absolved himself only to implicate his own son.

‘Of course he backtracked then,' Jim carried on, enjoying himself now and no longer requiring prompts from Laviolette, ‘but it was too late. We told him we had a witness, and that the description she gave us of the boy entering your kitchen could have matched either of his boys.'

The break in the tape, Laviolette thought. The break in the Bobby Deane tape that Anna had picked up on the night before.

‘But Jamie had an alibi.'

‘Yeah,' Jim agreed.

‘You believed him?'

‘Course we believed him. I might not be a very nice copper – in your book – but I'm a bloody good one. I'd done enough interrogations to know the truth when I heard and saw it. Jamie Deane had been doing exactly what he said he'd been doing all afternoon – screwing his girlfriend. No doubt about it.' Jim stood up. ‘We told Bobby it was definitely one of his boys – that we were having one of them.'

‘You asked him to make a choice?'

Jim nodded, looking suddenly serious. ‘He chose Jamie.'

‘And that's why you broke Laura? That's why you broke his alibi?'

‘At least we gave him a bloody choice,' Jim yelled suddenly. ‘Christ,' he spat, in conclusion to his outburst. Then, after a while, he said quietly, ‘People talk about women crying, but in my time I've seen more men cry than I ever have any woman.'

Laviolette looked at him. ‘So you knew it wasn't Jamie? And Bobby knew it wasn't Jamie?'

‘It was Bryan who killed him.'

‘And you all knew?'

‘We all knew – Bobby knew.' Jim picked his jacket off the back of his chair, holding onto his shirt cuffs and pulling it slowly on.

‘But why did he choose the innocent son?'

‘It was his choice. You know the story in the Bible – about Joseph being the favourite son. Well we each have our Joseph; it's human nature.' Jim paused here without intending to. ‘We told him he had twenty-four hours to find Bryan an alibi – and to find Bryan. He was back in hours.'