The Missing Marriage (31 page)

‘I don't believe you,' Jamie said, suddenly decisive.

‘He'll have been taken to one of two places – it won't take long to find him.'

‘I don't want to find him – I want to kill him.' Jamie's eyes rolled upwards and his face opened as he let out a brief laugh. ‘What did you think? I was only fifteen – I didn't know what twenty years meant. I let them put me away so that they wouldn't put him away. I thought he'd love me for it. I let them put me away because of the promise of that love.' Jamie was shouting now, but he was shouting carefully – he wanted somebody other than himself to understand what he'd gone through. ‘I thought it would be enough to last me twenty years – that promise – but it barely lasted me one. It barely lasted me one,' he said again, ‘because he never came to visit me. My father never came to visit me – not once – after what I'd done for him, and when I get out – when I come here after twenty years – he doesn't even remember me; doesn't even remember my fucking name. It wasn't me.'

‘And it wasn't him either, Jamie. It wasn't Bobby. Bobby never killed my father.'

Laviolette stopped speaking as he realised what it was he'd said.

Jamie looked suddenly bereft at the thought of not only his own, but his father's innocence – after all these years. Bobby's innocence affected him even more than his own. ‘How d'you know?' he asked. His mind felt strangely empty, but there were things he should be asking – important things. He was missing the point – he was always missing the point. He got everything and everybody wrong and he was tired of trying to live with the consequences; profoundly tired. He was so exhausted, in fact, that he could have lain down on the bed he'd found Mary on and slept forever. But before he did – and he could feel the bones starting to relax already at the thought of the bed – there was something he needed to know. His eyes, heavy lidded, rested on Laviolette and with an effort he said, ‘So if it wasn't me, and it wasn't him then who –' He broke off, realisation shaking off the soporific effects of shock. ‘You know who it was, don't you?'

He crossed the room and took hold of Laviolette, who'd been anticipating contact, but there was nothing he could do to brace himself against Jamie as he was pushed back against the wardrobe with such force that the wardrobe fell against the wall.

Laviolette lay sprawled inside.

‘Bryan,' Jamie said. ‘It was Bryan, and you knew. He knew as well, didn't he – my father? He knew it was Bryan.'

Laviolette had caught his leg on something metal inside the wardrobe. He felt a sharp, stinging pain and a line of blood – wet – running down his calf. He heard the sound of ambulance sirens carried irregularly by the wind.

‘Bryan,' Jamie said again. ‘Why did he give me up when it was Bryan who did it? Why?'

‘They made him choose one of you – it was an impossible choice.'

‘And he chose me – even though he knew I was innocent. He chose me, and that's what I've got to start living with now after the twenty years I've already done. This is the real life sentence starting.'

Laviolette could see, through the bedroom curtains, the lights of the ambulance parking outside. Any minute now, paramedics would be there in the room with them, moving – green and efficient – through a twenty-year-old story.

Jamie was shaking his head. ‘Laura said a body was washed up.'

Laviolette knew what he was going to do next, and that he shouldn't – for all sorts of reasons. What he didn't know was why he was doing it. Was it because of the scared, broken child who'd peered up at him from behind the mattress all those years ago, and who had been haunting him for too long? Was it because of what Anna had told him about Bryan Deane the night before, and how she'd looked the morning after, asleep still on the sofa in his study? Was it because of the way he'd come home that night twenty years ago to find Jim Cornish in filthy boots moving through his house? Was it the memory of the sheet covering his father's humped remains? Or was it because he was tired of other people deciding how this was going to end for him?

‘A body was found, but it wasn't Bryan's. He's still alive.'

‘Where?' Jamie demanded quietly.

Through the wardrobe doors, beyond Jamie, he saw paramedics enter the room, rapidly assess the situation and somehow manage to attend to Mary, push Jamie towards the bedroom door, and pull him carefully out of the wardrobe in an effort not to tear any more of his leg. The pain was worse, standing.

‘Where?' Jamie said again from the door.

‘Royal Quays Marina – North Shields. The Ropemakers Building – flat twenty-one.'

It felt as though the room was suddenly full of people, but Jamie had gone.

Jamie had at last gone.

It wasn't until he saw Mary being wheeled through the bungalow towards the ambulance parked outside that he realised he should tell Anna. Anna needed to know about Mary.

Half way down Quay Road, Anna stopped running.

He was sitting on a quayside bench straight ahead, watching the wind turbines while being watched in turn by Roy the Harbourmaster, propped slackly in the open doorway to the office, finishing a cigarette.

Hearing her footsteps, Roy turned – his eyes thin as he inhaled.

He gave her a silent wave then, seeing that her attention was directed towards the man on the bench, turned to contemplate him once more himself.

The day wasn't warm and although she'd been sweating only minutes before, was cooling off rapidly.

The rigging was ringing loudly against the masts of the trawlers and the trawlers themselves were rocking in wide arcs. Waves were breaking over the feet of the turbines, and beyond the north harbour wall the sea wasn't even making an attempt at hospitality.

She carried on walking, aware of Roy watching her as she passed, and just then the man on the bench – it
was
Bryan – turned instinctively towards her.

He didn't smile.

He watched her until she was close enough to press her thighs into the back of the bench he was sitting on.

The eyes were wide and bright, the cheeks more sunken and defined than she remembered from Easter, but she looked into his face in the same way she had all those months ago when she'd been looking for signs of Bryan Deane.

He smiled now – a thin, feverish smile.

‘Hello Anna.'

‘Hello Bryan.'

They contemplated each other, less inhibited than the last time when he'd still been alive.

‘You're not surprised,' he said, getting stiffly to his feet, placing his hands over hers where she was holding onto the back of the bench. ‘Does anything ever surprise you?' He continued to smile, happy.

The sound of the wind turbines beating loudly, close by, made her feel as if they weren't on land at all, but the deck of some strange machine preparing to take off.

‘You knew I hadn't really disappeared.'

‘I didn't want it to be true.'

Roy remained in the doorway to the Harbourmaster's office, unashamed at his curiosity, watching them until they disappeared into the Ridley Arms.

He flicked his head up briefly as the lights in the upstairs apartment went on – a warm, white defiant light that didn't do much to counteract the grey day. But still, ships at sea would be able to see it – if they were headed landwards.

He coughed for quite a while after throwing the stub of his roll-up down the drain. Then, straightening up, decided that there wasn't much happening on the quayside – so went back into the office feeling as though some weight he hadn't been aware of until then had been lifted. He definitely felt lighter; renewed almost.

He set to work again with a satisfied sigh.

Laura knew the flat was empty as soon as she opened the front door and stepped inside. She also knew that this time Bryan really had disappeared.

Nothing reasonable led her to this conclusion.

There was nothing out of place; no signs of definitive departure, and nothing for her to read. It was as if the air in the flat had absorbed his intentions, and it was these intentions that she could feel as she stood in the middle of the lounge-diner, staring about her, her bag and keys in her hands still.

If she added up the hours spent here in the past few months they wouldn't amount to very much, but it felt as though over half her life had been lived in those hours. Here, between the cornflower blue walls they'd painted themselves, she was neither Laura Hamilton or Laura Deane. She was nobody's daughter, wife or mother, but simply Laura. She'd come to know herself intimately here in a way she never had before. What did she do with that knowledge now?

She crossed the room and opened the balcony doors, stepping outside. The day was one of those infectiously grey days. She breathed in, shutting her eyes. As she exhaled slowly, she opened them again taking in the car park down below, the boats in the marina, the River Tyne wide here near its mouth, and the North Sea beyond, but it was as if nothing she laid her eyes on held any relevance to her any more.

She needed to cry, but couldn't. She was too furious.

The realisation that she was furious took her by surprise, and explained the tightness she felt in her chest.

Smelling cigarette smoke then, she turned and saw the Polish woman in her dressing gown on the balcony next door, staring out at the same things she'd been staring at.

Then she turned to stare at Laura, exhaling heavily.

Laura couldn't think of anything to say, and was about to go back inside when the Polish woman said, ‘He's gone, hasn't he?'

Laura nodded, dumbly, watching the descent of the woman's cigarette butt over the edge of the balcony.

‘D'you want to come round?'

Less than a minute later, Laura was standing in the corridor about to knock on the door to flat twenty-three when it was opened from the inside.

Without thinking, she let the woman wrap her arms around her, pressing her head gently against her shoulder. She smelt of sleep, old perfume and cigarette smoke, and she had her back up against the hallway wall as Laura collapsed, sobbing, into her.

After a while the woman managed to pull her gently into the lounge.

Laura stood in the kitchen doorway watching as the woman poured water from the kettle into a glass and handed it to her. The glass was full of something red.

‘Raspberry tea,' she explained, seeing Laura's face.

Laura nodded, her attention taken by the drawings on the fridge door. ‘These are you?' she asked, studying them.

‘I'm a life model – at the college.'

‘Bryan did these, didn't he?' she said, realising – too late – what she'd said.

‘It's okay – I know who you are . . . who he is.'

‘He told you?'

The woman shook her head. ‘I guessed. Then he told me.'

‘What did he tell you?'

The woman hesitated. ‘Everything.'

Laura turned away from her – back to the drawings.

‘That's how we met – at the art college. Then we realised we were neighbours.'

Laura didn't respond to this, but she was listening, and understood what it was the woman was telling her – out of what desire, she couldn't have said, but it wasn't cruelty – and that she'd somehow known all along.

‘It meant more to me than it ever did to him – he never lied to me about that. He said it would never have happened if he'd been Bryan Deane still. He kept his distance.'

‘By fucking you?' Laura said, sharply, taking a sip of tea and handing the glass back.

‘Even then.' The woman stood, absorbed by the drawing, finishing the tea. ‘He wasn't used to spending so much time alone. The nights were difficult, and he missed your daughter. He missed her a lot.' She hesitated. ‘I had a son – he was eight when I left him behind. We had that in common – our missing children. We spent most of the time talking about our children. I think it was that and the loneliness more than anything. Sometimes it was very bad; I got worried about him.'

Laura's eyes skimmed the Polish woman's flat, not resting on anything – not really taking anything in as she tried to imagine Bryan here; their intimacy.

‘I was waiting for you – out on the balcony today. I was worried when he didn't come back last night; I wanted to tell you.' The woman broke off. ‘You know where he is,' she said suddenly. ‘What are you going to do?'

Without saying anything, Laura turned and walked through the flat towards the door.

‘What are you going to do?' the woman called out again.

Laura opened the door and stopped, turning to her. The air in the corridor outside was much colder, and damp smelling. ‘What name did you use? What name did you call him by?'

‘Tom. To me he was Tom. What are you going to do?'

‘I'm phoning the police.'

The woman watched Laura run up the corridor to the staircase at the end. She stayed there listening to her shoes on the stairs, the regular clatter getting fainter and fainter as she neared ground level. Even fainter still, she heard the thud of the lobby door banging itself shut after Laura ran outside. She didn't hear anything after that, but she carried on waiting in the open doorway to her flat – feeling the cold now – for what, she didn't know.

Laura felt the belated nausea as she got into her car. Breathing in slowly, she tipped her head back and shut her eyes, waiting for it to pass. But it didn't. A second later, she was leaning out the car, vomiting over tarmac. Her head pounding, she saw that she'd splashed the side of the car parked next to her.

Searching in the door pockets, she found an old piece of tissue covered in lipstick prints and drank the remains of a cold latte pushed in the drinks holder. Then she stared up at the balconies lined one above the other, expecting to see the Polish woman – Tom Bowen's cure for loneliness – standing on her balcony, but she wasn't. Laura saw that she'd left the balcony doors to their flat open, but what did that matter any more? There was nothing left to steal up there.