It was a hot day in mid September. Martha left the music block where she’d had her last lesson of the day and joined the flock of girls in blue shirts heading down past the tennis courts towards the school’s main gates as the bell for the end of school rang. She was sweating – had been sweating all day in the airless classrooms whose open windows brought in nothing apart from the occasional bee – and the strap of her bag, heavy with books, was digging into her shoulders.
The school coaches were lined up on the road outside the gates ready to take girls back to Hexham and Alnwick where they were picked up by parents and driven to outlying villages. The grammar school had a county-wide catchment area. The coach drivers in wing-tip sunglasses and shortsleeve shirts – all short; all balding – stood talking and laughing, hands in pockets, as girls ate ice creams in small groups by the coaches’ open doors, catching the cold air from the air conditioning.
Martha used to get the coach home in year seven – there was one that ran to Tynemouth where she’d wait in the salon for Laura to finish. There were coach prefects, but they did little to make the journey any more endurable for girls like Martha so she’d been going home on public transport since year eight – the metro to Whitley Bay then the bus.
By the time she got to the gates, the coaches were starting to leave, and that was when she saw him – while waiting to cross the road.
The dog standing beside him – in the shade under a dusty horse chestnut – was white. His hair was blond and he was thinner. He had on a Pogues T-shirt she’d never seen before, but it was definitely him.
He wasn’t looking at her – he was looking at a group of girls in her year standing about a hundred yards away, laughing and making frantic arrangements for the weekend with friends. Why was he looking at them? He knew her; knew she wasn’t one of those laughing girls.
‘Dad!’ Martha cried out.
She saw the laughing girls turn and stare, but she didn’t care.
Her arm was up in the air – she felt the underarm seam of her shirt split – waving wildly.
He saw her then.
Suddenly he was looking straight at her, and the dog by his side, restless, let out a bark.
He didn’t react – he just looked scared then worried before starting to walk away.
‘Dad!’ she screamed this time, running into the road as one of the coaches pulled away. She was forced to stop, and as the coach drew heavily past her, she saw her reflection slipping along the length of its white body.
By the time the coach accelerated – taking her reflection with it – he’d disappeared.
She ran across the road and got to the chestnut tree where he’d been standing, staring about her, helpless. She stayed there for another hour before eventually starting to walk in the direction of the metro station, her eyes everywhere.
But she didn’t see a blond man in a Pogues T-shirt with a white dog walking beside him.
Laura left Starz Salon at around four, statuesque in white linen. Between the salon and the car, she saw three people she knew and passed through them in a bright hurry, waving energetically and pulling Roxy after her.
These people – who had sent flowers, personally delivered their condolences, expressed sympathy, offered support, and held onto Laura when words gave way to tears – stopped and stared. She’d moved through them so fast she left a wind blowing behind her that ruffled the feathers of decency. Her brightness took the warmth out of them and their feelings towards her.
They started to talk, making whispered observations that were as brief as they were insidious: Laura Deane looked like she’d found something rather than lost something.
Sitting on a stool on the other side of the salon window, Kirsty on reception drew a series of concentric circles absently round that day’s date in the appointment diary then glanced up at the clock on the wall in front of her and wrote down the time. After this she flicked back through the last couple of months. There were times written against all the days, including Saturdays but excluding Sundays when the salon was closed: since getting back from Uruguay Laura left the salon every day at around four o’clock with the same air of nervous anticipation.
After getting in her car, Laura drove through heavy after-school traffic towards North Shields, singing along absently to songs that came onto the radio until she reached her destination: Royal Quays Marina. She parked the car in the usual bay – number 87 – because she’d always been superstitious and like most superstitious people, enjoyed the resonance of pattern and order that superstition gave to the seemingly random act of life.
Leaving Roxy in the car with the shower radio tuned in to Planet Rock, Roxy’s favourite station – she bought the shower radio specifically for Roxy to listen to in the car because Roxy liked to lick the speaker when songs she recognised were playing – Laura crossed the car park, instinctively looking up to see if there was anybody on the balcony of their flat – flat fourteen – but there wasn’t.
On the balcony next door, she made out the head of the Polish woman who lived at number twenty-three, bent over a book, but she lost sight of her as she disappeared into the lobby of the Ropermakers Building.
The lobby had a communal smell to it that reminded her of school, but she didn’t have to wait there long because the lift was always on the ground floor. She’d been coming here nearly every day for the past two months and never yet seen anybody either getting out of or into the lift, but then that was hardly surprising given that only forty percent of units had been sold, and most of these – their own included – were running into negative equity.
It was their friend, Greg – Bryan’s colleague at Tyneside Properties – who’d talked up the Royal Quays development and put the idea of an investment property into Bryan’s head – initially proposing joint ownership then backing out at the last moment. Wise Greg.
They only managed to let it for six months before the property market crashed. Last year they put it on the market, but withdrew it in January when they realised that they weren’t going to sell the flat in the foreseeable future, and anyway by then Laura had conceived of a different use for it.
Flat twenty-one in the Ropemakers Building at Royal Quays Marina was where Tom Bowen was going to live.
She stared at herself for a moment in the lift’s mirror before the doors jolted unevenly open onto an empty corridor, lit by a south facing window at the end with a view over the marina. A door slammed shut somewhere in the building then there was silence, cut through by her footsteps as she walked down the corridor to flat twenty-one, letting herself in.
The windows in the flat were shut.
It was hot, smelt of food and sex from the day before, and felt empty.
It was also a mess, but Laura never felt the compunction to clean here that she did at home. Part of her liked the mess.
The flat had estuary views – views they’d paid a premium for, but that failed to retain their leverage during the economic downturn.
Leaving the windows shut, she moved through the rooms of the flat to confirm what she’d somehow instinctively known as soon as she walked in – Tom wasn’t there. The reason she left Roxy in the car when she came here was that Tom often looked after the Husky belonging to the Polish woman next door and Roxy and the Husky didn’t get on, but there was no sign of the Husky today. There were drawings across the sofa and coffee table – the ones on the coffee table pinned down by cups. Tom was taking a life drawing class on Tuesday and Thursday nights and his drawings covered most of the available surfaces.
She let herself out onto the balcony, saw the Polish woman reading still – and a cargo ship in the distance, moving through the mouth of the Tyne – and went back inside. She put the kettle on, watched it boil, then opened the fridge and took out one of the bottles of white wine she’d brought with her the day before, pouring herself a glass. She stood drinking it, anger passing to worry, passing to anger again. Where was Tom? The romance of the past few months, which had started at the Hotel L’Auberge in Punte del Este – a glorious, rolling, all consuming romance – broke suddenly as she stood silently drinking her glass of wine in the flat’s tiny kitchen.
For the first time since Bryan’s disappearance, she found herself thinking – what would happen if Bryan really did decide to disappear?
Anna was asleep on the sofa when Laviolette rang, the sun falling across her back. She’d fallen into a habit of going to bed around ten and sleeping until two or three in the morning when she’d get up and maybe eat something then go onto the computer for a while before going for a run at six. After the run, she had breakfast and drove over to see Mary. She came home in the afternoon and slept.
Laviolette had left three messages for her since Erwin’s death – nothing to do with Bryan Deane, just well intended enquiries after her general health and state of mind, neither of which were good.
She hadn’t returned any of them, but he didn’t bring this up – he didn’t ask her how she was feeling either, he just said, ‘Can you help me with something?’
‘What?’
‘I’m heading to fifty-one Perry Vale, Whitley Bay – following up a Missing Persons.’
She laughed. ‘They’ve assigned you another one?’
‘OAP – sixty-two – reckons his wife’s gone missing. He says she went out for a walk yesterday morning and never came home. Uniforms went round yesterday and took a statement, but there’s something . . . I don’t know.’
‘I don’t work for Northumbria Police, Inspector.’
‘I just want you to observe, Sergeant.’ He paused. ‘Where are we now? September? You’re into month six of your one month’s compassionate leave – that’s very understanding of the Met.’
‘They want me to have an evaluation before I go back to work. At the moment I’m not even up to the evaluation.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on – it’s a beautiful day. You need to get out more – it’ll help you sleep at night.’
Anna knew she was going to go.
Laviolette knew she was going to go.
She walked heavily over to the windows, her back and upper arms aching from the position she’d fallen asleep in on the sofa. She’d become dependent on the North Sea being outside her windows, and even though the Thames flowed past the new development in Greenwich where she rented a flat, it had none of the angry restlessness or empirical unpredictability of the North Sea.
‘How do you know I’m not sleeping at night?’
‘I can hear it in your voice.’
‘What did you say the address was?’
‘Fifty-one Perry Vale, Whitley Bay.’
It was Constable Wade who answered the door.
She looked surprised to see Anna.
Laviolette obviously hadn’t said anything, and Anna wondered if this was the way he worked – keeping people in the dark. In evaluations it was the kind of behaviour they linked to paranoia and an inability to communicate – she’d worked in an investment bank’s Personnel department running employee risk assessment profiles for six months when she first left university.
‘The Inspector wants me to observe,’ Anna explained, trying to put Constable Wade at her ease.
Constable Wade would never have openly criticised the Inspector – and made an effort now to neutralise any facial expressions – but she couldn’t help repeating, ‘Observe?’
Anna smiled and nodded, and the next minute DC Wade – who could only have been in her mid twenties – was grinning back at her.
Fifty-one Perry Vale smelt as if old people lived there. Anna followed DC Wade into a lounge where the Inspector and an elderly man – Mr Larcom – were sitting on a red three-piece covered in raised velveteen flora. There was a red and gold coffee table with a plate of Rich Tea biscuits on it and some cups of tea.
Sergeant Chambers was standing by an electric organ in the corner of the room, holding a cup of tea awkwardly in his large hands, and looking unhappy.
‘You made it,’ Laviolette said, smiling at Anna and introducing her to Mr Larcom simply as, ‘another colleague – Anna.’
Anna didn’t look at Chambers and Wade, instead her eyes swept quickly round the room and the thing that struck her was the lack of photographs. There was a sideboard, but there were no photographs on top of it.
‘D’you want to take a look round the house?’ he said to her over his shoulder before turning back to Mr Larcom and helping himself to another biscuit.
This time Anna saw Chambers and Wade exchange glances, which the Inspector also saw but chose to ignore.
‘They searched the house yesterday,’ Mr Larcom said, aware that Anna was watching him. ‘And these two,’ he jerked his thumb at Chambers and Wade, ‘they did it just now.’
All the Inspector said in response to this was, ‘Don’t worry – we’ll just carry on talking down here.’
Anna went into the kitchen and started opening cupboards as quietly as she could: instant coffee, Bistro gravy granules, mustard powder, Oxo cubes, Saxo salt – the war generation’s staple store cupboard ingredients. She wasn’t enjoying herself – why had she agreed to come?
She went upstairs.
The lilac bathroom was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house, the bathmat damp still – with talcum powder impressions of what must have been Mr Larcom’s feet.
The Larcoms’ bedroom was silent and gloomy despite the sun outside, and the spare room smelt damp, and felt as though it hadn’t been slept in for years. The whole house, in fact, felt strangely vacated.
She thought about Mr Larcom downstairs. There was no urgency to his worry over his wife’s disappearance. He only seemed mildly disorientated and confused – probably at the number of strangers he’d had in his house over the past two days.
The Inspector was right, there was something . . .
Her mind had picked up on something here upstairs.
She went back onto the tiny landing and looked around her then, distracted, went downstairs again – smiling encouragingly at Mr Larcom, who’d been too busy listening to her move around upstairs to respond to the Inspector’s questions.
Still smiling, she squeezed between Sergeant Chambers – who didn’t move – and the sideboard, and looked out the single patio door at the garden, which couldn’t have been more than three metres square – laid to lawn. There was a shed at the end and a wheelbarrow balanced against it.
‘Mind if I take a look at the shed, Mr Larcom?’ she said, opening the patio door before he had time to respond.
‘We did the shed just now,’ Chambers put in.
‘I’ll only be a few minutes. Is it locked?’
‘No – it’s not locked,’ Mr Larcom said, sounding sad for the first time as he said this.
The Larcoms clearly weren’t gardeners.
The shed was used as more of an overflow attic than anything else.
She paused, noticing a heap of blue harnesses on the floor in the corner behind an old push mower – the only piece of gardening equipment there was in the shed. They were the type of harnesses used by removal companies for large items of furniture.
She shut the shed door, crossed the lawn – and saw Mr Larcom watching her through the patio door.
Laviolette smiled placidly at her as she went back inside, his mouth full of biscuit, looking like he’d just informed Mr Larcom that an insurance premium was due to be paid out.
Constable Wade looked sombre, professional and solidly alert.
Sergeant Chambers looked like he was itching to rip someone’s head off and play football with it.
Mr Larcom just looked surprised all over again to find these strangers in his house.
‘D’you mind if I take one last look upstairs?’
It was Laviolette she was looking at as she made the request. He seemed pleased – with her request? Himself? The situation?
She went back upstairs, stopping on the top tread, her hand on the banister.
There was something wrong here on the landing; a humming sound – dull, electrical – coming from the ceiling, which her eyes ran over now. A white cable running out of the loft hatch had been messily pinned across the ceiling and down the wall where it ran into a plug socket in the skirting board.
There were marked impressions in the carpet from where – Anna guessed – a ladder must have stood.
She stayed motionless at the top of the stairs for a few minutes more, her eyes fixed on the loft hatch, before calling down. ‘Inspector? Inspector – d’you mind coming up here for a moment?’
The Inspector and Mr Larcom appeared at the foot of the stairs.
‘It’s alright Mr Larcom, you can stay down here. Constable Wade!’ Laviolette called out, waiting until she had lead Mr Larcom back into the lounge before joining Anna upstairs.
‘I’ve got a feeling that’s an extension lead,’ she said, running her fingers over the cabling, ‘going up into the loft. He’s got some sort of electrical appliance plugged in up there. Can you hear that?’
They stood listening until their ears picked out the faint humming sound.
‘I think we need some ladders.’
‘I think we do.’
They smiled at each other and went back downstairs.
‘Mr Larcom,’ Laviolette said brightly as they walked into the lounge where everyone was in the same position as before, ‘d’you mind if we get your ladders out the garden shed?’
Mr Larcom stared at them. ‘My ladders?’
Laviolette nodded. ‘We just want to take a quick look round the attic.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we didn’t do that this morning.’
‘I’ll get them,’ Mr Larcom offered wearily, hesitating before stepping through the garden door onto the patio.
Laviolette jerked his head at Chambers to follow him.
They returned a couple of minutes later with the ladders.
‘You want to watch when you put them up – the spring’s starting to rust. Sometimes you think they’re fully open and they’re not.’ Mr Larcom paused. ‘And the hatch to the attic is hinged.’ He paused again. ‘The hinges are on the right, and there’s a light cord hanging from one of the rafters – you can’t miss it.’
Leaving Mr Larcom downstairs with Constable Wade, they went upstairs – Chambers carrying the ladders.
‘D’you want me to go up?’ he offered when they got to the top landing.
‘You and Anna. Anna first – this is her lead.’
Anna hesitated before starting to climb. The hatch opened easily and she realised that it was easier than most lofts to get into because the hatch had been widened in a way that hadn’t been immediately obvious, standing beneath it.
She stood up, found the light cord and pulled it, looking round the illuminated attic space while she waited for Chambers.
There was a large chest freezer two metres away, filling most of the space. This was what the extension cable was for.
With a grunt, Chambers swung himself up and was soon standing beside her, looking at the chest freezer while trying to suck a large splinter out of his left index finger.
He turned round and spat among the rafters, shaking his hand. ‘Got it. Shit,’ he added.
Anna wasn’t sure if he was referring to the splinter or the chest freezer.
‘How the fuck did he get that up here?’
‘Those straps – in the shed.’
‘I didn’t see any straps,’ Chambers said, aggressively.
Anna ignored this, crossing the boards that had been laid across the three rafters separating them from the chest freezer.
‘We used to have one of these,’ he said.
‘So did we.’ Anna thought about the chest freezer Erwin used to have in the side passage at number nineteen Parkview for overflow from the vegetable patch.
‘Can’t think what the hell my mum used to put in it.’ He sighed, looking behind him at the open hatch where the Inspector’s head had appeared. ‘Seriously though, how the fuck did he get this up here?’
He was about to say something else when Anna opened the lid of the freezer.
They looked down then up at each other as Anna let the lid drop with a bang. She started to laugh.
Chambers looked at her, concerned, then started laughing himself – the back of his hand over his mouth. ‘Shit,’ he said, laughing even harder as Laviolette finally managed to haul himself up into the attic, picking his way awkwardly across the boards towards the chest freezer. ‘Sir, you’d better come and take a look at this,’ he said.
‘What am I looking at?’
Anna, no longer in hysterics, managed to say, ‘Mrs Larcom.’
And there lay Mrs Larcom, on top of a surprising amount of frozen food, twisted on her side, and fully dressed – the hem of a flesh coloured slip showing beneath a green skirt. There were wrinkles in her tights, at the ankle, and she only had one slipper on. The other slipper was resting on top of a box of arctic roll. She was wearing a pair of clip-on earrings, and a necklace and her hair was full of frozen peas and sweetcorn. There were peas in the hollows of her face. It looked like she’d been dropped into the freezer in a hurry, and the force of her landing had burst the bags of frozen vegetables.
Even looking at her from this angle they couldn’t see any wounding and, shutting her eyes, Anna gave in to an impression that she’d probably been drugged by Mr Larcom – there may even have been accomplices. He could have got her to climb up here on some pretext, given her a paralytic then pushed her into the freezer, shutting the lid and leaving her to freeze to death. Possibly.
Mr Larcom was waiting for them, expectant, when they got back downstairs. He looked sad – as though he’d given things his best shot, but wasn’t all that surprised that he hadn’t quite pulled it off.
‘We found your wife, Mr Larcom,’ Laviolette announced.
‘You did?’ He nodded slowly to himself then said, ‘We’ve been married forty years. What’s forty years? Silver? Diamonds?’ For some reason he appealed to Anna at this point. ‘We were never close though. I’ve been planning this ever since I retired twelve years ago. Oh well, I suppose it’s kept me busy. I needed the money, you know?’
Mr Larcom seemed much calmer now – relieved almost.
‘What did you need the money for?’ Sergeant Chambers asked, genuinely curious.
‘A woman I’ve been seeing – Romanian woman; she cleans down at Jesmond Dene . . . those big places down there. I wanted to make a go of it with her.’ He was speaking slowly, looking at them all in turn, and hoping it all made sense. ‘Seventy-seven’s not so old these days, is it?’ He grinned suddenly then, looking upset for the first time, ‘She won’t get into trouble over this, will she? She had nothing to do with any of it. I’ve got my pension, you see,’ he explained patiently, ‘but I needed the money settled on Brenda.’
‘Life insurance?’ Laviolette prompted.
‘That’s it,’ Mr Larcom nodded, pleased that they were following him.
Laviolette leant against his car, which was parked half way up Perry Vale.
‘What was that?’ Anna demanded.
‘Life.’
‘I’m not talking about Mrs Larcom. Mrs Larcom . . . shit.’ Anna started laughing again.
‘It’s good to see you laugh. It’s good to see you.’
Ignoring this, Anna said, ‘I’m talking about you getting me over here.’
‘You weren’t picking up your phone.’
‘I’m grieving.’
‘I was worried about you.’ Laviolette smiled at her.
‘Stop smiling.’
‘Okay.’ But he didn’t stop smiling.
‘You’ve got no right – to be worried about me.’
‘I wanted to take your mind off things.’
‘With Mrs Larcom?’
‘I’m looking for a new Detective Sergeant.’
‘You’ve already got one.’
‘Skipper here is relocating to Teeside.’
She glanced behind her at Sergeant Chambers, who gave her a brief consenting nod.
‘Can I ask you something Inspector?’ he said. ‘When you call me Skipper – is it because you’re fond of me or because you can’t stand the sight of me?’
‘It’s because I can never remember your name.’
Chambers nodded thoughtfully.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Anna said suddenly to Laviolette. ‘When you phoned me – asked me to come over – you’d already seen the extension lead running up to the loft hatch.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You knew about the extension lead – you wanted to see how long it would take me to notice.’ She paused then said again, ‘You knew.’
Laviolette shrugged. ‘Neither Chambers, Wade or any of the uniformed officers noticed the lead.’
‘So it wasn’t their day.’
‘Do you want a drink or something?’
‘You knew about that extension lead,’ she insisted.
He smiled suddenly at her, and it felt like the first real smile she’d seen on his face. ‘Come on – a drink.’
She hesitated, about to accept – she did want a drink – when her phone started ringing.
It was Martha Deane.
‘Some other time,’ she said, pulling herself away from the moment – with relief, she realised afterwards as she got back into the familiar Capri, her phone ringing again.
Laura had been looking forward to her meeting with Bryan’s old colleague, Greg Bolton at five that afternoon, but now she was distracted by the fact that for the first time since they’d started meeting there in the afternoons, Tom hadn’t been at the marina flat. She’d arranged the meeting with Greg the day before after a brief, flirtatious call to him. Their encounters had always been mildly flirtatious, and although initially Greg had been sombre because it was only the second time they’d spoken since Bryan’s disappearance, he soon found himself responding to her habitual flirting.
Greg Bolton had been made acting Branch Manager – not that Tyneside Properties were exactly going to advertise this fact, but they did need somebody to run the branch in Bryan’s absence.
Greg was coming to value the house because Laura was thinking about putting it on the market – selling the house was something she and Bryan had talked about before his disappearance on Easter Saturday. It was something she’d been afraid of for the past two years, but now it was actually going on the market the only thing she felt was an incredible sense of relief.
Greg knew the house – him and his wife, Patsy, were frequent guests at number two Marine Drive – but he enjoyed the guided tour Laura gave him.
Laura had spent time wondering how to play things with Greg, and as she drifted through the house, listing the obvious features with a genuine pathos, she could see that she’d been right to adopt sadness; a sadness that gave her an allure . . . a weight she hadn’t had before.
He didn’t tell her that the market had flat-lined, and he didn’t tell her that if she did go ahead with putting number two Marine Drive on the market, she wouldn’t get anything close to what they’d paid for it – because Laura knew all these things. He just told her to think about it; to be really sure.
‘It’s a beautiful home,’ he said, following her back downstairs and helping her to regain her balance as she slipped on the last tread.
They’d just walked into the kitchen and Laura, poised near the fridge, had just responded to his comment with one of her own – ‘It’s not a home any more’ – when Martha burst through the front door. Dropping her rucksack onto the floor near the breakfast bar and – seeing Greg with his hands on the bench behind him, leaning back and smiling, and her mother hanging onto the fridge door in the process of hauling out a bottle of wine – said, breathless, ‘I just saw dad.’
Greg and Laura didn’t move for what seemed like minutes afterwards.
‘I saw dad,’ she said again.
Laura arranged her hair carefully over her right shoulder, and turned to smile wearily at Greg, who didn’t smile back.
Confronted by the cataclysmic, a vague sense of horror had settled over Greg, immobilising him at a moment when he most felt like running – number two Marine Drive had lost its appeal.
‘You remember Greg, don’t you Martha?’ Laura persisted brightly.
‘I saw dad – I saw him,’ Martha yelled, her face suddenly red, the muscles on her neck defined, her eyes wide, and scared. ‘He was standing under a tree outside school. He was just standing there. He had blond hair and there was a dog with him, but I knew immediately – it was him.’ The next minute Martha burst into tears. ‘Say something!’
Laura’s smile had gone.
‘Martha!’ she called out as Martha, running and still crying, left the house.
She turned back to Greg, clutching the fridge door in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
On the other side of the fences lining the back gardens of Marine Drive, cars on the coastal road swerved to avoid the girl in school uniform running, oblivious, through the traffic. A van driver supplying custom-made blinds yelled something incoherent at her retreating back as, blue shirt billowing around her now in the wind from the incoming tide, she fled down past the play park and onto the dunes.
But nobody stopped.
As the speedometers flickered back up to forty and beyond, the girl became nothing more than a speck of blue and red on the line of dunes in the wing mirrors and rear-view mirrors of traffic heading north.
Martha sat down in a hollow above the beach.
She wasn’t crying any more, but her eyes were wet and stinging from the wind that had blown the last of the tears away, and she was sweating heavily. She drew her knees up and sat hugging them as she listened to the sea’s incoming roar.
After a while she phoned Anna.
Anna parked the Capri on the headland by the Kings Arms – a three-storey stone building painted white, overlooking the natural harbour at Seaton Sluice, which local history claimed was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.
She could see Martha, in her school uniform – sitting in the bus stop by the old customs house where she’d told her to wait.
Martha had seen Anna – was standing up, waving, and making her way towards her, running the last few hundred yards and slamming into her as she’d done on the drive outside her house the night Bryan disappeared.
‘Let’s go onto the beach,’ Anna said after a while.
Holding hands, they slid down the steep grass bank onto the harbour-side, following it round – past a red fishing boat swinging sharply from side to side – onto the beach. They walked slowly, in silence, following the line of debris from the last high tide – the sea had almost reached it now. The wind was strong down on the beach, but warm – and they had to shout to make themselves heard.
‘What did he look like?’
Martha stopped. ‘He looked like dad.’
‘I mean – had he changed his appearance in any way?’
‘He had this weird blond hair, and there was a white dog with him – a big white dog. I don’t know what the breed was,’ Martha said, worried, ‘but all I saw was dad. To me he looked just like dad.’ When Anna didn’t comment on this, she added, ‘And he looked sad – I never saw him look so sad.’
Ahead of them there was a group of school children hurling bits of driftwood at each other. Without saying anything, they turned and started heading back towards the harbour.
‘He’s alive, Anna,’ Martha said, suddenly excited as the wind blew the last of the shock away, and young enough not to see any difficulties or obstacles in this potential fact. ‘He wants me to know he’s still alive.’ She broke into a run, running hard along the beach until – out of breath – she was forced to stop and wait for Anna, who was walking towards her thinking of the drawing that was posted through her door the day of Erwin’s funeral. That was over two months ago – she hadn’t seen, heard or received anything else since.
Part of her wasn’t convinced Martha had seen Bryan.
Part of her was still open to the possibility that it was Martha who’d sent her the drawing – using the spectre of Bryan to remain connected to her.
But all the other parts of her wanted more than anything to believe that the man Martha saw standing under the chestnut tree outside school, and the person who sent her the drawing the day of Erwin’s funeral – was Bryan Deane.
‘What did your mum say?’
‘Fuck her.’ Martha drew her foot through the sand in a long arc then looked out to sea for a moment, distracted by the memory of Greg in the kitchen. She’d almost forgotten about Greg.
‘D’you think we should tell the Inspector?’
Anna thought about this. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Why?’ Martha demanded, immediately distrustful – as if Anna’s comment was indicative of doubt on her part.
Anna knew what Martha was thinking. ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘so far, you’re the only one who knows, and I’ve got a feeling that your dad wants as few people as possible to know he’s alive.’
Martha, who’d been listening carefully, smiled suddenly. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘we’ll keep him for ourselves.’
There was a simplicity to what she said that was dangerous in itself. But Anna nodded, smiling at the complicity of it, and the next minute, feeling a lightness she hadn’t felt in years, caught hold of Martha’s elbow and said, ‘Race you to the harbour!’
They started to run, the wind behind them now, the boats in the harbour restless, rocking, tired of their anchors.
In the heavy silence following first Martha then Greg’s departure, Laura stood motionless in the hallway until the quality of light started to change, casting longer slow-moving shadows over the beige walls.
Eventually she came to, startled by the sound of the doorbell ringing in the empty house and looking about her with something close to anguish. She hadn’t yet switched on any lights inside the house.
Falling into the doorframe as she made her way to the front door – badly bruising her left shoulder – she stared at her wind-torn daughter.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she shouted, louder than she meant to and catching Mrs McClaren – who’d just returned from swimming lessons and who was in the process of emptying her car of children – staring at them.
Mrs McClaren hesitated then waved.
Laura didn’t wave back; instead she grabbed hold of Martha’s thin arm and hauled her indoors.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said again, whispering now even though there was no point because they were indoors.
Martha stared at her the same way Mrs McClaren had done just seconds earlier – as if they had components inside them that were superior to those inside Laura herself.
‘Are we going to talk about this?’ Laura demanded.
Martha walked past her, in silence, up the stairs.
Laura followed; the door to Martha’s room slammed in her face – she pushed it open so forcefully that CDs started to fall out the rack on the wall.
‘You don’t believe me,’ Martha said at last, ‘so what’s the point?’
Laura picked up the CDs from where they’d fallen onto the floor, putting them back in the rack – some of the cases had come apart.
After a while, watching her, Martha said, ‘I saw him outside school – he was standing under a tree on the opposite side of the road. He had a dog with him,’ she concluded, flatly.
‘What sort of dog?’ Laura asked. ‘Big . . . white.’
‘Have you told anybody else?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this any more,’ Martha said sullenly. She swung away from Laura, but she could feel her mother’s eyes on her still. ‘What was Greg doing here?’
‘Greg?’ Laura, distracted, sounded surprised at the mention of his name. ‘Oh. I’m thinking of putting the house on the market. It’s something we discussed – dad and I – before –’
Martha was shaking her head, and Laura knew what was coming next. She stood up.
‘No,’ Martha said, her voice loud with disbelief. ‘No!’
Laura started to leave the room. ‘You’re right,’ she called back through the open door, from the top of the stairs. ‘I don’t believe you.’ She paused. ‘A big white dog?’ She started to laugh.