Martha was sitting in Sally Pearson’s office. She knew why she was there and was in the process of shutting herself down – something which had the unnerving effect of making people think she’d literally vacated herself.
First her eyes went dead then all expression left her face, and finally she let her body sink in on itself.
Even Miss Pearson’s professional brightness lost its glow at the sight of her.
‘Martha,’ she exhaled, her long earrings shaking.
Sally Pearson was the school’s educational psychologist.
They were sitting opposite each other at a table with a vase of stargazer lilies and an arrangement of sea shells between them. The room smelt of flowers, perfume, dust, nail varnish and futility.
Martha stared at the sea shells while Miss Pearson worked hard at maintaining her bright smile.
Out the corner of her eye, Martha saw her splay out her hands, check her nails then quickly curl her fingers back together. She was wearing an engagement ring she hadn’t been wearing the last time Martha saw her.
‘Is it too hot in here? Shall we open the window?’
Miss Pearson got up and opened the window with difficulty.
Martha watched her struggle and felt a fleeting pity she managed to suppress by reminding herself that no matter how professional Miss Pearson tried to appear, she couldn’t conceal the fact that she didn’t like Martha very much.
‘That’s better,’ she said as she sat back down, glancing at her watch. ‘Which shell is it that you’re interested in? This one?’
Miss Pearson picked up a shell at random and turned it round in her hands.
Martha could feel sweat collecting behind her knees and felt a sudden desperate urge to wash her hands. She often got this urge when she was nervous.
Miss Pearson fixed Martha with eyes that were becoming increasingly unsettled.
‘Your mother phoned the school this morning. She told me that you claim to have seen your father yesterday after school – outside the main entrance.’
Her mouth twitched fatally, and Martha watched, fascinated, thinking she was about to start laughing.
‘I don’t claim to have seen him. I saw him.’ Martha swallowed loudly. ‘Why is it that people are held to account for telling the truth far more than they are for lying?’
Not expecting an answer, she looked away, concentrating on the shells again, silent.
Laura met Laviolette at the entrance to the priory ruins, and they walked from there down onto the beach at King Edward’s bay. The beach was full – a patchwork of small, temporary encampments that Laura and Laviolette surveyed from the curving promenade.
People enjoying the last of the Indian summer glanced at them as they made their way laden, shouting, down onto the sand – the children running ahead, their faces open wide with excitement.
Laura felt a pang she couldn’t put a name to that she tidied quickly, efficiently away.
‘Has Martha contacted you at all?’
‘Martha? No.’ Laviolette stood with his hands clasped, his arms balanced on the promenade railings, the metal hot from the sun.
He spoke with his usual slow, easy manner, but Laura sensed his alertness as he continued to stare down at the beach, watching a group of children approach the rock pools with nets.
‘I was worried she might have done.’
‘Worried?’ He turned to face her, but her sunglasses concealed the better part of her face.
‘She says she’s seen Bryan.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday – outside school. I wasn’t sure if she’d already phoned you or –’ Laura fell silent. ‘I contacted the school this morning to let them know.
The Inspector straightened up, his hands on the railing still.
‘Why did you phone the school?’
‘I want her to see the psychologist – she’s very good. Martha’s seen her before. Martha lies, Inspector. We were told she does it to control things she doesn’t have any control over.’
‘You think Martha’s lying about having seen Bryan?’
Laura laughed in disbelief. ‘Of course she’s lying. She didn’t see Bryan – she couldn’t have.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s dead, that’s why,’ she finished angrily, turning away from him and starting to walk back up the steps when he caught hole of her arm.
She studied his fingers briefly where they were gripping her, before slowly pulling her arm away.
‘Bryan’s dead,’ she insisted. ‘I’m trying to come to terms with it. I’m trying hard, and some days are just about bearable. Martha’s got to start living with the fact sooner or later.’ Laura paused, and when the Inspector didn’t say anything, added, ‘I just wanted to warn you. I thought it was the right thing to do.’
Laviolette nodded, preoccupied. ‘Warn me?’
‘I thought she might have phoned you,’ Laura said again, ‘and that you might start deploying people . . . resources . . . when you don’t know Martha.’
People arriving at the beach and people leaving, stopped and stared, but Laura couldn’t see their eyes. Like her, most of them were in sunglasses. They looked like beetles all of them, their heads flicking suddenly in her direction. Some of them recognised her from the appeal, but nobody said anything, they just stood there, staring, poised somewhere between curiosity and judgement.
As she watched Laviolette’s retreating back, the shirt wet, clinging to his spine, she felt the onset of one of the anxiety attacks that she’d been having at least three times a week since Bryan’s disappearance. Hot, breathless, tearful she pushed her way up the steps onto the cliff top path, but when she got there it was as if all the buildings – even the thirteenth century priory ruins – had turned to face her and were conspiring to topple and bury her alive.
Laviolette parked the car on double yellows under the shade of a burgeoning hornbeam. He was excited. Excitement wasn’t something he often felt, but he was excited now.
The heat was forcing women – they were all women – out of the cars lining the road outside the Grammar School entrance, and they stood in well-groomed groups talking, laughing, waiting. These women took care of themselves; had time on their hands that Laviolette, watching, guessed it was sometimes an effort to fill. They wanted to belong – to what they weren’t quite sure, but the overall plan was that they and their children should belong. He thought of Laura Deane. Some of the women he could see through his windscreen had been born belonging; others had to work at it. He imagined that quite a few of the ones working at it had seen parents die of exhaustion before they got to claim their pensions, which was probably enough for them to have made vows never to grow so old so young themselves. Their mothers would have been too busy working to take them to school, and their mother’s mothers probably went to school barefoot with a potato in their pocket.
Quite a lot of them would remember being hit as children by parents trying to teach them the difference between good and bad, which was a love of sorts even if those same parents were too exhausted to show any other sort. The heat finally forced him out of his car as well and, sensing movement, a group of women close by – all dressed in white – turned towards him, but all they saw was a man in his late forties emerging from an outdated burgundy Vauxhall. They turned away.
Laviolette smiled affably at their backs, and sat down on the crumbling brick wall surrounding the hornbeam – a wall that was in the process of being destroyed by the tree’s roots.
He looked along the length of road filled with cars, coaches and two competing ice cream vans, and wondered where exactly Martha had seen Bryan the day before. There was an elderly man in a cap and braces watching his Jack Russell pee against a car tyre, and two shirtless builders, laughing, but none of these were Bryan Deane.
From somewhere inside the large stone building opposite, behind the glossy black railings, bells started ringing. There was a pause. The women shifted expectantly, and the leaves on the hornbeam started to move, making the shadow on the pavement by his feet move with them as a breeze picked up.
He stood up instinctively as the women’s laughter and conversation became louder in an attempt to meet the sounds now filling the air – of twelve hundred girls leaving a building they’d been compelled to remain inside for seven hours. The red and blue uniforms spilt onto the street, flowing in all directions. Laviolette felt momentarily overwhelmed. How was he going to find Martha in all this?
The women dispersed – plans made, news exchanged – their focus now on the girls as they stood by their cars shouting and waving. The flood was thinning, but there was still no sign of Martha.
He was looking instinctively at the girls leaving school alone, the girls without a pack, with curled postures and eyes – when they lifted their heads to check for traffic while crossing the road – that were unnervingly alert. That was Martha, he thought, realising for the first time how fond of her he’d become.
Then someone sounded their horn and that’s when he saw her, looking up like the rest of them, but more expectant. She looked through the slow moving traffic at a white transit van parked about one hundred metres away.
Jamie Deane.
Laviolette started walking towards it as Martha appeared on the pavement in front of him. She was smiling, and as the passenger door swung open the radio could be heard, playing loud.
‘Martha!’ he called out.
She couldn’t hear him above Jamie Deane’s radio.
‘Martha!’
This time she paused, her bag swung back over her shoulder as she looked down the street. Then she saw him, and hesitated – momentarily confused before pulling herself quickly up into the van.
Laviolette broke into a run as Jamie Deane started to manoeuvre the van out of the parking space. He got there just before it pulled away, and banged once on the window.
Martha’s face – pale, agitated – stared at him through the glass, and beyond her he saw Jamie Deane for the first time in twenty years.
Martha turned away and said something to Jamie that made them both start laughing hysterically as the van jumped forward and joined the rest of the traffic on the road.
Laviolette jogged alongside it for a while until he had to stop, sweating and breathless. He watched it disappear from sight, blinking to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.
Jamie hadn’t planned to pick Martha up from school – he’d been making a delivery in the area and passed a primary school just as all the children came running out of their classrooms into the playground. He parked the van for a moment and watched them navigate their afterschool freedom before turning the engine back on and pulling away – with something close to contentment.
It was then that he thought of Martha.
He had no idea what time she finished, but it was likely to be somewhere between half three and four. He was there at three thirty, parked up a side street. When the bell went, he drove round the corner and got a spot opposite one of the ice cream vans just as someone was leaving. He sat with the engine running and the radio playing, nonplussed by the volume of girls in uniform. After twenty years living in and among uniforms, he wasn’t daunted at having to pick out a face in a crowd.
The unstructured hours of his new life made him anxious and depressed – his counsellor had warned him they would – so he was pleased once he’d set himself the task of picking up Martha from school. He had somewhere he needed to be and something he needed to do.
He was only just discovering the real horror of imprisonment – that it made you terrified of freedom.
Martha. His niece, Martha. Martha had been a shock to him; he’d been wholly unprepared for the effect she had on him. While he’d been inside Laura, Bryan and others – but mostly Laura – had remained imaginatively real to him, but he had no real concept of Laura and Bryan’s daughter because she’d never really existed for him.
When the door to number two Marine Drive opened the night before, he really did think it was Laura standing in front of him, framed in the doorway. After twenty years, it was entirely possible and reasonable to him that he should find her exactly as he’d left her and it took him a while to come to terms with the fact that the girl he thought was Laura was in fact Laura’s daughter. It was then that he saw her walking through the school gates and started to energetically sound his horn.
Her face did exactly what he wanted it to when she saw him: it opened up – surprise followed by pleasure. He was so happy he was virtually bouncing in his seat by the time she’d crossed the road and got to the van. He leant over the passenger seat and threw open the door for her and that’s when she hesitated.
He let out a sound midway between a laugh and a choke, suddenly terrified she was about to change her mind, but then she jumped up into the seat, slamming the door shut and locking it. A second later there was a man outside, banging on the window. Jamie tilted his head to stare at the man’s palms, which looked swollen and white against the glass – like those of a drowned man.
‘It’s the Inspector,’ Martha said, in shock. ‘Laviolette.’
At the sound of the name, Jamie burst out laughing, the tattooed web on the side of his neck taking the strain of the sudden hysteria.
Without knowing why, Martha started laughing as well.
The sight of the Inspector, sweating on the pavement as they pulled away, struck her suddenly as the most absurd thing in the world. She pressed her left hand into her stomach – she was laughing so hard it was bruising her muscles – watching in the wing mirror as the Inspector continued to reduce in size by the second until he disappeared altogether when they turned right at the end of the road.
After this, they felt silent.
Martha sat clutching her rucksack on her lap, looking around the van, out the window and eventually at Jamie.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know – where do you want to go?’
‘Norway,’ Martha said decisively.
Jamie, who’d been smiling happily, stopped smiling and gave his nose a few vicious rubs as he tried to work this one out.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to Norway,’ Martha carried on, ‘it’s just across the sea – I’d like to see the fjords.’
He kept flicking her nervous glances while trying to keep his eyes on the road.
She watched his face tense as he thought about this then laid her hand suddenly on his arm, ‘But not today,’ she reassured him.
Then his face broke suddenly into a smile again.
Martha stared out the window thinking about a lot of things at once – including Norway.
‘How was school today?’ he asked after a while.
For some reason the question made her laugh.
‘Good? Not good?’
‘It’s never good.’ She carried on staring out the window as they passed a gas works on their left.
‘That bag of yours looks heavy.’
‘It is,’ she said, looking down at her rucksack. ‘Books – games kit.’
‘So what is it, O’Levels this year or whatever they call them?’
‘GCSEs – some this year, some next.’
‘How many are you taking?’
‘Twelve – including Mandarin.’
‘What the fuck’s Mandarin?’
‘Chinese.’
Jamie laughed. ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. China’s emerging as a market leader.’
‘Listen to you,’ he said, pleased. ‘So the Chinks are taking over the world?’
‘Maybe – in a couple of years’ time.’
He smiled happily to himself, thinking about this.
Five minutes later they turned onto Tynemouth Front Street, the priory ruins rising ahead of them.
‘I know where I am now.’ He twisted his head as they passed Starz Salon. ‘Your mum’s place. We could call in.’
Martha didn’t say anything as they turned the corner past the priory and started to head down the hill. ‘Wait. Stop here.’
Jamie pulled up outside St George’s church.
‘I want to get out. I want to walk on the beach.’
They got ice creams from the van parked opposite – run by a woman called Kath – which doubled up as a mobile library; the shelves at the back of the van were full of books Kath was happy to lend or exchange.
Kath was sitting outside the van on an old stool, smoking and reading ‘Mrs Dalloway’. She waved – recognising Martha.
‘Alright, pet?’
‘Hi Kath – this is my uncle Jamie.’
‘Alright, Jamie?’ Kath said automatically.
Most people were bothered by Jamie when they met him for the first time. They felt a subconscious mental, spiritual and physical aversion; the sort of aversion healthy, intact people instinctively feel towards the damaged and abused – who have been forced to acknowledge things about the world and the people in it that the majority would rather spend their lives never knowing.
Martha hadn’t been bothered by Jamie.
Kath wasn’t either.
She was a terse woman who valued her private thoughts.
Her eyes didn’t linger on his tattoos; they were happy to confront his eyes.
Jamie waited for her to recoil in the way he’d got used to people doing on the outside and that made him feel – for the few seconds it lasted – as if all the breath had been drawn suddenly out of the world.
But Kath didn’t recoil, and he rewarded her with a smile very few people saw; one that – for as long as it lasted – gave his eyes an extraordinary depth.
They headed down the steps cut into the cliff, Martha taking off her shoes and socks as soon as they got onto the beach where there was a wind blowing that at long last lifted the heat.
‘You should take your shoes off.’
Jamie hesitated before sitting down on a rock and pulling his trainers off awkwardly. His feet were white and he wasn’t wearing any socks. Martha could see the impressions of holes across the top of his feet where the eyeholes from his laces had been digging in.
‘Is that better?’ she said as he joined her and they started to walk away from the crowds congregating round the beach café, Crusoes, towards the sea, which was a long way out.
They stood paddling, the water lapping sluggishly round their ankles – Jamie flinching sporadically and checking behind him – as if life was taking place just over his shoulder at a forty-five degree angle.
There were hardly any waves and the water only came to the waists of three children far out to sea, trying to clamber onto an inflatable green dinosaur.
Jamie was watching them intently as if their game would help him to understand something he’d been trying to understand for a long time.
Martha was watching them as well – remembering what it was like to play in the sea at that age, and not have to think about her body.
After a while, she said, ‘Last night – when I said you sounded like dad on the phone? I meant it.’
‘You were close?’
‘We are close.’ She paused, lifting her foot out the water. ‘He’s still alive. I saw him yesterday. I was coming out of school and he was standing under a tree not far from where you were parked.’ She paused again. ‘I didn’t see him today.’
Martha caught hold suddenly of his arm with both her hands and rested her head against him. ‘He had blond hair, and he looked so thin. He had a dog with him – a Husky.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
Martha shook her head, staring out to sea still, which was empty now – the current had taken the children and their dinosaur elsewhere.
‘He wanted me to see him. He wants me to know he’s still alive.’
Jamie remained silent, thinking about this.
He ran his hand over her hair a couple of times then they started to walk back up the beach, people wondering in the absent way people did – about the schoolgirl and ill-looking man with tattoos. Martha felt their eyes on them, but Jamie remained oblivious, lost in thought. She didn’t need to ask him whether he believed her – she could tell he did.
‘Have you told anybody else?’ he asked her. ‘The police?’
Martha was about to respond to this when she saw a woman in a white jumper running across the sand towards them.
‘Martha!’ Anna called out.
She’d been standing at the water’s edge – only a couple of metres away – when she’d turned and seen them.
‘It’s okay,’ Martha said automatically, trying to reassure Anna, who was staring at Jamie because he looked a lot more like his brother, Bryan, than she remembered. ‘It’s okay,’ Martha said again.
Anna felt a wave of something close to pity pass over her as she laid eyes on Jamie Deane – who she’d last seen when she was a terrified thirteen-year-old; only a couple of years younger than Martha was now. She wondered if Laura knew her daughter was down on Tynemouth Longsands with Jamie Deane, who she could feel watching her now – without any particular resonance. He didn’t recognise her.
‘Anna Faust,’ she said, pausing awkwardly in the interlude following the introduction. She saw his face flicker with effort as he sought to remember her, and was about to say something when Martha said, ‘He didn’t do it, Anna. Tell her,’ she commanded Jamie.
But Jamie remained silent, his eyes on Anna.
Martha, frustrated, carried on, ‘He spent twenty years in prison for something he never did – because mum lied. The afternoon that man was killed, she was with him. She was with him the whole time.’
Looking from Martha to Jamie, Anna saw again Laura Deane sitting on the top of the stairs that day – sullen, scared – inside number fifteen Parkview.
‘You,’ Jamie said, becoming suddenly conscious of who Anna was. ‘I remember you. Bryan’s little friend.’
‘I knew it,’ Martha put in.
‘Why little?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. For some reason I always thought of you as little. I remember you,’ he said again, pleased. ‘Funny,’ he carried on slowly, more to himself.
Anna watched them climb up the steps past where the Grand Hotel used to stand before it was burnt down, back onto the cliff top road, unable to move from the spot. She was still standing there thirty minutes later when Inspector Laviolette arrived.
Laviolette drove along the coastal road towards Blyth. He wanted to talk to Anna, who he’d given up trying to call, and was just passing the Toy Museum when he saw her canary-coloured Capri parked not far from where Bryan Deane parked Easter Saturday, although she couldn’t have known this.
He parked as close to the Capri as he could and left a note under the windscreen asking her to wait for him in the car if their paths didn’t cross.
Then he stood for a while near the bench he’d seen Bryan Deane standing next to on the CCTV footage, and decided to conduct his own four minute vigil while scanning the beach and sea for Anna. It was low tide and there were no waves so she wouldn’t be surfing, but there were people in the water, swimming – mostly children.
His eyes picked out solitary figures as he checked his watch.
Two minutes had passed – two minutes that felt like ten, but then time was relative. It struck him again how long four minutes could be.
Then he saw her – he was sure it was her; at the water’s edge in a white jumper, her hair blowing. Unlike most of the solitary walkers on the beach, she had no dog with her.
She’d made an impression on him – enough of an impression for him to recognise her at a distance of over two hundred metres, and the sense of recognition was something he felt in his stomach. This made him afraid in a way he hadn’t been for years – decades even.
He checked his watch again.
Ten minutes had passed – ten minutes that felt like two.
He went down onto the beach using the same steps Jamie and Martha had, crossing the sand marked with their footprints still, towards Anna standing in the shallows, her shoes in her hand.
He tried calling out her name, but the wind, which was much stronger this close to the sea, tore it out of his mouth and carried it away.
She must have seen his shadow on the sand, drawing alongside hers – the two shadows stretching out from their owners at a forty-five degree angle – because she turned to look in his direction then, surprised to find herself no longer alone.
She smiled suddenly at him as if it had taken her a while to remember who he was.
He smiled back, trying to work out whether she was genuinely pleased to see him or not. ‘You were thinking about Bryan Deane,’ he said suddenly.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I was.’
‘Is that why you came here?’
‘Yes,’ she said again, staring down at her left foot as she drew it through the water.
The tide had turned; it was coming in now, and the waves were picking up and beginning to rush in the way they had a reputation for doing along this stretch of coast. It was a dangerous reputation to ignore, but summer after summer the coastguard were sent out to rescue tourists who’d taken a chance against the incoming tide at Holy Island and got stranded on the causeway.
‘How did you find me?’ Anna said after a while.
‘What makes you think I was looking for you?’
She laughed lightly and, without saying anything, they turned and started walking back down the beach at an angle, the tide was coming in so fast.
‘I saw your car parked on the cliff top. I was coming to see you anyway,’ he conceded, ‘but this saved me the journey. Do you want to get a beer or something?’
She hesitated then, nodding, followed him to Crusoes, the Longsands beach café where they managed to get a table outside on the decking. When he went in to get the beers, she slung her feet over the rope railing, tilted her head back and let her eyes shut.
Laviolette re-appeared a couple of minutes later. ‘I’ve never been here before,’ he said.
‘Any reason why you should have?’
‘I live in Tynemouth.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ she said, watching him.
‘In fact, apart from the investigation, I can’t remember the last time I took a walk on the beach.’
‘Well, you took a walk just now.’
‘I did,’ he agreed, smiling at her – pleased.
They sat in silence, watching people arrive and leave the beach.
‘You’re going to miss this,’ Laviolette observed, ‘when you go back to London.’ Then, when Anna didn’t respond, ‘The offer still stands. DS Chambers is moving back to Teeside to be near his wife’s family.’
Anna nodded, smiling. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘It is simple. You’re only renting in London – you haven’t got a place to sell.’
Anna pushed her chin down onto her chest, thinking about this.
‘Have you never thought about coming back?’
‘I’ve thought about it.’
They fell silent again.
‘Is that what you wanted to see me about?’
Laviolette shook his head as a woman came out to clear the table next to them.
‘We’re closing – ten minutes time,’ she said.
Neither Laviolette nor Anna responded.
‘Martha’s seen Bryan.’
Without commenting on this, Anna turned to watch a father attempt to organise his family into a game of beach cricket, the long legged teenage daughter refusing to listen, no longer interested in being a part of this tribe she’d grown up in because that wasn’t where life was at any more. The breakaway years . . . too old to run away from home, too young to officially leave.
Anna found herself staring at the pouting, sullen girl before turning her attention back to Laviolette.
‘She already told you,’ he said, watching her.
Anna nodded. ‘Yesterday. When did she tell you?’
‘She didn’t.’
‘So who did?’
‘Laura Deane – this morning. When were you going to tell me?’ Laviolette asked softly, without pausing.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether I believe her.’
‘Do you want to believe her?’
Anna didn’t say anything. ‘What did Laura say?’
‘That Martha lies a lot; that she didn’t want me wasting time and resources chasing a ghost.’
‘Only you don’t think it’s a ghost Martha saw.’
‘I think Martha wasn’t meant to see Bryan, but she did.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.’
‘Here’s another way – Laura phoned the school this morning and had Martha referred to the psychologist. Assuming Laura knows that Bryan’s still alive – she also knows that Martha’s telling the truth. Do you see what I’m saying?’
The boy on the table next to them, reading a book and waiting for a girl, glanced up at them – then at his watch, then back down at the book.
‘There’s a child somewhere in the middle of all this, and she’s losing ground as we speak,’ Laviolette explained in a strained undertone, ‘so whatever it is you know; whatever it is you’re thinking; whatever it is you’re feeling even – now’s the time to share.’ He was leaning forward, watching her intently. ‘D’you want to have dinner with me?’
Anna stood up. ‘Not tonight.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Let’s carry on walking.’
He followed her up the road beyond Crusoes that led onto the cliff top, and they carried on walking uphill towards the headland where the priory was.
They passed a group of school children sitting propped in the shade against the wall of the new public conveniences, eating chips and ice pops – using them as props to flirt with.
‘When we were children,’ Anna said, ‘Bryan used to draw. He was a brilliant draughtsman. It’s a damning testimony to the school he went to that they never picked up on it. After his mother died he used to draw in our garden – insects and stuff; mostly insects.’
They walked past the entrance to the priory and turned down Pier Road onto the Spanish Battery.
‘They really were brilliant – the drawings. I mean, he had a real talent,’ Anna insisted, as if Laviolette was disputing this. ‘The day of Erwin’s funeral, somebody posted a drawing through my door – of a butterfly.’
‘Bryan?’ Laviolette said, looking straight at her. ‘It had to be.’
‘And since then?’
‘Nothing.’ She met his gaze. ‘Nothing.’
‘He wanted you to know he was alive,’ Laviolette stated, feeling the tension and aggression that had been building up, release, as he paused for a moment to watch a group of rowers from the Tynemouth Rowing Club launch an eight-man boat into the sea from the small bay on the south side of the priory. The rowers’ silent collaboration gave a grace and coherence to the launch that made Laviolette feel calm to the extent of peaceful.
He could feel Anna beside him on the pavement, but she’d lost her relevance as he watched the departure of the rowers, wishing he was among them; one of the eight men. The desire was so strong that he felt like the one who’d been left behind once they’d gone.
Disorientated, he turned back to Anna.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the picture?’
‘It came the day of Erwin’s funeral, and –’
‘And?’
‘I’m not convinced it’s Bryan. It could be Martha.’
‘If you thought it was Martha, you would have told me sooner. Have you got the drawing still?’
Anna nodded.
‘Why don’t you want anybody else knowing Bryan Deane’s still alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did he know you were at the Ridley Arms?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where d’you think he is?’
‘I’ve got no idea.’ This time she held his gaze. ‘I know how this works. The kayak’s been washed up – there’s been nothing new since –’
‘Apart from the drawing.’
‘The drawing might not have been him. Everybody presumes Bryan drowned – nobody’s interested and they’re not going to give you any more resources.’
‘So we’re on our own.’
‘With what?’
‘The fact that Bryan Deane faked his own death – with the co-operation of his wife – because the life they’ve been living didn’t work out and they need the life insurance payout to start over again.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘You know I’m right.’
‘Nobody cares.’
‘I care. You care – and Bryan Deane cares enough to jeopardise everything in order to let you and Martha know he’s still alive, that’s how much Bryan Deane cares.’
‘And why do you care so much?’
‘Because I’m tired of people lying,’ Laviolette said before starting to walk again, taking the path that led down from the Battery onto the pier.
‘Ice cream?’ he asked as they passed the van parked in the small car park on the lower slopes of the Battery.
Anna stared at him as if he’d said something profane then shook her head.
The pier at Tynemouth wasn’t a resort pier; it was a long curving cement barricade with a small automated lighthouse on the end. It took a lot of battering from the sea, but renowned feet had walked its length – Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle – as well as those less renowned who came, regardless of age, because the sea didn’t care who they flirted with, who they groped or what they shot up on.
Laviolette and Anna walked the pier in silence, the incoming tide wetting them with spray as it hit the man-made defence. They passed a couple heading back towards land, who they smiled at and exchanged greetings with. The only other people on the pier were two Russians from a ship docked at North Shields, who asked them to take their photograph – standing against the rusting railings surrounding the lighthouse at the pier end, their arms around each other.
When the Russians left, Anna and Laviolette sat down on the warm cement – their legs hanging over the side only metres above the churning water.
‘Why did you come back up north?’
‘My grandfather was dying.’
Laviolette nodded. ‘And?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I really want to know.’
Anna breathed in deeply, watching the swell on the thick dark water beneath her feet. ‘Someone I was working with – I’d been working with him for two years on the same case – committed suicide. Afterwards, I started suffering from these attacks. I knew what they were – I’ve seen it happen to people I’ve been close to. I could be sitting in front of the computer and without warning I’d be overcome by . . .’ she tried to find the right words, ‘this sense of imminent collapse. When this happened I knew I had to get somewhere where I could be alone – usually the toilets.’ She saw herself in one of the sickly pink cubicles where she would either chew on her knuckles as she sobbed, hoping to stifle the sound or – when the attack was acute – find herself vomiting down the toilet. ‘It’s like being in a permanent state of grief – with nothing to grieve over. The attacks didn’t go unnoticed.’
‘You’re too good at your job, aren’t you?’
‘They didn’t put it quite like that, but that’s pretty much what it amounted to.’
‘And did you feel better, coming north – in spite of the cancer that brought you?’
Anna’s lips had gone thin, in the way they did when she was concentrating. ‘I felt better until the morning I saw Bryan Deane for the first time in sixteen years. That’s when I knew –’ she broke off, seeing herself again sobbing behind the wheel of the Capri while watching a toddler play with a Doberman in the house opposite number nineteen Parkview, ‘that what was happening to me had been sixteen years in the making. Everything I’d purposefully walked out on; everything I thought I’d left behind had been secretly keeping pace with me all along, and I’d run out of storage space.’
Laviolette didn’t say anything.
They watched the sun go down in silence, spreading a lazy line of orange along the surface of the sea.
‘I saw you once – you and Bryan. A long time ago.’
Anna, whose head had fallen unconsciously against his shoulder, pulled herself up straight. ‘Easter Saturday was the first time I ever saw you in my life.’
‘I said I saw you, I didn’t say you saw me – you couldn’t have been more than eighteen both of you. It was a Friday afternoon, and it must have been raining outside because you walked into the Clayton Arms soaked through.’
‘The Clayton Arms?’
‘Up at Bedlington station. Friday afternoon used to be strippers and that’s how I know it was a Friday I saw you – because there were two girls on stage that day wearing nothing but their tits.’
‘What was I doing at the Clayton Arms?’
‘You came in with Bryan, and you were the only other girl there. You looked at the stage for a bit then you went running out.’
Laviolette didn’t tell her the rest of it: how he’d run outside after her that afternoon, straight past Bryan Deane and into the rain; how he’d seen her in the distance, running away from them all.
‘How the hell d’you remember that? And h-h-how d’you know it was me?’
‘I recognised you as soon as I saw you Easter Saturday at the Deanes. The first time I see you, you’re with Bryan Deane. The next time I see you, sixteen years later, you’re looking for Bryan Deane. Only this time I’m the one coming in from the rain.’
‘Who said I was looking for him?’
‘Isn’t that why you came north?’ he said, getting awkwardly to his feet with the support of the railings round the lighthouse where the Russians had stood to have their photograph taken.
Anna didn’t say anything – she was too preoccupied still by the memory of Bryan and her at the Clayton Arms.
‘Where d’you think he is?’ Laviolette asked after a while.
‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘Close enough to wait for Martha after school.’
Laviolette looked down at his feet as a high wave colliding with the pier left a trail of spume over them. ‘You said – Easter Saturday – that all of us are involved one way or another,’ Anna said.
‘The living and the dead.’ He gave her a quick, shy smile. ‘Bobby Deane. Rachel Deane.’
The waves were getting higher and the pier was wet from sea spray with small rainbows bouncing off it where the sun still reached.
‘Rachel Deane was having an affair with my father – you knew that?’
‘Not until recently. Nan told me.’
‘People said that’s why she killed herself – because she couldn’t leave Bobby Deane and she couldn’t leave my dad, and she had to leave one of them. The mathematics of staying with both of them was –’
‘Inappropriate,’ Anna suggested softly.
‘Hellish,’ Laviolette corrected her. ‘Bobby came to see us after Rachel died, I’ll never forget that. He came round the back, straight through the door into the kitchen, drunk but not dead drunk. Dad had the radio in pieces on the bench – he was in the middle of trying to mend it – and when he turned round, the screwdriver in his hand still, his face just dropped. Bobby was huge – felt huge then anyway and dad was a lightweight. The thought of what Bobby had come to do to him terrified him, you could feel the fear coming off him and the violence coming off Bobby, and dad was sort of crumpling up before Bobby even got close.
‘I remember thinking, this is it, and feeling relieved. I also remember realising that dad was far more afraid of Bobby Deane than he’d ever been in love with Rachel Deane.’
‘How old were you?’
‘How old?’ He stared at her for a moment, too lost in the memory to respond. ‘Nineteen? Twenty?’ he said, seeing himself standing by the bench next to the dismembered radio, as if it was that Bobby Deane had really come for and he was meant to be guarding it. ‘Twenty,’ he decided, staring at her but not really seeing her. ‘Just married, and new on the force, but it never occurred to me to do anything about Bobby Deane standing in our kitchen because right then all I was thinking was – what did Rachel see in him? And I’m not talking about Bobby.
‘So there I was thinking, this is it, then the next minute Bobby just flopped, pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down in it – lifeless – and started sobbing. He wasn’t crying, he was sobbing. It was as if, somehow, we’d been his last hope and he’d been expecting to open our kitchen door and find Rachel in there with us, but she wasn’t and when he saw she wasn’t he finally gave up.
‘I’ll never forget the sight of his hand curled on the table as he sat there motionless, sobbing. After a while – it seemed like hours, but it couldn’t have been – he started wiping at his face, and he said to my dad, “Why did you give her a choice? Why didn’t you just take her away from here? You should of just taken her away – she’d of been alright then.”
‘I can remember him saying it – I can remember him saying every single one of those words, at a loss.’
They stared at each other for a moment before Laviolette turned and started to walk away.
Anna followed, drawing alongside him again.
‘I knew then that Bobby Deane had said everything he’d ever have to say to my dad, which was why – when dad was murdered – I knew it wasn’t Bobby Deane. He was taken in for questioning and when he realised they were holding Jamie as well, he tried to plead guilty.’
‘To protect his son,’ Anna put in, aware that she’d become cold in the past ten minutes. The heat had gone out of the day and the air was cooling rapidly.
‘They thought about letting him frame himself for it, but he had too many alibis – even for them. So they went for Jamie instead.’
She thought about Jamie and Martha on Tynemouth Longsands earlier. ‘Jamie was inside for twenty years!’ Anna shouted.
‘And guess who put him there?’
‘His alibi – Laura.’
‘Some alibi.’
A wave crashed over the pier then, soaking Laviolette’s back and Anna’s right hand side. The water was cold, running off her face.
‘How did you know Laura was his alibi?’
‘I didn’t – until today. I met Jamie and Martha on Longsands earlier – just before I met you.’
‘So that’s where they went.’
‘You were following them?’
Laviolette shook his head. ‘I tried to meet with Martha – after school. I saw her get into Jamie Deane’s van.’
He carried on walking.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.
‘Home.’
‘Where’s home?’
He pointed to the headland rising above them where the pier joined the land. ‘On the Battery.’
He could see Coastguard Cottages, and Mrs Kelly’s car parked outside. Harvey would be in the house, drawing one of the thousand cuboids he drew every day – that none of the line up of professionals who’d seen him could explain. It was enough for Mrs Kelly – who didn’t need an explanation as to why Harvey drew cuboids all day long – to ensure that he had a constant supply of pens and paper and therein, Laviolette thought, lay the answer.
He was aware that he wanted to take Anna up to the house.
Anna was eroding his need for privacy.
She was doing it unconsciously and inadvertently, but she was doing it and he wasn’t sure where this left him.
‘Are you going to invite me up?’
‘I already did. I invited you to dinner. You said no.’
He walked away and she watched as, in between waves, he got smaller.
A few more seconds passed before she broke into a run – along the pier through the breaking waves after him.