It was just after ten in the morning and Laviolette was sitting opposite Jim Cornish, Superintendent, in Jim Cornish’s office. There was twenty years of service and a desk full of golf trophies between them, as well as ranks of photographs positioned so that the person sitting in the chair Laviolette was currently sitting in was forced to contemplate them, as Laviolette was doing now. There were a lot of Jim shaking hands with people, and a collection of more personal, family shots. Jim had four children – two girls and two boys – but there was only one photograph showing all four. The rest were of the eldest son, Richard – mostly of him playing rugby – and the two girls, whose names Laviolette couldn’t remember. They were displayed to provoke reassurance in those Jim liked, and envy in those he didn’t.
The younger son, Dom, had left home at eighteen with a black man, and moved south. He committed suicide five years ago at the age of thirty, but Jim never talked about Dom – nobody did, in fact, apart from Jim’s wife. Jim’s wife had been on anti-depressants ever since while Jim just carried on with his year-on-year affairs, which he’d been doing ever since the birth of his first child, rugby-playing Richard.
Jim Cornish had started his career at the notorious Berwick Street station where the Deane interviews were conducted. He would hold mattresses over people in the cells while beating them half to death – and he was one of those who remained miraculously untarnished after Berwick Street was exposed, probably because he proved so adaptable to whatever new legislation, and faces accompanying it, was wheeled in. One of the main reasons Jim was so successful at adapting was that he had no self-belief – he was happy to assume, without question, the convictions of others – and he’d always managed to keep his sights on the bigger picture, which had to be upheld at all times, and at all costs.
Jim Cornish didn’t view justice as an arm of the law; he viewed it as the enemy. He knew what people wanted – he had a talent for that – and tried to ensure they got it. If people wanted their rapists to be six foot Jamaicans, he made damn sure they were. Who wanted to know that a rapist could also be a married white collar worker in his mid fifties with three children? Nobody. So why spoil somebody’s day with an inconvenient and complicated truth. It was selfindulgent and childish.
Jim advised his officers against many courses of action, but there was very little he actually condoned. As far as Jim was concerned, the law’s only purpose was to uphold order, and self-denial never changed the world. Laviolette had watched Jim rape a woman once during their early years on the force, but if either of them were embarrassed by that now – if either of them even thought about it as anything other than the caprices of youth – it wasn’t Jim.
It was a woman who brought about this morning’s summons, and that woman was Laura Deane. It was a formal complaint – Laviolette was harassing her daughter.
Jim’s eyes kept flicking between his computer screen and the papers on his desk before resting momentarily on his Detective Inspector.
‘So what’s going on?’ he said at last.
Jim used to speak almost entirely in profanities but since becoming a latter-life church goer following Dom’s suicide – at the invitation of the Chief Superintendent – he made an effort.
‘Martha Deane reckons she saw her dad outside school the other day.’
‘Reckons,’ Jim said, staring down mournfully at his desk. ‘What do you reckon, Inspector?’
‘That we need to investigate the claim.’
Jim shifted in his chair, leaning neatly over to one side so that he could look at Laviolette on the diagonal rather than front on – while trying to decide whether he needed to be wary of him or whether he could just feel sorry for him.
‘Problem is, this particular claim comes from a distraught fifteen-year-old who’s just lost her dad.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Come on!’ Jim exploded – a mini explosion that was quickly contained but that sent a pen he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding, across the desk. ‘This is a classic empathy sighting. Plus the kid’s been seeing the school shrink – compulsive lying or something.’
‘Probably inherited,’ Laviolette put in.
Jim paused, momentarily confused. ‘Compulsive lying,’ he said again, ‘and that’s her own mother talking.’
‘And what if it’s in her mother’s interest to say those things because she doesn’t want anyone knowing her husband’s still alive? Do you want to know what I’m thinking?’
‘No,’ Jim said loudly, leaning forward now and jerking his finger at Laviolette. ‘No, I don’t want to know what you’re thinking because your thinking is costing us too much.’
‘Bryan Deane faked his own death so that the Deanes can claim on the life insurance.’
Jim started laughing – all tension between them momentarily gone. ‘Yeah, I can see that, but who cares? Is that the kind of stuff you lose sleep over? They’re consenting adults.’ Then he stopped laughing. ‘Conspiracy theories, Laviolette. Who are conspiracy theories for? The unloved and the unemployed, that’s who, and you’re only one of those things at the moment.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘No, I’m just tired of you. You never change. Your working methods aren’t . . . I don’t know . . . I’d call them into question. A lot of people would.’
‘Like who?’
Jim waved his hand expansively to one side. ‘There’s no order to your work, and that’s what we’re about here; that’s what police work is: order. You’ve got no anchor. You’re not a religious man –’
Jim’s eyes dropped automatically to the photographs on the desk in front of him as if those were the just rewards of his religion, which didn’t explain Dom’s suicide at the age of thirty, but then Jim Cornish wasn’t the sort of man who sought explanations.
‘Mrs Deane said the way you’ve conducted the investigation so far has made her feel persecuted. She’s not happy. If she gets any unhappier, I may be forced to take it further.’
‘Since when have I ever been wrong about anything?’
Jim’s eyes were on him now, seriously considering this until he found his angle. ‘Since when has that been a skill?’ he said, impatient. ‘It’s when not to be right – you’ve never learnt that. If you won’t play the game, you’ve already lost your chances of winning by one hundred percent.’
Laviolette sat half listening to him, thinking that this was how he probably spoke to his children in the study at home – Jim was bound to have a study in his house where he acted out the whole paterfamilias thing before downloading that evening’s porn – when they made a bad decision.
Something else Laviolette realised – too late – was that Jim Cornish was most people, and most people trusted Jim Cornish not because he was trustworthy (he was inherently untrustworthy and had a penchant for getting blood on his fists in dark rooms), but because he was like them.
Laviolette wasn’t like them.
Jim was watching him, an amused expression on his face. ‘What did I say to you, when you first joined the force?’
‘You only said one thing?’
‘Think of truth as the deformed child we keep locked in the cellar.’
‘Well, at least there’s a cellar – that’s good to know,’ Laviolette said.
Jim Cornish stopped smiling. His eyes ran briskly over the golf trophies, photographs and office walls – the things he held dear; the things he had achieved. Then he stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘You asked me just now – when have you ever been wrong about anything? Well, you just got wrong,’ he announced.
Laviolette stood up as well so that the two men were facing each other. ‘About what?’
‘Bryan Deane’s body is in the mortuary. It was washed up this morning. You should go and take a look. DC Wade’s down there with Laura Deane as we speak.’ Jim grinned at him, knowing that the part that would get to Laviolette most was the fact that DC Wade had been told before him.
‘It’s over,’ Jim said, still grinning.
*
Laura Deane and DC Wade were just leaving when Laviolette got there, which had probably been the intention. He stopped by the double doors they walked through – still swinging with the momentum of their departure – suddenly, profoundly irritated. He’d wanted to be in the room when Laura Deane and her dead husband were reunited and she made the identification; he’d wanted to be there very badly, and now he’d missed it.
Laura stopped when she saw him, turning so that he got full frontal exposure to her grief. She didn’t say anything, she just brought her hands away from her face and let them hang by her side as she stood there so that he could see the unevenly red skin, swollen in all the right places, the make-up – expensive as it was and marketed with a no-run guarantee – beginning to run round the eyes. She let her face do the talking, and the face said, ‘Look at me – this is what a woman looks like when she’s just had to indentify her drowned husband’s body. I’m in shock, and now I’m officially grieving. You can’t touch me.’
Once she saw that he understood, she turned away from him back to DC Wade’s firm embrace.
DC Wade, embarrassed, twisted her head round and nodded briefly at Laviolette before leading Laura Deane – a slow-moving combination of white, beige and gold – up the corridor.
Laviolette remained standing there long after they’d gone. Someone emerged from a door close by – and for a second he could hear rock music playing on a radio – stared at him then disappeared through another set of doors, leaving him alone with the inescapable smell of chemicals and a total lack of natural daylight.
A few minutes later, he was looking down at the bloated corpse of a drowned man. The small, tiled room was full of the infinite sadness of departure Laviolette had often felt when confronted with death. There was also nausea – faint, but it was there – because there was nothing human about the remains; they were just remains.
He pressed his back against the tiled wall, his fingertips splayed to either side, contemplating the real possibility that this might be Bryan Deane.
What if it was?
What if it wasn’t?
Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful just to go with it – ignore the light he’d seen in Laura Deane’s eyes and choose only, in retrospect, to see the grief?
Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful to agree with everyone that death by drowning had really been the forgone conclusion all along, but that protocol had been followed and deployed?
Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful to close the case and move on . . . allow Jim Cornish to shake his hand and squeeze his shoulder?
Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful to just let go?
Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful to stop fighting?
He let his head drop back against the cream-coloured tiles that always provoked in him a shuddering foretaste of violence, as if he expected at any moment to see them sprayed with blood. Then he shut his eyes, but as soon as he shut them Laura’s perfume, undercut by a wall of chemicals, became even stronger.
He didn’t want the corpse lying in front of him to be Bryan Deane.
He didn’t want the search – no, it was more than that; it was a quest that had been going on for over twenty years – to finish here today, like this.
He didn’t want the Deanes to win, and he didn’t want Anna – he thought about her perched on the edge of the sofa in his study last night – to lose her reason for staying.
He didn’t want the story to end here.
Sighing, he took a step closer, thinking again about the light at the back of Laura Deane’s eyes. It had only been there for a split second, but it had the effect of changing her expression completely – from one of grief to one of triumph.
Laura Deane thought she’d won; was suddenly sure of it – standing outside in the corridor, staring at him.
Then he remembered something Anna had said about Bryan having had appendicitis surgery. Looking down, he saw no sign of a scar.
He phoned Yvonne – an old friend he’d known since first joining the force, and the only person he could trust right then. Yvonne had never been promoted above the rank of sergeant because she’d never asked to be – if she had, she would have been; people didn’t say ‘no’ to Yvonne, who was in a league of her own not even Jim Cornish could touch.
Yvonne knew everybody and operated way beyond the perimeters of her job description. She had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest thimble collection in the world, and both she and her husband – a retired officer who spent his time on planes escorting illegal immigrants home – collected porcelain figurines.
‘I hear you’ve got a body,’ she said – brusque; wry.
‘Yeah, I’m with it now – only it’s not my body.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Based on?’
‘Nothing much other than the absence of an appendicitis scar. Yvonne – I need you to run a check – all missing persons reported in the last six months.’
‘Because?’
‘This isn’t Bryan Deane.’
Laviolette banged open the double doors and started to run – along the corridor and through the building, its daylight levels increasing as he ran – until he was standing in the car park in full sunlight, breathless.
He wanted to know where Laura Deane had gone after identifying her missing husband in a mortuary.
But there was no sign of a silver Lexus 4x4 parked anywhere.
Laviolette walked, distracted, to where his own car was usually parked, and stood staring at the black Volkswagen Polo in front of him, waiting for it to transmogrify into a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier.
But it didn’t.
Then he remembered that he hadn’t been able to get his usual spot that morning, but couldn’t remember where he had actually parked his car – he was going to have to check all one thousand bays.
He started to walk through the car park.
By the time he’d located the Vauxhall – somewhere he had no recollection of leaving it – he’d tried Laura’s mobile, the landlines at number two Marine Drive, Starz Salon, and Don Hamilton. Laura clearly hadn’t told her parents about the body in the mortuary.
Laura Deane was nowhere to be found.
He tried Anna’s mobile, but she wasn’t picking up either – so phoned the house. It had been too late and they’d drunk too much the night before for Anna to drive back to Blyth, so she’d spent the night on the sofa in the study. He hadn’t seen her before leaving that morning – she’d still been asleep.
Mrs Kelly picked up. He could hear Harvey, in the background, irate. ‘Is Anna there?’
‘Anna?’ Mrs Kelly – distracted by Harvey who was outraged that his pipe cleaner cuboid was refusing to stand level on the table – was at a loss.
‘Last night?’
‘Oh. Anna.’ Mrs Kelly said the name shyly. ‘She left.’
‘When?’
‘Not long ago.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘No, she didn’t really say anything. Just a minute –’ He heard her trying to calm Harvey. ‘I was going to do a stew for tonight – is that okay?’ she said, hesitant.
‘Fine – that’s fine.’
‘Oh, and Harvey’s got his appointment in North Shields later – so we won’t be back until six.’
Mrs Kelly’s mention of North Shields was entirely incidental, but it triggered something in Laviolette. He’d forgotten about North Shields, and that was something he shouldn’t have done.
The Deanes had a flat in North Shields that they rented out – at the Royal Quays Marina.
Anna had woken that morning on the sofa in Laviolette’s study, in Laviolette’s house with a feeling of empty panic at having given something away, drunk, that in daylight she regretted, and daylight was staring down at her through the skylight as she swung her legs over the edge of the sofa into a sitting position, staring down at her bare feet in the carpet as if they had nothing to do with her.
Laviolette had left without waking her.
Uncertain, she went downstairs and attempted to talk first to Harvey then Mrs Kelly. Harvey was easier, but Mrs Kelly did offer to make her coffee. She had the impression they were waiting to go out – had been waiting for some time – but that Mrs Kelly didn’t want to leave her in the house alone. Anna also guessed – from both Harvey and Mrs Kelly’s reaction to her presence – that visitors at number four Coastguard Cottages were a rarity. She tried to think of some way to reassure them both, but in the end gave up.
She took her coffee upstairs with her after telling Mrs Kelly she’d be leaving in ten minutes, and sat on the sofa in the study again looking round the room more intently now she was alone in it. She thought about Harvey – downstairs – and what Laviolette had said about him being there the day Roger Laviolette had been killed. A minute later, she was pulling down the old projector box with the interview tapes in it, from the shelves.
The cine projector was in the box still, the clearly labelled tapes slotted down either side of the incommodious machine. Anna found herself wondering – like she had with the car when she first met Laviolette the night Bryan disappeared – if the old projector was even his, and if it was, what had it been used for? She couldn’t imagine – from the things he’d said the night before – that the early years of his married life were times anyone would want to capture and replay.
They’d listened to all the tapes, Anna realised, apart from the one she’d just come across – the one she’d seen Laviolette hesitate over the night before, and withhold. Anna stared down at the tape, which had her grandmother’s name on it: Mary Faust.
She wanted to play it on Laviolette’s machine then and there, but could hear Mrs Kelly on the stairs. So she’d taken it with her – without hesitation – feeling entitled to it while wondering briefly how long it would take for him to miss it.
Why had police interviewed Mary after Roger Laviolette’s death?
It was starting to rain, but Laviolette barely noticed as he dialled DC Wade’s number.
‘What have we got on the Deane’s flat – the one at the marina in North Shields?’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following,’ Veronica said at last.
‘The Deanes have a flat,’ Laviolette said, tersely, articulating each word, ‘in North Shields at the Royal Quays Marina.’
‘I understand that.’
‘What did Laura Deane tell us about the flat?’
‘You want me to look in the case file?’
‘Yes, I want you to look in the case file.’
‘But, Inspector, this morning –’
‘This morning, what?’
‘The mortuary,’ DC Wade said, helplessly, anxious to resolve the situation without dispute. ‘I was there in the room with Mrs Deane, sir. I was there.’
Laviolette was trying not to lose patience. He didn’t want to push her too hard, even though that was his inclination, because if he pushed DC Wade too hard, she might go running to Jim Cornish, and this situation that Laviolette was playing out right now was just the sort of situation Jim was looking for.
‘We all want this case closed, Wade, but there’s the coroner’s report still to come and while we’re waiting on that, I just want to review the case file – make sure we asked everything we were meant to when we were meant to. I don’t want anything coming back to haunt us when this is closed, that’s all,’ he concluded.
‘So it’s not an investigative request as such?’
‘Not as such, no. It’s –’
‘Administrative?’ she suggested helpfully, happy to have made sense of the Inspector’s request at last. He was being thorough, that was all.
‘So you want me to check what went down on file regarding the North Shields property?’
‘Please.’
‘I’ll take a look.’
Veronica phoned back twenty minutes later.
‘What did you find?’
‘Nothing much. Mrs Deane confirmed they had a second property let through Tyneside Properties – we cross-checked with them. That’s it.’
‘Great, we can sign that off then.’
‘So – that’s it?’ Veronica said, relieved.
‘That’s it.’
When Laura walked into the marina flat, Tom was standing by the dining table, absently shuffling some drawings into a pile.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said, his mind elsewhere.
He walked past her into the kitchen and started to methodically load the dishwasher. She remained where she was in the middle of the living room and watched him load it in the same perverse way he’d always done, which meant that everything had to be rinsed in the sink afterwards because it never got washed properly.
She’d stopped letting him stack the dishwasher at number two Marine Drive for precisely this reason, but here she’d felt no compulsion to do that.
The silence was awkward.
It was a silence that needed words, that tried seeking for them, but that couldn’t find any.
‘D’you want a tea or coffee?’
‘I brought champagne,’ she said, moving at last over to the kitchen doorway and leaning against the frame.
‘Champagne?’ He didn’t understand.
‘You died today – it’s almost official.’
He carried on drying his hands on the tea towel. ‘I did?’
‘I saw you over an hour ago, laid out in the mortuary. I identified you. I cried.’
She was poised, watching him, waiting for him to get it.
‘You did?’ he said, in the same distant tone.
‘You drowned. You got washed up in the harbour at Cullercoats. A fisherman found you.’ She paused, still waiting. ‘Bryan – there’s no catch. We’ve just got to wait for the coroner’s report. Then –’
He walked slowly past her, still holding the tea towel, and sat down on the sofa in the living room.
‘So – we’re nearly done here?’
She nodded, sitting down on the coffee table, on top of a pile of his drawings and taking hold of his hands. Instead of bringing them together, the body in the mortuary had somehow come between them.
‘What did he look like – this drowned man?’
‘Like – nothing.’
He pulled his hands out of her grasp and fell back against the sofa, preoccupied.
‘Please, Bryan,’ she said, suddenly scared. ‘We’re this close.’ She held up her thumb and forefinger so that they were almost touching, trying to bring him back to her. ‘This close.’
He turned to her. ‘To what?’
Laura shifted position carefully – it was as if everything had suddenly become breakable. ‘Everything we talked about.’
‘What did we talk about?’
‘Don’t be cruel – not now. It’s too late for cruelty.’
‘Seriously,’ he persisted. ‘I can’t even remember any more, what it was we set out to do – what any of this is about.’
He stood up, preoccupied, and went out onto the balcony where his attention was taken by a young woman pushing a buggy out of the building and across the car park. There was a toddler in the buggy, asleep, her arm flung over the side so that the teddy she was holding hung out. A second later he watched it fall to the ground. The mother hadn’t noticed, and he found it upsetting.
‘Bryan?’ Laura said, joining him on the balcony.
‘A kid just dropped it – look,’ he said, pointing to the teddy lying face down in the car park below.
Laura glanced at it without interest, waiting for him to turn back to her, but he didn’t.
He walked straight through the flat, leaving the door open.
‘Bryan? Where are you going?’ She could hear him running down the stairs, and a few moments later he appeared in the car park below.
Laura saw him pick up the teddy from where it was lying, and dust the muck off it then jog after the young mother, calling out and waving the bear.
‘Excuse me,’ Laura heard him say, breathless, eventually drawing level. ‘You dropped this.’
‘Oh.’ The mother nodded, surprised – pleased – as Bryan peered, smiling, into the buggy.
Laura remained on the balcony, unaware that she was crying, watching as the mother shunted the buggy forwards again, leaving Bryan standing in the car park.
He felt unaccountably relieved that he’d managed to return the teddy – a bear in a dress – to the sleeping child, and that the sleeping child would never know she’d lost it.
He felt unaccountably relieved that the bear was no longer lost.
Maureen at Tyneside Properties was standing at the back of the office talking to a decayed looking man in expensive clothes with a light covering of auburn hair that straggled across his cranium – a property developer whose small complex of four luxury mews houses in Gosforth they were hoping to sell. But she recognised the Inspector as soon as he walked in because everybody at Tyneside Properties – apart from the young man smiling affably at the Inspector now – had been interviewed after Bryan Deane’s disappearance.
‘Inspector!’ she called out, more irately than she’d meant to.
The property developer turned to him, momentarily curious, but the curiosity soon passed. He’d known Bryan Deane relatively well. Tyneside Properties sold all the units on another of his developments four years ago, down near the Quayside, and got above asking price on all of them. They’d spoken once about branching out into the commercial property market, but Bryan had lost the inclination to make that kind of money and the developer – who’d spent very little of the past twenty years sober – was no player.
Maureen approached – in a red suit with brass buttons running the length of it. The suits she’d worn in the late eighties and early nineties – when she first knew Bryan – that made her look like an estate agent, now made her look like an air hostess, and Maureen had always worn make-up like a transvestite; something that had never ceased to entertain Laura Deane.
‘Inspector,’ she said again, smiling this time.
‘Can I just have a few moments?’
They went into the small kitchen where brown brick walls were covered in health and safety regulations, an aerial photograph of the coast from Tynemouth up to Blyth, staff targets, a sole postcard from the Isle of Wight, and a poster of an airbrushed woman in a wide brim hat eating a cherry. There was also the front page of The Journal from the day Bryan Deane’s picture had been published. Someone had scribbled something in blue biro across it and up close, Laviolette saw that it read: Fess up, Greg, just how badly did you want that promotion?
He turned to look at Maureen, amused.
‘That shouldn’t be up there,’ she said, mortified, pushing past him and ripping it down. She placed the offending article on top of the microwave. ‘Greg’s been made temporary Branch Manager. It’s a tasteless joke, it’s –’ Words failed her. ‘Please –’ She waved her arm at the bank of outdated office chairs, gesturing at Laviolette to take a seat.
‘I need to ask you something about the Deane’s flat – the one in North Shields.’
Maureen nodded, and stopped smiling.
‘Mrs Deane told us the property was rented, and we just need a bit more information regarding that.’
Maureen looked thoughtful. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting when she saw the Inspector, but it wasn’t this.
‘When I saw you, I thought you might have some information for us – not that you’d be needing some from us.’
Laviolette thought of the body in the mortuary and smiled sadly. ‘Unfortunately not.’
‘Can I get you a tea or coffee or anything?’
‘I’m fine.’ He watched her put the kettle on anyway. ‘The Deanes’ flat is down at the Royal Quays Marina in the Ropemakers Building.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for it,’ she said, ‘it’s Justin who works on lettings. Did you meet Justin? No, you wouldn’t have done,’ she carried on before he had time to answer, ‘he’s only been with us a couple of weeks.’
‘I need to know when the flat was let, for how long, and who the tenant is?’
Maureen listened to this while regarding the Inspector, as steam from the boiling kettle rose up behind her.
The kettle clicked off, but the steam carried on rising.
‘That’s quite specific information you want,’ she pointed out, uncertain, waiting for him to back up the request with something that would explain the personal visit to retrieve such seemingly irrelevant information. When no such explanation was forthcoming, she said, ‘They were bloody lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘The Deanes – with the rental of the marina flat in the current climate.’
She realised from the Inspector’s expression – too late – that she’d ended up inadvertently saying more than she’d meant to.
‘There’ve been a lot of repossessions at the marina.’
‘How long’s it been let for?’
‘I’d have to check the contracts file – I’m not sure.’ She paused. ‘Have you not heard anything at all since the appeal?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’
She disappeared into the office, reappearing a few minutes later, and remained standing near the door. ‘It was let mid-February,’ she said, her hand holding onto the door handle still.
Laviolette was aware that his posture had become tense and that his left shoulder hurt. He wanted a name.
‘It’s a twelve month let and the deposit plus rent were paid up front.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘Depends.’ She paused. ‘There was only one name on the contract – a man called Tom Bowen.’
‘Tom Bowen,’ Laviolette said, smiling. He wanted to say it out loud, and as soon as he said it, the image of the morning’s bloated corpse slid off the table it had been lying on, and floated away. Tom Bowen was a good name; a vivid name. It sounded like a name belonging to someone who was still alive. Bryan Deane might be nowhere, but Tom Bowen was somewhere. Tom Bowen was living at flat twenty-one, the Ropemakers Building, and he’d been there all along.
Maureen hadn’t left her position by the door, and looked relieved when the Inspector stood up to go.
Laviolette, feeling suddenly light-headed, asked for a photocopy of the contract, which – after only a moment’s hesitation – Maureen did herself, on a double-sided setting.
He was about to leave with the contract when Greg walked in, gave Laviolette a professional smile – clearly not remembering him despite having been interviewed for over an hour by DS Chambers and himself – and said to Maureen, ‘I’m parked on doubles, and I’m late for the Marine Drive viewing – can you chuck me the keys?’
He gave Laviolette another brief, open smile although this one tapered slightly towards the end.
Maureen didn’t look at him at all. She went to the key cupboard on the back wall of the office near the fire extinguisher and took out the keys, throwing them lightly to Greg.
‘Back in about an hour,’ he said, giving Laviolette a quick look before jumping back into his car, which he’d parked directly outside Tyneside Properties.
‘Laura – Mrs Deane – has put the house on the market,’ she said, worried that she hadn’t mentioned this before. ‘You already knew?’
Laviolette nodded slowly and took his leave.
As Laviolette drove through the rain into Tynemouth along Grand Parade, he saw Anna’s yellow Capri parked in the same place it had been parked since yesterday, and knew immediately that this was where she’d come when she left Coastguard Cottages.
Despite the weather, there were surfers in the water – not many – but enough at this distance for them to look like a small colony.
He parked and walked down onto the beach via the small slip road full of recycling bins that led down to Crusoes – the café they’d had a drink at the previous evening.
The beach was empty as he walked towards the sea, stopping about five metres from the water’s edge. The surfers looked strangely androgynous in their wet suits, even up close, but he saw her immediately. She had none of the aggressive intentness most of them had, she just wanted to be there in the water doing what she was doing, and it gave her a beguiling grace; a purity almost. He knew he didn’t understand what he was seeing, but he felt it.
She’d seen him and was heading towards him, gaining height and straightening up. She came to a standstill a couple of metres away from him, stepping easily off her board and catching it up before the next wave came.
She didn’t look surprised to see him, and she was smiling – a wet, exhilarated smile that had nothing to do with him.
He jumped back as a wave caught at his shoes and, laughing, her face relaxed and the unsettling exhilaration left it.
They started to walk back across the beach – towards Crusoes.
‘We’ve been stupid,’ he said when they were far enough from the sea to talk comfortably.
‘About what?’ she said, sniffing loudly and not particularly interested.
‘There’s a body.’
She stopped walking. ‘Since when?’
‘Yesterday. A fisherman at Cullercoats Bay found it sandwiched between his boat and the harbour wall.’
‘Bryan?’
‘Enough people want it to be – including Laura, who came in this morning to identify it.’
‘Did you see it?’
Laviolette nodded. ‘Did you ever see a drowned body?’
‘Once,’ Anna said, automatically. ‘How was Laura?’
‘I saw her just after the identification.’
‘And?’
‘She identified it as her husband’s body.’
There was a pause.
‘And?’
‘I’m waiting on the coroner’s report. How about you?’
‘I don’t know. There’s a body now. What if this time he really did die?’
‘It’s not him.’
‘I need proof. I need something . . . it’s just supposition,’ she shouted over her shoulder as she carried on walking. ‘I hear nothing but supposition.’
‘It’s more than that.’
This time she stopped.
‘There was no appendicitis scar on the body.’
‘A scar like that wouldn’t show if a body had been in the water that long. You’ll have to do better.’
‘The Deanes have an investment property Bryan Deane bought just before the crash. I told you about it, it’s at the Royal Quays Marina.’ He broke off. ‘Right now it’s like the Empty Quarter down there, but the Deanes managed to let their flat in February this year – through Tyneside Properties.’
Anna was staring at him. ‘You think that’s where Bryan’s been hiding?’
Laviolette nodded. ‘And I think that’s where Laura Deane went after identifying her husband’s body at the mortuary this morning.’
Anna looked away from him towards the sea, which was depositing a line of something on the beach – large, grey-white objects that lay stranded and quivering in the wet sand before being picked up by the next wave and deposited again, each time a little closer to them. Jellyfish – hundreds of them -stretching along the waterline as far as the eye could see.
‘She identifies her husband’s body then she gets in her car and drives directly to their flat at Royal Quays Marina – currently rented to a Tom Bowen.’
She looked up at him. ‘Tom Bowen?’
‘That’s the name of the guy who’s renting the marina flat.’
‘You think Tom Bowen’s Bryan Deane?’
‘It’s him, Anna, I know it’s him.’
‘No, you don’t know it’s him.’
‘It’s him,’ Laviolette said, grabbing hold suddenly of her arm. ‘Anna –’
Pulling her arm free, she started walking again.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Crusoes. I left my clothes with Sheila on the counter so I can get changed out of this,’ she said, pulling on the collar of the wetsuit. ‘This isn’t an investigation – it’s a manhunt.’
‘Come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘The marina.’ He started walking towards her.
‘You’ll never get a warrant for that.’
‘You don’t want that body in the mortuary to be Bryan Deane.’
‘I don’t work for you. You’ve got your own people.’
‘Not any more I haven’t. They’ve assigned me to an armed robbery case in a supporting role.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said frankly, meaning it.
The sea was following them up the beach, and they’d instinctively started to raise their voices again in order to be heard above it.
‘I want you to come with me because you’re the only one who’d recognise him.’
‘What makes you think that?’ she said, starting to walk away.
‘You told me – last night!’ he yelled after her retreating back.
Anna and Laviolette sat in Laviolette’s car in the marina car park, looking up at the Ropemakers Building. They’d spent ten minutes driving round the car park, but there was no sign of Laura’s Lexus.
Some of the balconies had garden furniture and pot plants on them, but most didn’t.
Their attention was taken by a balcony door opening half way up the building. A woman with short hair dyed purple stepped outside – it was one of the balconies with furniture and pot plants – and lit up, staring absently at a fixed point in the distance. She was joined by a man they couldn’t see clearly, who remained near the doors. She turned to face him leaning her elbows on the railings – and continued to smoke.
They stood there contemplating each other until suddenly exchanging a brief, hard kiss before pulling away. The man put his hand on the woman’s right breast, but she lifted it off, kissing it. She dropped the cigarette into one of the pot plants and they went inside.
The balcony doors remained open, the white curtains blowing out, and there was something relentless in the way the curtains kept blowing that prompted Laviolette and Anna to get out of the car.
As they crossed the car park full of puddles after the day’s five minute rain storm – which had been almost tropical in intensity – and entered the Ropemakers Building, a white Husky trotted through the curtains and onto the balcony where the couple had been standing.
It ran round the balcony a couple of times, its nose to the ground, sniffing the decking before lying down suddenly on its side in a temperamental patch of sunlight, its eyes rolling up towards the sky, its tail knocking rhythmically against a pot full of bamboo.
They moved fast, through the lobby – which smelt damp – and up the metal and wood staircase, too impatient to use the lift; aware now of a renewed sense of urgency. The building felt empty, and when Laviolette rang on the bell to the Deanes’ flat – flat twenty-one on level D – they could hear it echoing inside.
They waited – Anna watching the enlarged shadows of raindrops running down the window at the end of the corridor, moving across the floor.
There was no answer.
After pressing his ear to the door and trying the handle, Laviolette rang again – knocking as well this time. Drumming his fingers on the door he instinctively knew wasn’t going to open he went along the corridor to flat twenty-three and rang on this door instead.
There was no answer here either, but he did hear movement on the other side. Briefly distracted by the sound of voices in the stairwell, speaking what sounded like Chinese, he waited for them to fade before ringing again. This time a woman’s voice – foreign – simply said, ‘Yes?’
This was followed by a dog, barking.
‘Police,’ he called out.
He looked at Anna.
The door opened and the tall woman with purple hair – who they’d just seen out on the balcony – was standing there in a black and gold dressing gown, her face startled-looking despite the heaviness around her eyes. The dressing gown wasn’t tied, but pulled protectively round her.
There was a dog standing behind her – a Husky, whose neck she was holding onto.
Anna was staring at the dog, and the dog was staring back at her – unblinking.
The back draft of the smell of sex hung momentarily in the hallway.
Sex in the afternoon – it had been somehow instilled in Laviolette since childhood before the breakdown of decency and order, without anybody ever referring to the subject directly – was for teenagers, newlyweds, the unemployed, and the wealthy, or you were paying for it.
‘Yes?’ she said again.
‘We’re trying to get hold of Mr Bowen – in the flat next door?’
‘Next door?’ She took a step closer and looked vaguely up the corridor.
‘Flat twenty-one – nobody’s answering.’
‘Oh – Tom. I don’t know him.’
‘Apart from the fact that he’s called Tom.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s at work.’
‘He works?’ Laviolette asked quickly.
The woman stared at him for a moment then shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’
Laviolette detected movement behind her eyes. He didn’t doubt that what she was saying was true, he just didn’t believe her.
‘You’re Russian?’
‘Polish,’ she said with a faint smile – as if his diagnosis amused her.
While she was still smiling, he said, ‘I couldn’t trouble you for a glass of water, could I?’
She stared at him – then Anna.
There was the sound of a toilet being flushed in the flat behind her, but what Anna guessed to be the bathroom door remained shut. The door to the bedroom was also shut.
‘It’s no trouble.’ She gave him another faint smile.
He followed her in and she stopped, turning round to face him, making an effort to conceal the tension in her face. ‘I’ve got a spare bottle – I’ll fill it.’
Laviolette waited in the flat’s tiny hallway, light-headed and fractious for a moment before walking into the lounge-diner, leaving the front door open behind him.
Anna followed.
She thought she heard a door open behind her and, turning round, caught a glimpse of a man with blond hair – the man from the balcony – disappearing through the bedroom door.
‘So you’ve got no idea when would be a good time to catch your neighbour?’ he said, startling the woman from her crouching position on the kitchen floor where she’d been looking for an empty water bottle in the cupboard under the sink.
She stood up. ‘Not really, no.’
‘Is he around in the evenings?’ Laviolette persisted.
‘I’m sorry – I really have no idea,’ she said, exasperated.
They watched each other for a moment then Laviolette swung away from her with a smile, taking in the room behind him while she poured him a glass of water from the tap.
‘I thought I had a spare bottle, but I couldn’t find one.’
She gave the benches a quick wipe with a yellow cloth while he drank the water, drifting over to the fridge where there were a couple of drawings held up by alphabet magnets.
They were life drawings – in pen and ink – of a woman lying on her back with one leg hooked up and an arm flung over her head. Laviolette looked from the drawings to the woman cleaning the benches.
‘That’s you?’ he asked.
She nodded.
They’re good,’ he said, adding, ‘Anna – come and take a look. You don’t mind?’ he said to the woman.
She shook her head.
‘Somebody gave you these?’ Laviolette asked, watching Anna, who was staring thoughtfully at the drawings.
‘Somebody in the class. I do four classes a week – it’s good money,’ she said quietly then, in the same quiet voice – before he had a chance to ask any more questions – she said, ‘what did you say your name was?’
‘I didn’t. Detective Inspector Laviolette.’ He didn’t introduce Anna. ‘If you see Mr Bowen, will you tell him I need to speak to him?’
She nodded, moving past them towards the front door.
After taking one last look around the lounge diner, he followed her.
There were no tell-tale signs of male occupancy in the flat – the blond man and purple haired Pole weren’t a couple, of that he was sure; so either she was cheating on someone, or he was cheating on someone, or they were both cheating on someone.
When they got back to the car Anna said, ‘She was telling the truth,’ echoing Laviolette’s earlier sentiment.
Laviolette nodded. ‘I agree. So why don’t I believe her?’ He stared up at the balcony, whose doors were open – the curtains blowing still. ‘What were you thinking – when you were looking at the drawings?’
‘That they could be Bryan’s.’
‘And?’
‘They could be Bryan’s.’
‘You think it’s worth checking to see if Tom Bowen’s enrolled in any life drawing classes?’
Anna nodded, but she wasn’t thinking about the drawings any more – she was thinking about the man she’d caught a glimpse of, disappearing into the bedroom inside flat twenty-three. He’d looked at her – only for a split second – but he’d definitely looked, and she’d felt the look across the back of her shoulders.
‘What are you thinking?’ Laviolette asked, watching her.
She turned to face him. ‘Nothing.’