Laviolette was in his pyjamas still when Mrs Kelly arrived that morning. She ran her eyes over him – surprised then concerned – but didn’t say anything. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, aimless, watching her get Harvey’s breakfast together while chatting nervously to Harvey who was drawing cubes with a neon marker at the kitchen table. She was nervous because Laviolette was watching and making an effort to understand the scene so that he could find some part to play in it.
Once Mrs Kelly had handed him his mug of coffee, he gave up and went back upstairs to his study where he phoned DC Wade to say he’d be in late. He didn’t give a reason and, despite the hesitation in her voice, she didn’t ask for one. Afterwards, he sat blowing on his coffee and contemplating his downfall – something he found curiously satisfying; cathartic, even.
He wasn’t surprised that such an inauspicious career made up of seemingly insignificant incidents – failure to take a bribe here, failure to tamper with evidence there, failure to intimidate a witness here, failure to get blood on his fists in a dark room there – should culminate in this moment because a fact he’d come to realise over the years was that the more trustworthy he became the less likely those he worked for were to actually trust him.
Given his case record, they had to give him Detective Inspector, but they made it clear at the time that he’d reached his ceiling.
The way he’d handled the Bryan Deane case – the fact he’d been given it at all – had been pivotal, and it had been clear after yesterday’s meeting with Jim Cornish that someone somewhere had decided his moment had come.
He sat in his old office chair, gently swinging it from side to side while starting to idly scrawl a frame round the bits of sellotape stuck to the surface of the desk – with a biro advertising a local insurance company. He thought about the day his father died – how he’d got the call and how he’d gone home to find Jim Cornish standing in the burnt out kitchen, and how his standing there had shocked and infuriated Laviolette almost more than what had happened.
The fire brigade was still there cleaning up when he arrived.
The smells of his childhood had vanished under the smell of smoke, burnt MDF, burnt lino, burnt vinyl and burnt flesh – his father’s remains were under sheeting on the floor.
There were people everywhere, but wherever he turned the only face he saw was Jim Cornish’s.
Turning away from him, Laviolette saw – through the door leading to the garden – Harvey’s blue buggy tipped on its side.
‘Harvey?’ he said, to nobody in particular, feeling sick.
‘Ambulance took him to hospital – burns unit,’ Jim Cornish added, shaking his head.
‘It’s not serious,’ another officer put in. ‘He’s fine – it’s just routine. I can drive you there.’ He swung, uncertain, towards Jim.
‘What happened here?’ Laviolette said at last. ‘Who did this?’
‘It could have been anyone,’ Jim said, fixed on Laviolette now, ‘I mean – given the state of things round here. The tensions –’
‘The tensions,’ Laviolette repeated stupidly.
‘Everyone knows you’ve got two wages coming in here – and what with you in uniform.’
‘Dad’s a safety engineer,’ Laviolette said. ‘He’s not NUM, he’s NACODS. The National Union of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers decided not to strike.’
He remembered his father telling him, explaining patiently that if maintenance below ground wasn’t kept up geological conditions would deteriorate to a state that would make it impossible for the pits to re-open. Going on strike would work against the cause.
Jim Cornish closed his mouth and puffed out his cheeks and didn’t say anything – as if Laviolette wasn’t getting the point.
A corner of the sheet covering Roger Laviolette’s charred remains was caught under the toe of his boot.
‘A neighbour says she saw a boy come in the back door here this afternoon, and we think we’ve got a match – to the description.’
‘Who?’
‘Jamie Deane.’
‘Jamie Deane?’ Laviolette repeated in the same stupid way as before.
Everybody standing in the burnt-out kitchen knew who the Deanes were, and everybody knew about Rachel Deane and his father. He could tell from the other officer’s face that Jim Cornish wasn’t meant to tell him about the neighbour’s allegation, but it was too late now.
Laviolette knew that if Bobby had got to Jamie first, he would have told him to say he was with him that afternoon, but Bobby didn’t get there first.
Jim Cornish took Jamie Deane to Berwick Street station and Jamie told him the truth – that he’d spent the afternoon with Laura Hamilton; he could smell her still on his skin, crouched in the corner of the room with his arms wrapped round his head.
Laviolette was driven to the hospital to see Harvey, who they were keeping in overnight for observation. Everything had been choreographed to perfection. After the hospital, he was driven in the same car straight to Berwick Street station – in silence, with nothing to distract him from the image of Harvey lying curled in his hospital cot clutching the Sooty puppet he always slept with, the side of his face covered in a dressing from where he’d fallen against something or been pushed – nobody was clear about this.
Jamie Deane was lying in the same position as Harvey when Laviolette got to the station – only Jamie Deane was sandwiched between a large mattress and a brick wall in a dark room, and the team looking after him was headed by Jim Cornish.
The boy was all smashed up and Laviolette knew that he’d been brought to Berwick Street to smash him up some more; that it was permissible – expected of him, even. And that Jim Cornish desired this particularly.
On his way to the cells past the badly painted blue walls and dusty pot plants living out suspended life sentences, he passed Laura Hamilton and her parents – he didn’t know then who she was, all he saw was a girl of about thirteen with long blonde hair, supported on either side by her parents – all three of them looking terrified.
‘It’s him,’ Jim Cornish said, when Laviolette walked into the room, scraping his hair back into position. ‘He just lost his only alibi.’
The face that peered up at Laviolette from behind the mattress had long ago stopped trying to differentiate between friend and foe, and was now working on the premise that anybody who walked into that room was foe.
Fifteen looked smaller than it sounded – especially lying crumpled behind a stained mattress on the floor.
The face was pale and discoloured.
It didn’t look like a face that could have done what it was meant to have done to his father, but at that moment Jamie flinched and Laviolette felt a sudden charge of exhilaration – the sort he’d often seen on other men’s faces during the Strike, whatever side they were on.
He’d never seen anyone flinch from him before, and it gave him such a rush that he finally let go of the parts of an upside down world he was still valiantly trying to hold onto.
It got to the point where Jamie Deane’s body was no longer moving of its own accord, but only in response to his blows, and nothing had ever felt so good.
At some point Bobby Deane arrived at the station with a group of men – there were twelve of them altogether. Laviolette heard them as a distant roar, but had a sudden, clear picture of Bobby Deane in a corridor out there somewhere while only metres away, his son . . .
He looked down then at Jamie Deane – a long way down by his feet as if he was seeing him now for the first time, and seeing him, he was violently sick over the mattress lying on the floor that he’d asked Wilkins to take away.
Laviolette looked down at his desk in the study at four Coastguard Cottages – surprised to see that he’d scribbled a sequence of numbers, and even more surprised when he recognised them as his mother’s Co-Op account number. The number he used to give the cashier when he was sent out for the groceries.
He was still staring at the numbers when his phone rang five minutes later.
It was Yvonne.
‘They’ve got a problem,’ she said, toneless. ‘I ran a check on all missing persons –’
‘And?’
‘A couple of months ago, a girl called Alison Marsh had an argument with her boyfriend. He walked out, and she didn’t hear from him so left it. After a while, she started leaving messages, which he never returned. She cried herself to sleep every night for weeks –’
‘You just made that up,’ Laviolette interrupted her.
‘Yeah,’ Yvonne agreed, ‘I just made that up. But she did start phoning his friends only they reckoned they hadn’t seen him either. Alison thought they were lying – covering for him – and was on the verge of dying of a broken heart when the boyfriend’s mother phoned asking if Alison had seen Brett, because she hadn’t heard anything from him in weeks. Alarm bells started ringing then, and a couple of days later Alison and Brett’s mother filed a Missing Persons with Newcastle police. Friends and family have heard nothing since then.
‘Tell me about Brett,’ Laviolette said, his eyes fixed still on the numbers he’d scrawled into the desk.
‘He shouldn’t have argued with his girlfriend.’
‘Something else.’
‘Male – Caucasian – thirty-three years old on his last birthday.’ Yvonne paused. ‘You’re smiling.’
‘Did Brett have any defining features?’
‘Defining as in features that would clarify, beyond a doubt, that there was no way Brett could be mistaken for Bryan Deane – or vice versa?’
‘Yeah, those kind of defining features.’
‘He had a moth – not a butterfly, a moth, Alison was particular about that – tattooed on his left ankle over the Achilles tendon. Laviolette? If you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do –’
‘Yvonne,’ he said, ‘can you still remember your mother’s Co-Op account number?’
She responded, without hesitation, ‘Five-one-six-two-five.’
Then the line went dead.
Bull & Dunnings offices – where Alison Marsh worked – were in a moderately sized building of steel and blue glass that already looked outdated, on a side street behind the Laing Art Gallery. On the rare occasions that he found himself in Newcastle with time to spare, Laviolette always did one of three things – went to the Hancock Museum, took a walk down Grey Street to the Quayside or went to see the Winslow Homer paintings at the Laing. There used to be a Mexican restaurant nearby that he ate at regularly with a social worker he dated seriously in his early thirties, but the social worker and Mexican restaurant had since disappeared.
A young woman with a pair of scissors in her hands was on reception, behind an elaborate flower display. When he got close enough to ask for Alison Marsh and explain that he worked for Northumbria Police, he saw that the woman was around eight-months pregnant and that she was cutting out a frieze of teddy bears – presumably destined for a nursery wall.
She didn’t ask to see his badge and, after watching him for a while from under her fringe, asked if he wanted something to drink.
He shook his head, smiling, and continued to shuffle restlessly round the shabby lobby waiting for Alison Marsh to appear.
Behind the security door to the left of reception, Alison left the safety of her carpet-lined booth decorated with reminders scribbled on neon post-it notes, and tokens from a life more personal – and went into the lobby where Laviolette was waiting for her.
They shook hands and Alison’s eyes, which looked scared, remained fixed on him as he introduced himself and asked to speak to her in private.
‘It’s bad news,’ the pleasant dependable-looking girl who was Alison Marsh stated, quietly, turning to the receptionist. ‘Lindsay, can you book meeting room three for the next . . .’ she turned back to Laviolette, ‘thirty minutes?’
‘We won’t need thirty minutes.’
‘I might.’
‘It’s booked,’ Lindsay announced.
Laviolette could tell from the way she walked through the maze of hollow corridors lined with old black and white prints of Newcastle landmarks that she was fairly certain why he’d come.
‘What d’you do?’ he asked her.
‘I’m a conveyancer. I work with a team of conveyancers,’ she added, unnecessarily, speaking in the way Laviolette was used to hearing people speak when they were in shock.
‘This is about Brett,’ she said, standing just inside the door to meeting room three, holding the handle still.
‘I’m afraid so.’
She sat down at the long beige table with a tray of glasses in the middle and a plastic folder someone somewhere was probably looking for. She sat turned slightly away from him, her left hand on the table, her right in her lap, and started to cry.
‘D’you mind getting me something for my face?’ she said after a while, unevenly.
He left the room, found a ladies toilet, knocked loudly on the door, and walked in past a woman doing her make-up who watched him in the mirror, outraged, as he disappeared into a cubicle and emerged with a roll of toilet paper.
Although she was in exactly the same position he’d left her in, Alison was no longer crying when he got back to meeting room three – she was sitting very still, and the room felt emptier than if there was nobody there at all. This moment had changed her forever, and Laviolette was tired of changing people, he realised.
She turned to him, looking to him for guidance because she had no experience of moments like these. He could tell, from her face, that she already felt marked – set apart. The usual rapid, random thoughts ran through his head, prompted by a curiosity that had remained intact, unlike a lot of officers who’d been on the force as long as he had. Was it Brett who’d bought her the necklace she was wearing? What time did she set her alarm for in the morning?
‘This isn’t over yet, is it?’ she said, already sounding a little less lost.
Laviolette shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not – I need you to come with me.’
‘Now?’
She got unsteadily to her feet and allowed him to take hold of her left elbow, which he could feel through the fabric of her shirt. They went back into the corridor where she looked around her, bewildered, as if the layout of the building she’d worked in for eight years had been reconfigured while they were inside meeting room three. The familiarity had been taken out of her world and now she was looking at him as if he was the only thing she recognised.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m sorry, but we need you to identify Brett for us. You might want to pick up your things – tell someone you’re going.’
She stared at him flatly, no longer horrified.
Laviolette knew what was coming next and he was tired of this as well, he realised – tired of being the one who always knew what was coming next.
DC Wade was waiting for them at the mortuary.
He’d asked her to be there.
At this point, she either went to Jim Cornish to clear the request because she knew that Laviolette shouldn’t be doing an identification on a body that had already been identified – or she kept quiet and showed up when and where he told her to show up.
She’d chosen to keep quiet and show up, and he couldn’t pretend not to be happy about this.
Alison Marsh, looking as if she’d been rushed out of one life and into another she never knew existed, let DC Wade hold her as they went into the small, tiled windowless room Laura Deane had walked into the day before.
He’d told her on the drive over that the body had been washed up at Cullercoats, and the only thing she’d said in response to this was to comment on the rain, which had started suddenly – breaking violently over them just outside Gosforth.
Alison remained pressed close to DC Wade as an assistant called Shona showed her the left ankle.
They all saw the moth attached still to skin that no longer looked like skin.
Alison nodded, her hand gripping DC Wade’s forearm.
‘D’you need some air? D’you want to take a breather?’
Alison nodded again, but remained where she was.
After a few moments silence, and without saying anything Laviolette nodded at Shona to uncover the face.
‘That’s not him. Brett,’ she said, in the same breath.
There was a suspended sense of relief in the room that Laviolette often felt at positive identifications when something no longer identifiable as human, was given a name.
‘We argued,’ Alison said, starting to cry, looking helplessly round the room at all of them for some sort of atonement.