The weather had turned.
Autumn, which had felt more like a late summer that year, was passing into winter and Anna felt the pinch of it with a quiet exhilaration as she ran down onto the beach. A grey sky was hung out over the sea, the wind picking up the waves and dropping them. She knew what seas like these felt like because they were her seas; the seas she’d grown up with. These were seas you fought with.
As the wind ripped through her now, grazing her face with sand it had lifted from the dunes and spray it had skimmed from the breaking waves, she started to feel – finally – that elusive sense of belonging she’d been searching for since Easter. This grey country with its occasional days of respite when it felt as though someone had unearthed stockpiled boxes of sunlight and, overjoyed, emptied them all at once, might just be her country after all.
She didn’t know whether it was the oppressive bleakness she remembered from childhood, so often mistaken for being inarticulate by outsiders – or the growing intimacy with Laviolette – but she’d never told anybody the things she told him –
She carried on running, wiping at her face which was wet with sea spray and the drizzle now starting to fall.
The only other person on the beach was a bundled-up woman down at the water’s edge, yelling at a black Labrador standing watching her, motionless.
Then she saw him – the blond man who’d been in the Polish woman’s flat yesterday when she and Laviolette went to the Ropemakers Building.
Then she recognised him – and it was confirmation of what she’d somehow known since then even though it was only a glimpse she’d caught of him, passing through the hallway.
Not knowing what to do, she carried on running, feeling sicker each time she landed on the sand, the wind in her ears hurting and disorientating her.
The man walking along the edge of the dunes towards her had blond hair and was taller than she remembered. He looked nothing like Bryan Deane – who used to have brown hair with auburn tints when the sun shone down on him. She’d seen the auburn standing next to him outside number seventeen Parkview, Easter Saturday.
But she knew it was him.
She kept on running.
Jim Cornish and Laviolette were in Jim Cornish’s office. Jim was sitting behind his desk in the same position as the day before while Jim’s wife and children, encased in various combinations inside various frames, were staring at Laviolette in the same unnerving, unsmiling way: rugby playing Richard, suicidal Dom, and the nameless girls referred to simply – by Jim himself – as ‘the girls’, denoting their supporting role within the family.
Laviolette was regarding Jim, who didn’t look as if he’d moved at all since the day before, which had the odd effect of making Jim himself as well as Jim’s accessories – the photographs and golf trophies – seem somehow less real; caught out, almost.
Jim was furious.
He didn’t show it, but Laviolette could feel it as he watched Jim rub his thumb slowly backwards and forwards along the edge of the desk.
Laviolette had come straight from the mortuary to torment him.
It was a long time since anybody had attempted to torment him, and Jim was having trouble working out why it was that Laviolette had chosen this particular course of action.
After a while, aware that one of them had to speak otherwise the moment was at risk of slipping silently out of his grasp, Laviolette said, ‘Brett Taylor had a tattoo – a moth just above the Achilles tendon on his left foot.’
‘Says who?’ Jim demanded, quietly, from the middle of a migraine that had been brewing since yesterday, and started in earnest about thirty minutes ago.
‘The Missing Persons report.’
‘Which you . . . just happened to have to hand?’ Jim moved his lips into a long, narrow smile, which made them change colour.
He jerked his hand instinctively to his forehead, pressing down hard on the bridge of his nose with his fingertips, and momentarily shutting his eyes.
‘Brett Taylor and Bryan Deane were the same age, same height, and matched similar descriptions, living. Worrying similarities –’
‘Worrying,’ Jim echoed, laughing. He carried on laughing for what felt like quite a while after that, his eyes on Laviolette.
‘For the purposes of identification,’ Laviolette finished. ‘How many drowned corpses have you seen?’
Jim started at the question before giving it some serious thought. ‘Two,’ he said almost a minute later. Jim had always been precise, and particular about precision not only in himself, but in others as well – regardless of whether or not they were telling the truth. There was nothing vague about Jim.
‘They all look the bloody same,’ he concluded loudly.
Laviolette nodded. ‘That’s why I was concerned about Laura Deane’s positive ID. A defining feature – like Brett’s tattoo – helps. Laura was probably too upset to notice. It happens,’ he added, expansively.
Jim stood up suddenly, shunting his chair back harder than he’d meant to so that it travelled across the carpeted floor fast, just reaching the wall behind Jim’s desk where one of the wheels gave a faint tap on the skirting board, which Laviolette noticed was badly chipped.
Jim observed him with his mouth open, sinking his hands in his pocket and making an effort to control his breathing, but his face didn’t relax and his eyes remained protruding without expression fixed on Laviolette.
He said, ‘What d’you want?’
‘Why did you assign me this case?’ Laviolette surprised himself; this wasn’t what he’d been going to say.
Ignoring the question, Jim said, ‘We’ve got two missing persons – descriptions match – and only one body. We can work it out mathematically.’ He raised his head slightly and jerked it towards the corner of the room as if there was a third party with them. ‘What d’you want?’ he asked again.
‘I want you to tell me who killed my father.’
Jim started laughing again – loudly, genuinely.
Bryan watched Anna run past, a feverish smile on his face that nobody was there to bear witness to.
He’d spent the night on the beach, in the dunes, and his body told him he was unwell. There was sand in his hair, his clothes were damp and he was varying between hot and cold – intermittent shudders passing through him. He’d woken in a hollow in the dunes well after first light to a grey, inhospitable day and the sound of children playing nearby. After using the car park toilets, he watched a woman turn a roundabout with two children on, laughing – until the woman became aware of him. There were many things lonely men weren’t meant to do, and staring at children in a play park was definitely one of them.
He started to walk, heading along the dunes north towards Blyth, the Alcan towers and wind turbines at Blyth Harbour becoming closer. Even this far from the waterline, the air was full of sea spray – he could feel it on his face and hair. There was nobody on the beach apart from a woman with a Labrador, the dog standing expectant in the rolling waves, which were churning and breaking continuously – an even heavier grey than the sky. He pushed his hands in his jacket pocket, cold, only to find himself sweating a minute later.
Then, looking up, he saw her running along the beach towards him. It had to be her – it was right that they should meet on the beach like this. He saw her head turn in his direction and stopped, waiting. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then carried on running. He stood watching her, and it was how she’d always made him feel – like nothing more than an observer. The smaller her retreating figure became, the more bereft he felt. He’d been lonely most of his life since losing his mother, but it was only ever Anna who’d had the ability to remind him of this loneliness that had, over the years – and without him being aware of it – come to define him.
It occurred to him, standing there in the wind and drizzle that was starting, that all he had to do was run after her; catch her up, but he knew he wasn’t going to do that. She had to turn and come back to him – retrace her steps – at some point. Nobody could run in one direction forever. The world might no longer be flat, but there were still edges a person could fall off.
He turned and carried on walking north, in the opposite direction – convinced, at last, that this was the only way they’d ever meet.
‘You knew Jamie Deane was innocent – he had an alibi you chose to break. Why?’
Laviolette watched Jim slide some papers with his forefinger across the desk and scan them with a heavy sigh.
‘D’you remember Laura Hamilton – before she became Laura Deane?’
‘Of course,’ Jim said, pleasantly – it was no effort to him; he didn’t begrudge Laviolette demanding this memory of him. ‘She was a sweet thing – a very sweet thing. I imagine she still is – from her voice. I’ve only spoken to her on the phone.’
Laviolette saw Laura, walking up the corridor towards him at Berwick Street station, propped between Don and Doreen. ‘She was only thirteen.’
Jim didn’t dispute this; he just carried on smiling pleasantly at Laviolette, waiting for him to make his point.
‘You forced her to lie – about being with Jamie that afternoon. Why? Why did you want it to be Jamie Deane that badly?’
As he sat down again Jim shook his head, pulling his hands up and clasping them behind it – with an affected boredom Laviolette could almost have believed if the eyes hadn’t remained so alert. ‘We didn’t. That wasn’t our choice.’
‘So whose was it?’
‘Bobby’s – Bobby Deane’s,’ Jim said, distracted, his eyes running over the photographs on his desk. He flicked a quick look at his watch. ‘I’ve got somewhere to be in six minutes.’
Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘How?’
Yawning, Jim let his arms fall. ‘We thought about nailing it on Bobby for a while, but it wasn’t going to stick – not even when he realised we had Jamie, and he wanted it to stick.’
‘The neighbour said she saw a boy go into the house through the kitchen door.’
Jim waved this to one side. ‘And her description matched at least one of the Deanes. It made sense – everyone knew your father and Rachel Deane were screwing around. Everyone –’ He was staring straight at Laviolette now, his arms laid out on the desk in front of him. ‘Motive was never an issue; it was more a question of which Deane? We rounded up Bobby and Jamie, but we couldn’t find the other one – Bryan. Nobody knew where he was, but we had two of them and we only needed one. We put the situation to Bobby – told him what had happened with your father, and that we were thinking of charging him. He gave us the name of at least twenty alibis. I can still see his face as he listed them, name after name – angry; triumphant. He thought he’d won.’
‘It should never have been a game.’
‘Maybe not,’ Jim conceded, pushing his lips together. ‘But we were young, and –’ He gave a short laugh. ‘The opportunity presented itself.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere in three minutes. We called his bluff. We had Jamie in the other cell, and we put it to Bobby then, after he’d drawn over twenty alibis out the hat – that if it wasn’t him, which it couldn’t have been, it must have been Jamie who killed your dad.’
‘He didn’t know you had Jamie until then?’
Jim shook his head, laughing. ‘He went – Fuck, you can imagine – broke Kyle’s nose and started to tear his ear off. . . .’ Jim was laughing uncontrollably now, ‘before we managed to restrain him. He’d walked right into it.’ Jim rubbed at his eyes, wheezing as the laughter came to a halt. ‘God, that feels good – can’t remember the last time I laughed like that.’
Laviolette stood motionless, staring at him. He could almost feel Bobby’s fury – the horrible realisation of his own impotence – across a distance of over twenty years; the realisation that he’d absolved himself only to implicate his own son.
‘Of course he backtracked then,’ Jim carried on, enjoying himself now and no longer requiring prompts from Laviolette, ‘but it was too late. We told him we had a witness, and that the description she gave us of the boy entering your kitchen could have matched either of his boys.’
The break in the tape, Laviolette thought. The break in the Bobby Deane tape that Anna had picked up on the night before.
‘But Jamie had an alibi.’
‘Yeah,’ Jim agreed.
‘You believed him?’
‘Course we believed him. I might not be a very nice copper – in your book – but I’m a bloody good one. I’d done enough interrogations to know the truth when I heard and saw it. Jamie Deane had been doing exactly what he said he’d been doing all afternoon – screwing his girlfriend. No doubt about it.’ Jim stood up. ‘We told Bobby it was definitely one of his boys – that we were having one of them.’
‘You asked him to make a choice?’
Jim nodded, looking suddenly serious. ‘He chose Jamie.’
‘And that’s why you broke Laura? That’s why you broke his alibi?’
‘At least we gave him a bloody choice,’ Jim yelled suddenly. ‘Christ,’ he spat, in conclusion to his outburst. Then, after a while, he said quietly, ‘People talk about women crying, but in my time I’ve seen more men cry than I ever have any woman.’
Laviolette looked at him. ‘So you knew it wasn’t Jamie? And Bobby knew it wasn’t Jamie?’
‘It was Bryan who killed him.’
‘And you all knew?’
‘We all knew – Bobby knew.’ Jim picked his jacket off the back of his chair, holding onto his shirt cuffs and pulling it slowly on.
‘But why did he choose the innocent son?’
‘It was his choice. You know the story in the Bible – about Joseph being the favourite son. Well we each have our Joseph; it’s human nature.’ Jim paused here without intending to. ‘We told him he had twenty-four hours to find Bryan an alibi – and to find Bryan. He was back in hours.’
‘Who was Bryan’s alibi?’
Jim finished shrugging his jacket on, turning to glance briefly at his reflection in the glass doors of the bookcase. ‘Mary Faust. You knew that already. Can I go now?’
He walked past Laviolette to the office door, holding it open. ‘Are you staying or going?’
Laviolette stayed where he was, thinking.
‘I’m meant to be somewhere – thirty seconds. They’re fitting me with a pacemaker next month. I don’t run any more.’
‘Alison Marsh gave us a positive ID on the body at the mortuary. She was sure anyway, but the tattoo placed it beyond a doubt. I drove her there myself. DC Wade acted as witness. Should I contact Laura Deane or . . .?’
Jim held onto his office door. ‘Nobody comes out of something like this completely clean. Not even in private. Why does Jamie Deane’s innocence matter so much to you now? Twenty years ago the only thing you asked for was the mattress to be taken away.’ He let go of the door and stepped up to Laviolette as it clicked quietly shut. ‘You didn’t care then. That boy was barely breathing when you finished with him. You could have been a very different man, Laviolette.’
‘Maybe, but I like myself the way I am.’
‘You do?’ Jim said, genuinely surprised.
Since his death, Mary had been prescribing herself Erwin’s morphine. She’d also taken to carrying the tablets around with her whenever she left the house because these days anything and everything had the potential to terrify her while catastrophe seemed so inevitable and imminent it often left her breathless. Carrying the morphine around with her made her less afraid, and gave her back the dignity robbed her by fear. As soon as she shut the gate to number nineteen Parkview, she tapped her pocket to check for the now familiar rattle before – reassured – embarking on whatever journey she needed to embark on in pursuit of life’s necessities despite life itself having ceased to feel necessary.
People she met – young and not so young – seemed to be under the impression that because she was old, her loss could be counted as bearable. It wasn’t. Life had become unbearable, and the one person she felt like telling was Erwin, who was no longer there – and that, she realised, was one of the defining cruelties of grief: the cause of it was also the only cure for it.
She stood in the kitchenette, unaware of the time, listening to the quiet house. Houses were never silent – she could hear an isolated drop falling from a tap in the bathroom, the muffled clank of the old fashioned toilet cistern and the click of the central heating installed in the early nineties – but number nineteen Parkview had definitely become quiet as she moved, uncertain, through it leaving barely any trace. She’d found that if she waited until midnight before going to bed, she could sleep through until at least four – maybe five. She ate breakfast in the kitchenette while it was still dark, the blinds down and the orange light humming overhead. After that she sat in one of the rocking chairs in the lounge, waiting for dawn. Sometime after dawn the family in the house next door – number twenty-one – stirred; the man first if he was on the early shift at the Nissan factory; heavy footed. Then came the sound of the child – running feet, slamming doors . . . TV. The walls were thin and she heard most things that went on in the house next door, reassured by the rhythms and noises of their family life.
Once their TV went on, Mary put on hers, watching it without really understanding any of it, unsure how much longer she could carry on like this.
The first few weeks after the funeral, Don and Doreen had been good to her – having her round to lunch most days. If Don was playing golf, she’d pop next door and watch the Jerry Springer show with Doreen. Don drove her to the supermarket Friday mornings, and took her up to the club for a white wine and soda Friday nights, but she didn’t like to lean too heavily on people – it wasn’t how she’d been brought up.
It was a grey day today and with the kitchenette light on she was able to see – clearly – her reflection in the window as she pushed a strip of tablets into the pocket of the powder blue Mac she’d bought with Anna in Newcastle.
Outside, Don was getting into his car with his golf caddy, wearing a pair of plaid trousers that would have looked ridiculous on a more competitive man, but Don was so ready to laugh at himself that others rarely had to.
Mary could tell from the way he greeted her that he knew where she was going, which was why – without any preliminaries – Don was able to say to her now, ‘Mary – he’s gone. I was about to come and tell you.’
Mary stared at him as he watched her, uncertain. ‘Bobby – he’s gone.’
‘Bobby?’ she said. It was a long time since she’d heard Don say his name. ‘Where?’
‘Somewhere he can get the right sort of care. Social services have been trying to contact Bryan – Laura told us.’ Don hesitated, unsure what else there was to say. An apology – expression of sympathy – didn’t seem appropriate. ‘Are you alright?’
Mary nodded dumbly as, after another moment’s hesitation, Don got into his car.
She watched the car disappear then went back indoors, her hand shaking as she tried fitting the key in the lock. Shutting the front door behind her, she went into the kitchenette, and stood there in her Mac still, in darkness, for she didn’t know how long.
She was at a loss.
Eventually, without being conscious of having come to any sort of decision, she turned on the light and filled her pockets with the remainder of the dwindling morphine supplies – as well as everything else Erwin had been prescribed that was still on the bench. Crouching with difficulty, she got a freezer bag out of the box under the sink and filled it with pills, carefully sealing it.
She caught sight of herself again, briefly – in the reflection in the window. So this is what it looks like, she thought – after almost half a century of marriage, this is what the end looks like.
She left the house for a second time.
Don’s car was still gone.
She walked to Armstrong Crescent at around the same time as usual, letting herself in. She felt, instinctively, the curtains twitching in the bungalow next door, but Mary had the measure of the Mrs Harrises of this world; the gossip mongers and fire starters who, unsatisfied with their own lives and unsure how to go about getting the ones they felt entitled to, destroyed the lives of others instead.
She went inside, automatically calling out, ‘Bobby?’
It wasn’t that she doubted Don; she just couldn’t believe that Bobby had really gone, but as she walked through rooms as empty as those at number nineteen Parkview, she knew it was true.
They’d taken most of his clothes from the wardrobe and chest of drawers, but not all of them. Looking about her it was difficult to see what else they might have taken – he didn’t have much. She sat down, exhausted, on the side of the bed, which had been left unmade, thinking about the day Roger Laviolette died.
Her mind turned unconsciously to that day because it was the last time Bobby had needed her; really needed her. She’d been his first thought that day – after he was released from Berwick Street station.
He hadn’t turned to anybody else.
She’d been downstairs in the kitchenette at Parkview. Anna was upstairs in the bath, upset still, and when she’d looked through the window there was Bobby standing in the garden near the rhubarb, his face the wrong colour and loose looking.
She went out to him.
Roger Laviolette was dead and Bobby had come to her.
At first she thought it was a confession, but then he told her – pulling her after him into their wash house – that he’d just come from Berwick Street station; that a neighbour had seen one of his boys enter Roger Laviolette’s house.
‘Which one?’
‘They’ve got Jamie,’ he said, helplessly, turning to pull on her arms in the twilight.
‘Who have?’
‘Police.’
‘It was Jamie who did it?’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t Jamie – no.’
‘It couldn’t have been Bryan – the neighbour must of got it wrong.’
He looked at her then, and seeing her face started to cry.
She’d been too shocked to react as Bobby stood in the wash house sobbing and clinging to her.
‘No,’ she said spontaneously. ‘He couldn’t of –’
‘He did.’
‘No.’ Again.
‘I’ve got to hand one of them over. I’ve got to give one of them up.’
He’d pulled away from her then. It was getting darker by the minute, but she could make out his face – and eyes.
‘But Bryan did it, Bobby. It was Bryan.’
‘I can’t give them Bryan, Mary. Not Bryan. She’d never forgive me.’
‘Rachel’s dead, Bobby.’
‘I’m not giving them Bryan.’ He took hold of her again then, pulling her close – and she let him, knowing she’d do anything he asked her to.
‘Where is Bryan?’
‘Home.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
Bobby looked away. ‘Tell them he spent the afternoon here – with you and Anna. Tell them that.’
He’d come to her because he knew she would; he’d come to her because he couldn’t help knowing – even after Rachel; even after Erwin – what he’d once been to her and still was. He’d been powerless that night Rachel walked into the dance hall. He’d known what it had done to Mary and he’d have done anything to lessen the hurting, but there was nothing he could do. Where Rachel was concerned, he was powerless. When Rachel walked into the dance hall that night he remembered her in her pinafore at the foot of the dunes, feeding his pit pony. He knew he’d been waiting for her ever since.
And Mary knew exactly what that felt like.
An hour later when Jamie came banging into the bungalow on Armstrong Crescent looking for his father – shouting out his name and thumping so hard on the walls that the barometer in the lounge jumped off its hook and fell to the floor – he found Mary asleep on the bed in her powder blue Mac still, halfway through Erwin’s prescription drugs. There was a thin line of saliva curling out of the left hand side of her open mouth, and her left shoe had fallen to the floor, revealing a foot that had been misshapen in youth by dancing in badly fitting shoes.
Jamie stared down at her, worried, but not upset – trying to work out what she meant. He didn’t know what to think – or who she was.
By the time it occurred to him to check her breathing, Inspector Laviolette was pulling up outside the bungalow.
Laviolette saw Mrs Harris positioned in her usual spot, and waved.
The front door was already open and he pushed it back, walking quickly, silently through the bungalow until he came to Bobby’s bedroom at the back.
‘Jamie,’ he exhaled, taking in Mary Faust on the bed, and Jamie Deane lying beside her.
Jamie spun round, terrified – recognising Laviolette properly for the first time – and got clumsily to his feet, momentarily losing his balance. His hand went out to Mary’s left leg – which had been balanced precariously on the edge of the bed – for support.
The leg slipped over the edge and the rest of Mary followed until she was lying face down on the carpet, her arms twisted uncomfortably under her.
‘It wasn’t me!’ Jamie shouted, backing towards the wall.
‘I know – I know that now.’ Laviolette crouched instinctively – as he would have done with a frightened child – trying to make himself less immense. It wasn’t until he’d said it that he realised he wasn’t talking about Mary – lying face down on the floor between them both.
Jamie, backed up against the wall, stared down at the Inspector, his eyes wide.
He was taller – bigger altogether – than Laviolette, but he’d retained childhood’s perspective on his childhood tormentor.
‘I didn’t do it –’
‘I know that, Jamie, and I’m sorry – I’m so very sorry.’
Jamie kept glancing from the Inspector to Mary Faust, concerned – not about Mary’s state, but about the implications of that state on him. He didn’t know what Laviolette was doing here in the bungalow on Armstrong Crescent after all these years, and he didn’t know whether to believe him – or not.
Laviolette shuffled, crouching, over to Mary – worried that Jamie would run.
‘She’s still alive,’ he said, checking her pulse. He glanced up at Jamie. ‘How long have you been here for?’
‘I didn’t do it,’ he protested.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Laviolette tried to calm him, ‘I’m just trying to ascertain how long she’s been lying here for. We need to phone for an ambulance. Either you can do that – or I can do it.’
Jamie tried to think about this, but he was too confused still, and becoming more irate by the second.
‘Jamie we need to do this now.’
Laviolette remained crouched on the floor, his left hand on Mary’s neck.
‘Who is she?’
‘A friend of your father’s.’
Jamie glanced at Mary – Laviolette’s response didn’t explain much. ‘You phone for the ambulance.’
He watched as Laviolette made the phone call, his movements slow and deliberate as he took the phone out of his pocket and dialled, his eyes never leaving Jamie’s face.
‘Where’s your dad?’
Laviolette moved slowly, awkwardly, to a standing pos ition holding onto the wardrobe doors, the hangers clanging emptily on the shuddering rail.
‘He’s gone,’ Jamie said blankly, staring into the virtually empty wardrobe. Then again, in disbelief – looking to Laviolette for an explanation – ‘He’s gone.’
‘Social services,’ Laviolette said, thinking of the phone calls he’d made.
‘Why?’
‘He wasn’t well, Jamie. He needs round the clock care.’
‘You sorted it up – with social services?’
‘It needed doing, and nobody else –’
‘Why?’
‘Because I could.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Jamie said, suddenly decisive.
‘He’ll have been taken to one of two places – it won’t take long to find him.’
‘I don’t want to find him – I want to kill him.’ Jamie’s eyes rolled upwards and his face opened as he let out a brief laugh. ‘What did you think? I was only fifteen – I didn’t know what twenty years meant. I let them put me away so that they wouldn’t put him away. I thought he’d love me for it. I let them put me away because of the promise of that love.’ Jamie was shouting now, but he was shouting carefully – he wanted somebody other than himself to understand what he’d gone through. ‘I thought it would be enough to last me twenty years – that promise – but it barely lasted me one. It barely lasted me one,’ he said again, ‘because he never came to visit me. My father never came to visit me – not once – after what I’d done for him, and when I get out – when I come here after twenty years – he doesn’t even remember me; doesn’t even remember my fucking name. It wasn’t me.’
‘And it wasn’t him either, Jamie. It wasn’t Bobby. Bobby never killed my father.’
Laviolette stopped speaking as he realised what it was he’d said.
Jamie looked suddenly bereft at the thought of not only his own, but his father’s innocence – after all these years. Bobby’s innocence affected him even more than his own. ‘How d’you know?’ he asked. His mind felt strangely empty, but there were things he should be asking – important things. He was missing the point – he was always missing the point. He got everything and everybody wrong and he was tired of trying to live with the consequences; profoundly tired. He was so exhausted, in fact, that he could have lain down on the bed he’d found Mary on and slept forever. But before he did – and he could feel the bones starting to relax already at the thought of the bed – there was something he needed to know. His eyes, heavy lidded, rested on Laviolette and with an effort he said, ‘So if it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t him then who –’ He broke off, realisation shaking off the soporific effects of shock. ‘You know who it was, don’t you?’
He crossed the room and took hold of Laviolette, who’d been anticipating contact, but there was nothing he could do to brace himself against Jamie as he was pushed back against the wardrobe with such force that the wardrobe fell against the wall.
Laviolette lay sprawled inside.
‘Bryan,’ Jamie said. ‘It was Bryan, and you knew. He knew as well, didn’t he – my father? He knew it was Bryan.’
Laviolette had caught his leg on something metal inside the wardrobe. He felt a sharp, stinging pain and a line of blood – wet – running down his calf. He heard the sound of ambulance sirens carried irregularly by the wind.
‘Bryan,’ Jamie said again. ‘Why did he give me up when it was Bryan who did it? Why?’
‘They made him choose one of you – it was an impossible choice.’
‘And he chose me – even though he knew I was innocent. He chose me, and that’s what I’ve got to start living with now after the twenty years I’ve already done. This is the real life sentence starting.’
Laviolette could see, through the bedroom curtains, the lights of the ambulance parking outside. Any minute now, paramedics would be there in the room with them, moving – green and efficient – through a twenty-year-old story.
Jamie was shaking his head. ‘Laura said a body was washed up.’
Laviolette knew what he was going to do next, and that he shouldn’t – for all sorts of reasons. What he didn’t know was why he was doing it. Was it because of the scared, broken child who’d peered up at him from behind the mattress all those years ago, and who had been haunting him for too long? Was it because of what Anna had told him about Bryan Deane the night before, and how she’d looked the morning after, asleep still on the sofa in his study? Was it because of the way he’d come home that night twenty years ago to find Jim Cornish in filthy boots moving through his house? Was it the memory of the sheet covering his father’s humped remains? Or was it because he was tired of other people deciding how this was going to end for him?
‘A body was found, but it wasn’t Bryan’s. He’s still alive.’
‘Where?’ Jamie demanded quietly.
Through the wardrobe doors, beyond Jamie, he saw paramedics enter the room, rapidly assess the situation and somehow manage to attend to Mary, push Jamie towards the bedroom door, and pull him carefully out of the wardrobe in an effort not to tear any more of his leg. The pain was worse, standing.
‘Where?’ Jamie said again from the door.
‘Royal Quays Marina – North Shields. The Ropemakers Building – flat twenty-one.’
It felt as though the room was suddenly full of people, but Jamie had gone.
Jamie had at last gone.
It wasn’t until he saw Mary being wheeled through the bungalow towards the ambulance parked outside that he realised he should tell Anna. Anna needed to know about Mary.
Half way down Quay Road, Anna stopped running.
He was sitting on a quayside bench straight ahead, watching the wind turbines while being watched in turn by Roy the Harbourmaster, propped slackly in the open doorway to the office, finishing a cigarette.
Hearing her footsteps, Roy turned – his eyes thin as he inhaled.
He gave her a silent wave then, seeing that her attention was directed towards the man on the bench, turned to contemplate him once more himself.
The day wasn’t warm and although she’d been sweating only minutes before, was cooling off rapidly.
The rigging was ringing loudly against the masts of the trawlers and the trawlers themselves were rocking in wide arcs. Waves were breaking over the feet of the turbines, and beyond the north harbour wall the sea wasn’t even making an attempt at hospitality.
She carried on walking, aware of Roy watching her as she passed, and just then the man on the bench – it was Bryan – turned instinctively towards her.
He didn’t smile.
He watched her until she was close enough to press her thighs into the back of the bench he was sitting on.
The eyes were wide and bright, the cheeks more sunken and defined than she remembered from Easter, but she looked into his face in the same way she had all those months ago when she’d been looking for signs of Bryan Deane.
He smiled now – a thin, feverish smile.
‘Hello Anna.’
‘Hello Bryan.’
They contemplated each other, less inhibited than the last time when he’d still been alive.
‘You’re not surprised,’ he said, getting stiffly to his feet, placing his hands over hers where she was holding onto the back of the bench. ‘Does anything ever surprise you?’ He continued to smile, happy.
The sound of the wind turbines beating loudly, close by, made her feel as if they weren’t on land at all, but the deck of some strange machine preparing to take off.
‘You knew I hadn’t really disappeared.’
‘I didn’t want it to be true.’
Roy remained in the doorway to the Harbourmaster’s office, unashamed at his curiosity, watching them until they disappeared into the Ridley Arms.
He flicked his head up briefly as the lights in the upstairs apartment went on – a warm, white defiant light that didn’t do much to counteract the grey day. But still, ships at sea would be able to see it – if they were headed landwards.
He coughed for quite a while after throwing the stub of his roll-up down the drain. Then, straightening up, decided that there wasn’t much happening on the quayside – so went back into the office feeling as though some weight he hadn’t been aware of until then had been lifted. He definitely felt lighter; renewed almost.
He set to work again with a satisfied sigh.
Laura knew the flat was empty as soon as she opened the front door and stepped inside. She also knew that this time Bryan really had disappeared.
Nothing reasonable led her to this conclusion.
There was nothing out of place; no signs of definitive departure, and nothing for her to read. It was as if the air in the flat had absorbed his intentions, and it was these intentions that she could feel as she stood in the middle of the lounge-diner, staring about her, her bag and keys in her hands still.
If she added up the hours spent here in the past few months they wouldn’t amount to very much, but it felt as though over half her life had been lived in those hours. Here, between the cornflower blue walls they’d painted themselves, she was neither Laura Hamilton or Laura Deane. She was nobody’s daughter, wife or mother, but simply Laura. She’d come to know herself intimately here in a way she never had before. What did she do with that knowledge now?
She crossed the room and opened the balcony doors, stepping outside. The day was one of those infectiously grey days. She breathed in, shutting her eyes. As she exhaled slowly, she opened them again taking in the car park down below, the boats in the marina, the River Tyne wide here near its mouth, and the North Sea beyond, but it was as if nothing she laid her eyes on held any relevance to her any more.
She needed to cry, but couldn’t. She was too furious.
The realisation that she was furious took her by surprise, and explained the tightness she felt in her chest.
Smelling cigarette smoke then, she turned and saw the Polish woman in her dressing gown on the balcony next door, staring out at the same things she’d been staring at.
Then she turned to stare at Laura, exhaling heavily.
Laura couldn’t think of anything to say, and was about to go back inside when the Polish woman said, ‘He’s gone, hasn’t he?’
Laura nodded, dumbly, watching the descent of the woman’s cigarette butt over the edge of the balcony.
‘D’you want to come round?’
Less than a minute later, Laura was standing in the corridor about to knock on the door to flat twenty-three when it was opened from the inside.
Without thinking, she let the woman wrap her arms around her, pressing her head gently against her shoulder. She smelt of sleep, old perfume and cigarette smoke, and she had her back up against the hallway wall as Laura collapsed, sobbing, into her.
After a while the woman managed to pull her gently into the lounge.
Laura stood in the kitchen doorway watching as the woman poured water from the kettle into a glass and handed it to her. The glass was full of something red.
‘Raspberry tea,’ she explained, seeing Laura’s face.
Laura nodded, her attention taken by the drawings on the fridge door. ‘These are you?’ she asked, studying them.
‘I’m a life model – at the college.’
‘Bryan did these, didn’t he?’ she said, realising – too late – what she’d said.
‘It’s okay – I know who you are . . . who he is.’
‘He told you?’
The woman shook her head. ‘I guessed. Then he told me.’
‘What did he tell you?’
The woman hesitated. ‘Everything.’
Laura turned away from her – back to the drawings.
‘That’s how we met – at the art college. Then we realised we were neighbours.’
Laura didn’t respond to this, but she was listening, and understood what it was the woman was telling her – out of what desire, she couldn’t have said, but it wasn’t cruelty – and that she’d somehow known all along.
‘It meant more to me than it ever did to him – he never lied to me about that. He said it would never have happened if he’d been Bryan Deane still. He kept his distance.’
‘By fucking you?’ Laura said, sharply, taking a sip of tea and handing the glass back.
‘Even then.’ The woman stood, absorbed by the drawing, finishing the tea. ‘He wasn’t used to spending so much time alone. The nights were difficult, and he missed your daughter. He missed her a lot.’ She hesitated. ‘I had a son – he was eight when I left him behind. We had that in common – our missing children. We spent most of the time talking about our children. I think it was that and the loneliness more than anything. Sometimes it was very bad; I got worried about him.’
Laura’s eyes skimmed the Polish woman’s flat, not resting on anything – not really taking anything in as she tried to imagine Bryan here; their intimacy.
‘I was waiting for you – out on the balcony today. I was worried when he didn’t come back last night; I wanted to tell you.’ The woman broke off. ‘You know where he is,’ she said suddenly. ‘What are you going to do?’
Without saying anything, Laura turned and walked through the flat towards the door.
‘What are you going to do?’ the woman called out again.
Laura opened the door and stopped, turning to her. The air in the corridor outside was much colder, and damp smelling. ‘What name did you use? What name did you call him by?’
‘Tom. To me he was Tom. What are you going to do?’
‘I’m phoning the police.’
The woman watched Laura run up the corridor to the staircase at the end. She stayed there listening to her shoes on the stairs, the regular clatter getting fainter and fainter as she neared ground level. Even fainter still, she heard the thud of the lobby door banging itself shut after Laura ran outside. She didn’t hear anything after that, but she carried on waiting in the open doorway to her flat – feeling the cold now – for what, she didn’t know.
Laura felt the belated nausea as she got into her car. Breathing in slowly, she tipped her head back and shut her eyes, waiting for it to pass. But it didn’t. A second later, she was leaning out the car, vomiting over tarmac. Her head pounding, she saw that she’d splashed the side of the car parked next to her.
Searching in the door pockets, she found an old piece of tissue covered in lipstick prints and drank the remains of a cold latte pushed in the drinks holder. Then she stared up at the balconies lined one above the other, expecting to see the Polish woman – Tom Bowen’s cure for loneliness – standing on her balcony, but she wasn’t. Laura saw that she’d left the balcony doors to their flat open, but what did that matter any more? There was nothing left to steal up there.
Balking at the taste left in her mouth, she got out her mobile and dialled Laviolette’s number.
Laviolette was sitting in the back of the ambulance parked in Armstrong Cresecent when Laura phoned. He was having the cut on his leg stitched.
‘I know where Bryan is.’
Her voice was clear and steady – as if what she was saying no longer held any significance for her.
‘Where?’ Laviolette demanded, quietly.
‘He’s with Anna. Anna Faust. He’s gone to her.’
Laviolette shut his eyes, and heard the paramedic who was stitching him up say, ‘Only a few more to go,’ under the impression that he was the cause of Laviolette’s pain.
‘You realise the implications of your telling me this?’
‘I realise.’
‘All the implications? I’m going to have to make arrests, Laura.’
‘I realise.’
Laviolette’s eyes remained shut. She didn’t know what she was saying. How could any of them know the implications?
The nausea had passed and with it the headache as Laura, feeling calmer than she had in years, pulled out of the parking bay and drove towards the marina exit. As the barrier lifted and she checked for traffic on the main road, she failed to notice the white transit van pull up at the barrier behind her.
She hadn’t noticed it earlier either, following her from Tynemouth to North Shields on the A189.
Jamie had sat in his van and watched her disappear inside the Ropemakers Building. Shortly after that he’d seen her appear on the balcony and start talking to a woman with purple hair standing smoking.
As he pulled out of the marina it occurred to him that at one point – a lot of years ago when they were children still – he thought Laura was going to lead him to himself. The least she could do now was lead him to his brother.
*
‘Look at us,’ Bryan said.
‘Look at us,’ Anna echoed, in her running clothes still, watching him, in his coat still – moving about the room taking in everything.
He stood gazing silently at the panorama for a moment before turning his back on it. ‘Do they bother you?’
‘What?’
‘The wind turbines.’
‘I like them. They make me feel watched over.’
He nodded, watching her; taking her in again – something he kept doing. ‘You should have phoned me. I told Doreen to tell you.’
‘She did.’
‘I could have found you somewhere.’
‘I like it here.’
‘Always so independent. But then you wouldn’t want to be beholden to anybody, would you – especially not me.’
She stood motionless behind the kitchen bench. ‘I did phone,’ she said at last. ‘I phoned Tyneside Properties and asked to speak to you – then put the phone down. It’s been sixteen years, Bryan. Sixteen years is too long to make a phone call about –’
‘Real estate?’
‘Yes.’
‘So how much is this costing you?’
‘I don’t know.’
He shook his head then pointed to the drawing on the bench, saying, ‘You got it. What did you think?’
She paused. ‘I was relieved – hopeful. More than that.’ He was standing close to her. ‘I dream about you – often.’ He lifted up her hands and pressed their palms together. ‘I didn’t want to believe you were dead.’
He studied their hands carefully. ‘I was worried you might tell.’
‘Who?’
‘The police. The inspector.’
‘Laviolette,’ she said looking at him, but he didn’t look at her; he kept his eyes on their hands, which were clasped now, mid-air.
He looked at her then, pulling away, drifted over to the bench where the photograph of him in Cephalonia was propped. ‘Where did you get this from?’
‘Martha. She gave it to me. She wanted me to keep a vigil.’
‘Martha,’ he said, keeping hold of the photo. ‘Martha. God, Martha.’
He walked to the nearest sofa, collapsing onto it. ‘What have I done?’
‘Why did you do it Bryan?’
He sat with his legs apart, his elbows balanced on his knees, his head bent, staring down at the floor.
She sat down beside him.
‘Are you happy?’ he asked without looking at her.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That means you’re not.’
She thought about this. She’d often thought about it before, but now she had to give an answer because she wasn’t asking it of herself. ‘I’m happy with my life, I’m just not happy in it,’ she said at last.
They sat there in silence for a while until Bryan said, ‘D’you remember the fret – the day I disappeared?’
‘I saw you disappear into it.’
He stood up again – standing limply in front of her, his arms hanging down. ‘I was meant to meet Laura on the beach between here and Seaton Sluice, but then the fret came in and I just about made it to the rocks at St Mary’s. The island was deserted because the tide was in. I pushed the kayak off the seaward side where the graves of the Russian sailors are, and waited for the tide to go in. When it was on the turn, I waded across the causeway and phoned Laura from the pay phone in the car park on the headland.
‘When she eventually arrived, I got into the passenger seat and sat there, shaking. I couldn’t stop. I turned to her and said, “Hold me,” and she held me and I cried. The shock – of doing what we’d talked about.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘She drove me to the Haymarket and I got a bus up to Rothbury.’
‘Why Rothbury?’
‘D’you remember that place you used to camp when you and Laura were kids?’
Anna nodded.
‘We often went there later. There was a hut in the woods. I lived there for a month or so. No CCTV; barely any roads; no mobile signal.’ He paused. ‘It was a long month. I thought a lot about meeting you that day – on the beach, the day I disappeared. I thought a lot about you. I thought –’
‘What?’
‘That you’d somehow know I hadn’t really disappeared. That you’d come looking for me.’ He walked over to the windows, watching the blades on the turbines turn. ‘I couldn’t believe it had actually worked – gone to plan. Laura was talking about the insurance money and selling the Marine Drive house; about moving to Uruguay – buying a house on the beach. She wouldn’t stop talking, and I let her talk because I felt free, but I knew I wasn’t going to do any of those things – I wasn’t going to give up my freedom again.’
‘Laura met you – in Uruguay.’
‘It was meant to be a house hunting trip. I stayed on after she left.’
‘Why Uruguay?’
‘It’s cheap. Sun. The sea –’
She stood up and crossed the room until she was standing beside him at the window. ‘You’ve got the sea here.’
‘Uruguay’s a long way away.’
‘From what?’
‘Our old life. You.’
‘I was never in your life.’
‘Oh you were. Everything we’ve done – Laura and me – every decision we’ve made, we’ve made because of you.’
Ignoring this, Anna said, ‘You travelled to Uruguay as Tom Bowen.’
‘I liked being Tom Bowen. I was going to contact you, from Uruguay. I wanted you to join me in Punte del Este.’
‘You wanted me to come to Uruguay?’
‘Would you have come?’
When Anna didn’t answer, he said, ‘If you’d have come, I would have stayed. I wouldn’t have come back here.’
‘What about Martha?’
‘We’d have found a way –’
Anna walked back into the middle of the room. ‘Why are you still married? Normal people get divorced.’
‘We talked about that. We talked about it a lot. The imminent divorce became a feature of our marriage.’
‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this. Why now? It’s been sixteen years, Bryan. You haven’t contacted me in over sixteen years, and now – this. Whatever this is. I was pregnant when I left for university. I asked you what we were going to do and you told me – you were the one who told me – to get an abortion. So that’s what I did, and I’m tired, Bryan. I’m tired of wondering what it would have been like, if I’d spent my life with you.’
She started to cry and he tried to take hold of her, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘What are you doing here?’ she yelled. ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You chose Laura.’
‘I could give Laura the life she wanted. I didn’t know where to start with you. I did it so that we’d have this – so that I could feel the way I felt that day, seeing you for the first time again after all these years, the way I still feel.
‘You wanted to go. You didn’t want to stay. I couldn’t go with you. If you’d had the baby, you’d have stayed with me – you’d have ended up hating me and that would have destroyed me. I loved you too much to ask you to keep it.’
‘You’ve got no idea what you asked me to give up.’
‘You’d already left, Anna. You’d already left.’
‘Well, I’m back now.’
They started to move towards each other.
Neither of them had seen Laura’s car go past Roy, standing in the office doorway smoking again. They didn’t see the car pull into the bay next to the yellow Capri, or Laura get out and look up at the apartment. They didn’t hear her push open the front door, which Bryan hadn’t thought to shut, and they were only dimly aware of footsteps on the stairs – of Laura herself in the room behind them taking in the scene she’d foretold would happen at some point in all their lives. Maybe not quite like this, but this was the scene that had haunted her all her married life.
A marriage she’d built from scratch, and it had been a grind from the beginning having Martha so young. She’d renounced romance for decades of life-threatening rows over spilt milk, and they’d survived – only to find Anna standing in the middle of their marriage now.
Laura had known the risks as soon as they started talking about faking Bryan’s death. She’d known then that until he was pronounced officially dead, he was free . . . But the financial black hole they’d been in was threatening to swallow their marriage whole and the only way to hold onto to it was to give him up, but not to this – not to Anna.
‘Don’t touch him,’ Laura said, automatically, staring from one to the other. She was breathing heavily and shaking uncontrollably, but didn’t care; no longer cared about anything. ‘I want to see what she does –’ Laura held onto the sofa, trying to get her breath back. ‘I want to see what she does when she knows everything because I know you haven’t told her everything.’
‘Laura, he chose you. We were both pregnant at the same time.’
‘I know – he told me. I got pregnant on purpose, and it worked, but only because he’s a coward. He was terrified of what you’d think.’
Anna wasn’t looking at Bryan any more, she was looking at Laura. ‘About what?’
‘Terrified that one day you’d find out.’
‘About what?’
‘Him killing Roger Laviolette.’
Anna carried on staring at her as Bryan took hold of Laura, pulling on her. She felt choked as she remembered finally who it was who’d let her out of the wash house that day – realised that she’d known all along, but somehow suppressed the memory.
It was Bryan who let her out. Jamie Deane locked her in that day – the day Roger Laviolette died – and Bryan let her out.
Then she remembered something else – that his left arm, stomach and some of his face had been covered in blood. The air in the wash house had been so full of blood she thought it was blood from the deer as he pushed past, but now – thinking about it pointedly, deliberately for the first time in years – she realised that Bryan had appeared in the doorway to the wash house already covered in blood, and that the reason he’d gone to the sink by the window was to wash it off.
‘I thought he’d come to let me out, but he hadn’t – he didn’t even see me. He was covered in blood – I forgot that,’ she said, shivering.
The sky outside was becoming darker by the minute, but none of them made a move to switch on any lights.
Anna turned to Bryan. ‘It was you. You killed him.’
‘I knew,’ Laura said, quietly. ‘I’ve always known. I realised early on that romance depended on ignorance so I gave romance up. I loved him harder than anyone ever loved him in his life before. That’s why he chose me; he chose me because I knew him. He loved you because you didn’t. Life’s not fair. If only, when you left, you’d given him up. I kept waiting to hear that you’d met someone, but you never did. You just kept waiting, and now he’s chosen you and I can’t live with that.’
Bryan was shaking her so hard that she could no longer talk.
‘Stop it,’ Anna shouted, attempting to pull them apart. ‘Stop it!’
But they ignored her. Laura’s eyes were fixed on Bryan – her body had gone slack. ‘Finish it,’ she said, ‘just finish it now.’
Slamming her hands hard into Bryan’s chest, Anna pushed him back until he hit the wall near the front door.
Laura stood motionless, watching them both as if they were no longer real. ‘I phoned Laviolette. I told him you were alive. I told him you were here.’
Bryan stared at her. ‘D’you realise what you’ve done? Do you realise everything that you’ve done?’
He turned, helpless, from Laura to Anna – who was staring out the window.
‘Laviolette?’
She shook her head. ‘Your brother – Jamie.’
The white transit van was parked at an angle across three bays.
*
Martha stood outside the school gates, jostled on all sides, looking for the now familiar white transit van. The road was chaotic – full of the usual coaches, cars, and streams of girls – but there was no sign of Jamie and his van. She didn’t know what to do. He’d been there every day since September; he’d become habit – the drive home with him in the van something she relied on. She was his reason for getting up in the morning, that’s what he told her; he said that getting out of bed when you had to was hard enough, but getting out when you didn’t have to was even harder.
She crossed the road and sat down on the low brick wall circling the horse chestnut where she’d seen Bryan all those months ago, waiting. Today was a Thursday and on Thursdays they’d started going to the leisure pool at Whitley Bay because Martha was teaching Jamie to swim – or how not to drown, as she put it. They made a strange pair – the white sinewy, tattooed man with the shaved head, and the skinny, laughing girl – but the lifeguards had got used to them, looked out for them even, and made encouraging comments on Jamie’s progress.
It had taken Martha a fortnight to get him to let go of the side, but now he was using a float with only one hand. They had a wave machine at the pool and a separate diving pool whose deep, narrow proportions and dark blue water terrified Jamie. The diving pool had an underwater window that Jamie stood shivering at as he watched Martha dive, waiting for her small body in its black school swim suit to cut through the liquid mass of blue. She would swim towards the window and put her hand against it – the flat palm an amphibious white against the glass, her face covered in goggles and an underwater smile that bubbles escaped from, the water around her full of her slow moving hair – until he banged on the glass, worried that she’d been under for too long. Then she would rise to the surface of the deep, narrow pool, breaking it with a spluttering laugh as she pushed her goggles up and swam to the steps.
She waited on the wall until half four then made her way slowly to the metro station.
The day felt suddenly all wrong – fathomless in the way it had the day her dad disappeared.
She got out at Whitley Bay and caught a bus going up the coastal road towards Blyth. It wasn’t until she saw the line up of vast warehouses to her right that she realised she’d completely missed her stop. They were going past South Harbour on the outskirts of Blyth. She stayed on the bus as it made its way down Ridley Avenue, getting out on the edge of Ridley Park. She could walk to the Quayside from there – she hadn’t seen Anna in a long time.
As Jamie shut the van door, he saw a man standing in the twelve-centimetre length of the wing mirror. The man was gaunt and had blond hair and looked nothing like he remembered his brother looking, and yet he knew – without a doubt – that the man was his younger brother, Bryan.
He stood momentarily inert with disbelief that the man in the mirror was a reflection of something real; half expecting, as he turned round – which he now did – to find the Quayside behind him empty.
It wasn’t.
Bryan was still there – and he’d grown. He was no longer twelve centimetres tall, but well over six foot.
The two men were suspended somewhere between grief and panic.
In spite of everything, a brief joy – too instinctive to be suppressed – passed across both their faces. They were brothers, after all, and it had been a long time.
Then there were the memories; unbidden, but as impossible to suppress as the brief joy they’d both just experienced – and so long forgotten they had no form as they fell shapelessly between them on the Quayside where they stood.
Jamie remembered a silver stereo he used to have that he recorded songs on from the radio; a black and orange NCB jacket, which had only just been hung up on the back of the door and was swinging still . . . a pile of laundry on the bedroom floor and a woman’s legs in tights and slippers standing beside it . . . sellotape covering the holes in the carpet . . . him grabbing a red tractor out of Bryan’s hands, the tractor breaking and Bryan crying . . . a tea towel on top of a brown gas heater and the smell of the tea towel as it started to burn . . . a blue deck chair with a white rose motif on it, and their mother’s perfume . . . not their mother, just her perfume, which was dusty and sweet smelling because it had been saved for too long, for a life that never happened, and gone off . . . she’d used it all up the day she died because she knew it was the last time she was ever going to wear it. The wash house – the washing out on the line in the garden; the garden itself – had been full of the smell of it. He’d smelt it in his dreams ever since, and it was the smell of departure . . . unspeakable loss.
Jamie felt suddenly closer to this woman who was his mother than he ever had anybody. For the first time, he understood the creeping despair she must have felt when the one man capable of making her happy no longer had the time, energy or inclination to manufacture so much as a minute’s worth of joy between them, forcing her to first wait then lose hope then go looking for it elsewhere.
She was a woman who loved to laugh; who felt that laughter was the best cure for the indignities life imposed. After the joy had gone out of the big things in life, she was happy to look for them in the little. It was after the joy went out of these as well that the despair set in. It was despair that sent her to Roger Laviolette, it had to be – that tight, airless man who was no match for his mother.
‘I loved her too,’ he said suddenly to Bryan, poised opposite him still – it was the first thing he’d said to him in twenty years.
Afterwards, he wasn’t even sure he’d said the words out loud so he said them again. ‘I loved her too.’
‘Then why didn’t you do it? I waited and waited for you to do something.’ Bryan shifted position, distressed. ‘It was an accident,’ he finished helplessly. ‘I just wanted to look at the house, that’s all. I thought – I don’t know – I wasn’t even thinking about Roger Laviolette, I just wanted to see the place she’d gone to when she left us because part of me didn’t believe it existed. I went round the back . . . then I saw him, the kitchen door was open. He was sitting at the table mending something. There was this patch of white skin at the back of his neck. It . . .’ Bryan searched for the word; trying to articulate something not governed by reason, ‘bothered me. A lot. D’you remember how things used to bother me? Like that time I went through your drawers and cut up all your T-shirts? Well, it was like that only much worse.
‘There was a kid in a buggy beside him and I thought . . . I thought maybe it was his and her’s. That’s what I thought – without thinking. Of course it wasn’t,’ Bryan said – to himself – almost angry. ‘But the things is, that man was whistling, Jamie. There he was, mending a radio, whistling and the sun was shining into the kitchen, and it was like nothing had happened; like none of it could ever have happened. I half thought that if I went home then, I’d find her there doing the same thing . . . whistling in the sunshine. But that wasn’t true. So I picked up the radio and brought it down . . . on his head . . . hard. I kept on banging the radio on his head, and the kid was just staring at me.’ Bryan looked like he might laugh at this recollection. ‘There was blood, and he was moaning, and the whole place smelt of white spirits. He’d been using it to clean the radio and I must have knocked it over because I remember him trying to right the empty bottle, but his hand wasn’t working properly. I watched him stand up and go over to the cooker, and put the fucking kettle on or something and there was all this blood on his shoulders and running into his eyes and mouth. He’d stopped whistling by then, but he turned to me and said, ‘Rachel’s boy.’
Then the fire started on his hands and arms and he was screaming and by then the kid was screaming, and I tried to get the kid out the buggy but couldn’t work the straps, so I just picked it up with him in it still and pushed it down the garden away from the house. I ran then. It was an accident – an accident, Jamie. I never would of done it if he hadn’t been whistling . . .’
It was then that Jamie saw Laviolette, and called out instinctively – not his name, just a sound. He heard the sound fill the air, shocked.
They needed to run – Bryan and him – but Bryan was already running.
Jamie ran after him, trying to close the gap between them – and the gap was closing – yelling, ‘Bryan!’ as he swung his arm towards his brother’s collar, hitting him on the side of the head and pulling him so forcefully towards him that Bryan lost balance and ended up trying to hold on.
Up close, Bryan saw the horrible brightness of Jamie’s eyes – remembering now that they were blue – then they started to fall.
Jamie had the sensation of falling before they actually started to fall.
Holding onto each other as though they’d been wrestling like this for years, they carried on falling, anticipating a landing that never came as they fell over the edge of the Quayside into the sea.
Bryan, disorientated, couldn’t hear anything any more – Jamie had hit him on the side of the head and he’d lost his hearing almost immediately then his leg got caught in the ropes belonging to one of the fishing trawlers and instead of landing, he carried on falling, hitting his head again on the side of the prow as he went down.
It was dark and cold, and he was bearing a great weight.
He’d heard his daughter’s voice – he was sure – calling out, but not for him; for his brother. How did she know Jamie, and why was it that her calling his name out like that – which was enough to bring any man back to shore – left him, Bryan, with nothing? The love and intimacy of the past fifteen years – an intense, wrenching sort of love – became incoherent and meaningless.
He didn’t think to struggle. He was no longer thinking at all . . . not even about Martha.
He was alone, and ceasing . . . he was nothing.
Just before hitting the water, Jamie heard voices – he thought he recognised Martha’s – then the water closed over his head and he started to struggle to find a way out, quickly losing all sense of direction. He wanted, more than anything, to go up, but couldn’t be sure where up was. There was no light and nothing to hold onto even though he had been holding onto something, he was sure, before falling. He pushed his arms through the water, but the only thing they came into contact with was more water.
Martha had seen her father and Jamie disappear over the edge. Without thinking, she’d thrown her bag to one side, yelling, ‘He can’t swim!’
‘Martha!’
It was Anna’s voice.
Turning round, she saw Anna running across the Quayside towards her. Her mother was there, just behind Anna, running as well, but not as fast – and Laviolette. Everybody was there. If only they would stop rushing about and stand still . . . they’d lost all sense of perspective, and with it their balance. They’d spent too long making happiness their goal when all they needed to do, was be. She’d tried showing them when she took the picture of Bryan in Cephalonia – that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that he was sad; it didn’t have to mean anything. It was just sadness, for a moment – terrifying, beautiful, real and true. Why did it have to be anything more than that? Why couldn’t they all just stop this rushing towards – what?
Turning her back on them and their shouting with relief, feeling suddenly calm and full, she jumped into the dark messy water. The sense of emptiness that had kept step with her all her life had gone. She loved everybody – Laviolette, Anna and her mother (even her mother) on the Quayside above, and Jamie and her father down here in the water.
When she broke the surface, the sea was washing noisily against the hulls of the trawlers moored there and the rigging on the masts sounded irate. She saw a head, briefly, about three metres away – then it disappeared beneath the surface. She swam instinctively towards it, hearing Anna’s voice again, a long way away now.
Jamie flung out his arms, desperate to find something to hold onto, but there was nothing. After what felt like twenty years of falling, he wanted to land and come to a rest. Water was everywhere, rising above him, over him, entering him through every orifice it could find, filling him. His throat was burning and his eyes felt as though they were being pulled from their sockets. His insides were collapsing and he was still falling; it was like falling twice. If he didn’t find something to hold onto, he’d carry on falling like this forever.
He had a short breathless memory of a girl in water, her hair moving around her and her costume black against white tiles. Tiles . . . the pool. His feet sought out the chipped edges of the pool’s tiles and touched something . . . there was a girl in the water.
It was the hair – he thought it was Laura and tried to hold on. Then he remembered Laura had already tried to kill him once. Using her body to haul himself up and break the surface, he took in one last lungful of air before pulling her tightly to him and down with him this time.
Anna wrenched off her trainers – she took off her trousers as well, but left on her running top – as Laviolette, standing beside her, slipped awkwardly out of his coat and suit jacket.
Anna curled her toes over the edge of the Quayside. She could see what was happening and knew that if Martha managed to haul Jamie to the surface, he was going to struggle – uncontrollably – and probably drown her.
‘Who are you going for?’ Laviolette asked.
‘Martha.’
Anna dived in at the same spot Martha had – it was a good spot – cleared the trawlers and their moorings, and surfaced, trying to swallow as little water as possible, which was difficult with waves this high. She saw them breaking now over the north harbour wall, crashing in from the open sea, then turned and swam back towards the trawlers, her arms already aching – as Jamie and Martha broke the surface, reaching them at the same time as Laviolette.
As Jamie pulled Martha back under, she found herself momentarily alone in the water with him.
‘Get Martha away!’ he yelled.
They went under.
Below the surface there was only panic and silent struggle – any sense of individuality was lost. All Anna could make out was a mass of limbs, darkly clothed, indistinct, constantly moving. It felt as though they weren’t attached to anything; that there was nothing completely human in the water with her. In the end, it was Martha’s hair she managed to get hold of as the current brought it billowing slowly towards her. She took hold of as much of it as she could, filling her hands and kicking hard, pulling Martha backwards through the water towards her.
She swam with her round the stern of a trawler – Flora’s Fancy, that had volunteered its services on the police search for Bryan after he disappeared. She watched Martha haul herself up the ladder on the harbour wall and onto the Quayside where she knelt, vomiting and choking as Laviolette struggled to keep Jamie above the surface long enough for him to grasp onto the ship’s ropes.
Then Anna turned and scanned the harbour’s water, unsteady now with three-foot waves, but there was no sign of Bryan Deane.
Anna surfaced then dived, surfaced then dived, frustrated that the waves made it impossible to check near the trawlers themselves where he’d gone down. After a while she noticed the surface of the whole sea was creeping down the harbour wall. The tide was going out and the current had a strong pull – she could feel it now – Bryan could have been carried out to sea. The waves were cresting and hitting the north harbour wall with such force on the side facing the open sea, it made a mockery of the man-made defences she was now starting to swim towards.
The water felt thicker and greener near the harbour wall and it took her five attempts to haul herself up the ladder. She had to use her arms to protect her head as the waves pushed her up against the wall and they pulled her back with such force that she didn’t have time to grasp the rungs properly and kept losing her grip. Twice, she managed to hold on, but the waves breaking over the harbour wall, filling the sky above with water, pushed her back under.
Eventually, somehow managing to time it, she climbed exhausted to the top of the ladder, clung on as another wave washed over the wall then pushed herself up, got to her feet and ran. She had three minutes before the next big wave crested to run the length of the wall to where the old coal staithes were.
She got to the wooden staithes as the final wave caught her, drenching her back, and lay along the wet moss-covered wood staring up at the wind turbines as the indifferent blades continued to turn.
Her ears still full of the sea, she turned and saw the group of tiny figures on the Quayside, human in their attitudes but barely recognisable across what seemed like a vast stretch of churning water. For a moment she couldn’t remember who they were, and didn’t care. She saw her yellow Capri and the white transit van and behind them the windows of her apartment – and half expected to see herself.
That’s where she should have been – behind glass, looking out – not lying stretched and shivering along a sea defence. She’d been in the water too long, looking for somebody who was already drowned. Her attention was taken again by the wind turbines, white against the grey sky – as she attempted to guess the immense intentions of these immense machines who knew nothing about Bryan Deane or the last twenty years of all their lives.