The Missing Marriage Read online

  Martha turned away from him to look out the window, uninterested. ‘Do you think anybody marries the person they’re meant to?’

  ‘Some people do.’

  Laviolette turned into the Duneside development.

  ‘On Saturday – when dad was dropping me off at Nan’s – Anna was there, and it was the first time they’d seen each other in, like, sixteen years, and he was holding my hand so tight it went – numb,’ she finished, gripping suddenly onto Laviolette’s arm. ‘Stop the car.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The van – the one parked outside the house,’ she whispered, ‘it’s dad’s brother – Jamie Deane.’

  Laviolette’s hand remained on the gearstick as he peered through the windscreen at the van. ‘Does he often come round to the house?’

  Martha was staring so intently out the window that Laviolette, unsure whether or not she’d heard the question was about to ask it again when Martha said, ‘Never. I didn’t even know dad had a brother – until last night when he phoned mum, but she was too doped up to hear – so I picked up.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  Martha thought about this. ‘Nothing. He just said that he knew about dad. I didn’t say anything – I just let him talk. He thought he was speaking to mum. He sounded just like dad – on the phone. That was weird. Where are you going? Wait –’

  But the Inspector was already out the car, running in a way that should have made him look ridiculous, but didn’t – towards the white van, which juddered into life, pulling away sharply from the kerb and reversing over the ‘Private Property’ sign on the edge of number four’s lawn before accelerating unevenly away – the van’s exhaust scraping the blue gentians in Mr Thompson’s rock garden.

  Half way up Marine Drive the van jumped as the gears were changed. Thinking it was going to stall, Laviolette ran after it, but was left stooped panting over a drain as the van accelerated once more – watched by Martha who was smiling to herself, pleased. Jamie Deane had got away – from what, she didn’t know, but he had got away and for some reason this made her suddenly happy.

  Still bent over double, Laviolette twisted his head in the direction of number two Marine Drive, whose door was open.

  The front door to number four was also open. It opened, in fact, at the same time as the door to number two, and Mr Thompson – who’d been watching the white van long before the wanton act of vandalism – was now running in a lopsided fashion towards the rockery where he fell on his knees in the damp grass in front of his shredded gentians.

  Laura Deane stood in the doorway to number two, her phone in her hand, and it was Laura Deane the Inspector made his way towards, still breathless.

  For a moment her face was the most open he’d seen it – verging on vulnerable – and this, he realised, was due to fear.

  But before Laviolette had a chance to speak Laura – who was watching Martha get her bike out of the Inspector’s car and wheel it slowly past Mr Thompson next door, prostrate still before his gentians – said, ‘What’s Martha doing with you?’

  Laviolette was about to respond to this when all three of them became suddenly aware of Mr Thompson getting numbly to his feet on the lawn outside number four, two dark patches of dew on his trousers at the knee.

  ‘This is private property,’ he hissed unevenly at them before stalking indoors with his left fist clenched, fully intending to write a letter requesting compensation for damages.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ Laviolette suggested at last. ‘I want to talk about Jamie Deane,’ he carried on smoothly, noting the expression on Laura’s face.

  ‘My uncle,’ Martha prompted her. ‘The one I never knew I had?’

  Ignoring this, Laura said, ‘I’ll open the garage so you can put your bike in.’

  Laviolette waited in the hallway while Laura opened the garage door. He heard her talking to Martha. The tone was angry, but he couldn’t make out the words and when they emerged from the garage Martha walked straight past him up the stairs, holding her arm as if it hurt, her face set.

  ‘D’you mind if we go into the kitchen,’ Laura said, looking suddenly tired.

  He hauled himself awkwardly onto one of the bar stools – as awkwardly as Don had earlier – and watched her fill the kettle with water and switch on the gas.

  ‘I’m putting the kettle on – I don’t know why. D’you want tea? Coffee?’

  ‘I’m fine thanks.’

  ‘Me neither.’ She switched off the gas and hovered restlessly for a moment in the corner of the kitchen. ‘Actually, I’m going to have a glass of wine – it’s been a long day. I don’t suppose you’re allowed one, are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said again, watching her uncork an already open bottle and close her eyes as she took the first sip.

  ‘We decided not to tell Martha about Jamie.’

  Laviolette didn’t say anything.

  ‘It was a joint decision,’ she added. ‘Are you comfortable talking about this?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well it was your –’

  ‘How did Jamie feel about this joint decision?’

  Laura shrugged irritably. ‘Put it this way – he never tried to contact us either.’

  Laviolette stared down at the reflection of himself in the polished granite surface of the breakfast bar. ‘Until now.’

  ‘I don’t know how he found out about Bryan,’ she said, watching him.

  ‘Or why finding out about him should provoke an impromptu visit.’ He looked up at her.

  ‘D’you think he’s got something to do with Bryan’s disappearance?’

  Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘How did he know where you lived?’

  Laura shook her head and looked afraid again. ‘No idea. I’ve got no idea how he got the number either.’

  ‘What did he say – on the phone? What did he want?’

  ‘Nothing – apart from that he knew Bryan had gone missing, and that he was parked outside.’

  ‘Did he threaten you in anyway?’

  Laura gave a short laugh. ‘Most women would find a man calling them to say they’re parked directly outside their house threatening.’ She paused. ‘I feel taunted. Jamie was always good at that.’ She stopped suddenly as she realised what it was she’d said.

  ‘So you knew him well at some point?’

  ‘As a child.’ She poured herself another glass of wine.

  ‘And as a child was it Bryan you knew first – or his brother, Jamie?’

  Laura hesitated. ‘Jamie, I suppose.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just always seemed to be around.’

  ‘Were you and Jamie ever together as in a relationship together?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Not really,’ the Inspector repeated.

  ‘But you already knew that, didn’t you, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You know all about Jamie Deane.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So why are we doing this? Why are you even handling this case?’

  ‘Because although you’re answering my questions, you’re not giving me anything here.’ He brought his palm down suddenly against the granite surface, leaving a print.

  Laura jerked in reaction to this, spilling some wine, as Laviolette slipped off the stool far more gracefully than he’d got onto it, walked purposefully towards the patio doors and stared out at the garden – wondering briefly which of the Deanes was responsible for it, and trying to discern any real horticultural passion.

  ‘How old were you and Bryan when you first started seeing each other?’

  ‘I was thirteen. Bryan was fourteen.’

  ‘What did Jamie think about that?’

  ‘I don’t know – he was in prison.’

  Laviolette sunk his hands in his pockets and swung round to face her, ‘Have Bryan and Jamie been in contact at all over the years?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. B
ryan’s never said anything anyway.’

  ‘Do you have much contact with your father-in-law, Mr Deane?’

  ‘My father-in-law?’ Laura repeated, surprised. ‘We never really got on.’

  ‘Your father-in-law’s got Alzheimer’s,’ Laviolette said, aware that Laura winced every time he said ‘father-in-law’. ‘He shouldn’t be living alone.’

  Laura stared at him, impassive, but her expression changed to shock when he said, ‘I went to visit him yesterday.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To ask him if he’d seen Bryan.’

  ‘How would he know? He doesn’t know who Bryan is any more.’

  ‘Does Bryan visit him?’

  ‘Occasionally – I think. He doesn’t really talk about it.’

  ‘Doesn’t it weigh heavily on him – a father with Alzheimer’s, living alone?’

  ‘They fell out years ago. It’s complicated – but then, that’s families, isn’t it? They’re complicated.’

  She looked out the kitchen window at the McClarens’ cat – a mink-coloured Burmese attempting to catch a fly by the Hebe.

  ‘Are you a family?’ she asked him.

  The question was strangely but accurately put. ‘Your daughter asked me that on the way over here in the car.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know – maybe once, but not any more.’

  He nodded.

  ‘That’s sad,’ Laura responded.

  He turned away from her, back to the garden, and watched a cat – the McClarens’ cat – sprint from the fence onto the lawn where it stood, one paw raised, alert and absorbed in its own agenda. It flicked its head quickly in his direction, just to the left of his shoulder as if there was somebody standing directly beside him; somebody he could neither see nor feel. Then it looked away. Behind him, he heard her say, ‘People on the outside don’t understand, do they – the work that goes into a marriage?’

  ‘I ran out of energy – the energy required to undertake the monumental acts of heroism needed to keep us together.’

  He crossed the kitchen aimlessly then stopped, feeling suddenly stranded. He wanted a glass of wine now, and had to put a lot of effort into stopping himself asking for one.

  ‘In the beginning you can’t imagine anything ever going wrong, can you? You see other people – couples; families – and you think, I’m never going to let that happen to me . . . us. But somehow stuff does go wrong, and one day you look around you and realise that you’re just like everybody else – clinging on.’ She stopped speaking and started to twist the wine glass nervously in her hand.

  Laviolette was watching her trying to decide whether she’d taken herself by surprise speaking like that or whether the whole scene – this speech included – was pre-meditated. Then he decided that he didn’t care – her words had a resonance to them he found hard to resist.

  He looked quickly at her. For the first time since meeting her, he realised that he was thinking of Laura Deane as a victim rather than . . . rather than what, he wondered? The word that came to mind was ‘conspirator’.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘About what?’

  She hesitated. ‘Jamie – coming round here.’

  ‘Feeling threatened isn’t the same thing as being threatened. I can’t stop him coming.’

  ‘Why are you protecting him?’ she said harshly, frustration changing her tone. ‘I can’t believe you’re protecting him – after what he did.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  She stared at him in disbelief. ‘He killed your father.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laviolette said, thoughtful. ‘I’ve spent such a lot of time thinking about that over the years, and I’m not sure he did.’

  ‘But that’s why he went to prison – for twenty years.’

  ‘What if he didn’t go to prison because he murdered my father, but because all those years ago, a girl lied? That would be a very different matter, wouldn’t it?’

  Laviolette drove down the coast to Tynemouth, turning left at the Priory onto Pier Road and the bulk of headland known as the Spanish Battery. Although there were houses here – his own included – and the white clapboard headquarters of the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade (anchored to the headland by steel guy ropes to prevent it from being carried away in the frequent storms), the headland felt severed from the land rising behind it; a severance reflected in the poise of the Admiral Collingswood statue (Nelson’s second in command at Trafalgar), whose face was turned resolutely seawards. The Spanish Battery was named after the seventeenth century Spanish mercenaries who manned the guns on the headland in response to the Dutch threat at the time. Laviolette had, for some reason, always had a soft spot for those Spanish mercenaries.

  He parked outside number four Old Coastguard Cottages – an old stone house that was also home – the headlamps illuminating the long grass that was rolling in one of the headland’s perpetual winds. Even after he’d switched off the engine, he could still feel the wind rushing under and over the car, rocking it from side to side.

  He continued to sit in the dark car, aware that the last thing he felt like doing right then was walking into number four Old Coastguard Cottages and asking Mrs Kelly how her day had gone – how his son, Harvey, who she looked after, had been. He didn’t want to listen, smiling, to the account of their day, rent with the small seismic details Mrs Kelly insisted on giving him because Mrs Kelly was a gem . . . a real find, and Laviolette knew that these small seismic details were borne of the love she had for his son; a love that let him off the hook. He felt responsible for Harvey, but he didn’t love him.

  He thought about the conversation he’d just had with Laura Deane, and how today – for the first time in years – he’d spoken about his wife, and not just once but twice: first with Martha then Laura Deane. In fact, Laura Deane reminded him a lot of Lily – what Lily could have been in the right hands. He’d told Martha that he had no idea whether she was living or dead and he hadn’t said it to be barbaric. Years ago when he first lost her, he might have done, but not now.

  He shut his eyes and saw her briefly – thin, blonde, scruffy, and bruised. He hadn’t loved her, which made him the last person she should have entrusted herself to . . . agreed to marry.

  He swung his gaze away from the house back out to sea. There was a couple walking tightly together along the pier below the cliff on which stood the priory’s ruins. A couple taking a walk . . . he knew that normality could conceal the most incredible acts of sedition, but tonight he chose to believe that the couple taking a walk were nothing more than what they seemed: a couple taking a walk, and wondered what it would be like to walk with someone along the pier at the end of the day. How did people get to the stage where they could just take a walk together like that?

  Sighing, he got out of the car, bracing himself against the wind and the cold as he made his way across the small garden separating his house from the road. Instead of going to the front door, he stood outside the window whose curtains Mrs Kelly rarely drew before he came home – an old superstitious habit she’d acquired over the years being married to a fisherman.

  Through the window he saw Mrs Kelly and Harvey sitting on the sofa together – Harvey was a lot taller than Mrs Kelly – watching what looked like a costume drama on TV. There was a tray on the coffee table in front of them with cheese and biscuits on it, and some paper covered in the 3-D shapes Harvey was forever drawing. Harvey, perched on the edge of the sofa, was rocking gently backwards and forwards. Mrs Kelly sat still with her hands clasped in her lap.

  He couldn’t remember when or why he’d painted the walls of his house yellow; when or why he’d chosen the carpet he had, but somehow it all hung together. He’d constructed a life for himself out of a series of inescapable facts, and number four Old Coastguard Cottages looked like someone’s home.

  Mrs Kelly twisted her head instinctively towards the window and, smiling, waved at him a
s if the fact that he was standing out in the garden peering in through the window at them was the most normal thing in the world.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, but thought suddenly of Bryan Deane’s four-minute vigil above Longsands on Easter Saturday – the one he’d watched on the CCTV footage. Bryan Deane’s four-minute vigil had been motionless and yet during those four minutes Bryan had departed one life and entered another.

  Once Mrs Kelly had put Harvey to bed for the night and left, Laviolette went up to the small room at the top of the house he used as a study. It was tiny, and full of stuff too meaningless and personal to go anywhere else in the house. It felt like a student’s room – one he was renting inside his own house – and he often spent the night up here on the sofa.

  There was a skylight in the roof, but no windows – the lack of a view calmed him.

  He had a cardboard box by the desk full of objects he’d collected over the years that had got broken – tea pots, desk lamps, Harvey’s toys – that he often found himself repairing before realising that they no longer had any purpose in his life, and so were returned, repaired, to the box where they got jolted to the bottom, broken once more.

  A therapeutic cycle of needless activity. It made him think of the factory Lily used to tell him Harvey could work in when he got older – a place where they made people like Harvey spend half the day making wooden crates and the other half smashing them up with rubber mallets.

  People like Harvey.

  He also had things up here he shouldn’t have – like copies of interview tapes from the investigation following his father’s murder, and it was one of these he put on now, dated 7th August 1987.

  He sat down on the sofa that was covered in a crocheted blanket he had a feeling his mother must have made – maybe while she was dying.

  The room was a deathly blue and beige that always made him feel depressed, but he was able to think clearly there – he’d never sought to understand the connection between depression and lucidity.