by Sarah May
‘Bryan?’ Laviolette said, looking straight at her. ‘It had to be.’
‘And since then?’
‘Nothing.’ She met his gaze. ‘Nothing.’
‘He wanted you to know he was alive,’ Laviolette stated, feeling the tension and aggression that had been building up, release, as he paused for a moment to watch a group of rowers from the Tynemouth Rowing Club launch an eight-man boat into the sea from the small bay on the south side of the priory. The rowers’ silent collaboration gave a grace and coherence to the launch that made Laviolette feel calm to the extent of peaceful.
He could feel Anna beside him on the pavement, but she’d lost her relevance as he watched the departure of the rowers, wishing he was among them; one of the eight men. The desire was so strong that he felt like the one who’d been left behind once they’d gone.
Disorientated, he turned back to Anna.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the picture?’
‘It came the day of Erwin’s funeral, and –’
‘And?’
‘I’m not convinced it’s Bryan. It could be Martha.’
‘If you thought it was Martha, you would have told me sooner. Have you got the drawing still?’
Anna nodded.
‘Why don’t you want anybody else knowing Bryan Deane’s still alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did he know you were at the Ridley Arms?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where d’you think he is?’
‘I’ve got no idea.’ This time she held his gaze. ‘I know how this works. The kayak’s been washed up – there’s been nothing new since –’
‘Apart from the drawing.’
‘The drawing might not have been him. Everybody presumes Bryan drowned – nobody’s interested and they’re not going to give you any more resources.’
‘So we’re on our own.’
‘With what?’
‘The fact that Bryan Deane faked his own death – with the co-operation of his wife – because the life they’ve been living didn’t work out and they need the life insurance payout to start over again.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘You know I’m right.’
‘Nobody cares.’
‘I care. You care – and Bryan Deane cares enough to jeopardise everything in order to let you and Martha know he’s still alive, that’s how much Bryan Deane cares.’
‘And why do you care so much?’
‘Because I’m tired of people lying,’ Laviolette said before starting to walk again, taking the path that led down from the Battery onto the pier.
‘Ice cream?’ he asked as they passed the van parked in the small car park on the lower slopes of the Battery.
Anna stared at him as if he’d said something profane then shook her head.
The pier at Tynemouth wasn’t a resort pier; it was a long curving cement barricade with a small automated lighthouse on the end. It took a lot of battering from the sea, but renowned feet had walked its length – Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle – as well as those less renowned who came, regardless of age, because the sea didn’t care who they flirted with, who they groped or what they shot up on.
Laviolette and Anna walked the pier in silence, the incoming tide wetting them with spray as it hit the man-made defence. They passed a couple heading back towards land, who they smiled at and exchanged greetings with. The only other people on the pier were two Russians from a ship docked at North Shields, who asked them to take their photograph – standing against the rusting railings surrounding the lighthouse at the pier end, their arms around each other.
When the Russians left, Anna and Laviolette sat down on the warm cement – their legs hanging over the side only metres above the churning water.
‘Why did you come back up north?’
‘My grandfather was dying.’
Laviolette nodded. ‘And?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I really want to know.’
Anna breathed in deeply, watching the swell on the thick dark water beneath her feet. ‘Someone I was working with – I’d been working with him for two years on the same case – committed suicide. Afterwards, I started suffering from these attacks. I knew what they were – I’ve seen it happen to people I’ve been close to. I could be sitting in front of the computer and without warning I’d be overcome by . . .’ she tried to find the right words, ‘this sense of imminent collapse. When this happened I knew I had to get somewhere where I could be alone – usually the toilets.’ She saw herself in one of the sickly pink cubicles where she would either chew on her knuckles as she sobbed, hoping to stifle the sound or – when the attack was acute – find herself vomiting down the toilet. ‘It’s like being in a permanent state of grief – with nothing to grieve over. The attacks didn’t go unnoticed.’
‘You’re too good at your job, aren’t you?’
‘They didn’t put it quite like that, but that’s pretty much what it amounted to.’
‘And did you feel better, coming north – in spite of the cancer that brought you?’
Anna’s lips had gone thin, in the way they did when she was concentrating. ‘I felt better until the morning I saw Bryan Deane for the first time in sixteen years. That’s when I knew –’ she broke off, seeing herself again sobbing behind the wheel of the Capri while watching a toddler play with a Doberman in the house opposite number nineteen Parkview, ‘that what was happening to me had been sixteen years in the making. Everything I’d purposefully walked out on; everything I thought I’d left behind had been secretly keeping pace with me all along, and I’d run out of storage space.’
Laviolette didn’t say anything.
They watched the sun go down in silence, spreading a lazy line of orange along the surface of the sea.
‘I saw you once – you and Bryan. A long time ago.’
Anna, whose head had fallen unconsciously against his shoulder, pulled herself up straight. ‘Easter Saturday was the first time I ever saw you in my life.’
‘I said I saw you, I didn’t say you saw me – you couldn’t have been more than eighteen both of you. It was a Friday afternoon, and it must have been raining outside because you walked into the Clayton Arms soaked through.’
‘The Clayton Arms?’
‘Up at Bedlington station. Friday afternoon used to be strippers and that’s how I know it was a Friday I saw you – because there were two girls on stage that day wearing nothing but their tits.’
‘What was I doing at the Clayton Arms?’
‘You came in with Bryan, and you were the only other girl there. You looked at the stage for a bit then you went running out.’
Laviolette didn’t tell her the rest of it: how he’d run outside after her that afternoon, straight past Bryan Deane and into the rain; how he’d seen her in the distance, running away from them all.
‘How the hell d’you remember that? And h-h-how d’you know it was me?’
‘I recognised you as soon as I saw you Easter Saturday at the Deanes. The first time I see you, you’re with Bryan Deane. The next time I see you, sixteen years later, you’re looking for Bryan Deane. Only this time I’m the one coming in from the rain.’
‘Who said I was looking for him?’
‘Isn’t that why you came north?’ he said, getting awkwardly to his feet with the support of the railings round the lighthouse where the Russians had stood to have their photograph taken.
Anna didn’t say anything – she was too preoccupied still by the memory of Bryan and her at the Clayton Arms.
‘Where d’you think he is?’ Laviolette asked after a while.
‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘Close enough to wait for Martha after school.’
Laviolette looked down at his feet as a high wave colliding with the pier left a trail of spume over them. ‘You said – Easter Saturday – that all of us are involved one way or another,
’ Anna said.
‘The living and the dead.’ He gave her a quick, shy smile. ‘Bobby Deane. Rachel Deane.’
The waves were getting higher and the pier was wet from sea spray with small rainbows bouncing off it where the sun still reached.
‘Rachel Deane was having an affair with my father – you knew that?’
‘Not until recently. Nan told me.’
‘People said that’s why she killed herself – because she couldn’t leave Bobby Deane and she couldn’t leave my dad, and she had to leave one of them. The mathematics of staying with both of them was –’
‘Inappropriate,’ Anna suggested softly.
‘Hellish,’ Laviolette corrected her. ‘Bobby came to see us after Rachel died, I’ll never forget that. He came round the back, straight through the door into the kitchen, drunk but not dead drunk. Dad had the radio in pieces on the bench – he was in the middle of trying to mend it – and when he turned round, the screwdriver in his hand still, his face just dropped. Bobby was huge – felt huge then anyway and dad was a lightweight. The thought of what Bobby had come to do to him terrified him, you could feel the fear coming off him and the violence coming off Bobby, and dad was sort of crumpling up before Bobby even got close.
‘I remember thinking, this is it, and feeling relieved. I also remember realising that dad was far more afraid of Bobby Deane than he’d ever been in love with Rachel Deane.’
‘How old were you?’
‘How old?’ He stared at her for a moment, too lost in the memory to respond. ‘Nineteen? Twenty?’ he said, seeing himself standing by the bench next to the dismembered radio, as if it was that Bobby Deane had really come for and he was meant to be guarding it. ‘Twenty,’ he decided, staring at her but not really seeing her. ‘Just married, and new on the force, but it never occurred to me to do anything about Bobby Deane standing in our kitchen because right then all I was thinking was – what did Rachel see in him? And I’m not talking about Bobby.
‘So there I was thinking, this is it, then the next minute Bobby just flopped, pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down in it – lifeless – and started sobbing. He wasn’t crying, he was sobbing. It was as if, somehow, we’d been his last hope and he’d been expecting to open our kitchen door and find Rachel in there with us, but she wasn’t and when he saw she wasn’t he finally gave up.
‘I’ll never forget the sight of his hand curled on the table as he sat there motionless, sobbing. After a while – it seemed like hours, but it couldn’t have been – he started wiping at his face, and he said to my dad, “Why did you give her a choice? Why didn’t you just take her away from here? You should of just taken her away – she’d of been alright then.”
‘I can remember him saying it – I can remember him saying every single one of those words, at a loss.’
They stared at each other for a moment before Laviolette turned and started to walk away.
Anna followed, drawing alongside him again.
‘I knew then that Bobby Deane had said everything he’d ever have to say to my dad, which was why – when dad was murdered – I knew it wasn’t Bobby Deane. He was taken in for questioning and when he realised they were holding Jamie as well, he tried to plead guilty.’
‘To protect his son,’ Anna put in, aware that she’d become cold in the past ten minutes. The heat had gone out of the day and the air was cooling rapidly.
‘They thought about letting him frame himself for it, but he had too many alibis – even for them. So they went for Jamie instead.’
She thought about Jamie and Martha on Tynemouth Longsands earlier. ‘Jamie was inside for twenty years!’ Anna shouted.
‘And guess who put him there?’
‘His alibi – Laura.’
‘Some alibi.’
A wave crashed over the pier then, soaking Laviolette’s back and Anna’s right hand side. The water was cold, running off her face.
‘How did you know Laura was his alibi?’
‘I didn’t – until today. I met Jamie and Martha on Longsands earlier – just before I met you.’
‘So that’s where they went.’
‘You were following them?’
Laviolette shook his head. ‘I tried to meet with Martha – after school. I saw her get into Jamie Deane’s van.’
He carried on walking.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.
‘Home.’
‘Where’s home?’
He pointed to the headland rising above them where the pier joined the land. ‘On the Battery.’
He could see Coastguard Cottages, and Mrs Kelly’s car parked outside. Harvey would be in the house, drawing one of the thousand cuboids he drew every day – that none of the line up of professionals who’d seen him could explain. It was enough for Mrs Kelly – who didn’t need an explanation as to why Harvey drew cuboids all day long – to ensure that he had a constant supply of pens and paper and therein, Laviolette thought, lay the answer.
He was aware that he wanted to take Anna up to the house.
Anna was eroding his need for privacy.
She was doing it unconsciously and inadvertently, but she was doing it and he wasn’t sure where this left him.
‘Are you going to invite me up?’
‘I already did. I invited you to dinner. You said no.’
He walked away and she watched as, in between waves, he got smaller.
A few more seconds passed before she broke into a run – along the pier through the breaking waves after him.
Chapter 15
As they walked into number four Coastguard Cottages, Anna realised that she had no idea what to expect. She knew, from the conversation they’d just had, that Laviolette had married at twenty and that there was at least one child because she’d heard a child when they’d spoken on the phone. Which was why, when they entered the kitchen, she interpreted the scene in the way she did.
It wasn’t until she was introduced to Mrs Kelly – rolling pastry on the bench next to the oven, flustered by the interruption and more shocked by Anna than Anna ever could have been by her – that she began to realise what Laviolette’s life was.
Harvey was about six feet tall, in his early twenties, and sitting at the kitchen table with a box full of striped drinking straws and a sellotape dispenser. There were three identical 3-D cubes lined up in front of him and he gurgled, distracted, when he heard Laviolette mention his name. He didn’t look up.
Anna thought back to the Easter Sunday when Laviolette had phoned. The child he’d been trying to feed while on the phone to her – the child she’d mistaken for a toddler – must have been Harvey.
Once Laviolette had established with Mrs Kelly – shy to the point of silence now in Anna’s presence – that there would be enough steak and kidney pie to go round, he led Anna upstairs to the study at the top of the house.
‘How d’you manage?’ she said, taking in the small box-like room crammed full of books and files that she guessed Laviolette spent most of his time in when at home. It smelt of carpet, sunlight, coffee and elastic bands.
‘Mrs Kelly.’ He smiled flatly, preoccupied – trying to work out whether he’d made the right decision bringing Anna here; whether or not he wanted her here. ‘She had to have a knee arthroscopy this time last year and I paid for her to have it done privately so that she could be out in three days,’ he heard himself saying automatically, still preoccupied.
Anna, about to sit down on the sofa, hesitated. ‘It’s okay,’ she said.
He looked at her startled.
‘I don’t have to stay.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I wanted to show you something.’
She sat down on the edge of the sofa as Laviolette got the tapes out from their usual place – aware that this was the first time he’d ever listened to them with anybody else; aware of Anna’s eyes on him, and deciding against any sort of introduction.
‘Where’s Harvey’s mother?’ she said,
watching him.
Laviolette stopped and turned towards her, the tapes in his hands, staring at her as if she’d said something in a foreign language he used to speak and that he hadn’t heard spoken since he was a child.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, still staring at her. ‘We separated
– a long time ago. Actually, it wasn’t even that formal – it just got to a point when she was no longer with us.’
Anna knew, from the way he said it, that he hadn’t tried looking for her, and that this was something – as he grew older – he’d come to regret. Not necessarily for his sake, but for her’s.
‘I can’t even remember when she left.’
‘What was her name?’ Anna didn’t know why she was asking – it was irrelevant, but for some reason she wanted to know.
He paused before answering. ‘Lily. It wasn’t Harvey. I mean, Harvey was a shock and we were young, but it wasn’t just Harvey. There was other stuff.’ He paused again. ‘My father was brilliant with Harvey. I was closer to him the two years before he died than I ever was – because of how he was with Harvey. He was only two when dad died – he was there when he was killed.’
‘So Harvey knows,’ Anna said, quietly.
Laviolette looked at her, realising this for the first time. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’
Then he pressed ‘play’ on the machine and the small room at the top of number four Coastguard Cottages was full of the sound of a child’s voice – Laura Hamilton, age thirteen.
It was also the voice of Anna’s own childhood; the voice that had chattered with her as they’d turned cardboard boxes and old curtains into ships with sails, the voice that had suggested they swapped leotards for the weekly tap and ballet classes they went to at Mrs Miller’s Academy; the voice that had discussed in detail whether they should spend the ten pence they had between them on two sherbet dips or ten one penny sweets in Mo’s shop. She remembered the way their hands smelt after a ride on the park’s iron horse and how that last summer they went camping together, they’d practised kissing in the green tent at night so that they’d know how to do it when it came to the real thing.
