by Sarah May
Anna sat on the edge of Laviolette’s sofa, neither of them looking at each other, thinking all these things and feeling a thick, ebbing sorrow because the child on the tape – her best friend, Laura Hamilton – had already forgotten these things. The two adult male voices aggressive, cajoling, tittering, were asking her how many times she’d had sex before with Jamie Deane. Where did they do it? Did her parents know? She was underage. It was illegal. Anna couldn’t picture the interview room or the officers conducting the interview, all she could see was Laura – perched at the top of the flight of stairs inside number fifteen Parkview, her hair hanging over her face.
‘It happened that day – the day he locked me in the wash house – where Rachel Deane committed suicide,’ she said to Laviolette, unaware until she spoke that the tape had stopped. Laura’s voice was no longer filling the room.
Jamie and Laura had probably spent other days that summer doing the same thing, but somehow Anna knew it was that day – the day she’d gone round with the magnifying glass to number fifteen Parkview – that Roger Laviolette was murdered.
‘I went round to return something of Bryan’s, but he wasn’t there. Laura was though, and that shocked me. We weren’t friends any more by then.’
Without saying anything, Laviolette slid one of the desk drawers open and pulled out a bottle of Nicaraguan rum, pouring them both a glass.
Anna sat absently tilting the amber liquid. ‘There was a dead deer in there, hanging upside down – its eyes staring.’
She drank the rum and held out her glass – it had a white banner painted on it with the words ‘Good Luck’ in red.
‘Who let you out?’
‘Of where?’
‘The wash house.’
‘That’s the only thing I can’t remember.’
‘Jamie?’
‘It could have been. I don’t remember.’ She drank the second glass of rum. ‘Who gave you this case?’
‘The man who conducted that interview we just listened to. Superintendant Jim Cornish.’
She kept her eyes on him as he filled their glasses again. ‘You’ve got other tapes?’
‘I’ve got all the tapes.’ He wondered if she knew Mary had been interviewed.
The Jamie Deane interview was as unbearable as always to listen to.
Halfway through Anna got up and turned off the machine. ‘He didn’t do it, did he? Where was he interviewed?’
‘That wasn’t an interview – it was an interrogation.’ Laviolette paused. ‘Berwick Street.’
Anna thought he was going to add something to that, but he didn’t. He carried on swinging lightly in his chair from side to side, staring at the spot on the sofa where she’d been sitting.
She knew about Berwick Street – whether you’d been there or not, everybody growing up on the Hartford Estate knew about Berwick Street.
‘You said they brought Bobby in?’
After listening to the Bobby tapes, they sat in silence.
Anna felt one of the waves of depression she often got after conducting interviews herself when the answers she got didn’t collectively amount to a resolution. If Bobby Deane didn’t kill Roger Laviolette – and Jamie Deane didn’t – then who did?
Stretching, she got up slowly from the sofa and crossed the room to the desk where Laviolette was sitting. She stared at the tape machine for a moment before rewinding the Bobby Deane tape. She kept stopping it and pressing ‘play’ until she got to the right spot.
Unsure what she was doing, Laviolette listened for about ten minutes before Anna pressed ‘stop’ again.
‘There,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Listen.’ She rewound it and pressed ‘play’. This time she let the tape run for five minutes before stopping it.
He could feel her watching him.
‘Did you hear it?’
He shook his head and she played the same five minutes again.
‘He stops claiming he’s guilty.’
‘Yes, but before he changes his mind they stopped the tape.’
‘I can’t hear it.’
She rewound it another three times. ‘You hear the cough?’
Laviolette nodded.
‘The dynamic of the interview changes after that cough. Somebody coughed to cover up the sound of the tape going off. What did they say to him when the tape stopped running?’
‘They must have been making a deal.’
Anna nodded, thinking. ‘Listen to the way he’s speaking after the break. His tone –’
‘He’s still lying,’ Laviolette commented after they’d listened to the five minutes for the tenth time.
‘I agree. But he’s lying in a different way.’
‘Different way – how?’ Laviolette yawned, unaware until then of just how exhausted he was.
‘When people lie to protect themselves, it’s different to when they lie to protect others. After the break in the tape, Bobby’s lying to protect someone else – he knows who did it. He knows who killed your father.’
Laviolette thought about the last time he’d visited Bobby Deane in his bungalow on Armstrong Crescent. ‘Bobby Deane doesn’t know his own name any more,’ he said.
Mrs Kelly brought their supper upstairs on a tray. She didn’t come into the study – she left it outside the door.
They ate in silence, and afterwards – with a bottle of wine drunk and onto rum again – found it easier to talk about things they would have found it hard to talk about sober; things they carried around with them every day; things that made them who they were, and that it was a relief to acknowledge.
When Laviolette asked her what she was doing that day in the Clayton Arms with Bryan Deane, it wasn’t painful to remember or an effort to talk.
She settled back in the sofa – the square of sky visible through the skylight, dark now.
‘That day . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I hadn’t spoken to Bryan since I was thirteen. It was summer – the last summer. I was leaving in September for London, and Bryan had become nothing more than the boyfriend of the girl next door.’ Anna laid her head on the sofa’s armrest.
‘I was in the final stages of re-inventing myself that summer – nobody from nowhere. The accent had gone even then, before I left – eroded. I’d gone from running back home from school as fast as I could – to running from home to school as fast as I could. None of my friends were ever invited back to number nineteen Parkview.
‘Laura was working at Mo’s sister’s salon by then, and Bryan . . . I heard he was working as well, but nobody knew what it was exactly that he did. We hadn’t spoken in years. I think it was only just this side of legal – was he collecting rents for somebody? I don’t know. Put it this way, he acted like he’d lost his boundaries, like he was operating beyond the opinion of others. I never saw him with anyone apart from Laura at that time. He felt . . . contaminated in some way. I’m surprised he managed to keep himself clean – has he never had a record?’
‘Nothing,’ Laviolette said.
‘He drove a car nobody in a hundred-mile radius could have afforded, and it’s the car I remember because it was outside Laura’s house that day and Bryan was sitting in it. He must have been waiting for her. I was walking back from Mo’s and he asked if I wanted to go for a drive . . . after five years never saying a word to each other.’
‘You said yes.’
‘Without thinking. I didn’t ask where we were going. I didn’t say anything.’
Anna fell silent, remembering how the breeze – and Bryan’s eyes – had felt on her face.
‘He felt much older than eighteen,’ she said. ‘We drove into Tynemouth as the storm clouds rolled in, got some beer from an off licence on Front Street, an went down on the beach.’
‘Which beach?’ Laviolette asked.
‘Longsands.’ She hesitated. ‘There’s no connection. We haven’t tried to contact each other – not once – in sixteen years.’
‘What happened on Longsands?’
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‘We talked – that’s all. We talked about everything in the way people do maybe only once or twice in their lives because . . .’ her eyes slid away from him, round the room and up to the skylight then back again, ‘those are the kinds of conversations that make or break lives.’
They were silent for a moment, aware of a faint ticking sound coming from somewhere in the room.
Laviolette guessed that it was one of the clocks in the repairs box. It must have started working again of its own accord. Distracted by the clock, he heard her say, ‘I’ve never really felt whole again since that afternoon. Can one afternoon do that to a person – break them in that way?’
Laviolette was contemplating her – aware that he was probably the only person she’d spoken to about that afternoon on Longsands.
‘Why did you never try to contact him afterwards?’
‘I don’t know. He never tried to contact me either.’ She fell silent again, already regretting haven spoken to Laviolette. It was uncharacteristic of her, and she wasn’t that drunk. Lying along the sofa, she continued – silently – to track her way back into the memory of that afternoon.
The storm never broke, but the threat of it was forcing people off the beach, and the beach was emptying – something they only noticed when they finally stopped talking and looked around them.
A few minutes later, they got to their feet and, taking hold of each other’s hands, walked down to the water.
They started kissing, in increasingly deep water under a grey sky.
‘Bryan wanted to go up to the priory, and . . . Do kids still go up to the priory?’
‘Kids will always go up to the priory to do their business.’
‘I said no. I tried to persuade myself that I was thinking of Laura and that I’d done enough damage already, but I wasn’t thinking of Laura – neither of us was. I was just scared. Bryan was furious. We drove home after that – via the Clayton Arms. I remember walking into that bar full of men – the storm clouds had broken by then and we were soaked through from the rain. I had no idea what we were doing there.’ She broke off. ‘That’s when you must have seen us.’
‘Why did Bryan take you there?’
‘He was angry with me.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘There were two women on stage. Bryan told me that the brunette was my mother.’
‘Was she?’
Anna shrugged. ‘It could have been. She left just after I was born, and I’d only seen her once since.’ She remembered running out of the Clayton Arms and trying to make it to a drain, but the drains were flooded in the downpour so she was sick on the pavement instead. ‘He phoned me – the next day – to say he’d made it up. He didn’t know why. I didn’t know whether to believe him and anyway, the damage was done – it’s the only image of Bettina I’ve ever had, whether I want it or not: a half naked brunette, drugged on a smoky stage. It was as if he was using the idea of her to counterbalance something between us.’
‘Counterbalance?’ Laviolette was staring at the carpet near her feet, swinging the well oiled chair rhythmically from side to side still, in a way that made it whisper.
‘A darkness that was in both our lives – I don’t know. It was as if he was trying to say that we weren’t so different after all, but then – I never said we were.’
‘Then you left,’ Laviolette said quietly. ‘I left. Bryan stayed. By the time I came back from my first term at King’s – Christmas – Laura Hamilton was three months pregnant and about to become Laura Deane.’
‘Did she get pregnant on purpose?’
‘Probably, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Bryan stayed.’
‘Did you go to the wedding?’ he asked, curious.
‘No. I went to Damascus with a Syrian called Khalid. It didn’t work out in the long term, but then neither of us expected it to.’
‘Were you invited – to the wedding?’
‘I can’t remember. By the time I left university, the Met – along with most of Britain’s police forces – were launching a major drive to recruit women (on paper, anyway) in an attempt to revamp an organisation shot through with endemic corruption.’
‘And oestrogen was the answer,’ Laviolette put in.
‘I was interviewed on Woman’s Hour – along with another female recruit. Mary still has the –’
Before she finished speaking, he said, ‘Why did you come north?’
‘I came looking for Bryan.’
‘And that was before he disappeared,’ Laviolette observed.
Anna kept what happened the day after that to herself – for herself.
The day after she’d refused to go up to the priory with Bryan, she let him take her to a house in North Blyth, which felt as though it was being used as a squat. She didn’t ask about the house; she didn’t ask any questions. This time, in contrast to the day before, they barely spoke; they just went upstairs and made love on a mattress Bryan spread their clothes over in an attempt to cover some of the more sinister stains. There was a curtain still at the window that Bryan managed to draw despite the pole hanging at an angle.
Anna had never felt so naked in her life before, and never so naked since.
They knew, as they were making love – which they did three times, sleeping in between as day turned to night – that this was the moment all other moments in their life would be judged against.
‘Come to London with me.’
‘To do what? Clean the streets? This is my place.’
‘I can’t stay.’
‘I know you can’t.’
‘I have to go.’
‘I know.’ She remembered Bryan pushing the hair from her face, the night air around them thick with the smell of industry – the power station, the aluminium smelting plant.
She was back where she’d started.
Chapter 16
It was just after ten in the morning and Laviolette was sitting opposite Jim Cornish, Superintendent, in Jim Cornish’s office. There was twenty years of service and a desk full of golf trophies between them, as well as ranks of photographs positioned so that the person sitting in the chair Laviolette was currently sitting in was forced to contemplate them, as Laviolette was doing now. There were a lot of Jim shaking hands with people, and a collection of more personal, family shots. Jim had four children – two girls and two boys – but there was only one photograph showing all four. The rest were of the eldest son, Richard – mostly of him playing rugby – and the two girls, whose names Laviolette couldn’t remember. They were displayed to provoke reassurance in those Jim liked, and envy in those he didn’t.
The younger son, Dom, had left home at eighteen with a black man, and moved south. He committed suicide five years ago at the age of thirty, but Jim never talked about Dom – nobody did, in fact, apart from Jim’s wife. Jim’s wife had been on anti-depressants ever since while Jim just carried on with his year-on-year affairs, which he’d been doing ever since the birth of his first child, rugby-playing Richard.
Jim Cornish had started his career at the notorious Berwick Street station where the Deane interviews were conducted. He would hold mattresses over people in the cells while beating them half to death – and he was one of those who remained miraculously untarnished after Berwick Street was exposed, probably because he proved so adaptable to whatever new legislation, and faces accompanying it, was wheeled in. One of the main reasons Jim was so successful at adapting was that he had no self-belief – he was happy to assume, without question, the convictions of others – and he’d always managed to keep his sights on the bigger picture, which had to be upheld at all times, and at all costs.
Jim Cornish didn’t view justice as an arm of the law; he viewed it as the enemy. He knew what people wanted – he had a talent for that – and tried to ensure they got it. If people wanted their rapists to be six foot Jamaicans, he made damn sure they were. Who wanted to know that a rapist could also be a married white collar worker in his mid fifties with thr
ee children? Nobody. So why spoil somebody’s day with an inconvenient and complicated truth. It was selfindulgent and childish.
Jim advised his officers against many courses of action, but there was very little he actually condoned. As far as Jim was concerned, the law’s only purpose was to uphold order, and self-denial never changed the world. Laviolette had watched Jim rape a woman once during their early years on the force, but if either of them were embarrassed by that now – if either of them even thought about it as anything other than the caprices of youth – it wasn’t Jim.
It was a woman who brought about this morning’s summons, and that woman was Laura Deane. It was a formal complaint – Laviolette was harassing her daughter.
Jim’s eyes kept flicking between his computer screen and the papers on his desk before resting momentarily on his Detective Inspector.
‘So what’s going on?’ he said at last.
Jim used to speak almost entirely in profanities but since becoming a latter-life church goer following Dom’s suicide – at the invitation of the Chief Superintendent – he made an effort.
‘Martha Deane reckons she saw her dad outside school the other day.’
‘Reckons,’ Jim said, staring down mournfully at his desk. ‘What do you reckon, Inspector?’
‘That we need to investigate the claim.’
Jim shifted in his chair, leaning neatly over to one side so that he could look at Laviolette on the diagonal rather than front on – while trying to decide whether he needed to be wary of him or whether he could just feel sorry for him.
‘Problem is, this particular claim comes from a distraught fifteen-year-old who’s just lost her dad.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Come on!’ Jim exploded – a mini explosion that was quickly contained but that sent a pen he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding, across the desk. ‘This is a classic empathy sighting. Plus the kid’s been seeing the school shrink – compulsive lying or something.’
‘Probably inherited,’ Laviolette put in.
