The Missing Marriage

by Sarah May

  The face was pale and discoloured.

  It didn’t look like a face that could have done what it was meant to have done to his father, but at that moment Jamie flinched and Laviolette felt a sudden charge of exhilaration – the sort he’d often seen on other men’s faces during the Strike, whatever side they were on.

  He’d never seen anyone flinch from him before, and it gave him such a rush that he finally let go of the parts of an upside down world he was still valiantly trying to hold onto.

  It got to the point where Jamie Deane’s body was no longer moving of its own accord, but only in response to his blows, and nothing had ever felt so good.

  At some point Bobby Deane arrived at the station with a group of men – there were twelve of them altogether. Laviolette heard them as a distant roar, but had a sudden, clear picture of Bobby Deane in a corridor out there somewhere while only metres away, his son . . .

  He looked down then at Jamie Deane – a long way down by his feet as if he was seeing him now for the first time, and seeing him, he was violently sick over the mattress lying on the floor that he’d asked Wilkins to take away.

  Laviolette looked down at his desk in the study at four Coastguard Cottages – surprised to see that he’d scribbled a sequence of numbers, and even more surprised when he recognised them as his mother’s Co-Op account number. The number he used to give the cashier when he was sent out for the groceries.

  He was still staring at the numbers when his phone rang five minutes later.

  It was Yvonne.

  ‘They’ve got a problem,’ she said, toneless. ‘I ran a check on all missing persons –’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A couple of months ago, a girl called Alison Marsh had an argument with her boyfriend. He walked out, and she didn’t hear from him so left it. After a while, she started leaving messages, which he never returned. She cried herself to sleep every night for weeks –’

  ‘You just made that up,’ Laviolette interrupted her.

  ‘Yeah,’ Yvonne agreed, ‘I just made that up. But she did start phoning his friends only they reckoned they hadn’t seen him either. Alison thought they were lying – covering for him – and was on the verge of dying of a broken heart when the boyfriend’s mother phoned asking if Alison had seen Brett, because she hadn’t heard anything from him in weeks. Alarm bells started ringing then, and a couple of days later Alison and Brett’s mother filed a Missing Persons with Newcastle police. Friends and family have heard nothing since then.

  ‘Tell me about Brett,’ Laviolette said, his eyes fixed still on the numbers he’d scrawled into the desk.

  ‘He shouldn’t have argued with his girlfriend.’

  ‘Something else.’

  ‘Male – Caucasian – thirty-three years old on his last birthday.’ Yvonne paused. ‘You’re smiling.’

  ‘Did Brett have any defining features?’

  ‘Defining as in features that would clarify, beyond a doubt, that there was no way Brett could be mistaken for Bryan Deane – or vice versa?’

  ‘Yeah, those kind of defining features.’

  ‘He had a moth – not a butterfly, a moth, Alison was particular about that – tattooed on his left ankle over the Achilles tendon. Laviolette? If you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do –’

  ‘Yvonne,’ he said, ‘can you still remember your mother’s Co-Op account number?’

  She responded, without hesitation, ‘Five-one-six-two-five.’

  Then the line went dead.

  Bull & Dunnings offices – where Alison Marsh worked – were in a moderately sized building of steel and blue glass that already looked outdated, on a side street behind the Laing Art Gallery. On the rare occasions that he found himself in Newcastle with time to spare, Laviolette always did one of three things – went to the Hancock Museum, took a walk down Grey Street to the Quayside or went to see the Winslow Homer paintings at the Laing. There used to be a Mexican restaurant nearby that he ate at regularly with a social worker he dated seriously in his early thirties, but the social worker and Mexican restaurant had since disappeared.

  A young woman with a pair of scissors in her hands was on reception, behind an elaborate flower display. When he got close enough to ask for Alison Marsh and explain that he worked for Northumbria Police, he saw that the woman was around eight-months pregnant and that she was cutting out a frieze of teddy bears – presumably destined for a nursery wall.

  She didn’t ask to see his badge and, after watching him for a while from under her fringe, asked if he wanted something to drink.

  He shook his head, smiling, and continued to shuffle restlessly round the shabby lobby waiting for Alison Marsh to appear.

  Behind the security door to the left of reception, Alison left the safety of her carpet-lined booth decorated with reminders scribbled on neon post-it notes, and tokens from a life more personal – and went into the lobby where Laviolette was waiting for her.

  They shook hands and Alison’s eyes, which looked scared, remained fixed on him as he introduced himself and asked to speak to her in private.

  ‘It’s bad news,’ the pleasant dependable-looking girl who was Alison Marsh stated, quietly, turning to the receptionist. ‘Lindsay, can you book meeting room three for the next . . .’ she turned back to Laviolette, ‘thirty minutes?’

  ‘We won’t need thirty minutes.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘It’s booked,’ Lindsay announced.

  Laviolette could tell from the way she walked through the maze of hollow corridors lined with old black and white prints of Newcastle landmarks that she was fairly certain why he’d come.

  ‘What d’you do?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m a conveyancer. I work with a team of conveyancers,’ she added, unnecessarily, speaking in the way Laviolette was used to hearing people speak when they were in shock.

  ‘This is about Brett,’ she said, standing just inside the door to meeting room three, holding the handle still.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  She sat down at the long beige table with a tray of glasses in the middle and a plastic folder someone somewhere was probably looking for. She sat turned slightly away from him, her left hand on the table, her right in her lap, and started to cry.

  ‘D’you mind getting me something for my face?’ she said after a while, unevenly.

  He left the room, found a ladies toilet, knocked loudly on the door, and walked in past a woman doing her make-up who watched him in the mirror, outraged, as he disappeared into a cubicle and emerged with a roll of toilet paper.

  Although she was in exactly the same position he’d left her in, Alison was no longer crying when he got back to meeting room three – she was sitting very still, and the room felt emptier than if there was nobody there at all. This moment had changed her forever, and Laviolette was tired of changing people, he realised.

  She turned to him, looking to him for guidance because she had no experience of moments like these. He could tell, from her face, that she already felt marked – set apart. The usual rapid, random thoughts ran through his head, prompted by a curiosity that had remained intact, unlike a lot of officers who’d been on the force as long as he had. Was it Brett who’d bought her the necklace she was wearing? What time did she set her alarm for in the morning?

  ‘This isn’t over yet, is it?’ she said, already sounding a little less lost.

  Laviolette shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not – I need you to come with me.’

  ‘Now?’

  She got unsteadily to her feet and allowed him to take hold of her left elbow, which he could feel through the fabric of her shirt. They went back into the corridor where she looked around her, bewildered, as if the layout of the building she’d worked in for eight years had been reconfigured while they were inside meeting room three. The familiarity had been taken out of her world and now she was looking at him as if he was the only thing she recognised.

  ‘Where are we going?’
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br />   ‘I’m sorry, but we need you to identify Brett for us. You might want to pick up your things – tell someone you’re going.’

  She stared at him flatly, no longer horrified.

  Laviolette knew what was coming next and he was tired of this as well, he realised – tired of being the one who always knew what was coming next.

  DC Wade was waiting for them at the mortuary.

  He’d asked her to be there.

  At this point, she either went to Jim Cornish to clear the request because she knew that Laviolette shouldn’t be doing an identification on a body that had already been identified – or she kept quiet and showed up when and where he told her to show up.

  She’d chosen to keep quiet and show up, and he couldn’t pretend not to be happy about this.

  Alison Marsh, looking as if she’d been rushed out of one life and into another she never knew existed, let DC Wade hold her as they went into the small, tiled windowless room Laura Deane had walked into the day before.

  He’d told her on the drive over that the body had been washed up at Cullercoats, and the only thing she’d said in response to this was to comment on the rain, which had started suddenly – breaking violently over them just outside Gosforth.

  Alison remained pressed close to DC Wade as an assistant called Shona showed her the left ankle.

  They all saw the moth attached still to skin that no longer looked like skin.

  Alison nodded, her hand gripping DC Wade’s forearm.

  ‘D’you need some air? D’you want to take a breather?’

  Alison nodded again, but remained where she was.

  After a few moments silence, and without saying anything Laviolette nodded at Shona to uncover the face.

  ‘That’s not him. Brett,’ she said, in the same breath.

  There was a suspended sense of relief in the room that Laviolette often felt at positive identifications when something no longer identifiable as human, was given a name.

  ‘We argued,’ Alison said, starting to cry, looking helplessly round the room at all of them for some sort of atonement.

  Chapter 19

  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.